Greater Britain

Although the disadvantages are more evident than the advantages of the annexation for commercial purposes of such countries as Abyssinia, China, and Japan, the benefits are neither few nor hard to find. The abstract injustice of annexation cannot be said to exist in the cases of Afghanistan and Abyssinia, as the sentiment of nationality clearly has no existence there, and as the worst possible form of British government is better for the mass of the people than the best conceivable rule of an Abyssinian chief. The dangers of annexation in the weakening and corrupting of ourselves may not unfairly be set off against the blessings of annexation to the people, and the most serious question for consideration is that of whether dependencies can be said “to pay.” Social progress is necessary to trade, and we give to mankind the powerful security of self-interest that we will raise the condition of the people, and, by means of improved communications, open the door to civilization.

It may be objected to this statement that our exaggerated conscientiousness is the very reason why our dependencies commercially are failures, and why it is useless for us to be totaling up our loss and profits while we willfully throw away the advantages that our energy has placed in our hands. If India paid as well as Java, it may be shown, we should be receiving from the East 60 millions sterling a year for the support of our European officials in Hindostan, and the total revenue of India would be 200 or 250 millions, of which 80 millions would be clear profit for our use in England; in other words, Indian profits would relieve us from all taxation in England, and leave us a considerable and increasing margin toward the abolition of the debt. The Dutch, too, tell us that their system is more agreeable to the natives than our own clumsy though well-meant efforts for the improvement of their condition, which, although not true, is far too near the truth to allow us to rest in our complacency.

The Dutch system having been well weighed at home, and deliberately rejected by the English people as tending to the degradation of the natives, the question remains how far dependencies from which no profits are exacted may be advantageously retained for mere trade purposes. At this moment, our most flourishing dependencies do not bear so much as their fair share of the expenses of the empire: – Ceylon herself pays only the nominal and not the real cost of her defense, and Mauritius costs nominally £150,000 a year, and above half a million really in military expenses, of which the colony is ordered to pay £45,000 and grumbles much at paying it. India herself, although charged with a share of the non-effective expenses of our army, escapes scot-free in war-time, and it is to be remarked that the throwing upon her of a small portion of the cost of the Abyssinian war was defended upon every ground except the true one – namely, that as an integral part of the empire she ought to bear her share in imperial wars. It is true that, to make the constitutional doctrine hold, she also ought to be consulted, and that we have no possible machinery for consulting her – a consideration which of itself shows our Indian government in its true light.

Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay their actual cost, their retention stands on a wholly different footing from that of colonies. Were we to leave Australia or the Cape, we should continue to be the chief customers of those countries: were we to leave India or Ceylon, they would have no customers at all; for, falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to export their goods to us and to consume our manufactures. When a British Governor of New Zealand wrote that of every Maori who fell in war with us it might be said that, “from his ignorance, a man had been destroyed whom a few months’ enlightenment would have rendered a valuable consumer of British manufactured goods,” he only set forth with grotesque simplicity considerations which weigh with us all; but while the advance of trade may continue to be our chief excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our Eastern dealings – even for use toward ourselves. Without repeating that which I have said with respect to India, we may especially bear in mind that, although the theory has suffered from exaggeration, our dependencies still form a nursery of statesmen and of warriors, and that we should irresistibly fall into national sluggishness of thought, were it not for the world-wide interests given us by the necessity of governing and educating the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our own.

One of the last of our annexations was close upon our bow as we passed on our way from Aden up the Red Sea. The French are always angry when we seize on places in the East, but it is hardly wonderful that they should have been perplexed about Perim. This island stands in the narrowest place in the sea, in the middle of the deep water, and the Suez Canal being a French work, and Egypt under French influence, our possession of Perim becomes especially unpleasant to our neighbors. Not only this, but the French had determined themselves to seize it, and their fleet, bound to Perim, put in to Aden to coal. The Governor had his suspicions, and, having asked the French admiral to dinner, gave him unexceptionable champagne. The old gentleman soon began to talk, and directly he mentioned Perim, the Governor sent a pencil-note to the harbor-master to delay the coaling of the ships, and one to the commander of a gunboat to embark as many artillerymen and guns as he could get on board in two hours, and sail for Perim. When the French reached the anchorage next day, they found the British flag flying, and a great show of guns in position. Whether they put into Aden on their way back to France, history does not say.

Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the shortest course for ships, nor are the rocks the only dangers of the Red Sea. One night about nine o‘clock, when we were off the port of Mecca, I was sitting on the fo‘castle, right forward, almost on the sprit, to catch what breeze we made, when I saw two country boats about 150 yards on the starboard bow. Our three lights were so bright that I thought we must be seen, but as the boats came on across our bows, I gave a shout, which was instantly followed by “hard a-port!” from the Chinaman on the bridge, and by a hundred yells from the suddenly awakened boatmen. Our helm luckily enough had no time to act upon the ship. I threw myself down under a stancheon, and the sail and yard of the leading boat fell on our deck close to my head, and the boats shot past us amid shouts of “fire,” caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. When we had stopped the ship, the question came – had we sunk the boat? We at once piped away the gig, with a Malay crew, and sent it off to look for the poor wretches – but after half an hour, we found them ourselves, and found them safe except for their loss of canvas and their terrible fright. Our pilot questioned them in Arabic, and discovered that each boat had on board 100 pilgrims; but they excused themselves for not having a watch or light, by saying that they had not seen us! Between rocks and pilgrim-boats, Red Sea navigation is hard enough for steamers, and it is easy to see which way its difficulties will cause the scale to turn when the question lies between Euphrates Railway and Suez Canal.

CHAPTER XXII.

FRANCE IN THE EAST

IT is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even Heliopolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which they should be approached. English “going out” and “coming home” are there at all days and hours, and the hundreds of Arabs selling German coins and mummies of English manufacture are terribly out of place upon the desert. I went alone to see the Sphinx, and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to read the riddle of the face, and to look through the rude carving into the inner mystery; but it would not do, and I came away bitterly disappointed. In this modern democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has no place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but we can no longer read them. A few months may see a café chantant at their base.

Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or Egyptian peasantry, are apparently the most miserable of human beings, and their slouching shamble is a sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The slave-market of Cairo has done its work; indeed, it is astonishing that the English should content themselves with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo continues to be all-but open to the passer. That the Egyptian government could put down slavery if it had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During my week‘s stay in Alexandria, two such cases came to my notice: – in the first, one of my fellow-passengers unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and was shot at by one of them with a long pistol. A number of Englishmen, gathering from the public gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and beat off the cavasses, and the next morning marched down to their Consulate and demanded justice. Our acting Consul went straight to the head of the police, laid the case before him, and procured the condemnation of the man who shot to the galleys for ten years, while the policeman who had looked on was immediately bastinadoed in the presence of the passenger. The other case was one of robbery at a desert village, from the tent of an English traveler. When he complained to the sheik, the order was given to bastinado the head men and hold them responsible for the amount. The head men in turn gave the stick to the householders, and claimed the sum from them; while these bastinadoed the vagrants, and actually obtained from them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the village. “Stick-backsheesh” is a great institution in Egypt, but the Turks are not far behind. When the British Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some years ago, our Consul telegraphed the fact to the Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at once: – “Bastinado forty men” – and bastinadoed they were, as soon as they had been selected at random from the population.

Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is inclined to believe that, while our Indian government is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt is misgoverned in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of fact, however, it is not fair to the King of Egypt that we should compare his rule with ours in India, and it is probable that his government is not on the whole worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up as a “civilized ruler,” the King of Egypt performs the duties of his position by buying guns which he uses in putting down insurrections which he has fomented, and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to think that he has done all that Peter of Russia himself could have accomplished, when he sends a young Egyptian to Manchester to learn the cotton-trade, or to London to acquire the principles of foreign commerce, and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage the soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The aping of the forms of “Western civilization,” which in Egypt means French vice, makes the Court of Alexandria look worse than it is: – we expect the slave-market and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt superadds the Trianon, and a bad imitation of Mabile.

