'THE ETHICS OF ENGLISH "IMPERIALISM" IN THE EAST.
MR. FREDERIC HARRISON is stronger in philippic than in irony. His sarcasm is poor beside Mr. Matthew Arnold's, wants the fineness and delicacy of flavour without which. satire is a clumsy weapon ; but for good sound invec- tive, the letter directed against ourselves, which we print else- where, is not to be easily surpassed. As we are, however, entirely -unable to accept Mr. Harrison's account either of the motives or the true drift of tha remarks we have made on the Abys- sinian war and its possible results, we must say a few words in answer to this very drastic epistle.
What we said last week which has exposed us to Mr. Har- Tison's lash he wishes to interpret as meaning simply this :— • • It may suit England's- selfish interests to steal Egypt in order to secure her road to India ; hence it might possibly suit her to begin operations even now by stealing Abyssinia. A capi- tal political veil to throw over these selfish and cynical motives,—a veil admirably suited to dazzle the eyes of the ordinary British Philistine,—would be the pretence of Testoring order in a society which we had previously broken in pieces, and of protecting an "inchoate Christianity" from the 'danger of Mohammedan proselytism.' Mr. Ilanison does not, probably, attribute to us in grave earnest these amiable wishes and sentiments. If he did, he would scarcely think it worth -while even to inveigh against us at all, still less to preface his tirade with a complimentary prelude, which is, we are sure, meant sincerely. But he is something of a rhetorician, and cannot help stating his opponent's case in words which, -while they describe the enormities of which he, holding his -views, would be guilty, if he were to carry out our policy, do -not even criticize what we can scarcely doubt that so clever -a writer has not entirely failed to apprehend as the true purport and meaning of our views on the Eastern policy of England. But for the sake of those of our readers who may shudder as we did at the unutterable iniquity which MT. Harrison attributes to us in a framework of expressions so cour- teous, let us, without further replying to his effective rhetoric, -simply state the moral standard by which we have always -tried to measure our policy in the East, and by which we believe that we can at least give a coherent ethical mean- ing to all we have ever advanced.
We would say at once, then, that we are far from dissenting from Mr. Gladstone's assertion that "the people of this country are at this time fully charged, and perhaps over- charged, with responsibilities of empire from which they cannot in honour escape, but to which it would be folly and guilt gratuitously to add." We have said the same thing ourselves in reference to the audacious plan of Mr. Lay for founding a British Protectorate in China, and though we do not pretend to know what proportion of her population England could without loss of strength send out to scatter political seed corn in the East,—though we are haunted by a suspicion that hitherto at least we have gained in all respects, moral, political, and imperial, by every such apparent deduction from our home strength, that the political Englishman in the East, with all his intolerable arrogance and other faults, is an indefinitely higher creature, of indefinitely higher uses in this world, than the same man in his natural sphere at home,—we have never doubted that the case on the other side is so impos- ing, that Mr. Gladstone may be right in calling it "gratuitous guilt" to set about increasing these responsibilities, while those we still have are so inadequately discharged. But while maintaining this, as we have not hesitated to do, when a dream of far greater Imperial splendour was suggested to the ima- gination by Mr. Lay's Chinese scheme, we have no wish to deny that we do regard the Imperial functions and work of England in the East,—disfigured though they have been by great political crimes,—as great and noble ones, in relation to which it would be unnatural and childish for any but a positivist philosopher to feel only, or chiefly, shame. We hold, indeed, and have always used such power as we have to enforce, that what we do in India, or Borneo, or, for that matter, in the West India Islands, should be regarded as only a preparatory work, the whole end and aim of which should be to fit the native or naturalized populations for a period in which they may govern themselves with as much firmness and equity as they now experience at our hands, and with all the additional self- respect of independence. That is the one aim we have con- stantly tried to keep in view in discussing our Indian policy. It is with this view that time after time we have advocated the opening up of the greater careers to native gentlemen, and quite recently demanded that the policy which we had so recently and solemnly announced of not encroaching further on Native States should be carried out in Mysore. England has no right at all in India, or in any other Oriental State of the same class, except what she derives from the material, social, and political benefits which she distributes ; and if we have maintained one thing steadily in these columns, it is that her first and most urgent new duty is to train up a school of native statesmen, who may first assist and, one day, supersede us. No doubt there is an early stage,—now, we believe beginning, in India at least, to pass away,—in which this is impossible, in which all we can do is to govern with perfect steadiness and as much equity as aliens in blood, in language, and in religion, can achieve. We quite admit that it would be a curse rather than a blessing to interfere thus in any society which contained in itself, without our aid, any seeds of progress and vitality. We have shown our sincerity in this conviction by arguing for the surrender of Gibraltar to Spain. But whether our rule has not been, in spite of its coarseness and shortcomings, a real blessing to India and to our West India Islands, is a practical question on which com- petent foreign observers and historians,—not English,—seem to have very little doubt.
