CHAPTER
VI
Ancient and Modern Methods of Empire
A
CLEAR distinction must be made between ,two political
aggregates which go equally in current language by
name of empire. For there is the homogeneous national and
there is the
heterogeneous composite empire. In a sense, all empires are composites, at any
rate, if we go back to their origins; but in practice there is a difference
between the imperial aggregate in which the component elements are not divided
from other by a strong sense of their separate existence in the ole and the
imperial aggregate in which this psychological is of separation is still in
vigour. Japan before the absorption ,Formosa and Korea was a national whole and
an empire only the honorific sense of the word; after that absorption it became
al and a composite empire. Germany again would have been purely national empire
if it had not burdened itself with three minor acquisitions, Alsace, Poland and
Schleswig- Holstein which e not united to it by the sense of German nationality
but only military force. Let us suppose this Teutonic aggregate to have its
foreign elements and at most have acquired instead the Teutonic provinces of
Austria. Then we should have had an example of a homogeneous aggregate which
would yet be an empire in the honorific sense of the word; for that would be a
composite of homogeneous Teutonic nations or, as we may conveniently call them
sub-nations, which would not naturally harbour any sentiment of separatism, but
rather, drawn always a natural unity, would form easily and inevitably a
psychological and not merely a political unit.
But this
form in its purity is now difficult to find. The United States are the example
of such an aggregate, although from the accident of their rule by a
periodically elected President and not
a hereditary monarch we do not associate the type with the idea
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of
an empire at all. Still if the imperial aggregate is to be changed from a
political to a psychological unit, it would seem that it must be done by
reproducing mutatis mutandis something of the system of the United
States, a system in which each element could preserve a sufficient local State
independence and separate power of legislative and executive action and yet be
part of an inseparable greater aggregate. This could be effected most easily
where the elements are fairly homogeneous as it would be in a federation of
Great Britain and her colonies.
A tendency to large homogeneous
aggregations has shown itself recently in political thought, as in the dream of
a Pan- Germanic Empire, a great Russian and Pan-Slavic Empire or the
Pan-Islamic idea of a united Mahomedan world.1 () But these tendencies are usually associated with the control by this
homogeneous aggregate over other elements heterogeneous to it under the old
principle of military and political compulsion, the retention by Russia of
Asiatic nations under her sway,2 the seizure by Germany of wholly or partially
non-Germanic countries and provinces, the control by the Caliphate of
non-Moslem subjects.3 Even if these
anomalies were absent, the actual arrangement of the world would lend itself
with difficulty to a remodelling of empire on a racial or cultural basis. Vast
aggregates of this kind would find enclaves in their dominion inhabited by
elements wholly heterogeneous to them or mixed. Quite apart therefore from the
resistance and refusal of kindred nations to renounce their cherished
nationality and fuse themselves in combinations of this kind, there would be
this incompatibility of mixed or heterogeneous factors, recalcitrant to the
idea and the culture that sought to absorb them. Thus a Pan-Slavonic empire
would necessitate the control of the Balkan Peninsula by Russia as the premier
Slav State; but such a scheme would have to meet
1
All three have been broken by the effect of
revolution and war, but if the nation idea dwindled, the last might still at some future date
revive; the second, if Communism destroyed the national idea, may still be a
possibility.
2 This has been modified by the substitution of a
Soviet Union claiming to unite these Asiatic peoples voluntarily with Russia:
but one is not quite sure whether this is a permanent reality or only a
temporary apparent phenomenon
3 These two empires have now
disappeared and there seems to be no possibility of their revival.
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not only the independent Serbian nationality and the
imperfect Slavism of the Bulgar but the quite incompatible Rumanian, Greek and
Albanian elements. Thus it does not appear that this tendency towards vast
homogeneous aggregates, although it has for
some time played an important part in the world's history and is not exhausted or
finally baffled, is ever likely to be the eventual solution; for even if it
triumphed, it would have to meet a greater or less degree the difficulties of
the heterogeneous 'empire, The true problem of empire therefore still remains,
how to transform the artificial political unity of a heterogeneous empire,
heterogeneous in racial composition, language and culture, into real and
psychological unity.
