Thoughts on South Africa

by Olive Schreiner

Europe during the last thousand years would probably not have contributed much more to the sum total of human advance, in the direction of freedom and many-sided intellectual growth, than the vast Chinese Empire has contributed during the same period, or than the Roman Empire contributed during the last long centuries of its bloated existence.

The national organization, controlled from one point and comprising a too vast multitude of humans, must, from that mere fact of size alone and apart from any other defect, tend to become inert. Even supposing free representative institutions universally to prevail, as they never have in any empire, past or present—(for in the British Empire of to-day a few million voters control the entire central government of Great Britain, while in India alone there are over two hundred millions of British subjects who have no representative institutions whatever and who are dominated over by the central body of voters)—and supposing each individual within a vast empire to be endowed with a share in its government, the share of power and control would be exceedingly minute and infinitesimal as regards the central power, and the bulk of citizens would be, of necessity, so far removed from that centre that that intensity of civic life and consciousness of responsibility, which alone makes democratic government healthful, and which exists easily in a small state or a tribe, where the government is as it were under the eyes of all and where each individual tells sensibly on the body politic, cannot exist.

Yet further, the inertness caused by mere excess of numbers under a central rule is but one cause of the inefficacy and unhealthiness of all vast empires. A central government, extending its sway over widely severed and diverse parts of the earth's surface and therefore over bodies of humans in diverse social and physical conditions, is a yet more fertile source of social disease and of enervation and deterioration to the individuals comprised in the body. The very fact, that the government and institutions of a wide empire are exactly suited to the wants of the original central dominant body, makes it impossible that the same government and institutions should be equally suited to peoples geographically remote and under socially diverse conditions. Each shell-fish lives best and healthfully only in the shell it has itself secreted; the cuttle-fish glides through the sea better in its own coarse chalky shield than were it forced into the most elaborate and gorgeous mantle that was ever developed by a nautilus: and human institutions or governments are good or bad exactly as shells are, not abstractedly, but as they harmonize with the wants of the living creatures they are bound to. As even the hermit crab, who makes his home in the shells he has not secreted, can only live and develop on condition of his choosing his own shell; forced between the pearled valves of an oyster or a mussel he will die miserably; so even a noble and virile alien people, when compelled to adapt themselves to the institutions and government developed with regard to the needs of humans in other lands and under distinct conditions, is bound miserably to decay if not to become extinct.

The central government of a vast empire, if it spreads its control over diverse or unlike territories or peoples, spells death and disease to them, not necessarily because it is evil in itself, but because it has not been gradually and spontaneously evolved with regard to the needs of the diverse units themselves. The better the shell fits the form of the creature who secreted it, the more deadly it may be when forced artificially over another.

Freedom and health for a folk desiring a tribal head is the right to possess him and to live and die for him; for a people with republican instincts is the right to republican institutions; for folk with an inclination towards monarchy, a monarchical rule; national slavery is the compulsory participation in alien institutions. Were an empire based on force yet ruled entirely by a desire to govern for the benefit of the subject nations and not for the subject powers (as none up to the present has ever been), it would still be a disease-producing, freedom-limiting institution; but, based as all empires up to the present have been, on self interest, Imperialism spells the death of all healthful human readjustments and developments.

Even where the parts of a large body social are not held together by merely external force, where a very great degree of real homogeneity does exist between all its parts, the evils of a much centralized rule are always manifest. It may be questioned whether even France, which is essentially one entity in many respects, has not suffered during the last century, and does not owe many of her difficulties and political perturbations, to that system of over-centralized control and uniformity of local institutions introduced by Napoleon, which has not left sufficient autonomy and self control to the really, in many minor respects, distinct provinces of France; and it is more than open to question whether Germany, almost compelled as she has been in self defence to sacrifice the independence and individuality of her component states during the last twenty years, has not intellectually and morally lost almost as much as she would by foreign domination, by her more centralized government: while in England the attempt forcibly to incorporate Ireland with herself, and govern a closely allied yet differing people, though divided only by a narrow strip of sea, has resulted in centuries of social disease and suffering for Ireland and of moral disease and instability for England.

Imperialism is the euphonious title of a deadly disease which under certain conditions tends to afflict the human race on earth. It increases in virulency in proportion as it is extended over more distant spaces and more diverse multitudes, till it becomes at last the death shroud of the nations.

It is undoubtedly true that the existence of more rapid means of intercommunication have, during the last centuries, made possible the existence of larger health aggregates than were possible in earlier times, when the small tribe and the city with a few leagues of earth about it formed invariably the largest national organization which was compatible with full social health and the highest human development. To-day, New York and San Francisco are in fact almost as close to each other as Athens and Sparta were two thousand years ago; but even to-day no vast social organism, large both as to numbers and geographical extent, such as the United States of America, could possibly exist with even tolerable healthfulness, were it not for the fact of the complete internal autonomy, individual organization and strength of its separate component states; and, above all, for the important and controlling fact, that the bond between the different states is not Imperial, is not the domination of one central state over others, but an equal confederacy of all.

Had the United States of America been united on the Imperial basis of one state dominating and guiding others, not even the more or less homogeneous nature of its peoples, or the internal autonomy of its separate states, could have kept its vast masses in even that condition of social health and freedom in which we find them to-day.

And further, were the separate states of America not conterminous, but widely scattered over the earth, that powerful and vital confederacy as it now exists would be impossible. If New Hampshire were in America, Maine in India, and Virginia in Northern Russia, the band which to-day naturally and strongly unites them could not exist.