The Liberal Tradition

5. IMPERIALISM AND THE BOER WAR

109. SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT: Speech at West Monmouthshire, 31 May 1899

What is this Imperialism which, in the slang of the day, is paraded as the highest form of patriotism? I laugh sometimes when I hear myself and others denounced as ‘Little Englanders.’ I confess I did not know that there was a ‘Little England’ to belong to. I always thought that England was the greatest, the most extensive, the most powerful, the most famous nation in the world; that it was one of which any man might be proud to be a citizen and have no cause to be dissatisfied. Little England, forsooth! Where is it? If I desire (which I do not) to be a Little Englander, I must cease to be a British citizen, because being a British citizen I am necessarily a Great Englander, a citizen of a great Empire. . . .

But what does that Imperialism you hear so much about mean? If it means pursuing a policy which is the wisest and best for that great Empire to which we belong, of course we are all Imperialists in that sense. But then remains the practical question—what is the policy of Imperialism? It is a policy which has its first regard to the consolidation of the vast dominions, the countless millions, and the varied interests which compose our unequalled Empire, the development of their resources, the lightening of their burdens, the fostering of their natural growth, the relief of distress within it, and the raising of the standard of all sorts and conditions of men who are the subjects of the Queen. That is Imperialism as I inderstand it. That is a policy which makes the Empire great and keeps it so.

There is another and exactly opposite view of imperial policy. It is to postpone and subordinate all these objects to vanity, to the acquisition of fresh populations, the adoption of additional burdens—that is the extensionists’ theory, and the extensionists, it seems to me, are extremely like what in currency are called the inflationists, who are of opinion that the more paper you issue the more wealth you create and the more prosperity you will have. Well, I am not an inflationist in currency and I am not an extensionist. In my judgement, at least, it is a greater and a wiser policy to cultivate an Empire than to boom an Empire. . . .

To these ends (the ends of the Imperialists) the principal genius of administration and the energies of Parliament are directed. Social reforms are neglected. Indeed Mr. Chamberlain told us, in a scornful tone, that to talk of their social reforms was merely ‘parochial’ and that what we ought to occupy ourselves with is this inflated Imperialism. Now, what is the end of that? It means that the Empire is committed to land speculators, to mining syndicates, and that they are to determine the limits of the Empire and the methods of its administration. They are not particular—all know that—as to the methods to be employed. ‘Expansion, at any rate, at whatever cost, and by whatever means.’ That is the sleeping genie. Well, sometimes I think it might be better if it took a little more sleep.

A. G. Gardiner, Life of Sir William Harcourt (London, 1923), vol. ii, pp. 496-7.

110. J. L. HAMMOND: Colonial and Foreign Policy, in Liberalism and the Empire (1900)

A main cause of the precipitate abandonment of their tradition by many Liberals is to be found in a fatalism, a doctrine contemned by strenuous men and strenuous times, which has lately been erected with solemn honours into a political principle. It is not only amongst Conservatives that the new divinity claims its votaries. The pseudo-scientific jargon of’manifest destiny,’ ‘inevitable development,’ and the like—the vocabulary of men who see finality in each fugitive phase and phenomenon of public affairs—has invaded almost every school of political thought. . . . The assumptions of Imperialist determinism have no greater claim to scientific accuracy than any of the predictions hazarded with no less assurance in the past which history has turned to ridicule. . . .

But the futility of this practice is of small consequence in comparison with its vicious results. If war is imminent, we are warned that no human power can stop it. When war breaks out, Providence and the enemy must divide the blame. If a conflict is inevitable, diplomacy becomes a mere incident, or, rather, well-timed irritation becomes a diplomatic art; and it is the business of a statesman, recognising that he cannot avoid a struggle, to arrange to provoke it at the moment most convenient to his own country. . . . Thus, fatalism becomes a narcotic administered to the public conscience by the advocates of aggrandisement. . . . But the whole temper of fatalism is foreign to the Liberal spirit. If Liberals are content with a moral somnolence, it is no wonder they have little taste for a creed which insists on nothing so strongly as the duty of developing just the active sense of responsibility that fatalism saps. Ulysses’ bow was useless to men who were unable to draw it. The faith of Mr. Gladstone sits ill upon a listless indifference to its great and vivifying principles. All the native fire and inspiration is gone out of his creed when it is invoked by Liberals who understand by Liberalism a disorderly collection of miscellaneous enthusiasms rather than an established attitude to the fundamental moralities of politics. For all idealism belongs to robust and virile natures; and the temper which governed the foreign policy associated with the name of Liberal during the nineteenth century was, above and before all things, idealist. . . .