The Court influence shows itself in the action of the people, or rather the influence at work upon the Court is pressing also upon the people. For knavery, no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One word, however, is far from describing all the infamies of the city. It surpasses Cologne for smells, Benares for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for vice. There is a layer of French “civilization” of the worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but still the town is chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the other hand, is completely Europeanized, and has a white population of seventy or eighty thousand. The Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifications, and French is the only language spoken in the shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town.

It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has been from the beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, and that, however interesting to the shareholders may be the question of its physical or commercial success, the probabilities of failure have had but little weight with the French government. The foundation of the Messagerie Company with national capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt, and it is not certain that we should not look upon the occupation of Saigon itself as a mere blind.

Of the temporary success of the French policy there can be no doubt; the English railway-guards have lately been dismissed from the government railway line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one waves over the hotel; the King of Egypt, glad to find a third Power which he can play off, when necessary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in the canal. It is when we ask, “What is the end that the French have in view?” that we find it strangely small by the side of the means. The French of the present day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is a sort of desire to extend the empire of their language, their dance-tunes, and their fashions; and the natural wish of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that will outlast his life prevents their having any such permanent policy as that of Russia or the United States. An Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when he said, “There is nothing permanent about France except Mabile.”

The Suez Canal is being pushed with vigor, although the labor of the hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies is very different to that of the tens of thousands of impressed fellaheen. The withdrawal from the Company of the forced labor of the peasants has demonstrated that the King is at heart not well disposed toward the scheme, for the remonstrances of England have never prevented the employment of slave labor upon works out of which there was money to be made for the viceregal purse. The difficulty of clearing and keeping clear the channel at Port Said, at the Mediterranean end, is well known to the Pacha and his engineers: – it is not difficult, indeed, to cut through the bar, nor impossible to keep the cutting open, but the effect of the great piers will merely be to push the Nile silt farther seaward, and again and again new bars will form in front of the canal. That the canal is physically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to believe that it can pay. Even if we suppose, moreover, that the canal will prove a complete success, the French government will only find that it has spent millions upon digging a canal for England‘s use.

The neutralization of Egypt has lately been proposed by writers of the Comtist school, but to what end is far from clear. “The interests of civilization” are the pretext, but, when summoned by a Comtist, “civilization” and “humanity” generally appear in a French shape. Were we to be attacked in India by the French or Russians, no neutralization would prevent our sending our troops to India by the shortest road, and fighting wherever we thought best. If we were not so attacked, neutralization, as far as we are concerned, would be a useless ceremony. If France goes beyond her customary meddlesomeness and settles down in Egypt, we shall evidently have to dislodge her, but to neutralize the country would be to settle her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny that the position of France in the East is connected with the claim put forth by her to the moral leadership of the world. The “chief power of Europe” and “leader of Christendom” must needs be impatient of the dominance of America in the Pacific and of Britain in the East, and seeks by successes on the side of India to bury the memories of Mexico. One of the hundred “missions of France,” one of the thousand “Imperial ideas,” is the “regeneration of the East.” Treacherous England is to be confined to her single island, and barbarous Russia to be shut up in the Siberian snows. England may be left to answer for herself, but before we surrender even Russia to the Comtist priests, we should remember that, just as the Russian despotism is dangerous to the world from the stupidity of its barbarism, so the French democracy is dangerous through its feverish sympathies, blundering “humanity,” and unlimited ambition.

