The British in 1914. SECTION V 1914 CHAPTER XI THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN 1914 IN August 1914 the British Empire covered rather The nucleus of this strange combination of wondrously diverse communities, dispersed over the face of the whole earth, was the United Kingdom, with an area of rather over 121,000 square miles, and a population round about 45 millions. The white population elsewhere in the Empire amounted, very roughly, to about 17 millions, making a total white population in the Empire of some 62 millions. It was an island nucleus, a home country circled by the sea, in a great pool a swan's nest,' so the greatest of all Englishmen wrote of Britain, when the island had but lately become Great Britain. German Empire Differing at all points and in all phases, poles asunder The from every side of view, was the mighty antagonist of the British Empire, the German Empire; continental in its in 1914. essence, in its essence concentrated; a homeland large, closely knit, highly organized, with some outlying overseas dependencies, all latter-day acquisitions; the very antipodes of a pair of unevenly yoked islands, in strange sort and in diverse manners perpetually widening their sphere by a process of growth and loose expansion, not by the application of a tight hand and a mailed fist. Germany in Europe had an area of 209,000 square miles, the centremost square miles of the European Continent, peopled in 1914, according to the ordinary returns, by some 68 millions, though these figures were no doubt too low. Overseas, the German Empire included an area of rather more than 1,100,000 square miles, with a population of over 12 millions, the white members of which did not exceed 25,000. Nine-tenths of the area was in Africa; the other tenth was in the Pacific, with the exception of one small but most valuable foothold in Asia, the leased area at Kiao-chau. In the New World the Germans were many in number, but not one square foot of American soil owned allegiance to the Kaiser. In Africa Germany had four separate dependencies, and each of the four marched with British territory or Protectorate. Similarly in the Pacific Islands the two Powers were side by side. On paper there was no comparison between these two The Empires. The German Empire, in size and numbers, was of the diversity far inferior to the other. But war is not made on paper, British Empire. Ꭱ and the British Empire was not made for war. Its outstanding feature was and is endless diversity. The number of different tenures, by which the lands were held, and the peoples counted as being within the British circle, illustrates the variety of the component elements. There were lands which were British in virtue of settlement, ranging from Barbados or the Bermudas, empty islands in either case when the English first landed on their shores, and never even invaded by any other European Power, to Newfoundland, oldest of British Colonies, or the Continent of Australia. There were lands made British by freewill cession. Such were Malta in the Mediterranean, Basutoland in South Africa, in the Pacific the Fiji Islands, and the noble British Dominion of New Zealand. The site of Freetown at Sierra Leone had been given or sold for a nominal price to a band of English philanthropists; the site of Fort St. George at Madras had been bought or leased by a British trading company, the first bit of Indian soil owned by the English. The British tenure of Cyprus was a licence to occupy and administer the island, paying an annual tribute to its Turkish owners; Wei-hai-wei in North China was held on lease, so was the major part of the Kowloon peninsula over against the island of Hong-Kong. Conquest and forcible annexation accounted for the Rock of Gibraltar at one end of the inland waterway to the East, for the Rock of Aden at the other end. It accounted for much of India; for part of the Dominion of Canada, where, however, the North-West territories and British Columbia were not the fruits of war; for part of South Africa, where again Natal was British in virtue of settlement. Very much of the British Empire was in point of law not British soil at all, only British under the convenient form of Protectorate; and the kinds of Protectorate in turn were manifold, varying from simple assurance of protection against foreign foes, coupled with control of foreign relations, to complete administration in the name of the native ruler. Some Protectorates, more especially in Africa, had evolved out of a still more embryonic phase, known as 'spheres of influence'. The Sudan was under joint British and Egyptian authority; the New Hebrides group in the Pacific were under a condominium of Great Britain and France. Dominions and dependencies had in turn their own dependencies, ranging, for instance, from Papua, subject to the Government of the Australian Commonwealth, to the Maldive Islands, which from all times have followed the fortunes of Ceylon. In Borneo, under British protection, a British chartered company ruled at will a territory rather larger than Scotland. Adjoining it, and also under British protection, was a state whose ruler, a benevolent despot, was a private English citizen, Rajah Brooke. Constitutions were as various as tenures; they ranged from parliaments of self-governing Dominions, from political machinery more democratic than that of the Mother Country, to no legislatures at all, with intermediate stages of all kinds. In the self-governing Dominions unity had grown up from below, the product of closer approximation between separate colonies or discordant races. In India unity was coming down from above, the outcome of a single controlling power, alien to the soil. The whole fabric of the Empire was so illogical, so wholly without parallel in history, so impossible to define, so hard to understand or to explain, that to the orderly German mind, as to the unfriendly German eye, it seemed to be a bundle of sticks with no containing bond, except in name. The wonder grew when the losses which the Empire had sustained were counted up. No system in the world ever sustained such a loss in magnitude and in kind as the severance of the United States, and yet survived. Like the gains, the losses had come from various sources. The supreme loss just mentioned was the result of defeat in war; the transfer of the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864 was a purely freewill cession, giving the lie to Adam Smith's dictum that 'no nation ever voluntarily gave up the dominion of any province'; the cession of Heligoland was the outcome of a political bargain, countervailed by gains in Africa. Our Colonial The Empire', said Lord Carnarvon, far back in 1870, has indeed been the child, sometimes of accident, and sometimes of mistake; but in spite of all it is an Empire of which we have reason to be proud '.1 Specs I growd' was the account given of herself by Empire Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The British Empire is the has been greatest illustration of growth that the world has seen. of growth. No Empire has ever had so much that was natural, so little that was artificial, in its composition. It grew, not the result The slow ment of the British Empire. in spite of itself, but in spite of its government, for its chronicles are replete with vain efforts made by one Ministry and another to refuse additions and to check expansion. It has been as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how'. With many and grievous stains upon its record, above all the incomparable wickedness of the slave trade, the British Empire has at least resembled the Kingdom of God in this one feature of growth. Growth necessitates diversity, if it is growth on natural lines; the more a plant grows, the more it differs from the original seedling; there could not possibly be so many glaring anomalies in the Empire, if it had been artificially made. All this has implied peace, not war. It is true that much of the Empire has come in the train of war; but the proportion of its area which is the immediate and direct result of premeditated conquest is not very large. More has come through peaceful channels; and the work of private citizens or combines of private citizens has, directly or indirectly, been more responsible for expansion than any direct action of the State. Through the centuries the expansion went on, with develop alternations of gain or loss, with ebb and flow of tide. The term Empire', the story of most empires, suggests well-defined action, clearly-cut results, a more or less speedy and continuous process of over-running and annexation, a campaign or a series of campaigns, in a year or a few years, followed, it may be, by a new series of 1 Speech in the House of Lords, February 14, 1870. |