EMPIRE

Minerva's owl

DENIS BROGAN

`Minerva's owl flies only in the dusk.' This phrase, obscure to the Anglo-Saxon mind, is

in fact a lot clearer than many of the dicta of Georg Friedrich Hegel. But although it is fairly easy to give a general meaning to this

utterance, it is not so easy to give a particular

meaning to it-in the context of the celebra tion, if that is the word for it, of the Dia-

mond Jubilee of the Round Table*. For we have to ask the question, when did the owl begin to fly in the dusk, and has it stopped flying?

It could be argued, and I would argue, that the dusk started about the time the Round Table was founded. And perhaps the foun- dation of the Round Table was an un- conscious response to the approaching dusk in which the imperial idea was now about to live—and die. For in the sixty years of the existence of the Round Table we have not only seen the transformation of the British Empire into something called the Com- monwealth, and the secession from the Com- monwealth of some important parts of its early territory, but a great falling off in inter- est in the Commonwealth and a great scaling down of its prospects.

Here I think I'd like to distinguish between the long-term scepticism with which the Commonwealth idea is greeted today, and the irritable and bad-tempered pessimism of people like Lord Milner. As early as 1910, Lord Milner was already gloomy about the prospects of the Empire which he had served and whose rulers had conspicuously failed to follow his lead. Other preachers of the imperial idea were beginning to suspect that perhaps they had been pursuing not a star but an ignis fatuus. It was, of course, possi- ble after the the First Great War to believe that the Empire had come through this ordeal more united than ever, with common memories of victory. But the signs of decline were already very visible. The idea of an integrated imperial government was nonsense by 1919. There was not going to be any Zollverein on the German model, and there was not going to be an organised federal empire on any lines.

This was concealed from naive enthusiasts like Lionel Curtis. It was even concealed from shrewder people than he by the mere size of the Empire, and by the hopes ex- pressed in such enterprises as the Empire Ex- hibition of 1925. Already the white domi- nions were asserting their own independence, the leader being Canada, and the reluctant acceptance of Irish independence in the form of the Irish Free State introduced a very tepidly loyal member of the Empire to the world political system.

This is reflected in the Diamond Jubilee number of the Round Table where a great many of the articles do, in fact, account for the falling off in imperial faith and imperial efficacy. Milner and his disciples were fighting a losing battle long before they fully realised it. True, Milner as early as 1910 was very sceptical about the future of the

*The Round Table: Diamond Jubilee Number, November 1970: Empire to Com- monwealth, 1910-1970. Empire, but that was because the 'Radical had sold the pass to Boer nationalism, to claims for economic and political dependence of the old dominions, and wer in the process not only of accepting Lb break-up of the United Kingdom, but of ac cepting the great anomaly within the Empir of an Indian dominion. A subject which h. never, I think, been properly studied b historians is the revelation of the unease, a proaching despair, which marked To politics just before the war of 1914 an which produced some discreditable activit' like the organised rebellion in Ulster. A Gandhi was already casting his shado almost completely over that last imper show, the Delhi Durbar of 1911. So for th old-fashioned founders and readers of th Round Table, this Jubilee number has melancholy charm or is a source of mark dejection. What went wrong, and why?

We must remember that scepticism abou imperial expansion was not confined Great Britain. In his last year as Presiden Theodore Roosevelt came to the conclusio that the occupation of the Philippines ha been a great mistake rashly giving hostage to fortune. Pearl Harbour was to show tha Theodore Roosevelt was tightly sceptical, i not soon enough or completely enoug Then it began to be noticed (and could has been noticed long before) that imper enthusiasm was very largely a middle cla and upper class hobby. In this admirabl symposium there are one or two misleadin attempts to evade a sad truth about Empire: namely, that the British workin classes were comparatively indifferent to existence. Thus, we are told here tha Canada and Australia replaced the Unit States as the chief home of refuge for Britis emigrants. But this was surely not becau the British working man, especially in th depressing years after the First War, prefer red Canada or Australia to the Uni States, but because the United States ha stopped welcoming immigrants of any kind It was slightly less chilling to British emi grants than to others: for example, Itali or Pdlish emigrants; but it had ceased to lis up to the famous motto on the statue o Liberty. It wanted Europe to keep its o pressed, depressed, and poverty-stricken pee pie at home, or at any rate not to land the on a country going through a fit o xenophobia, of which the Ku Klux Klan only one revealing symptom.

