Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (48 page)

By the end of July the British had landed a force of Royal Marines on San Juan, and all because of a pig the island seemed ready for war. The two little armies, one at each end of the island, flew their flags boldly and greased their guns for action, while at weekends boatloads of sightseers from Victoria cruised expectantly off-shore. Far away in London and Washington nobody had yet heard of Mr Cutler’s pig, but on the spot the atmosphere was perilous. In Victoria hotheads demanded the instant expulsion of the Americans: in Fort Vancouver Harney was urged to summon all available American naval forces. In August the Americans landed more men and guns on the island, and Admiral Lambert Baynes, Royal Navy, arrived to take over the British naval command at Esquimault in the great three-decker
Ganges
,
eighty-four guns. The
British
Colonist
,
in Victoria, suggested a pre-emptive war at once, while the odds were in British favour; the American Governor of Washington Territory visited San Juan to be greeted with a salute of cannon from the American camp. General Harney announced that the Indian raids along the coast were instigated by Hudson’s Bay Company to scare American settlers off, and observed piously that in occupying San Juan he had merely ‘assumed a defensive posture against the encroachments
of the British … upon the rights, the lives and property of our citizens’.

He really seemed to want a war. Perhaps it was only his native belligerence. Perhaps he thought a quick victory over the traditional enemy would bring him political kudos. Some British theorists supposed him to be obeying secret orders from Washington, intending to neutralize the British fleet at Esquimault as the first step in an attack on British Columbia. Others speculated that he thought a foreign war might avert the impending disaster of the War between the States at home, or alternatively (he came from Tennessee) that it might give the South a better chance to secede. But the British would not play. Governor Douglas held his hand, Admiral Baynes would not shoot, and the soldiers bore themselves with a sensible restraint. In any case both the British and American Governments were preoccupied with more desperate events elsewhere—the British with disquieting shifts of power in Europe, the Americans with the prospect of civil war.

It was ten years before the Pig War was settled. Throughout the 1860s San Juan island, some ten miles long, was occupied by the rival toy armies, one at the north end, one at the south. The Americans consolidated their position above Griffin Bay, a windswept healthy place with a magnificent view over the bay to the Olympic Mountains beyond. They built five or six clapboard huts up there, and surrounded the camp with a neat stockade, and erected an immense white flagstaff for Old Glory. The British, though, on the shore of Garrison Bay in the north, built themselves a station more in the imperial manner. On the beach they erected a blockhouse of wood, with rifle-slits commanding the bay, and behind it they cleared a large parade ground, to keep the Royal Marines up to scratch. For the rest, the encampment had a comfortable, almost a domestic look. Two rows of Douglas firs were planted, in honour of the Governor. Little flower gardens were lovingly tended. The steep wooded hill behind was hacked into limestone terraces for tennis courts and croquet lawns. There was a white clapboard barrack for the men, and the officers did themselves very well with seven-roomed houses among the trees. The commander’s house had a ballroom and a billiard room, and in old pictures of the establishment everybody
looks very contented in this improbable outpost of imperial arms—the soldiers spanking and muscular in immaculate uniforms, the officers lounging about on verandahs in sporting gear, with gun-dogs at their feet.

The rival forces grew friendlier as the years passed. Nobody bothered them much, and the officers often visited each other, competed at race meetings, or enjoyed picnics together on the beach. It was not until 1871 that the Governments of Great Britain and the United States finally submitted the San Juan question for arbitration by the newly-proclaimed Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm I. His Supreme Highness did not in fact give the matter his closest personal attention, but referred it to three learned sages, Doctors Grim, Kiepert and Goldschmidt, who studied the Washington Treaty in its hydrological, geographic, legal and historic aspects, and advised the Emperor accordingly. On October 21, the Kaiser gave his decision: ‘The claim of the Government of the United States,
viz
., that the line of boundary between the dominions of Her Britannic Majesty and the United States should be run through the Canal de Haro, is most in accordance with the true interpretation of the Treaty….’

Within a fortnight the British garrison had embarked, and even before they left the Americans had cut down the flagpole at Garrison Bay, and chopped it up for souvenirs.
1

This was still mid-Victorian imperialism. The British Empire could afford to lose, especially to the Americans, for it was not yet a national infatuation. Convinced of its own merit and generally sure of its rights, the Empire in the 1860s was not habitually aggressive. Its wars were, by its own lights, chiefly fought in self-defences and its acquisitions were often forced upon it. Not only in the Pacific, but
everywhere in the world the British were still without envy, for they knew themselves beyond challenge.

