Tragedy and Hope
A History of The
World in our Time
Carroll Quigley
Part Three—
A History of The
World in our Time
Carroll Quigley
Part Three—
The Russian Empire to 1917
Chapter 7—
Creation of the Russian Civilization
In the nineteenth century most historians regarded Russia as part of Europe but it is
now becoming increasingly clear that Russia is another civilization quite separate from
Western Civilization. Both of these civilizations are descended from Classical
Civilization, but the connection with this predecessor was made so differently that two
quite different traditions came into existence. Russian traditions were derived from
Byzantium directly; Western traditions were derived from the more moderate Classical
Civilization indirectly, having passed through the Dark Ages when there was no state or
government in the West.
Russian civilization was created from three sources originally: (1) the Slav people, (2)
Viking invaders from the north, and (3) the Byzantine tradition from the south. These
three were fused together as the result of a common experience arising from Russia's
exposed geographical position on the western edge of a great flat-land stretching for
thousands of miles to the east. This flat-land is divided horizontally into three zones of
which the most southern is open plain, while the most northern is open bush and tundra.
The middle zone is forest. The southern zone (or steppes) consists of two parts: the
southern is a salty plain which is practically useless, while the northern part, next to the
forest, is the famous black-earth region of rich agricultural soil. Unfortunately the eastern
portion of this great Eurasian plain has been getting steadily drier for thousands of years,
with the consequence that the Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples of central and east-central
Asia, peoples like the Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols, and Turks, have pushed
westward repeatedly along the steppe corridor between the Urals and the Caspian Sea,
making the black-earth steppes dangerous for sedentary agricultural peoples.
The Slavs first appeared more than two thousand years ago as a peaceful, evasive
people, with an economy based on hunting and rudimentary agriculture, in the forests of
eastern Poland. These people slowly increased in numbers, moving northeastward
through the forests, mixing with the scattered Finnish hunting people who were there
already. About A.D. 700 or so, the Northmen, whom we know as Vikings, came down
from the Baltic Sea, by way of the rivers of eastern Europe, and eventually reached the
Black Sea and attacked Constantinople. These Northmen were trying to make a way of
life out of militarism, seizing booty and slaves, imposing tribute on conquered peoples,
collecting furs, honey, and wax from the timid Slavs lurking in their forests, and
exchanging these for the colorful products of the Byzantine south. In time the Northmen
set up fortified trading posts along their river highways, notably at Novgorod in the north,
at Smolensk in the center, and at Kiev in the south. They married Slav women and
imposed on the rudimentary agricultural-hunting economy of the Slavs a superstructure
of a tribute-collecting state with an exploitative, militaristic, commercial economy. This
created the pattern of a two-class Russian society which has continued ever since, much
intensified by subsequent historical events.
In time the ruling class of Russia became acquainted with Byzantine culture. They
were dazzled by it, and sought to import it into their wilderness domains in the north. In
this way they imposed on the Slav peoples many of the accessories of the Byzantine
Empire, such as Orthodox Christianity, the Byzantine alphabet, the Byzantine calendar,
the used of domed ecclesiastical architecture, the name Czar (Caesar) for their ruler, and
innumerable other traits. Most important of all, they imported the Byzantine totalitarian
autocracy, under which all aspects of life, including political, economic, intellectual, and
religious, were regarded as departments of government, under the control of an autocratic
ruler. These beliefs were part of the Greek tradition, and were based ultimately on Greek
inability to distinguish between state and society. Since society includes all human
activities, the Greeks had assumed that the state must include all human activities. In the
days of Classical Greece this all-inclusive entity was called the polis, a term which meant
both society and state; in the later Roman period this all-inclusive entity was called the
imperium. The only difference was that the polis was sometimes (as in Pericles's Athens
about 450 B.C.) democratic, while the imperium was always a military autocracy. Both
were totalitarian, so that religion and economic life were regarded as spheres of
governmental activity. This totalitarian autocratic tradition was carried on to the
Byzantine Empire and passed from it to the Russian state in the north and to the later
Ottoman Empire in the south. In the north this Byzantine tradition combined with the
experience of the Northmen to intensify the two-class structure of Slav society. In the
new Slav (or Orthodox) Civilization this fusion, fitting together the Byzantine tradition
and the Viking tradition, created Russia. From Byzantium came autocracy and the idea of
the state as an absolute power and as a totalitarian power, as well as such important
applications of these principles as the idea that the state should control thought and
religion, that the Church should be a branch of the government, that law is an enactment
of the state, and that the ruler is semi-divine. From the Vikings came the idea that the
state is a foreign importation, based on militarism and supported by booty and tribute,
that economic innovations are the function of the government, that power rather than law
is the basis of social life, and that society, with its people and its property, is the private
property of a foreign ruler.
