THE MORALITY OF CONQUEST.
IS it genuine love for others, or only distrust in ourselves, which has revived the discussion as to the lawfulness of conquest ? Certainly it is not knowledge of the history of progress in the world, which is inseparably allied with the history of conquering tribes. With the single exception of the Ottoman Turks, it would be difficult to point to a conquering race which had not either added to civilisation a new dominion, or developed in the conquered a new capacity for progress in all the higher conditions of well-being. The world owes to the Romans, who were conscious and wilful conquerors, that idea of law as opposed to will upon which all modern social progress has been built ; and to the barbarians who conquered them, all the freedom which it now enjoys. Without the conquests of Charle- magne, Europe might have waited centuries for the extinc- tion of Paganism ; and because Europe could not conquer Western Asia, the most fertile regions of the earth's surface are still lost to humanity in a kind of barbarism or tempered social anarchy. Conquest alone has secured for civilised mankind the vast territories comprised in the two Americas ; and it is in conquest alone that there is any hope of terminating the savagery of Africa, where races left to self-government for ages, in regions superabundantly fertile, have not only not advanced, but have positively retrograded, and are now distinctly more degraded than many of the savages of Polynesia. The most cruel conquest recorded in history, that of the Canaanite& by an Arab tribe, saved for the world its only beneficial creed ; and the double conquest of Britain by two sets of Norsemen enabled the Anglo-Saxon to take his vivifying place in the history of mankind. The evidence which proves that the conquest of the inferior races by the superior has been beneficial either to them or the world at large is irresistible, and, in all who know history, wakes in them a doubt whether assaults upon the system can be either well-informed or sincere. It is certain, however, that they are often both, and that many, whose intelligence is as undoubted as their motives, seriously question whether the new effort of the Whites to conquer Africa, which is now going on from all points of the Continent at once, is anything better than a huge dacoity, an effort to steal vast resources which properly do not belong to the conquering people. No such act, they assert, is compatible with Christianity; and though God in his beneficent providence may utilise such a crime for good, still it is a crime of which decent people who believe their faith should repent in sackcloth and ashes. This view is unusual on the Continent, even among the pious, an d is unknown in America ; but we are sure we do not misrepresent in the least degree either the religious Radicals or the semi- Socialists of our own country.
We cannot but think that, with the exception of a minute section, they are entirely mistaken. With that section, which denies the right of making war under all circumstances, we have no quarrel, nor any common ground upon which it is possible to argue. They think that Christ forbade war, and taught non-resistance even in extreme cases ; and if he did, the question for us, at least, ends, and we yield to a wisdom which transcends reason, and is directed towards ends of which we have no conception. For the very few who are con- sistent in this faith, and who would abolish policemen equally with soldiery, trusting for defence or reparation only to super- natural power, we have the highest respect ; or, in the few cases where faith and action are beyond all doubt united, a kind of reverence such as Arabs feel for the insane. We cannot, however, agree with them in the least ; and holding that Christ, in rejecting all counsels of in- surrection against Ca3sar, declared conquest lawful, and that war may be a legitimate exercise of human faculties, we are wholly unable to see that war for the conquest of barbarians is a specially bad kind of war. On the con- trary, it seems to us the beet, far better than the wars for points of honour or fractions of territory which Europe has been accustomed to wage. The world really gains by the new wars immensely, and the White peoples, in taking up, as they have done, a responsibility for the world, are bound to see that their wars, like their other acts, push it a step farther towards their best ideal. If they can do that, and will do that, they have, we 'conceive, a right to conquer Africa, which without them will remain for the next three thousand years, as it has remained for the last three thousand, a wilderness in which man has been, on the whole, the most savage and useless of the wild beasts. They have a right, with provocation or without it, to introduce order, and to use all force which they honestly believe to be necessary to that end. That the exercise of this force involves slaughter is no more to be regretted than that all discipline involves the inflic- tion of pain ; while the argument that slaughter ought to be accomplished with the hands alone is absolutely non- sensical. The right of the white men arises from superior intelligence, and they have as much right to use it in beating down resistance as in wise government when resistance has died away. The Maxim gun is no more an evil instrument than the telegraph, and the great race is no more bound to fall back upon spears and swords instead of Winchesters, than it is bound to employ canoes instead of steamers to carry troops. If such ,contrivances increased the need- ful slaughter, there might arise a moral question, but they, in fact, decrease it greatly, both by rendering victory rapid, and by precluding those insurrections in which the conquered, but for the impact made upon their imagina- tions by hopeless defeat, would continually endeavour to reverse the original verdict. Did any of our readers ever endeavour to calculate how many lives the English have saved in India by the victories which have, perhaps, produced an account against us of a hundred thousand dead? It is far more than a hundred millions, including, as it does, the whole of that vast increment of population which is due almost ex- clusively to the order and right rule which those victories secured. That, having conquered, we are bound to justify conquest by good government, we of course admit to the full, and there are failures in our conduct in that respect as to which we should agree heartily with the strictest Quakers, but the failure is at that point, viz., the subsequent action, and not in the original fact of conquest.
