Read Online Pax Britannica by Jan Morris - Free Book Online Page A

the British Empire no conventions applied. Command, authority, privilege were natural rights of the British people. The world measured its longitude from Greenwich, and the postage stamps of Great Britain, alone in the world, did not bother with a national title, but simply bore Victoria’s head. Take it, the British seemed to say to the world, or leave it.
    To this specialness the Queen herself no doubt subscribed, just as her person summed it up. It was Disraeli, thirty years before, who had made an imperialist of Her Imperial Majesty. He saw the Empireas an Eastern pageantry, a perpetual durbar, summoning the British people away beyond the dour obsessions of Europe to a destiny that was spiced and gilded. Under his seductive influence Victoria, like so many of her subjects, found herself bemused by the exotic allure of Empire. The Queen had a horror of John Bullism, by which she meant arrogance and bullying in diplomacy: but the older she grew, the more she grew accustomed to the imperial stance, until by the time of her Diamond Jubilee her very appearance among her satraps, mercenaries and imperial commanders seemed to give sanction to the idea of the British Empire as a divinely sponsored phenomenon—By Appointment to God.
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    The Empire was at its zenith, the Crown glittered as never before, magnificently in the centre of the world lay England, home and glory. With such a background of national self-esteem, it was difficult not to be pugnacious. The late Victorians were plumper and more complacent than their fathers had been, but they still had plenty of élan, and the history of the past century had inspired them with a happy contempt for all adversaries. Their society was stable. Their inventive genius was everywhere acknowledged. The superiority of their arms seemed to have been permanently established by the twin victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. There had been setbacks, of course, generally when a gallant company of cruelly outnumbered Britons had been caught unfairly by surprise: but even the blunders of the Crimea had been redeemed by the effortless conquest of Egypt, and by a score of successful small colonial wars. Nowadays, when a British soldier marched into some unknown and potentially hostile territory, he marched in the almost certain conviction that he was going to win. The British armies of the day fought ferociously, matching barbarism with brutality, and seldom hesitating to employ the most terrible of weapons, the Maxim gun or the expanding Dum-Dum bullet, against the most primitive of enemies—‘Butcher and Bolt’ was the army’s own nickname for punitive expeditions. But it was all in a good cause. As Austin exclaimed in another irresistible poem:

    Who would not die for England! And for Her
    He dies , who, whether in the fateful fight ,
    Or in the marish jungle, where She bids,
    Far from encircling fondness, far from kiss
    Of clinging babes, hushes his human heart.
    And, stern to every voice but Hers, obeys
    Duty and Death that evermore were twin.
    So th e taste for power inflamed the imperial violence. It must have seemed so easy. In India the Forward School of strategists constantly pressed for the extension of frontiers northward and eastward through the passes—to confront the enemy, Russian, French or Chinese, muzzle to muzzle on ground of British choosing. In the Pacific the virile Australians wanted to create a Mare Nostrum, excluding other European Powers and keeping the Asiatics where they belonged. In Africa the British seemed to be storming belligerently everywhere, seizing territories or abasing chieftains for reasons that were basically economic or strategic, but were often sublimated on the spot into the sheer love of a scrap. Austin was once asked to define his idea of Heaven. It was, he said, to be sitting in a garden receiving news by alternate messengers of British victories at sea and British victories on land. The British were not really a belligerent people—few