History
gives us only one great and definite example of an tempt to solve this problem
on this large scale and with antecedent conditions which could at all afford
any guidance for the vast heterogeneous modern empires, those of Russia,
England,1 France to which the problem is
now offered. The old Chinese empire of the five nations, admirably organised,
was not a case point; for all its constituent parts were Mongolian in race and
presented no formidable cultural difficulties. But the imperial Roman had to
face essentially the same problems as the moderns minus one or two very
important complications and he solved them up to a certain point with a
masterly success. His empire lured through several centuries and, though often
threatened with disruption, yet by its inner principle of unity and by its
overpowering centripetal attraction triumphed over all disruptive tendencies.
Its one failure was the bisection into the Eastern and Western empires which
hastened its final ending. Still when that end came it was not by a disruption
from within but simply by e decaying of its centre of life. And it was not till
this central life faded that the pressure of the barbarian world without, to
which its ruin is wrongly attributed, could prevail over its magnificent
solidarity.
The
Roman effected his sway by military conquest and military colonisation; but
once that conquest was assured, he
1 This
empire has so altered its form into that of a free Commonwealth that the
objection is no longer relevant; there is no longer an old-world empire but a
free Commonwealth and a number of subject peoples moving rapidly towards
self-government.
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was not content with holding it together as an artificial
political unity, nor did he trust solely to that political convenience of a
good, efficient and well-organised government economically and administratively
beneficent which made it at first acceptable to the conquered peoples. He had
too sure a political instinct to be so easily satisfied; for it is certain that
if he had stopped short there, the empire would have broken up at a much
earlier date. The peoples under his sway would have preserved their sense of
separate nationality and, once accustomed to Roman efficiency and
administrative organisation, would inevitably have tended to the separate enjoyment
of these advantages as independent organised nations. It was this sense of
separate nationality which the Roman rule succeeded in blotting out wherever it
established its own dominant influence. And this was done not by the stupid
expedient of a brutal force after the Teutonic fashion, but by a peaceful
pressure. Rome first compounded with the one rival culture that was superior in
certain respects to her own and accepted it as part of her own cultural
existence and even as its most valuable part; she created a Graeco-Roman
civilisation, left the Greek tongue to spread and secure it in the East, but
introduced it everywhere else by the medium of the Latin language and a Latin
education and succeeded in peacefully overcoming the decadent or inchoate cultures
of Gaul and her other conquered provinces. But since even this process might
not have been sufficient to abolish all separatist tendency, she not only
admitted her Latinised subjects to the highest military and civil offices and
even to the imperial purple, so that within less than a century after Augustus,
first an Italian Gaul and then an Iberian Spaniard held the name and power of
the Caesars, but she proceeded rapidly enough to deprive of all vitality and
then even nominally to abolish all the grades of civic privilege with which she
had started and extended the full Roman citizenship to all her subjects,
Asiatic, European and African, without distinction
The result was that the whole empire
became psychologically and not only politically a single Graeco-Roman unity.
Not only superior force or the recognition of Roman peace and good government,
but all the desires, associations, pride, cultural
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affinities
of the provinces made them firmly attached to the maintenance of the empire.