But, says our well-meaning opponent, the country we take from savages belongs to them, and why have we a right to take it away? Why does it belong to them ? They are not using it for their own best advantage, or, which is much more important, that of humanity at large. They are simply wasting it, impairing the small resources of the human race as much as if they were killing all the cattle or poisoning all the fish. The world is not so large that humanity as a whole can leave Mashonaland to a clan of pirates, or Australia to tribes who are hardly in intelligence above their own kangaroos, and who, as we know from the clam-heaps, have had at least four thousand years in which to demonstrate their continuous imbecility. It is not merely a right, it is a clear duty to utilise the resources which they neglect, and would be such even if they were white men with the indefinite chances of advance which that division of humanity appears to inherit. Suppose the old territory of the Hudson's Bay Company bad been found capable of growing wheat, and the Company had insisted on reserving it for 10,000 bunting Indians, would the United States, wanting room, have had no right to terminate that state of affairs by an unhesitating use of the sword ? Just as much right as they would have had to prevent a State of their own country from becoming a desert because its few voters preferred that it should be kept free of population. National ownership, to be rightful, means ownership for the benefit of mankind ; and savages have no more property-right in their vast territories than the Ottoman Turks have in their vast Empire. Both misuse the great heritage Providence gave to mankind. That the savages have a right to the portion they can use we never dreamed of disputing, and hold that any attack upon that portion, while peacefully held, is a monstrous abuse of irre- sistible force. In the greatest of all conquests, however— that of India—no acre was ever taken away from an aborigine, nor even in Africa have we taken cultivated land from the tribe which held it, except as a penalty—often, no doubt, far too harsh—for some illegal or criminal act. We cannot admit that the right of the Ma,ories to New Zealand is of a kind that makes war on them, in order to find room for a better race, iniquitous or cruel.
But then there is the question of freedom. In conquering an inferior race we take its freedom from it, or part of its freedom, and can that be right P That depends upon whether we consider freedom an absolute right qr only a privilege liable to be withdrawn if it is abused. Clearly in Western Europe it is the latter, for we suspend freedom every day not only for breaches of the moral law, but for acts contrary to the social welfare. If we have a right to prevent English- men from murdering, why have we not a right, equal power being granted, to prevent the Matabele ? The native popu- lations of Australia and Africa are, taken as a whole, abusing their freedom to lead lives fatal to progress and even to continued existence ; and the wiser race, which perceives that, is not only entitled but bound to bring them under discipline, the condition precedent of which, in one form or another, is conquest. We should recognise this fast enough if the Isle of Wight belonged to a people like the Dahomeyans, or the Isle of Man belonged to savages like those of the Upper Niger, and we cannot see that distance makes any difference whatever. We are bound to govern Mashonaland on Christian principles, with a steady eye to the general good, just as we are bound to govern St. Lake's Hospital on Christian principles. and with an eye to the patients' cure ; but in the one case as in the other, our responsibility is to God and our own develop- ment in character, and not to the patients whom humanity requires us for the time being to restrain. Even in India this is the ground of our right, for there, though the people are not savages, but have a strong and in some respects lofty civilisation of their own, the conditions are so peculiar that without us anarchy would at once replace the order without which there can be no advance. The white races have become responsible for the world, and it is to their improvement in justice, mercy, and self-suppression that philanthropists should direct their efforts, not to the territorial limitation of their authority.
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