The Liberals who made the foreign policy of England during a great part of the century, and whose doctrines, as we believe, supply the true solution of our modern problems, were distinguished by three great principles. They believed in morality between nations, they respected and cherished the best instincts of a true nationalism, and they held that England could not cut herself off from the highest interests of Europe. Each of these principles is attacked by Imperialism. . . . None of these Liberal principles are to be found in the new ideal of national conduct and the new moral canon presented by Imperialism. The moral syllogism which it applies to politics runs thus: The British Empire is the greatest blessing known to mankind. Whatever helps to extend the Empire is good. Therefore, although a particular course of action may be immoral, in the sense that it is a breach of faith, or that it is an attack upon national rights, or that it implies violence, it becomes not merely innocent, but positively virtuous, if it helps to extend the Empire. . . .

But the contrast between the Liberal and the Imperialist positions might be put in another form: The Liberal believes that the greatness of the British Empire imposes a special obligation to act with self-control and moderation; the Imperialist sees in it an authority for disregarding the restraints which he would recognise as binding on a State less powerful and less beneficent. There are certain things, argues the Liberal, which our very strength makes it at once impolitic and unchivalrous for the British Empire to do. Great Britain’s position is such, argues the Imperialist, that she must not be held to her word, or hampered by conventions like other people; she acts as the right hand of Providence in regenerating the world, and no technical obstacles must be allowed to interfere with her mission of carrying from continent to continent the energies of a just and sublime civilization, the art of a new and divine ordinance.

Liberalism and the Empire (1900), pp. 161-71.

III. J. A. HOBSON: Imperialism (1902)

Modern British colonialism has been no drain upon our material and moral resources, because it has made for the creation of free white democracies, a policy of informal federation, of decentralisation, involving no appreciable strain upon the governmental faculties of Great Britain. Such federation, whether it remains informal with the slight attachment of imperial sovereignty which now exists, or voluntarily takes some more formal shape, political or financial, may well be regarded as a source of strength, political and military.

Imperialism is the very antithesis of this free, wholesome colonial connection, making, as it ever does, for greater complications of foreign policy, greater centralisation of power, and a congestion of business which ever threatens to absorb and overtax the capacity of parliamentary government.

The true political nature of Imperialism is best seen by confronting it with the watchwords of progress accepted in the middle of the nineteenth century by moderate men of both great parties in the State, though with interpretations varying in degree—peace, economy, reform, and popular self-government. Even now we find no formal abandonment of the principles of government these terms express, and a large section of professed Liberals believe or assert that Imperialism is consistent with the maintenance of all these virtues. . . .

The political effects, actual and necessary, of the new Imperialism, as illustrated in the case of the greatest of imperialist-Powers, may be thus summarised. It is a constant menace to peace, by furnishing continual temptations to further aggression upon lands occupied by lower races and by embroiling our nation with other nations of rival imperial ambitions; to the sharp peril of war it adds the chronic danger and degradation of militarism, which not merely wastes the current physical and moral resources of the nation, but checks the very course of civilisation. It consumes to an illimitable and incalculable extent the financial resources of a nation by military preparation, stopping the expenditure of the current income of the State upon productive public projects and burdening posterity with heavy loads of debt. Absorbing the public money, time, interest and energy on costly and unprofitable work of territorial aggrandisement, it thus wastes those energies of public life in the governing classes and the nations which are needed for internal reforms and for the cultivation of the arts of material and intellectual progress at home. Finally, the spirit, the policy, and the methods of Imperialism are hostile to the institutions of popular self- government, favouring forms of political tyranny and social authority which are the deadly enemies of effective liberty and equality.

