The British people are already confronted with grave troubles in India and Egypt and the Soudan. History has placed responsibilities on their shoulders which they cannot shrug off with a careless gesture of indifference or a splendid gesture of renunciation. That welter of races and religions in India cannot be abandoned by people who have ruled it, given it law, justice, internal peace, and protection from old cruelties, tyrannies, famine and disease. If the British lost their hold on India there would be a world of anarchy among all those races and creeds between which there is no tolerance, so that they cannot eat together, or mingle in a crowd, or touch without defilement. If the British lost India other powers would fight to take it and the world would be aflame again.
England will lose India if she grant self-government too quickly, or too generously, to native rulers who cannot hold the scales of justice, even as England has held them; who cannot control the native princes by any such allegiance as they have given to a white emperor; who could not keep Hindus and Moslems and other religious fanatics from each other’s throats, nor administer justice with commonsense and impartial judgment, as young magistrates from English public schools in remote districts, where they were law-makers, judges, administrators, in the midst of native populations obedient to their verdict and with faith in their honesty. But the agitators in India, the “holy men” like Ghandi, the students with Western education, are in revolt against this benevolent despotism. They believe that India is able to govern itself. They are refusing to buy British made goods. They use “Liberty” as their watchword, and those who believe in national liberty, as I do, can only answer their arguments by saying that India is not a nation but a collection of races, and that Western ideas of parliamentary government, “no taxation without representation” cannot be translated into an Oriental country before centuries of education and preparation, nor—failing that—without an anarchy in which a thousand horrors would happen. To the fanatical Indian student from King’s College, London, that answer is taken as an insult and as hypocrisy. And yet it is true.
So also in Egypt and the Soudan. The Egyptians ignore the benefits that have come to them from British rule, British engineering, British science, which dammed the Nile and fertilised their fields, gave a better chance of life to the peasants, brought peace from the passions, barbarities, slave-driving of the African races. They have a new sense of power because they know England’s need of peace. They are prepared to blot out all British benefits for the sake of that cry, “Egypt for the Egyptians!” shouted from Cairo across the deserts. They demand the Soudan as their province, although it was subdued by British troops, and its barbarism was tamed by British rule after a history of human cruelty in this black region hellish in its torture and diabolism, to which, beyond any doubt, it will return if by weakness of man power, hatred of war, or economic poverty, the British government releases its control.
England is the leader of world peace. Poverty is creeping closer to her. Her old Imperial spirit is deadened by war weariness and by new ideals of liberal policy from which military force is eliminated. Yet by their Imperial heritage the British people have responsibilities towards the coloured races which cannot be supported without force of arms, as military police for the order of the human race. If Great Britain, for reasons of economy or lack of strength, retires from these regions, as the Romans did from their own wide Empire, chaos and upheavals in Africa, India and Asia will let loose a world of human passion and revolt. Other powers will claim the succession, and another world war, on a more terrible scale, will begin.
The French in Morocco
France is storing up trouble for herself in North Africa by raising her Colonial Army from the dark-skinned races. She is training Arabs and negroes to handle machine-guns with great efficiency, to throw the latest type of bombs, to be familiar with field guns and heavy artillery, to shoot straight with the rifle and stab straight with the bayonet.
The French military leaders are justly proud of their work in Morocco. Marshal Lyautey understands the Arab mind as no other man. The French colonial officers have a wonderful skill and sympathy with the legions under their command. But can France be sure that this army they have created will be loyal to French interests, and will fight eagerly, even gladly, against German shell-fire and poison-gas if ever France is again attacked by the same enemy? In the last war the coloured troops were sacrificed in many battles. They were led like sheep to the shambles, or rather like tigers to the pits of death. They did not like it. Those who escaped the slaughter and went home told frightful tales. Already there is a spirit of revolt stirring in Morocco below the surface of loyalty to France. Some of the Arab tribes in French Morocco are joining hands with those fighting against Spain. “Our time is coming,” said an Arab guide to a recent traveller. “We shall sweep the Feringhi into the sea—like that!” He made an arrogant gesture and smiled, with ferocity in his eyes. France will have trouble with her Colonial troops, and it will be a dirty business in future history.
Those are some of the danger zones of our present state; and I have said nothing about Japan or China, in which there is no standing still in the Oriental quietude of ancient history. Japan has learnt to use modern weapons on sea and land. She has great ambitions. The white races have got to be careful lest they are weakened and exhausted by wars of their own, and let their own causes of quarrel blind them and make them mad.
The Economic Struggle
Meanwhile the economic struggle between the white nations is threatening to develop with a severity of competition which is alarming to all students of international affairs. Great Britain and the United States of America are bound to be competitors in the world market against nations able to produce manufactured articles at far less cost owing to cheap labour. The United States will undoubtedly make a serious effort to overcome this difficulty by cutting into the international trade with surplus products on a small margin of profit, but whether they succeed or not does not matter very much to the life and prosperity of their people, who are self-supporting and self-contained. For Great Britain it is literally a matter of life and death as a great power. To feed their population England, Scotland and Wales have to import more than nine months’ food supplies, which can only be paid for by the export of raw material and manufactured goods. In the same way they must pay for the essential services of the nation, including the Army, Navy, and Civil Service. At the present time Great Britain has succeeded in regaining her export trade to over seventy per cent. of its pre-war standard of money values; but that is not nearly enough now that her population, ten years after, has increased by nearly two millions, and now that the cost of life and production is very much higher than in 1913 owing to the burden of taxation, the higher rate of wages, and the lower purchasing power of English money.