Every attempt of provincial ruler or military chief to start provincial empires
for their own benefit failed because it found no basis, no supporting tendency,
no national sentiment and no sense of either material or any other advantage to
be gained by the change, in the population on whom the successful continuity of
the attempt had to depend. So far the Roman succeeded; where he failed, it was
due to the essential vice of his method. By crushing out, however peacefully,
the living cultures or the incipient individuality of the peoples he ruled, he
deprived the peoples of their sources of vitality, the roots of their force. No
doubt, he removed all positive causes of disruption and secured a passive force
of opposition to all disruptive change;. but his empire lived only at the
centre and when that centre tended to become exhausted, there was no positive
and abounding life throughout the body from which it could be replenished. In
the end Rome could not even depend on a supply of vigorous individuals from the
peoples whose life she had pressed out under the weight of a borrowed
civilisation; she had to draw on the frontier barbarians. And when she fell to
pieces, it was these barbarians and not the old peoples resurgent who became
her heirs. For their barbarism was at least a living force and a principle of
life, but the Graeco- Roman civilisation had become a principle of death. All
the living forces were destroyed by whose contact it could have modified and
renewed its own force. In the end it had itself to be destroyed in its form and
its principle resown in the virgin field of the vital and vigorous culture of
mediaeval Europe. What the Roman had not the wisdom to do by his organised
empire,
- for even the profoundest and surest political instinct
is not wisdom,
- had to
be done by Nature herself in the loose but living
unity of mediaeval Christendom.
The example of Rome has haunted the
political imagination of Europe ever since. Not only has it been behind the Holy
Roman Empire of Charlemagne and Napoleon's gigantic attempt and the German
dream of a world-empire governed by Teutonic efficiency and Teutonic culture,
but all the imperial nations, including France and England, have followed to a
certain extent
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in its footsteps. But, significantly enough, every attempt
at renewing the Roman success has failed. The modern nations have not been able
to follow Rome completely in the lines she had traced out or if they tried to
follow, have clashed against different conditions and either collapsed or been
obliged to call a halt. It is as if Nature had said, "That experiment has
been carried once to the logical consequences and once is enough. I have made
new conditions; find you new means or at least mend and add to the old where
they were deficient or went astray."
The European nations have extended
their empires by the old Roman method of military conquest and colonisation,
abandoning for the most part the pre-Roman principle of simple over lordship or
hegemony which was practised by the Assyrian and Egyptian kings, the Indian
States and the Greek cities. But this principle also has been sometimes used in
the shape of the protectorate to prepare the more normal means of occupation.
The colonies have not been of the pure Roman, but of a mixed Carthaginian and
Roman type, official and military, enjoying like the Roman colonies superior
civic rights to the indigenous population, they have been at the same time and
far more commercial colonies of exploitation. The nearest to the Roman type has
been the English settlement in Ulster, while the German system in Poland
developed under modern conditions the old Roman principle of expropriation. But
these are exceptions, not the rule.
The conquered territory once occupied and
secure, the modern nations have found themselves brought up short by a
difficulty which they have not been able to surmount as the Romans surmounted
it,
- the difficulty of uprooting the indigenous culture and
with it the indigenous sense of separateness. All these empires have at first
carried with them the idea of imposing their culture along with the flag, first
simply as an instinct of the conqueror and as a necessary adjunct to the fact
of political domination and a security for its permanence, but latterly with
the conscious intention of extending, as it is some- what pharisaically put,
the benefits of civilisation to the "inferior" races. It cannot be
said that the attempt has anywhere been very prosperous. It was tried with
considerable thoroughness
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and
ruthlessness in Ireland, but although the Irish speech was stamped out except
in the wilds of Connaught and all distinctive signs of the old Irish culture
disappeared, the outraged nationality simply clung to whatever other means of
distinctiveness it could find, however exiguous, its Catholic religion, its
Celtic race and
nationhood, and even when it became Anglicised, refused to become
English. The removal or
slackening of the foreign pressure has
resulted in a violent recoil, an attempt to revive the Gaelic speech, to
reconstitute the old Celtic spirit and culture. The German failed to
Prussianise Poland or even his own kin who speak his own language, the
Alsatians. The Finn remained unconquerably Finnish in Russia. The mild Austrian
methods left the Austrian Pole as Polish as his oppressed brother in German
Posen. Accordingly, there began to rise everywhere a growing sense of the
inutility of the endeavour and the necessity of leaving the soul of the subject
nation free, confining the action of the sovereign State to the enforcement of
new administrative and economic conditions with as much social and cultural
change as may be freely accepted or may come about by education and the force
of circumstances.
