Why is it, then, that one nation desires to subjugate another at all? Sometimes the object has simply been space—the pressure of population upon the extent of ground. Pastoral and nomad hordes, like the "Barbarians" and Tartars, have had that object, but, as a rule, it has ended in their own absorption. The motives of the Roman Empire were strangely mixed. Plunder certainly came in; trade came in; in later times the slave-trade and the supply of corn to Rome were great incentives. The personal advantage and ambition of prominent statesmen like Sulla or Caesar were among the aims of many conquests. The extension of religion had little to do with it, for the Romans had the decency to keep their gods to themselves and never slaughtered in the name of Jove. But they were compelled to Empire by a peculiar conviction of destiny. They did not destroy or subdue other peoples so much for glory as from a sense of duty. It was their Heaven-sent mission to rule. Their poet advised other nations to occupy themselves with wisdom, learning, statuary, the arts, or what other trivialities they pleased; it was the Roman's task to hold the world in sway. To the Roman the object of Empire was Empire. It seemed to him the natural thing to conquer every other nation, making the world one Rome. That was, in fact, his true religion, and we can but congratulate him on the unshaken faith of his self-esteem. The Turk, on the other hand, who was the next Imperial race, boasted no city and no self-conscious superiority of laws or race. He subdued the nations only in the name of God, and to all who accepted God he nobly extended the vision of Paradise and a complete equality of earthly squalor. The motives of mediaeval and more recent conquests were the strangest of all. They were usually dynastic. They depended on the family claim of some family man to a title implying actual possession of another country and all its population. There was always one claimant contending against another claimant, this heir against that heir, as though the destinies of nationality could be settled by a strip of parchment or a love-affair with a princess. People grew so accustomed to this folly that even now we hardly realise its absurdity. Yet I suppose if the King of Spain left his kingdom by will to his well-beloved cousin George of England, not an English wherry would stir to take possession, and our newspapers would merely remark that there was always a strain of insanity in the Spanish branch of the Bourbons. Two hundred years ago such a will would have produced a prolonged and devastating war. Something is gained. We have eliminated royal dynasties from the motives of conquest.
In the extension and maintenance of our own Empire all previous motives have been combined. We have pleaded want of space; we have sought slaves either for export or for local labour; we have sought plunder and also trade or "markets"; we have sought dumping-grounds for our wasters, and careers for our public school-boys; like the Turks and Spaniards, we have sought to promote the knowledge of God by the slaughter and enslavement of His creatures; like the Romans, we have thought it our manifest duty to paint the world red and rule it. But within the last sixty or seventy years we have added the further motive most aptly expressed by the late King Leopold of Belgium in the document by which he obtained his rights over the Congo: I mean "the moral and material amelioration" of the subject peoples. That was a motive unknown to the ancients, though the Romans came near it when they granted equal citizenship to all provincials—a measure far in advance of any concession of ours. And it was unknown to the Middle Ages, though Turks and Spaniards came near it when they destroyed the infidels for their good and opened heaven to converted slaves and corpses. To subjugate a nationality for its own moral and material advantage is something almost new in history. It sounds the true modern note. That is not a pleasant note, but it is a sign of change, an evidence of hope. In the Boer War our real objects were to paint the country red on the maps and to exploit the gold-mines. But some people said we were fighting for equal rights; some said it was to insure good treatment for the natives; some thought we were Christianising the Boers; one man told me "the Boers wanted washing." Those excuses may have been false and hypocritical, but, at all events, they were tributes to virtue. They were a recognition that the old motives of Empire no longer sufficed. They exposed the hypocrites themselves to the retort of serious and innocent people: "Very well, then. If these were your motives, give equal rights, protect the natives, Christianise the Boers, wash them if you can." It is a retort against which hypocrisy cannot long stand out. It proves that a new standard of judgment is slowly forming in the world. But for this new standard, where would be the Congo agitation, or the movement against the Portuguese cocoa slavery, or such sympathy as exists with the Nationalists of India, Egypt, and Persia? When the doctrines of equal rights or even of moral and material amelioration are assumed, honesty will at last raise her protest and hypocrites be no longer allowed to reap the harvest of a quiet lie.
It is an advance. As history counts time it is a rapid advance. Now that Russia is reducing Finland to a state of entire subjection without even a pretext of right or the shadow of a pretence at improved civilisation, a general feeling of shame and loss pervades Europe. The governments do not move, but here and there the peoples raise a protest. Not even the most thorough-going champions of Imperialism, such as the Times, have ventured to defend the action. They have contented themselves with Cain's excuse that the murder was no affair of ours. A century and a half ago they would not have needed an excuse. No protest would have been raised, for it did not matter what nationality was enslaved. There is an advance, and we have now to extend it. In regard to races already subject, we have but to act up to the pleadings of our own hypocrisy; we have to maintain among them equal justice, equal rights and equal consideration as members of one great community, instead of depriving them of their manhood and kicking them out of their own railway carriages. We have to train them on the way to self-government, instead of clapping them into prison if they mention the subject.
And in regard to nationalities that still retain their freedom, we must bring our governments up into line with the leading thought of the day. We must show them that the destruction of a free people like Finland or Persia is not a local or distant disaster only, but affects the whole community of nations and spreads like a poison, blighting the growth of freedom in every land and encouraging all the black forces of tyranny, darkness, and suppression. Rapidly growing among us, there is already a certain solidarity between free States, and the problem of the immediate future is how to make their common action effective on the side of liberty. When I saw Tolstoy during the Russian revolution of 1905 he said to me:
"The present movement in Russia is not a riot; it is not even
a revolution; it is the end of an age. The age that is ending
is the age of Empires—the collection of smaller States under
one large State. There is no true community of heart or thought
between Russia, Finland, Poland, the Caucasus and all our
other States and races. And what has Hungary, Bohemia,
Syria, or the Tyrol to do with Austria? No more than Canada,
Australia, India, or Ireland has to do with England. People
are now beginning to see the absurdity of these things, and in
the end people are reasonable. That is why the age of Empires
is passing away."
It was a bold prophecy, but it contains the root of the whole matter. Only where there is community of heart and thought is national or personal life possible in any worthy sense. Unless that community exists between the various nationalities within an Empire, we may be sure the Empire is moribund. It is dying, as Napoleon said, of indigestion, and that other community of the world which is slowly taking shape among free and reasonable peoples will demand its dissolution. Our hope is that the other community will further proceed to demand that these disastrous experiments in the overthrow and subjection of free nationalities shall no longer be tolerated by the combined forces of liberty.
XXII
BLACK AND WHITE