"This is the Norman nobly born,
Who conquered the Dane that drank from a horn.
Who harried the Saxon's kine and corn,
Who banished the Roman all forlorn,
Who tidied the Celt so tattered and torn,"
and so on, back to the prehistoric Jack who built the long house of the dead.
Our later subjections to the French, the Scots, the Dutch and the Germans, who have in turn ruled our courts and fattened on their favours, have not been so violent or so complete; but for some centuries they depressed our people with a sense of humiliation, and they have left their mark upon our national character and language. Indeed, our language is a synopsis of conquests, a stratification of subjections. We can hardly speak a sentence without recording a certain number of the subject races from which we have sprung. The only one ever left out is the British, and that survives in the names of our most beautiful rivers and mountains. It is true that all of our conquerors have come to stay—all with the one exception of Rome. We have never formed part of a distant and foreign empire except the Roman. Even our Norman invaders soon regarded our country as the centre of their power and not as a province. Nevertheless, nearly every strand of our interwoven ancestry has at one time or other suffered as a subject race, and perhaps from that source we derive the quality that Mark Twain perceived when at the Jubilee Procession of our Empire he observed, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Perhaps also for this reason we raise the Recessional prayer for a humble and contrite heart, lest we forget our history—lest we forget.
We pray in contrite humility to remember, but we have forgotten. In speaking of Finland's loss of liberty, Madame Malmberg, the Finnish patriot, once said that in old days, when their liberties seemed secure, the Finns felt no sympathy with other nationalities—the Poles, the Georgians, or the Russians themselves—struggling to be free. They did not know what it was to be a subject race. They could not realise the degrading loss of nationality. They were soon to learn, and they know now. We have not learned. We have forgotten our lesson. That is why we remain so indifferent to the cry of freedom, and to the suppression of nationality all over the world.
Let us for a moment imagine that something terrible has happened; that our statesmen have at last got their addition sums in Dreadnoughts right, and have learned by hard experience that we have less than two to one and therefore are wiped from the seas; or that our august Russian ally, using Finland as a base, has established an immense naval port in the Norwegian fiords and thence poured the Tartar and Cossack hordes over our islands. Let us imagine anything that might leave some dominant Power supreme in London and reduce us for the sixth or seventh time to the position of a subject race. Where should we feel the difference most? Let us suppose that the conqueror retained our country as part of his empire, just as we have retained Ireland, India, Egypt, and the South-African Dutch republics; or as Russia has retained Poland, Georgia, Finland, the Baltic Provinces and Siberia, and is on the point of retaining Persia; or as Germany has retained Poland and Alsace-Lorraine; or as France has retained Tonquin and an enormous empire in north-west Africa and is on the point of retaining Morocco; or as Austria has retained Bohemia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and many other nationalities, and is constantly plotting to retain Albania. Let us only judge of what might happen to us by observing what is actually happening in other instances at this moment.