But a very different mood was presently to animate the Raj—which, while it fortunately never again came so close to war against the Americans, soon became so obsessed with its own glories, and so freely threw its weight about the rest of the world, that within a couple of decades it had scarcely a friend to call its own, only enemies, rivals or subjects.

I
N 1870 an English visionary of the merchant class elevated the imperial idea to the level of faith or art. The sage John Ruskin, art historian, painter, social reformer, the physically impotent master of a gloriously potent prose, had just been appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. There clung to his person, as to his reputation, the charisma of a prophet. He was a born conservative in the stateliest sense. He revered the past for its own sake, thought Gothic architecture the highest expression of human genius, had a taste for the grand, the spacious, the noble, the dedicated, and admired men of imperious decision: Bishop Colenso (‘loyal and patiently adamantine’), Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab (‘invincible soldiership and loving equity’), Governor Eyre (‘honourable performance of duty is more truly just than rigid enforcement of right’).

All his views he expressed with a magical conviction, and this was fortunate, for not infrequently he changed them. He was one of the most compelling and popular speakers in Britain, at working men’s clubs as at Eton or Oxford, his matter ranging splendidly free—he apologized once when his lecture, announced as being about Crystallography, turned out to be on Cistercian architecture. His style was incomparably majestic, and audiences of every kind hung upon his phrases. He spoke, we are told, ‘in a mediaeval way’, his pronunciation archaic, his Rs peculiarly rolled, and his words remained in the memory like music. Ruskin talked much nonsense in his time, but when he struck one of his grand themes the effect was unforgettable.

One such theme was Imperial Duty, and this was the subject of his inaugural lecture at Oxford. So many undergraduates had packed the University Museum to hear it that the lecture was adjourned while they all moved along the road to the larger Sheldonian
Theatre. Even there they overflowed the seats, sitting on the floor and hanging about the doors: and from the high dais of Wren’s little masterpiece, beneath the painted putti on the ceiling, rolling back their painted tentage to reveal the pale blue sky behind, Ruskin delivered his call for the ideology of Empire:

Such a view of the imperial summons placed the Empire in the very centre of national affairs—a task, Ruskin seemed then to be saying (for he soon lost interest in the subject), around which the whole of British life should revolve. Few who heard him that day could have been unmoved by the appeal, and some we know were influenced by it for the rest of their lives; for the first time the imperial idea now seemed to satisfy some craving in the British consciousness. Times had greatly changed during the thirty years since Victoria’s accession, when the possession of the Empire had seemed an irrelevance, or an eighteenth-century anachronism. In those days the announcement of a debate on imperial matters would almost certainly empty the House of Commons. The imperial topics were seldom political issues, the great public was not interested, and during the first half of the century no sensible politician would have
cared to stake his future upon the issue of overseas expansion. Though in fact the Empire had steadily grown throughout the Queen’s reign, it seemed to have happened without design or satisfaction—‘in a fit of absence of mind’, as was said of the process in a famous phrase. Even as late as 1861 a Select Committee of the House of Commons was recommending a complete withdrawal from West Africa, and though many Britons felt a sense of imperial duty, few were yet moved by an imperial enthusiasm.

Between 1837 and 1869, six men had been Prime Ministers of England. Three had been Conservative, three Whig or Liberal, but none could really be described as men of Empire. Melbourne had been a gentlemanly relict of the previous century, Peel a social reformer from the new industrial classes, Derby, Russell and Aberdeen old-school patricians. It occurred to none of them that the destiny of the British might lie primarily not in the British Isles at all, but in distant possessions overseas. Even the fire-eater Palmerston, ready though he was to slap a gunboat up any creek in defence of British interests, did not wish his country to possess the world, believing rather in the power of trade and moral prestige: unable to find a Colonial Secretary, it was said, for one of his ministries, with a sigh he took on the job himself—‘Come upstairs with me, H., when the council is over, we will look at the maps and you shall show me where these places are’. At no time in the first half of Victoria’s reign was Empire a central preoccupation of British statesmanship. Imperial episodes sometimes captured the centre of the stage—the Afghan tragedy, the Durham Report, the Mutiny—but no politician had tried to give the Empire an ideological meaning, or to convince the small and privileged electorate that theirs must be an imperial future. On the whole the Tory Party was the party of Empire, as the trustees of tradition and pride, while the Liberals were the champions of free trade and liberty: but neither could be described as a party of imperialism—a word which indeed carried for the English distasteful undertones of foreignness.