The German, indeed, new and inexperienced in imperial methods,
clung to the old Roman idea of assimilation which he sought to execute both by
Roman and by un-Roman means. He showed even a tendency to go back beyond the
Caesars of old, to the methods of the Jew in Canaan and the Saxon in Eastern
Britain, methods of expulsion and massacre. But since he was, after all,
modernised and had some sense of economic necessity and advantage, he could not
carry out this policy with any thoroughness or in times of peace. Still he insisted
on the old Roman method, sought to substitute German speech and culture for the
indigenous and, as he could not do it by peaceful pressure, he tried it by
force. An attempt of this kind is bound to fail; instead of bringing about the
psychological unity at which it aims, it succeeds only in accentuating the
national spirit and plants a rooted and invincible hatred which is dangerous to
the empire and may even destroy it if the opposed elements are not too small in
number and weak in force. And if this effacing of heterogeneous cultures is
impossible in Europe where the
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differences are only variations of a common type and there
are only small and weak elements to overcome, it is obviously out of the
question for those empires which have to deal with great Asiatic and African
masses rooted for many centuries in an old and well-formed national culture. If
a psychological unity has to be created, it must be by other means.
The impact of different cultures upon
each other has not ceased but has rather been accentuated by the conditions of
the modern world. But the nature of the impact, the ends towards which it moves
and the means by which the ends can most successfully be worked out, are
profoundly altered. The earth is in travail now of one common, large and
flexible civilisation for the whole human race into which each modem and
ancient culture shall bring its contribution and each clearly defined human
aggregate shall introduce its necessary element of variation. In the working
out of this aim, there must necessarily be some struggle for survival. The
fittest to survive will be here all that can best serve the tendencies Nature
is working out in humanity, -
not only the tendencies of the hour, but the reviving
tendencies of the past and the yet inchoate tendencies of the future. And it
will be too all that can best help as liberating and combining forces, best
make for adaptation and adjustment and for deliverance of the hidden sense of
the great Mother in her strivings. But success in this struggle is worst and
not best served by military violence or political pressure. German culture for
good or ill was making rapid conquests throughout the world before the rulers
of Germany were ill-advised enough to rouse the latent force of opposing ideals
by armed violence. And even now that which is essential in it, the State idea
and the organisation of the life of the community by the State which is common
both to German imperialism and to German socialism, is far more likely to
succeed by the defeat of the former in the War than it could have done by its
victory in a brute struggle.
This change in the movement and
orientation of the world's tendencies points to a law of interchange and
adaptation and to the emergence of a new birth out of the meeting of many
elements. Only those imperial aggregates are likely to succeed and eventually
endure which recognise the new law and shape their
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organisation to accord with it. Immediate victories of an opposite
kind may indeed be gained and violence done to the law; but such present
successes are won, as history has repeatedly shown, at the cost of a nation's
whole future. The recognition of the new truth had already commenced as a
result of increased communication and the widening of knowledge. The value of
variations had begun to be acknowledged and the old arrogant claims of this or
that culture to impose itself and crush out all others were losing their force
and self-confidence when the old outworn creed suddenly leaped up armed with
the German sword to vindicate itself, if it might, before it perished. The only
result has been to give added force and clear recognition to the truth it
sought to deny. The importance even of the smallest States, Belgium, Serbia,1
as cultural units in the European
whole has been lifted almost to the dignity of a creed. The recognition of the
value of Asiatic cultures, confined formerly to the thinker, scholar and
artist, has now been brought into the popular mind by association on the
battlefield. The theory of "inferior" races, an inferiority and
superiority measured by approximation to one's own form of culture, has
received what may well turn out to have been its death-blow. The seeds of a new
order of things are being rapidly sown in the conscious mentality of the race.