The dominant Power—let us call it Germany for short and merely as an illustration—would at once appoint its own subjects to all the high positions of State. England would be divided into four sections under German Governor-Generals and there would be German Governor-Generals in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Germans would be appointed as District Commissioners to collect revenue, try cases, and control the police. A Council of Germans, with a proportion of nominated British lords and squires, would legislate for each province, and perhaps, after a century or so, as a great concession a small franchise might be granted, with special advantages to Presbyterians, so as to keep religious differences alive, the German Governor-General retaining the right to reject any candidate and to veto all legislation. A German Viceroy, surrounded by a Council in which the majority was always German, and the chief offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Commander-in-Chief of the army, and so forth, were always filled by Germans, would hold a Court at Windsor or at Balmoral in summer and Buckingham Palace in winter. We should have to undertake the support of Lutheran Churches for the spiritual consolation of our rulers. We should be given a German Lord Mayor. German would be the official language of the country, though interpreters might be allowed in the law courts. Public examinations would be conducted in German, and all candidates for the highest civilian posts would have to go to Germany to be educated. The leading newspapers would be published in German and a strict censorship established over the Times and other rebellious organs. The smallest criticism of the German Government would be prosecuted as sedition. English papers would be confiscated, English editors heavily fined or imprisoned, English politicians deported to the Orkneys without trial or cause shown. Writers on liberty, such as Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Burke, Mill, and Lord Morley would be prohibited. The works of even German authors like Schiller, Heine, and Karl Marx would be forbidden, and a pamphlet written by a German and founded on official evidence to prove the injustice and tortures to which the English people were exposed under the German system of police would be destroyed. On our railways English gentlemen and ladies would be expected to travel second or third class, or, if they travelled first, they would be exposed to the Teutonic insolence of the dominant race, and would probably be turned out by some German official. Public buildings would be erected in the German style. English manufacturers and all industries would be hampered by an elaborate system of excise which would flood our markets with German goods. Such art as England possesses would disappear. Arms would be prohibited. The common people, especially in Scotland and the North-West Provinces, would be encouraged to recruit in the native army under the command of German officers, and the Scottish regiments would maintain their proud tradition; but no British officer would be allowed to rise above the rank of sergeant-major. The Territorials would be disbanded. The Boy Scouts would be declared seditious associations. If a party of German officers went fox-shooting in Leicestershire, and the villagers resisted the slaughter of the sacred animal, some of the leading villagers would be hanged and others flogged during the execution. Our National Anthem would begin: "God save our German king! Long live our foreign king!" The singing of "Rule, Britannia," would be regarded as a seditious act.
I am not saying that so complete a subjection of England is possible. We may believe that in a powerful, wealthy, proud, and highly civilised country like ours it would not be possible. All I say is that, if we assume it possible, something like that would be our condition if we were treated by the dominant Power as we ourselves are treating other races which were powerful, wealthy, proud and, in their own estimation, highly civilised when we invaded or otherwise obtained the mastery over them. I am only trying to suggest to ourselves the mood and feelings of a subject race—the humble and contrite heart for which we pray as God's ancient sacrifice. If we wish to be done by as we do, these are some incidents in the government we should wish to lie under when we were reduced beneath a dominant Power, as India and Egypt are reduced beneath ourselves. I have not taken the worst instances of the treatment of subject races I could find. I have not spoken of the old methods of partial or complete extermination whether in Roman Europe or Spanish and British Americas; nor have I spoken of the partial or complete enslavement of subject races in the Dutch, British, Portuguese, Belgian, and French regions of Africa. I have not dwelt upon the hideous scenes of massacre, torture, devastation and lust which I have myself witnessed in Macedonia under the Turks, and in the Caucasus, the Baltic Provinces, and Poland under Russia when subject races attempted some poor effort to regain their freedom. I have not even mentioned the old ruin and slaughter of Ireland, or the latest murder of a nation in Finland or in Persia. I have taken my comparison from the government of subject races at what is probably its very best; at all events, at what the English people regard as its best—the administration of India and Egypt—and we have no reason to suppose that Germany would administer England better if we were a subject race under the German Empire.
If Germany did as well she would have something to say for herself. She might lay stress on the great material advantages she would bestow on this country. Such industries as she left us she would reorganise on the Kartel system. She would much improve our railways by unifying them as a State property, so that even our South-Eastern trains might arrive in time. She would overhaul our education, ending the long wrangle between religious sects by abolishing all distinctions. She would erect an entirely new standard of knowledge, especially in natural science, chemistry, and book-keeping. She would institute special classes for prospective chauffeurs and commercial travellers. She would abolish Eton, Harrow, and the other public schools, together with the college buildings of Oxford and Cambridge, converting them all into barracks, while the students would find their own lodgings in the towns and stand on far greater equality in regard to wealth. German is not a very beautiful language, but it has a literature, and we should have the advantage of speaking German and learning something of German literature and history. Great improvements would be introduced in sanitation, town-planning, and municipal government, and we should all learn to eat black bread, which is much more wholesome than white.