Progress and History

by Unknown

Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople, so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached, named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken again so long as the World endures. That good rather than evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human responsibilities.[55]

The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming, predominantly a sea-power.

How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good. The first explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives accordingly.

England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with America was an important source of English wealth, and the philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it. There is no European race which can afford to remember its first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question of real importance is how far these various states were able to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher realization of their duty towards their races whom they were called by the claims of their own superior civilization to protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the issue.[56]

The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind with which we are concerned.

How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that knowledge—virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance, unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character, to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas, form an inseparable part.

It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by pointing to the facts of the world as we know it—to the existing colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit that it was; just as the exponents of laissez-faire were slow to admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed, is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer remarks,[57]

breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing under the plea that every people must be left free to manage its own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic world which protested against any interference by the State to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some civilized authority within it to stop them through its police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their resources, but in order to protect them alike from oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as the native, and then they must gradually develop, by education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage their own affairs.

Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably, led to their leadership in government also, and given them the predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out, its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the industries, and all the various organizations of government and control find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58] who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and for the future of the common life of mankind.

In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects, become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably, to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker all the world over; but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of activity it may not be directed.