This new turn of the impact of cultures shows
itself most clearly where the European and the Asiatic meet. French culture in
Northern Africa, English culture in India cease at once to be French or English
and become simply the common European civilisation in face of the Asiatic; it is
no longer an imperial domination intent to secure itself by assimilation, but
continent parleying with continent. The political motive sinks into
insignificance; the world-motive takes its place. And in this confrontation it
is no longer a self-confident European civilisation that offers its light and
good to the semi-barbarous Asiatic and the latter that gratefully accepts a
beneficent transformation. Even adaptable Japan, after the first enthusiasm of
acceptance, has retained all that is fundamental in her culture, and everywhere
else the European current has met the opposition of an
1 Now Yugoslavia.
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inner voice and force which cries halt to its
victorious impetus.1 The
East is on the whole, in spite of certain questionings and scruples, willing
and, where not wholly willing, forced by circumstances and the general tendency
of mankind to accept the really valuable parts of modern European culture, its
science, its curiosity, its ideal of universal education and uplift, its
abolition of privilege, its broadening, liberalising democratic tendency, its
instinct of freedom and equality, its call for the breaking down of narrow and
oppressive forms, for air, space, light. But at a certain point the East refuses
to proceed farther and that is precisely in the things which are deepest, most
essential to the future of mankind, the things of the soul, the profound things
of the mind and temperament. Here, again, all points not to substitution and
conquest, -but to mutual understanding and interchange, mutual adaptation and
new formation.
The old idea is not entirely dead and will not die without a last struggle.
There are still those who dream of a Christianised India, the English tongue
permanently dominating if not replacing the indigenous languages, or the
acceptance of European social forms and manners as the necessary precondition
for an equal status between a European and Asiatic. But they are those who
belong in spirit to a past generation and cannot value the signs of the hour
which point to a new era. Christianity, for instance, has only succeeded where
it could apply its one or two features of distinct superiority, the readiness to
stoop and uplift the fallen and oppressed where the Hindu bound in the forms of
caste would not touch nor succour, its greater swiftness to give relief where it
is needed, in a word, the active compassion and helpfulness which it inherited
from its parent Buddhism. Where it could not apply this lever, it has failed
totally and even this lever it may easily lose; for the soul of India reawakened
by the new impact is beginning to recover its lost tendencies. The social forms
of the past are changing where they are unsuited to the new political and
economic conditions and ideals or incompatible with the increasing urge towards
freedom and equality; but
1
There
has been a recrudescence of the Europeanising turn in Turkey and in China
reinforced by the influence of Bolshevist Russia. Wherever there is a
retardatory orthodoxy to overcome, this movement is likely to appear, but only
as a passing phase.
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there is no sign that anything
but a new Asiatic society broadened and liberalised will emerge from this
travail. The signs everywhere are the same; the forces everywhere work in the
same sense. Neither France nor England has the power—and they are fast or slowly
losing the desire — to destroy and replace the Islamic culture in Africa or the
Indian in India. All they can do is to give what they have of value to be
assimilated according to the needs and the inner spirit of the older nations.
It was necessary to dwell on this question because it is vital
to the future of imperialism. The replacement of the local by the imperial
culture and as far as possible by the speech of the conqueror was essential to
the old imperial theory; but the moment that becomes out of the question and the
very desire of it has to be renounced as impracticable, the old Roman model of
empire ceases to be of any avail for the solution of the problem. Something of
the Roman lesson remains valid, — those features especially that are essential
to the very essence of imperialism and the meaning of empire;
but a new model is demanded. That new model has already begun to evolve in
obedience to the requirements of the age; it
is the model of the federal or else the confederate empire. The problem we have
to consider narrows itself down to this: is
it possible to create a securely federated empire of vast extent and composed of
heterogeneous races and cultures ? And
granting that in this direction lies the future, how can such an empire so
artificial in appearance be welded into a natural and psychological unit?
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