Did space permit me, I could give many instances of this failing: let me be content with two. Mr Burden had voted honourably and straightforwardly for that small taxation of our food supplies, which was necessary for the consolidation of the Empire. Of the direct effect of that vote he never complained; but he would not or could not connect with his opinion upon this matter, the necessary depreciation which it involved in his investments. Again, he had read and applauded Mr Chamberlain’s great speech just after the Australian Commonwealth cancelled the “loans previous”; he also appreciated that Australia must have new capital, and that, in the actual state of her credit, this capital could only come from Great Britain; yet in the meeting in the Cannon Street Hotel six months later, he had described the reconstruction of the Waga-Murri mine as “un-English.”
Mr Burden’s dissociation from the underlying philosophy of his time went deeper still. He would have maintained, in a kind of abstract way, that the connection between finance and politics was dangerous—it is difficult to say whether he saw that it was necessary. At any rate he dreaded and avoided that necessity. He would have admitted that a Cabinet drawn from the ranks of rich men was a purer and better government than one formed upon the less stable models of democratic nations, but in some vague way he must have thought of their wealth as exclusively territorial, for he would not only have expressed, but would have felt a very genuine horror at hearing that a Cabinet minister had held, or had been given, such and such shares in a company connected with our Imperial development.
When he was asked, as I once asked him, how a man could be rich and yet not mixed up with the principal source of modern wealth in England, he replied with a simple affirmation; he said that any one in office should sell whatever shares he had possessed in such concerns. He refused to follow the logical consequences of his creed.
It was precisely upon this point that a greater mind, a mind more necessary to England, though not perhaps more English, found the principal difficulty of contact. Mr Barnett knew that the M’Korio Delta was a touchstone for the future of England. I do not pretend that his only motive lay there. His motives were largely economic. But, at anyrate, the fulfilment of his own legitimate ambition demanded that he should persuade English opinion of what the M’Korio Delta was.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, there was not at that time in the city any name whose influence would have a more immediate effect towards converting the investor in W. African securities than that of Mr Burden; and yet every avenue of Mr Burden’s mind was closed to such methods of approach as Mr Barnett comprehended. He could not offer shares, and that sharp imaginative power which would have turned the M’Korio Delta into the great province it must become in the future, he knew that Mr Burden did not and could not possess.
The very circumstances by which Mr Burden came to be the sole arbiter (as it were) of M’Korian trade made Mr Barnett’s advance the more difficult.
Charles Abbott, who by a curious anachronism, remains to this day the chief proprietor of the Abbott Line of steamers, had (and has) about him something of the explosive radicalism which was often to be discovered in the older sort of English officials and business men; the men who helped, in their unconscious way, to build that which we now direct towards such astounding destinies. Of the New Empire he had a shallow, but a curiously robust disgust. He loved things as he had seen them—as they were: for dreams, for anticipations, he had as profound a contempt as for debt. He had never owed any man a farthing; he had never done business with the future. In feature he was red and a little over-eager; in gestures abrupt and strong; but his violence was balanced by a deep and emphatic voice which possessed a strange power of persuasion, especially over men less hearty than himself.
Such a man had not founded his fleet of ships to deal with “niggers.” He had developed it upon the South American trade. A Government subsidy had persuaded him to touch once a month at the M’Korio. He had travelled there once in person, and had carried away nothing but an added contempt for the policy that could deal with such things. Through this unsympathetic channel had Mr Burden been introduced to the Delta.
Mr Abbott, though ten years Mr Burden’s junior, had been, almost from boyhood, his most intimate friend; it was an intimacy born of perpetual daily association, meals in common, and a long life spent with few other opportunities for expansion than that afforded by each other’s society. When he had last returned to Europe from a voyage to the Delta he had suggested to Mr Burden—with no great enthusiasm—that there was some little dealing to be had with the aborigines of that marsh, in goods of the sort that Mr Burden handled. Iron rings of a sort known to the trade as “Large Nines,” were in that district not only a rarity but an object of political necessity. Long the symbol of authority upon the heads of the chiefs, they had been manufactured with infinite pains from old ship nails by the natives, or imported at considerable expense from the neighbouring Sultanate of Botu. Our excellent English article, cheaper, more reliable, and more accurately made, soon settled the competition of these rivals. It was impossible, indeed, to accept as currency the valuable slaves which had formerly found their way to the Sultanate; but considerable quantities of ivory were obtainable for many years in exchange for a gross of these goods; and Mr Burden had the advantage not only of securing such a profit as was due to his initiative and skill, but of knowing that indirectly through his efforts, the slave trade had disappeared in a part of Africa where it had seemed inseparable from the soil.
It was not to be expected that this state of things should last for ever. Oligarchic as was the nature of M’Korian society, the number of chiefs was limited; and a religious awe forbade the possession by anyone of more than a certain number of these sacred symbols. Moreover, a German firm, secretly subsidised by its government, had so far interfered with the old monopoly as to offer the rings at a price which made it difficult for the original trade to subsist in English hands. But Mr Burden’s profits were soon supplemented from other sources. Guns, of a simple sort, and a kind of sword, were introduced, and (a very remarkable example of the ingenuity of a client in Birmingham) fine chain armour replaced the leathern jackets which the warriors of the protectorate had hitherto worn.