In the 1870s, however, there were signs that the British conviction of merit was growing into a conviction of command. Ruskin’s vision was partly an inspiration, but partly a symptom: and during the next decade two astonishing statesmen forced the issue of
imperialism into the forefront of British affairs, capping the Victorian age with its passions. Benjamin Disraeli became the maestro of Empire: William Ewart Gladstone, its confessor.

They might have been cast by some divine theatrical agency for their parts in the drama, so exactly suited were they to their roles not merely in manners and morals, but actually in appearance. They represented two complementary impulses in the British political genius: the idealistic impulse, which wished to make Britain the paragon of principle, the urge for glory, which fed upon the exotic, the flamboyant, even the slightly shady. In Victorian politics both these elements thrived, as they thrived too in everyday life, and it was their confrontation at the apex of the century that dictated the final character of Victoria’s Empire, setting its style and dictating its reputation for posterity.

Disraeli adopted the imperial cause deliberately. He recognized it for what it was, a sure vote-catcher, especially since the Reform Bill of 1867 had added a million urban labourers to the franchise (as early as 1849 he had suggested giving seats at Westminster to thirty MPs from the colonies, as a means of strengthening the Tory party). It was in June 1872, in a famous speech at the Crystal Palace, that he first presented to the British public his own romantic prospectus of Empire, coupling it with the English Constitution as the foundation of Tory policy. The English, he said, had a choice before them. They could choose to be subjects of ‘a comfortable England’, insular and ordinary, or of ‘a great country, an imperial country, a country where your sons, when they rise, rise to paramount positions, and obtain not merely the esteem of their countrymen, but command the respect of the world’.

Later this conception intermittently coloured all his politics, and guided his statesmanship too. Half-measures of glory were unworthy of such a nation at such a time. ‘Money is not to be considered in such matters‚’ he told the House of Commons when accused of extravagant imperial expenditures, ‘success alone is to be thought of.’ At home, he accused the Liberal Party of wanting to
jettison all the splendours of Empire, and described the English working classes as being ‘proud of belonging to an Imperial country’. Abroad he attended the Congress of Berlin in 1878, which settled the fate of south-eastern Europe for the next thirty years (and incidentally gave Britain possession of Cyprus), as the representative not just of a nation, but of an Empire—‘an Empire of liberty, truth and of justice’. He believed in the show of things, in prestige, in self-advertisement. Nations like people, he believed, were accepted at their own valuation. When he created Victoria Queen-Empress, or ordered the posting of Indian troops to Malta, or manipulated the Eastern Question to his purposes, he was making fact out of fantasy, and exploiting the world’s imagination. To the end of his days he represented, more colourfully than any other great statesman of British history, that latent English taste for the spiced and the half-foreign which was a driving motive of imperialism—after the Mutiny he was widely tipped as the first Viceroy of India, a dazzling prospect unhappily never fulfilled.

Tremendously on the other side stood Gladstone, who distrusted the imperial ethic with fastidious profundity, and made equal political capital out of his opposition to it. Gladstone was at once more explicit in his philosophies, and more diffuse. His every political instinct was for Little England, and for him the true national glory lay in moral superiority—supported of course by commercial good sense, for he was after all the son of a Liverpool West Indian merchant.
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The central strength of England, he wrote in 1878, lay in England. Those who believed in imperial expansion were the materialists of politics. ‘Their faith is in acres, in leagues, in sounding titles and long lists of territories. They forget that the entire fabric of the British Empire was reared and consolidated by the energies of a people which was … insignificant in numbers … and that if by some vast convulsion our transmarine possessions could all be submerged, the very same energies of that same people would … without them in other modes assert its undiminished greatness.’

Gladstone’s most celebrated political
tour-de-force
was his
Midlothian campaign, the whirlwind speaking tour by which, in 1879, he snatched an electoral victory from the Conservatives, and brought the Liberals back to power. This was not only a democratic innovation—the first time a British statesman of his rank had so freely solicited the support of the electorate: it was also a passionate attack upon the idea of Empire. In every corner of the globe, Gladstone cried, British imperialism had come as a pestilence. The Queen’s imperial title was theatrical bombast. The current war against the Afghans was a crime against God. In South Africa 10,000 Zulus had been slaughtered ‘for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and homes, their wives and families’. These were false phantoms of glory—mischievous and ruinous misdeeds—a policy in its result disloyal, in its essence thoroughly subversive—a road which plunged into suffering, discredit and dishonour. National pride should not blind a nation to higher dictates of justice. ‘Remember the rights of the savage! … Remember that the happiness of his humble home, remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own!’