Read Online Pax Britannica by Jan Morris - Free Book Online
Authors: Jan Morris
Tags: General, History, Europe, Political Science, Modern, Great Britain, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
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annihilation at Tsu-shima.
1 The oddest imperial issues were those of Heligoland, a British possession until it was ceded to Germany in 1890. These had been printed for Queen Victoria in Berlin.
1 Sixty years later in Nepal, which had been a British sphere of influence at least since the 1820s, I used runners to send dispatches from the Sola Khumbu region, in the Himalaya, to the British Embassy (ex-Residency) in Katmandu. Two of them did the 180-mile journey in five days, including the crossing of three 9,000-foot mountain ranges. Whenever I watched them sloping away down the glacier, or melting into the wet mists of the monsoon, slung about with bags and trappings, long sticks in their hands, I had a very imperial feeling myself.
1 They are buried outside the hotel at Barrow Creek, some 770 miles south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway—colloquially known in those parts as the Bitumen.
2 The station is still there, a mile or two north of the present town, designated a National Park, but still, in the brilliance of the Australian night, a wonderfully evocative place.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Glory
England, England, England,
Girdled by ocean and skies,
And the power of a world and the heart of a race
And a hope that never dies.
Wilfrid Campbell
7
T HE means of profit were for the few, but the hope of glory was almost universal. Empire and Imperialism, wrote the journalist W. F. Monypenny, 1 filled the place in everyday speech once filled by Nation and Nationality—the national ideal had given way to the imperial. The existence of the Empire, and its expansion, seemed to satisfy some national psychological need. In 1878 Lord Carnarvon, then Colonial Secretary, had felt obliged to ask what the word ‘imperialism’ actually meant. 2 The Oxford Dictionary gave an answer: ‘the principle or policy of seeking, or at least not refusing, an extension of the British Empire in directions where trading interests and investments require the protection of the flag, and of so uniting the different parts of the Empire having separate Governments as to secure that for certain purposes, such as warlike defence, internal commerce, copyright and postal communications, they shall be practically a single State.’ By 1897 nobody was likely to need a definition. So cataclysmic had been the explosion of the new ideas, so carried away was the nation, that everybody knew the meaning of imperialism now.
Two very different poets had between them expressed the popular interpretation. The first was the balladeer G. W. Hunt, whose most famous music-hall song had given a word to the language:
We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we ’ve got the money too.
We’ve fought the Bear before,
And while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople. 1
By no means everybody, even in this brash heyday of the creed, found Jingoism tasteful. Chauvinism was an old British trait, but this aggressive conceit was something new. Queen Victoria, contemplating the national vainglory with some disquiet, once observed that she could not quite understand ‘why nobody was to have anything anywhere but ourselves’. To most Britons, nevertheless, the spirit of Empire was essentially acquisitive, and Jingoism itself was one of the motives of imperialism.
The second poet was Alfred Austin, who apostrophized his country in loftier metre:
Thou dost but stand erect, and lo!
The nations cluster round; and while the horde
Of wolfish backs slouch homeward to their snow,
Thou, ’ mid thy sheaves in peaceful seasons stored,
Towerest supreme, victor without a blow,
Smilingly leaning on thy undrawn sword!
Fewer would quarrel with this image of the imperial presence, a magnanimous Galahad of the wheat fields, friend and protector of all. The British saw their country as a special kind of Power, sui generis, making rules of its own and legitimately imposing them on others. To
1 The oddest imperial issues were those of Heligoland, a British possession until it was ceded to Germany in 1890. These had been printed for Queen Victoria in Berlin.
1 Sixty years later in Nepal, which had been a British sphere of influence at least since the 1820s, I used runners to send dispatches from the Sola Khumbu region, in the Himalaya, to the British Embassy (ex-Residency) in Katmandu. Two of them did the 180-mile journey in five days, including the crossing of three 9,000-foot mountain ranges. Whenever I watched them sloping away down the glacier, or melting into the wet mists of the monsoon, slung about with bags and trappings, long sticks in their hands, I had a very imperial feeling myself.
1 They are buried outside the hotel at Barrow Creek, some 770 miles south of Darwin on the Stuart Highway—colloquially known in those parts as the Bitumen.
2 The station is still there, a mile or two north of the present town, designated a National Park, but still, in the brilliance of the Australian night, a wonderfully evocative place.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Glory
England, England, England,
Girdled by ocean and skies,
And the power of a world and the heart of a race
And a hope that never dies.
Wilfrid Campbell
7
T HE means of profit were for the few, but the hope of glory was almost universal. Empire and Imperialism, wrote the journalist W. F. Monypenny, 1 filled the place in everyday speech once filled by Nation and Nationality—the national ideal had given way to the imperial. The existence of the Empire, and its expansion, seemed to satisfy some national psychological need. In 1878 Lord Carnarvon, then Colonial Secretary, had felt obliged to ask what the word ‘imperialism’ actually meant. 2 The Oxford Dictionary gave an answer: ‘the principle or policy of seeking, or at least not refusing, an extension of the British Empire in directions where trading interests and investments require the protection of the flag, and of so uniting the different parts of the Empire having separate Governments as to secure that for certain purposes, such as warlike defence, internal commerce, copyright and postal communications, they shall be practically a single State.’ By 1897 nobody was likely to need a definition. So cataclysmic had been the explosion of the new ideas, so carried away was the nation, that everybody knew the meaning of imperialism now.
Two very different poets had between them expressed the popular interpretation. The first was the balladeer G. W. Hunt, whose most famous music-hall song had given a word to the language:
We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we ’ve got the money too.
We’ve fought the Bear before,
And while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople. 1
By no means everybody, even in this brash heyday of the creed, found Jingoism tasteful. Chauvinism was an old British trait, but this aggressive conceit was something new. Queen Victoria, contemplating the national vainglory with some disquiet, once observed that she could not quite understand ‘why nobody was to have anything anywhere but ourselves’. To most Britons, nevertheless, the spirit of Empire was essentially acquisitive, and Jingoism itself was one of the motives of imperialism.
The second poet was Alfred Austin, who apostrophized his country in loftier metre:
Thou dost but stand erect, and lo!
The nations cluster round; and while the horde
Of wolfish backs slouch homeward to their snow,
Thou, ’ mid thy sheaves in peaceful seasons stored,
Towerest supreme, victor without a blow,
Smilingly leaning on thy undrawn sword!
Fewer would quarrel with this image of the imperial presence, a magnanimous Galahad of the wheat fields, friend and protector of all. The British saw their country as a special kind of Power, sui generis, making rules of its own and legitimately imposing them on others. To
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