Is there any reason to believe that if im migration into the United States had been a easy in 1924 as it was in 1914 there woul have been the shift in the bias of Briti emigrants from the United States to 1 Empire'? I doubt it very much. 'America th Golden' was still the promised land for great part of the British working classes, a it was not their fault that the golden doe was being shut nearly completely in the faces. This, of course, was more visible from a great exporting city like Glasgow tha from the more confined and less In ternationally-minded city of London.

Nevertheltss,if you grew up in a great po for North America like Glasgow or Live pool, you were in touch with the Unit States—which made a great deal of imperil propaganda seem rather foolish (and I am not discussing the well known fact that a great many people who emigrated to Canada did this in order to move on later to the United States). The editors and authors of this symposium are on the whole candid about the decline the appeal of the Empire. Bodies like pilgrims and even the English-Speaking Union were misled and misleading. For, as I discovered in a great massy visits to the United States and visits to what I would call British concessions like Montclair, New jersey, many of the people who lived there were very sulky about their treatment in their native land. This wd§ discovered by credulous British propagandists during the second World War.

But of course the real acid that ate away the Empire was its transformation into the Commonwealth—not even the British Com- monwealth. India was an acid test, and so, not long after, was Africa. What was there in common between Lahore, 'the sword hand of India', as we read in Kim, and, say, Bolton or Port Glasgow? Very little.

That is not to say that the Empire had not had very great effects, many of them but not all of them beneficial, in India and in Africa. After all, the working language of India in government and in business is still English. How long this will last, I don't know, and people who know India much better than I do are increasingly pessimistic about the future of the valuable lingua franca that England presented to India, and, of course, to Pakistan.

But more serious and more revealing is the indifference of a great part of the population of Great Britain to the whole idea of either Empire or Commonwealth. This was visible in Balliol when I was an undergraduate: it was increasingly difficult to get able British students to go in for the Indian Civil Service examinations. One great friend of mine belonged to a great Anglo-Indian dynasty; he was extremely hostile to British rule in India, but I think it was less that he was hostile because he had become a Communist than that he had become a Communist because he was hostile.

It was not only the young who were somewhat tepid about the Empire; it included their elders and betters. I can remember in Corpus, Oxford, when I was Tice-President, that the President and I were attacked verbally and almost physically by a young Canadian and imperially minded undergraduate because the college had not hoisted the Union Jack on Empire Day. We acre put in a dilemma because the college hadn't got a Union Jack flag to hoist on any occasion, and neither the President or I knew when Empire Day fell. Indeed, a great deal of the imperial propaganda, ranging from the Prince of Wales in Empire butter to exchange programmes between school teachers of Canada and Britain, was to back- fire.

There were, of course, a great many other reasons for the decline in the imperial idea. India was becoming more and more ob- viously an anomaly. The new African states—I cannot call them nations—were going to be an even more obvious anomaly quite soon. Many of the heroes of the old imperial crusade were regarded very cynically by the young, almost without con- sideration of their social or educational background. Many of them, I am afraid, regard Sir Keith Hancock's still surviving nthusiasm. for that great phoney Field- arshall Smuts with incredulity. (Of course, great many of them don't know who Field- Marshal Smuts was.) The last war did not necessarily build up fresh imperial enthusiasm. Indeed, the elationships between Australia and the other country in that war were very far tom being wholly tranquil and trusting. e British Empire, in its great days, was a very remarkable phenomenon indeed, but the more acute spectators of the realities of the world, like Lord Salisbury and like Gladstone, had grave doubts about its viability, at any rate in the form preached by such leaders as Lord Milner, Joe Cham- berlain, Leopold Amery, and Geoffrey Robinson (or Dawson) of the Times.

During my solitary visit to India, I was driven from Delhi to Agra over relics of previous empires, and I thought perhaps the lesson of Ozymandias of Egypt was as applicable to British India as to the Pharoah Rameses tt. On the whole, the Empire or even the Commonwealth is not a thing to be ashamed of, although, of course, as in all great and artificial political structures, there is a great deal of guilt built into the foun- dations. But the application of immigration quotas against the white commonwealth is perhaps a sign of the times, and too much harping on the imperial theme will simply ir- ritate the people of this island who have their own troubles and have few reasons to believe that the dominions are going to help very much. It may be our duty, and I think it is our duty. to defend New Zealand, but I think Canada and Australia and India are no business of ours, and we could settle down either in not very splendid isolation or as an offshore American island, or perhaps con- sider seriously whether Britain can afford to go it alone or can to any real extent go it with its very mixed partners in 'the Com- monwealth'.