This revolution in our conception of History, this boundless industry which in Germany, France, England, Italy, has led to the printing of mountains of forgotten memoirs, correspondences, State papers, this endless sifting of evidence, this treasuring above riches of the slight results slowly and patiently drawn, is neither accident, nor transient caprice, nor antiquarian frenzy, but a phase of the guiding impulse, the supreme instinct of this age—the ardour to know all, to experience all, to be all, to suffer all, in a word, to know the Truth of things—if haply there come with it immortal life, even if there come with it silence and utter death. The deepened significance of history springs thus from the deepened significance of life, and the passion of our interest in the past from the passion of our interest in the present. The half-effaced image on a coin, the illuminated margin of a mediaeval manuscript, the smile on a fading picture—if these have become, as it were, fountains of unstable reveries, perpetuating the Wonder which is greater than Knowledge, it is a power from the present that invests them with this magic. Life has become more self-conscious; not of the narrow self merely, but of that deeper Self, the mystic Presence which works behind the veil.
World-history is no more the fairy tale whose end is death, but laden with eternal meanings, significances, intimations, swift gleams of the Timeless manifesting itself in Time. And the distinguishing function of History as a science lies in its ceaseless effort not only to lay bare, to crystallize the moments of all these manifestations, but to discover their connecting bond, the ties that unite them to each other and to the One, the hidden source of these varied manifestations, whether revealed as transcendent thought, art, or action.
Hence, as in prosecuting elsewhere our inquiry into the origin of the French Monarchy or the decline of oligarchic Venice, we examined not only the characters, incidents, policies immediately connected with the subject, but attempted an answer to the question—What is the place of these incidents in the universal scheme of things? so in the treatment of the theme now before us, the origins of Imperial Britain, pursuing a similar plan, we have to consider not merely the relations of Imperial Britain to the England and Scotland of earlier times, but its relations to mediaeval Europe, and to determine so far as is possible its place amongst the world-empires of the past. I use the phrase "Imperial Britain," and not "British Empire," because from the latter territorial associations are inseparable. It designates India, Canada, Egypt, and the like. But by "Imperial Britain" I wish to indicate the informing spirit, the unseen force from within the race itself, which in the past has shapen and in the present continues to shape this outward, this material frame of empire. With the rise of this spirit, this consciousness within the British race of its destiny as an imperial people, no event in recent history can fitly be compared. The unity of Germany under the Hohenzollern is an imposing, a far-reaching achievement. The aspirations of the period of the Aufklärung—Lessing, Schiller, Arndt, and Fichte—find in this edifice their political realization. But the incident is not unprecedented. Even the writings of Friedrich Gentz are not by it made obsolete. It has affected the European State-system as the sudden unity of Spain under Ferdinand or the completion of the French Monarchy under Louis XIV affected it. But in this unobserved, this silent growth of Imperial Britain—so unobserved that it presents itself even now as an unreal, a transient thing—a force intrudes into the State-systems of the world which, whether we view it in its effects upon the present age or seek to gauge its significance to the future, has few, if any, parallels in history.
§ I. THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE CONSCIOUS IN HISTORY
What is the nature of this Consciousness? What is its historical basis? Is it possible to trace the process by which it has emerged?
In the history of every conscious organism, a race, a State, or an individual, there is a certain moment when the Unconscious desire, purpose, or ideal passes into the Conscious. Life's end is then manifest. The ideal unsuspected hitherto, or dimly discerned, now becomes the fixed law of existence. Such moments inevitably are difficult to localize. Bonaparte in 1793 fascinates the younger Robespierre—"He has so much of the future in his mind." But it is neither Toulon, nor Vendémiaire, nor Lodi, but the marshes of Arcola, two years after Robespierre has fallen on the scaffold, that reveal Napoleon to himself. So Diderot perceives the true bent of Rousseau's genius long before the Dijon essay reveals it to the latter himself and to France. Polybius discovers in the war of Regulus and of Mylae the beginning of Rome's imperial career, but a juster instinct leads Livy to devote his most splendid paragraphs to the heroism in defeat of Thrasymene and Cannae. It was the singular fate of Camoens to voice the ideal of his race, to witness its glory, and to survive its fall. The prose of Osorius[[1]] does but prolong the echoes of Camoens' mighty line. Within a single generation, Portugal traces the bounds of a world-empire, great and impressive; the next can hardly discover the traces. But to the limning of that sketch all the past of Portugal was necessary, though then it emerged for the first time from the Unconscious to the Conscious. Similarly in the England of the seventeenth century the conscious deliberate resolve to be itself the master of its fate takes complete possession of the nation. This is the ideal which gives essential meaning to the Petition of Right, to the Grand Remonstrance, to the return at the Restoration to the "principles of 1640"; it is this which gives a common purpose to the lives of Eliot, Pym, Shaftesbury, and Somers. It is the unifying motive of the politics of the whole seventeenth century. The eighteenth expands or curtails this, but originates nothing. An ideal from the past controls the genius of the greatest statesmen of the eighteenth century. But from the closing years of the century to the present hour another ideal, at first existing unperceived side by side with the former, has slowly but insensibly advanced, obscure in its origins and little regarded in its first developments, but now impressing the whole earth by its majesty—the Ideal of Imperial Britain.
