CHAPTER XXV
A FINAL REFLECTION
“That strange force which has so often driven the English forward against their will appears to be in operation once more,” wrote the Spectator in May, 1904; “it is certain that neither the British Government nor the British people wished to go to Lhasa.”
This reflection was criticized by other journals at the time as savouring of hypocrisy. One paper said that no mention was made of the Viceroy, and that it was obvious that “the advance was a perfectly gratuitous move on the part of Lord Curzon.” Another leading London paper attributed the whole movement to “the designs of the little group of intriguing officials”; it said that “the raid was conceived and engineered as a part of the forward policy which has always been the peril of India and of the Empire,” and added that it had been “based upon the most trivial and factitious excuses ever invented by designing bureaucrats.”
This matter is worth going into. Bureaucrats, of whom presumably I was one, are only too painfully aware that they have not a tithe of the power which is attributed to them. They certainly have not the means of making the whole British Government and British people act against their will. I sometimes wish they had. To attribute to them such miraculous power is as shallow as to believe that the Lamas exercise their hold over Tibetans and Mongols only by trickery and chicanery. Bureaucrats and priests must have something far more powerful behind them than intrigues and trickery. The question is, What is it? What does impel us? Is there really, as the Spectator suggested, some strange force driving us forward? and if so, whither is it driving us?
These questions are not applicable to the Tibetan affair alone, but to the British Empire generally; and not only to the British Empire, but to the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Japanese Empire; to the French in Tongking and Annam, Algeria and Tunis; to the Americans in the Philippines, the Germans in Asia Minor, the Austrians in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are of fundamental importance, and go to the very root of things. They are therefore worth examination by so practical a people as ourselves.
In all these cases where one country advanced into the territory of another the forward movement has been attributed to the intrigues of bureaucrats or the crafty designs of scheming politicians. If the Germans advance to Paris, the action is attributed to the Machiavellian designs of Bismarck; if the Austrians openly declare what is already the accomplished fact of their sovereignty over Bosnia, Baron von Ahrenthal is believed to have deliberately schemed some devilment; if the French attempt to assert a predominance in Morocco, Delcassé is accused of plotting against Germany; if the British laboriously straighten out the affairs of Egypt, Lord Cromer is said to be designing to establish a permanent occupation of the country; and if we advance to Lhasa, Lord Curzon is accused of bureaucratic designs upon Tibet.
To take one very noteworthy case, the German invasion of France in 1870. To this day the action is ascribed to the deliberate designs of Prince Bismarck, and the story of his alteration of the Ems telegram is regarded as a proof positive of his set design heartlessly to make war on France. Yet quite recently there has appeared in the “Reminiscences of Carl Schurz,” the American statesman, who was originally a German subject and revolutionist of 1848, the account of a very remarkable interview[[65]] he had with Bismarck before the Franco-German War. In a tone quite serious, grave, and almost solemn, Bismarck said to Schurz: "Do not believe that I love war. I have seen enough of war to abhor it. The terrible scenes I have witnessed harass my mind. I shall never consent to a war which is avoidable, much less seek it. But this war with France will surely come. It will be forced upon us by the French Emperor." The Ems telegram was “edited,” but no mere editing of a telegram by a bureaucrat could by itself have produced a war, much less a victorious war. We read that when King William returned from Ems to Berlin, he was quite stupefied by the outburst of popular enthusiasm which greeted him from every side, and gradually came to see that it was in truth a national war which the people needed and craved for. What Bismarck did was simply to express and personify the feelings of the people. And in a recent work by a French writer a letter by Napoleon III. is mentioned, in which he admitted that the French Government had been the aggressor in 1870.
So far as the British are concerned, it is an undeniable fact that we have over and over again been forced forward against our deliberate wish and intention. Our presence in India is the best possible example. There could not by any means have been a deliberate intention on the part of the inhabitants of an island in the North Sea to establish an Empire over 200,000,000 people at the other end of the world, at a time when they could only be reached by a six months’ voyage round the Cape, and when the islanders were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with their powerful neighbours across the Channel. “International considerations,” the “wider purview,” the “interests of the Empire as a whole,” should in all conscience have prevented the English from establishing their rule in India. And yet, in spite of all these considerations, in spite of peremptory orders from England, in spite of Governor after Governor being sent out to stop any further aggressions, English rule did extend over India. The British Government and the British people never intended, never even wanted, to supplant the Moghul Emperors. They tried their very best, from motives of clean, sheer self-interest, to leave the Sikhs in the Punjab alone, just as they are now trying desperately to leave the Afghans and frontier tribes alone. But yet they supplanted the Moghuls at Delhi and annexed the Punjab.
It is absurd to put all this down to scheming bureaucrats. There must have been something bigger than bureaucrats behind it all. And in the case of Tibet, though the advance to Lhasa was undoubtedly due to a very large extent to Lord Curzon’s strenuous advocacy, and without that would not have taken place for some years later, yet it is a clear absurdity to suppose that his words alone, or his words, supported only by the opinion of Mr. White, myself, and a few other bureaucrats, would have been able to prevail against the deliberate wish and intention of the Cabinet in England, then faced by an opposition which the subsequent General Election showed had the great bulk of public opinion behind it. Lord Curzon is a man of great force and ability, and a most strenuous advocate of any cause he takes up, but even he could not make a British Cabinet reverse their opinion unless he had some strong compelling force behind him.