J. A. Hobson, Imperialism, (1938 edn.), pp. 125-6, 152.

112. SIR HENRY CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: Speech at Stirling, 26 October 1901

The cardinal fact upon which the whole problem turns is that this is of the nature of a civil war. We are not fighting with a foreign foe whom we are to thrash and overcome and vanquish and punish, and then abandon him and turn our back upon him. These men are to be our neighbours—nay, they are to be our fellow-citizens. Whatever be their faults, whatever be their offences in the present or in the past against us, if we are to stay in South Africa at all, they will be there; and not only so, but they are indistinguishable from the great majority of our own citizens in our own colonies. . . . Now any one who rightly appreciates these facts, what will he say are to be our objects in the war which we have undertaken in South Africa? The first ought to be to impose upon our antagonists our military superiority. But the second is to impress upon them our ultimate and essential friendliness towards them. . . .

Are the elements to be found for a settlement in the conditions to which you have now reduced South Africa?

The whole country in the two belligerent States outside the mining towns is a howling wilderness. The farms are burned, the country is wasted; the flocks and herds are either butchered or driven off; the mills are destroyed; furniture and implements of agriculture are smashed. These things are what I have termed methods of barbarism. I adhere to the phrase. I cannot improve upon it. If these are not the methods of barbarism, what methods does barbarism employ? . . . In time of war, things are not done in a rosewater sort of way; but the universal treatment of a whole country in this way, and the sweeping of women and children into camps is a process for which I venture to say nothing can furnish justification. When the war is happily ended and we set about the Constitution of this Arcadia, the fifty thousand prisoners of war will, of course, return to what by some sort of irony we may perhaps be permitted to call their home. These are the materials for your new self government. They will meet the hundred thousand women and children or the survivors of them. There will not be many children at the present rate. They will meet them, and in what sort of mind towards the British Empire will these men be when the husband meets the wife and hears her story, when the brother meets the sister, when the father asks in vain for his child? . . .

Hitherto I have spoken of the belligerent States. Now, what of the old Colony of the Cape? To what condition has the statesmanship of the Government brought it? . . . The Constitution is suspended. . . . Martial law, which is in other words no law, nothing but the arbitrary rule of soldiers, who know nothing of law, prevails from end to end of the country. We have reason to fear that martial law is but a form of undeclared war upon the Dutch population. With all the ordinary guarantees of civil rights suspended, no man is safe in property, in liberty or in life. The independent Press is silenced. So severe are the restrictions on news, that we have only partial information; but we have enough to know that hundreds of men, not Dutch only, but many British, have been arrested, thrown into gaol, deported to a distance from their homes, tried and condemned by these military tribunals on the evidence, it may be, of spiteful neighbours or political opponents. Why, with what indignation would we denounce such proceedings in other countries. . . . Have these Ministers of ours not learned that it is not by the suppression of civil rights, not by harshness, not by coercion and force in any form, that a free people can be kept quiet and contented? . . .

The Government . . . have revived old enmities and created new ones, they have sown seeds of lasting discord, and when they, by-and-by, lay down in discredit their responsibilities, they will leave a new Ireland in the Southern Seas to be a weakness and a difficulty to the Empire. . . . How true are the words of Mr. Burke in his famous speech on the conciliation of the American colonies. . . . Mr. Burke in this great speech urged a further objection to force—he was objecting to applying force in any case of this kind—and that was that you impair the object by your very endeavour to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing you recover, but depreciated, small, wasted and consumed in the contest. You may preserve your authority in South Africa, but it will be depreciated, and lessened, and wasted, and consumed. Is it too late even now to hope for counsels of moderation and a statesmanship which shall revert to the great traditions which have bound Great Britain and her Colonies together?

Speeches of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman (1908), pp. 77-83.