It is vain or misleading for the most part to fix precisely the first beginnings of great movements in history. Nevertheless it is often convenient to select for special study even arbitrarily some incident or character in which that movement first conspicuously displays itself. And if the question were asked—When does monarchical or constitutional England first distinctively pass into Imperial Britain? I should point to the close of the eighteenth century, to the heroic patience with which the twenty-two years' war against France was borne, hard upon the disaster of Yorktown and the loss of an empire; and further, if you proceeded to search in speculative politics or actual speeches for a deliberate expression of this transition, I should select as a conspicuous instance Edmund Burke's great impeachment of Warren Hastings. There this first awakening consciousness of an Imperial destiny declares itself in a very dramatic and pronounced form indeed. Yet Burke's range in speculative politics, compared with that of such a writer as Montesquieu, is narrow. His conception of history at its highest is but an anticipation of the picturesque but pragmatic school of which Macaulay is coryphaeus. In religion he revered the traditions, and acquiesced in the commonplaces of his time. His literary sympathies were less varied, his taste less sure than those of Charles James Fox. In constitutional politics he clung obstinately to the ideals of the past; to Parliamentary reform he was hostile or indifferent. As Pitt was the first great statesman of the nineteenth century, so Burke was the last of the great statesmen of the seventeenth century; for it is to the era of Pym and of Shaftesbury that, in his constitutional theories, Burke strictly belongs. But if his range was narrow, he is master there. "Within that circle none durst walk but he." No cause in world-history has inspired a nobler rhetoric, a mightier language. And if he is a reactionary in constitutional politics, in his impeachment of Hastings he is the prophet of a new era, the annunciator of an ideal which the later nineteenth century slowly endeavours to realize—an empire resting not on violence, but on justice and freedom. This ideal influences the action, the policy, of statesmen earlier in the century; but in Chatham its precise character, that which differentiates the ideal of Britain from that, say, of Rome, is less clear than in Burke. And in the seventeenth century, unless in a latent unconscious form, it can hardly be traced at all. In the speculative politics of that century we encounter it again and again; but in practical politics it has no part. I could not agree with Lord Rosebery when in an address he spoke of Cromwell as "a great Briton." Cromwell is a great Englishman, but neither in his actions nor in his policy, neither in his letters, nor in any recorded utterance, public or private, does he evince definite sympathy with, or clear consciousness of the distinctive ideal of Imperial Britain. His work indeed leads towards this end, as the work of Raleigh, of the elder Essex, or of Grenville, leads towards it, but not consciously, not deliberately.
In Burke, however, and in his younger contemporaries, the conscious influence, the formative power of a higher ideal, of wider aspirations than moulded the actual statesmanship of the past, can no longer escape us. The Empire is being formed, its material bounds marked out, here definitely, there lost in receding vistas. On the battlefield or in the senate-house, or at the counter of merchant adventurers, this work is slowly elaborating itself. And within the nation at large the ideal which is to be the spirit, the life of the Empire is rising into ever clearer consciousness. Its influence throws a light upon the last speeches of the younger Pitt. If the Impeachment be Burke's chef d'oeuvre, Pitt never reached a mightier close than in the speech which ended as the first grey light touched the eastern windows of Westminster, suggesting on the instant one of the happiest and most pathetic quotations ever made within those walls.[[2]] The ideal makes great the life of Wilberforce; it exalts Canning; and Clarkson, Romilly, Cobbett, Bentham is each in his way its exponent. "The Cry of the Children" derived an added poignancy from the wider pity which, after errors and failures more terrible than crimes, extended itself to the suffering in the Indian village, in the African forest, or by the Nile. The Chartist demanded the Rights of Englishmen, and found the strength of his demand not diminished, but heightened, by the elder battle-cry of the "Rights of Man." Thus has this ideal, grown conscious, gradually penetrated every phase of our public life. It removes the disabilities of religion; enfranchises the millions, that they by being free may bring freedom to others. In the great renunciation of 1846 it borrows a page from Roman annals, and sets the name of Peel with that of Caius Gracchus. It imparts to modern politics an inspiration and a high-erected effort, the power to falter at no sacrifice, dread no responsibility.
Thus, then, as in the seventeenth century the ideal of national and constituted freedom takes complete possession of the English people, so in the nineteenth this ideal of Imperial Britain, risen at last from the sphere of the Unconscious to the Conscious, has gradually taken possession of all the avenues and passages of the Empire's life, till at the century's close there is not a man capable of sympathies beyond his individual walk whom it does not strengthen and uplift.