The pride of England,—the justifiable pride, as we believe, —in her wide Imperial achievements and duties, seems to us to hinge on this, that we are performing gradually for the East, in a manner which, at least, does fair justice to the 2,000 intervening years of progress, the same task of sowing the elements of law, order, and civilization which Rome per- formed for Europe. No doubt to thinkers of Mr. Harrison's class, this is not a legitimate subject for satisfaction. They regard the very word "imperial" as the mere sign of vanity, arrogance, and ambition. It represents to us, on the con- trary, both ideas and achievements of which no nation should feel otherwise than proud,—a real and widely diffused sense of duty accompanying the stern pleasure of government,— a rude, lit may be, and now and then, even cruel assertion of the prerogatives of a governing caste, full of blots, and stained *by passions which no one sees more painfully than ourselves, but for all that penetrated, on the whole, by a principle of true power and responsibility, which has done and is doing more than has ever been done by such an empire in times past, to secure the substantial good of the races over whom we rule.
Supposing so much be admitted,—which, of course, it is not by Mr. Harrison,—we see no sort of reason why, when- ever fit opportunity arises, we should not still undertake for other races,—provided we be not, as Mr. Gladstone said, already overloaded by "the too vast orb of our fate,"—what we have already undertaken, with many shortcomings, but with more or less success, in India. Nobody that we know of ever thought of in- vading Abyssinia for our own selfish pleasure. But it became a question between abandoning a policy which no nation ought willingly to abandon, that of protecting its own unoffending subjects, or insisting on their surrender. If we can obtain this without collision, well and good. That puts an end to the only clear duty we have in the matter, and, therefore, the only clear principle of guidance. If the collision comes, and the Abyssinian kingdom,—such as it is,—does not crumble away before it, again well and good ; we have no right to go beyond what we proposed. But suppose, as we said last week, and as Mr. Harrison himself seems to think only too likely, that the least collision shatters the whole fabric of this society, and leaves it an easy victim to the Pasha of Egypt, who is already scenting his possible prey,— does that prove either that it was wrong in us to insist on our countrymen's release, or that the State and society which should so easily fall to pieces had had in it any principle of genuine life and progress ? It is idle and, in a thinker of Mr. Harrison's calibre, scarcely honest, to compare such a condition of things with the situation in Papal Rome, a diseased spot cut out of the natural dominions of a National Government some two thousand years ahead of the wretched Abyssinian kingdom, and the extension of which to Rome would put in the keystone to the arch of the Italian national life. If Mr. Harrison thinks that there is no difference at all between the immorality of dictating to a nation competent for self-government, and of dictating to one not only not competent, but without even the idea of such government,—if he thinks that the word "dictation" always implies the same thing, and that an evil thing, whether the dictatorial power is centuries in advance of the society or race dictated to, or whether it is not really ahead of it at all,—if he thinks the Government of England in India means, or in Abyssinia would in all cases mean, the same sort of gross and wanton interference with freedom which the Government of Russia in Poland meant in 1863, or that of France in Rome means now,—we are sorry that we have no common historical ground with him. As far as we know, almost every step in civilization has been due to the government of a semi-barbarous by a more civilized and advanced race. Had the South attempted honestly the task of elevating the negroes whom they used as their slaves, and been able to show a steady course of legislation, devised with the purpose, first, of liberating, and then of educating and enfranchising them, we certainly should never have raised our voice against them. We know nothing much more contemptible than the political philosophy which classes all acts of the same external form under the same moral head, which cannot distinguish between political tutelage and political murder. No doubt it is always a difficult and dangerous thing to decide moral scruples of this sort in one's own case. That which is gross fili- bustering in one case may, with the alteration of a very few important features, become the discharge of a sacred poli- tical trust. And the latter, again, may, by a visible improve- ment in the condition of the governed race, degenerate into the former. But that nations are partial judges in their own case, and that many political problems are difficult and com- plex, are no reasons why we should shut our eyes to real alter- natives of duty, and make believe very much that we have no more power for governing fairly, than a Surajah Dowlah or a Theodore. "Buccaneer" is an excellent rhetorical phrase, but the point of it lies in its applicability. If we go to Abyssinia for a legitimate and right end, if we are thoroughly willing to return directly that end is achieved, if we were to stay, in ease we did stay, only because no other authority seemed competent to keep the State together, and resist the onset of the fatal Mohammedan rule, and were to set to work in good earnest to govern for the Abyssinians, and not for our- selves, we should feel very indifferent indeed to the name of buccaneers. Buccaneers are men who, for their own selfish private purposes, rob others of their life, property, and free- dom. Whatever the Norman Conqueror of Great Britain was, he was not a buccaneer, any more than the English Conqueror of Scotland. History ceases to have any meaning if all seizure of political power by the strong and civilized over the weak and barbarous,—whatever the spirit and end of the policy,—be treated as bearing the same ethical character. Mr. Harrison's strong language is eloquent, but irrelevant. Much is not gained by applying language strictly descriptive of selfish and rapacious private crimes, to public policies deliberately adopted for statesman- like and unselfish ends. We do not wish, and we do not expect, to see Abyssinia conquered. But we repeat, as we have said before, that we can imagine circumstances resulting from our expedition which would impose on us, as a civilized, a humane, and a Christian power, the duty of administering the Government there, for the same reasons which have imposed on us the duty of administering more than one of the native Governments of India.
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