Chapter V

In connexion with this extension of our national consciousness one may note at the present time some curious questionings among thoughtful men as to the bearing of democratic theory on our imperial obligations. We call ourselves a democracy; but there are moments, even in the course of dealing with domestic problems, when we find it hard to reconcile the facts with the theory. And the difficulty becomes greater in proportion as we extend our thoughts to the imperial scale. According to the democratic theory the people are to be consulted as to all that concerns their interests. Well, there is nothing that concerns our interests quite so deeply as the existence of the Empire. But when has the people been consulted in the matter? Proud as the British may be of possessing an empire on which the sun never sets, it is certain that the people as a whole have never been asked whether they wished to possess such an empire or not. They have never been asked how large they wished the Empire to be; or whether they would or would not be content with something less or greater. In an age when all things political are supposed to be determined by voting it is a curious circumstance that this, the greatest of political questions, has never been voted on at all. Nay more. So far as I know, the British people have never said to themselves, as the Germans have recently been saying, ‘Go to, now; world-dominion shall be ours.’ It would tax the historian to fix the period when the design for a world-wide empire became a definite ambition of the British people. True, there have been statesmen like the late Lord Beaconsfield, or Lord Chatham in an earlier age, who made plans for increasing the dominions of the Crown. But the popular will did not originate these designs, much as it may have applauded them when they had been carried out—though even this has not always been the case. Moreover, the control exercised even by statesmen over the process of imperial expansion has been of a distinctly piecemeal character. As one annexation followed another none of our ministers has foreseen where the process would end. None of them has had a vision in advance of the Empire as it exists to-day—in extent, in population, and in wealth. As Seeley long ago pointed out, we have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind. Indeed it would be extremely hard to fix responsibility for the existence of the Empire, in its present character, on any group or series of statesmen, or on any particular generation of Britons—to say nothing of individual men. A province here, a frontier there, an island somewhere else might be correctly set down to an assignable wave of public opinion or to the diplomacy of a particular minister. But the total growth seems to have escaped from human control altogether. Certainly nothing would be more untrue than to treat the existence of the Empire as though it corresponded to the expressed will of the living generation. We have not _willed_ it into being. We have found it there—like so many of the financial obligations—e.g. the National Debt—which have been inherited from the past, and have to be accepted whether we like them or not, in spite of the maxim which is said to be the corner-stone of the constitution—‘No taxation without representation’.

Our new vision of the Empire is teaching us another thing. We are learning to understand more clearly the influence of the past on the present. We begin to see that we inherit from the past something more than the monuments of the mighty dead. We inherit the very form and pressure of our national life; the range, significance and general direction of our imperial duties. We inherit not our social problems only; but the courage to attack them, and much of the wisdom which guides us to their solution. These in all their essential features have been determined not _by_ us but _for_ us by the action of forces which did their work before we came into existence. We are therefore in no mood to respond to the lines of the well-known hymn which bid us ‘give the past unto the wind’. A past which has bequeathed to us our national status and the broad outline of our imperial responsibilities, a past which has given us our political idealism and our love of liberty, cannot be ‘given to the wind’ without a degree of treachery of which the fiercest anarchist in our midst is not capable. Without distinction we feel ourselves bound to ‘carry on’; and what we are ‘carrying on’ is the work of our fathers from the most distant ages to the present day. We are learning the great truth of which Burke was the prophet—the immortality of the State. The past is throbbing in our veins. The cause we are fighting for is a thousand years old. Patriots and martyrs for liberty are no longer mere names in the book of history; they are living forces in our midst. The buried generations are with us. We are members of a community which is continuous in time and has millions of members, vast clouds of witnesses from every age, whose work is waiting for our loyalty to make it complete.