The Course of Empire
By D. W. BROGAN, IN the last number of Time magazine to reach me, one of the main foreign stories is headed " Great Britain—Decline or Fall ? " and it is illustrated by a map showing Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda. The decline or the fall of the British Empire in Africa at this moment, Time admits, would not be an unmixed blessing, but Time seems pessimistic about its future. In the same week, I received from New York a number of that able left-wing anti-Stalinist journal, the New Leader, and its burden of complaint was that we had abandoned the imperial theme too soon, had given over India to partition and disorder. I could multiply examples; the Americans en masse are convinced that the British Empire is ,on the way out; some rejoice, some wish the decline were slower, some take refuge in an elegiac mbod. " Men are we and must grieve when even the shade Of that which once was great is passed away." I think that one of the first causes of friction in the imperial field between Britain and the United States is'just this American attitude (or attitudes) which is irritating enough to justify, just, a certain obfuscation. Just, for that natural resentment can be carried to the point of ,blinding us to certain truths. That the British Empire in its old form is being transformed; we can all agree on that; and that the new world empire (or one of the two) is the United States itself.
The second proposition is, of course, one put in another spirit and in another sense by the Communists, their pals and their dupes, so I had better make myself clear. What was striking to the imagination and to the reflection about the old British Empire from, say, the Peace of Paris (1763) on, was its world character. It was not, then, its painting the map red that mattered so much, it was its making the " multitudinous seas incarnadine " by its ships and bases. It was the Empire on which the sun never set, but many of the spots on which it never set were like " the barren rocks of Aden." It was put very well by an unfriendly critic, an Irish Bostonian poet, John Jeffery Roche: " Her pirate flag is flying Where the East and the West are one And her drums while the day is dying, Salute the rising sun."
But today, it is not the Union Jack (or flag) that fulfils this role, it is Old Glory. " Regions Caesar never knew " (and in the case of Thule human beings never knew) now see the Stars and Stripes, juke-boxes, bulldozers and the modern equivalent of ships of the line and frigates of the Royal Navy, the American Air Force. This is a fact that bewilders Americans and irritates a great many British people. But an ineluctable time, as an imperial poet put it, has come to both.. It is ineluctable because power counts; it is not all that counts, but power counts and never more than in the century of the common man. And none of us can doubt where the power lies; it lies in America. It is inside the white walls of the Pentagon, not inside the black walls of the Adthiralty, that the basic power decisions are made. This is no reason for despair, no reason for our thinking of ourselves as " Romans " of the early dark ages sending consular ornaments to a new Clovis but, if we begin to think that that is our situation, it will be.
Then it should be noted that (like the Romans) the Americans did not wish this destiny Co be thrust on them. They wanted to stay at home; most still do. If Europe (not only Britain) is feeble, anaemic, impotent, not even by 1914 standards, but by 1939 standards, it is our fault, not theirs. It is necessary to say this, fpr there is a Cdespread belief that.our misfortunes are America's fault. They are not; they are ours. America's misfortunes are America's fault, but that is another story. America's misfortunes, but what, are they ? the envious, the resentful, the merely curious may cry. , The misfortune of having lost hundreds of thousands of lives in the late war: of having lost tens of thousands in Korea; of having squan- dered, in wood and metal and rubber and cotton and nylon, what could have built millions of houses and schools, clothed tens of millions of American men and women. For it is an illusion to believe that the late war made America richer; it made her poorer and she paid (like Canada), at the time, for all her extravagance. She got no lease-lend, no loans. The Americans, in brief, did not wish to replace us and did not rob us.
But the fact remains that their power is spreading while ours is contracting. And much of the contracting is blamed on Americans and on American ideas. On American ideas, yes. The doctrines of the American Revolution (a little blown on at home) are still " heard round the world," notably that " all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." I do not believe this to be true, nor do all Americans, but hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa believe it to be true, and that American idea works against the old idea of Empire. It may be fanciful to think of the Mau Mau initiation ceremonies being even a parody of the proceedings at Philadelphia in 1776 but they are (among other things) a parody of the last. sentence of the Declaration of Independence. That is a fact we have got to live with and which the Americans have got to live with and with which they are just beginning to live. And we are at least as capable of living with it, dealing with it, as are the Affiericans. Our imperial role, in its new form, is very far from over. The Americans are beginning to understand something of what we achieved in India (the Indians know it already) and what was not accomplished in Iran where our imperialism was so erratic, feeble and half- hearted. They are also beginning to realise, a very difficult thing for men brought up in the self-deceiving anarchy of the American business tradition, that the business of any great nation is not business but politics, that (regrettably I think) the two can never be separated. What the businessmen of the Eisenhower cabinet are slowly learning in Washington. the United States is learning from Tokio to Venezuela. And more and more are willing to learn from us. (We have some things to learn, too.) Lastly, it is absurd to think of ourselves as being driven to the wall by American business ruthlessness. What could be more pointless than to lament that it was American money that brought in the West Australian oilfield ? Each addition to the world's wealth is to our benefit and for a nation that covered the world with its businessmen, that has not abandoned business in India because the flags have changed, this is reasoning and emotion unworthy of a nation of shopkeepefs. as Adam Smith pointed out, again in the fateful year, 1776. Our troubles are very great. America aggravates very few of them and diminishes far more. " The fault, dear Briton, is not in our stars," or not. mainly. I shall conclude with mil amended quotation from Mr. Roche in a poem he once wrote on the superiority of the Boston " a."
" Dies exit praegelida Sinistra quwn Britannia."
And this I shall translate freely as, " Britain will only get left when her feet get too cold."
Next week's article in this series will discuss Commonwealth Opinions of Britain. It will be by Sir Keith Hancock, Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and Professor of British Commonwealth Affairs in the University of London. La`cr contributors include Richard Chancellor, on Russian Opinions of Britain, and the Earl of Halsbury on the Industrial Outlook for Britain.
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