The present reaction against exaggerated nationalism is in itself a sign that our national mind is in a healthy state; but, while we distrust nationalism because it is illogical and narrow, we must remember that “cosmopolitanism” has been made the excuse for childish absurdities, and a cloak for desperate schemes. Love of race, among the English, rests upon a firmer base than either love of mankind or love of Britain, for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known: the ascertained virtues and powers of the English people. For nations such as France and Spain, with few cares outside their European territories, national fields for action are, perhaps, too narrow, and the interests of even the vast territories inhabited by the English race may, in a less degree, be too small for English thought; but there is India, – and the responsibility of the absolute government of a quarter of the human race is no small thing. If we strive to advance ourselves in the love of truth, to act justly towards Ireland, and to govern India aright, we shall have enough of work to occupy us for many years to come, and shall leave a greater name in history than if we concerned ourselves with settling the affairs of Poland. If we need a wider range for our sympathies than that which even India will supply, we may find it in our friendships with the other sections of the race; and if, unhappily, one result of the present awakening of England to free life should be a return of the desire to meddle in the affairs of other folk, we shall find a better outlet for our energy in aiding our Teutonic brethren in their struggle for unity than in assisting Imperial France to spread Benôitonisme through the world.

We cannot, if we would, be indifferent spectators of the extravagances of France: if she is at present weak in the East, she is strong at home. At this moment, we are spending ten or fifteen millions a year in order that we may be equal with her in military force, and we hang upon the words of her ruler to know whether we are to have peace or war. Although it may not be wise for us to declare that this humiliating spectacle shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that we should refrain from aiding the French in their professed endeavors to obtain for other peoples liberties which they are incapable of preserving for themselves.

If the English race has a “mission” in the world, it is the making it impossible that the peace of mankind on earth should depend upon the will of a single man.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE ENGLISH

IN America we have seen the struggle of the dear races against the cheap – the endeavors of the English to hold their own against the Irish and Chinese. In New Zealand, we found the stronger and more energetic race pushing from the earth the shrewd and laborious descendants of the Asian Malays; in Australia, the English triumphant, and the cheaper races excluded from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary legislation; in India, we saw the solution of the problem of the officering of the cheaper by the dearer race. Everywhere we have found that the difficulties which impede the progress to universal dominion of the English people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races. The result of our survey is such as to give us reason for the belief that race distinctions will long continue, that miscegenation will go but little way toward blending races; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle.

The countries ruled by a race whose very scum and outcasts have founded empires in every portion of the globe, even now consist of 9½ millions of square miles, and contain a population of 300 millions of people. Their surface is five times as great as that of the empire of Darius, and four and a half times as large as the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. It is no exaggeration to say that in power the English countries would be more than a match for the remaining nations of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people and the extent and wealth of their dominions they already considerably surpass. Russia gains ground steadily, we are told, but so do we. If we take maps of the English-governed countries and of the Russian countries of fifty years ago, and compare them with the English and Russian countries of to-day, we find that the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest and in colonization. The extensions of the United States alone are equal to all those of Russia. Chili, La Plata, and Peru must eventually become English; the Red Indian race that now occupies those countries cannot stand against our colonists; and the future of the table-lands of Africa and that of Japan and of China is as clear. Even in the tropical plains, the negroes alone seem able to withstand us. No possible series of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300 millions of beings – of one national character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pigmies by the side of such a people.

Many who are well aware of the power of the English nations are nevertheless disposed to believe that our own is morally, as well as physically, the least powerful of the sections of the race, or, in other words, that we are overshadowed by America and Australia. The rise to power of our southern colonies is, however, distant, and an alliance between ourselves and America is still one to be made on equal terms. Although we are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our manufacturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in America and dearer in Old England, we have nevertheless as much to bestow on America as she has to confer on us. The possession of India offers to ourselves that element of vastness of dominion which, in this age, is needed to secure width of thought and nobility of purpose; but to the English race our possession of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of China offers the possibility of planting free institutions among the dark-skinned races of the world.

The ultimate future of any one section of our race, however, is of little moment by the side of its triumph as a whole, but the power of English laws and English principles of government is not merely an English question – its continuance is essential to the freedom of mankind.

Steaming up from Alexandria along the coasts of Crete and Arcadia, and through the Ionian Archipelago, I reached Brindisi, and thence passed on through Milan toward home. This is the route that our Indian mails should take until the Euphrates road is made.