These concepts of the Russian system must be emphasized because they are so foreign
to our own traditions. In the West, the Roman Empire (which continued in the East as the
Byzantine Empire) disappeared in 476 and, although many efforts were made to revive it,
there was clearly a period, about goo, when there was no empire, no state, and no public
authority in the West. The state disappeared, yet society continued. So also, religious and
economic life continued. This clearly showed that the state and society were not the same
thing, that society was the basic entity, and that the state was a crowning, but not
essential, cap to the social structure. This experience had revolutionary effects. It was
discovered that man can live without a state; this became the basis of Western liberalism.
It was discovered that the state, if it exists, must serve men and that it is incorrect to
believe that the purpose of men is to serve the state. It was discovered that economic life,
religious life, law, and private property can all exist and function effectively without a
state. From this emerged laissez-faire, separation of Church and State, rule of law, and
the sanctity of private property. In Rome, in Byzantium, and in Russia, law was regarded
as an enactment of a supreme power. In the West, when no supreme power existed, it was
discovered that law still existed as the body of rules which govern social life. Thus law
was found by observation in the West, not enacted by autocracy as in the East. This
meant that authority was established by law and under the law in the West, while
authority was established by power and above the law in the East. The West felt that the
rules of economic life were found and not enacted; that individuals had rights
independent of, and even opposed to, public authority; that groups could exist, as the
Church existed, by right and not by privilege, and without the need to have any charter of
incorporation entitling them to exist as a group or act as a group; that groups or
individuals could own property as a right and not as a privilege and that such property
could not be taken by force but must be taken by established process of law. It was
emphasized in the West that the way a thing was done was more important than what was
done, while in the East what was done was far more significant than the way in which it
was done.
There was also another basic distinction between Western Civilization and Russian
Civilization. This was derived from the history of Christianity. This new faith came into
Classical Civilization from Semitic society. In its origin it was a this-worldly religion,
believing that the world and the flesh were basically good, or at least filled with good
potentialities, because both were made by God; the body was made in the image of God;
God became Man in this world with a human body, to save men as individuals, and to
establish "Peace on earth." The early Christians intensified the "this-worldly" tradition,
insisting that salvation was possible only because God lived and died in a human body in
this world, that the individual could be saved only through God's help (grace) and by
living correctly in this body on this earth (good works), that there would be, some day, a
millennium on this earth and that, at that Last Judgment, there would be a resurrection of
the body and life everlasting. In this way the world of space and time, which God had
made at the beginning with the statement, "It was good" (Book of Genesis), would, at the
end, be restored to its original condition.
This optimistic, "this-worldly" religion was taken into Classical Civilization at a time
when the philosophic outlook of that society was quite incompatible with the religious
outlook of Christianity. The Classical philosophic outlook, which we might call
Neoplatonic, was derived from the teachings of Persian Zoroastrianism, Pythagorean
rationalism, and Platonism. It was dualistic, dividing the universe into two opposed
worlds, the world of matter and flesh and the world of spirit and ideas. The former world
was changeable, unknowable, illusionary, and evil; the latter world was eternal,
knowable, real, and good. Truth, to these people, could be found by the use of reason and
logic alone, not hy use of the body or the senses, since these were prone to error, and
must be spurned. The body, as Plato said, was the "tomb of the soul."
Thus the Classical world into which Christianity came about A.D. 60 believed that the
world and the body were unreal, unknowable, corrupt, and hopeless and that no truth or
success could be found by the use of the body, the senses, or matter. A small minority,
derived from Democritus and the early Ionian scientists through Aristotle, Epicurus, and
Lucretius, rejected the Platonic dualism, preferring materialism as an explanation of
reality. These materialists were equally incompatible with the new Christian religion.
Moreover, even the ordinary citizen of Rome had an outlook whose implications were not
compatible with the Christian religion. To give one simple example: while the Christians
spoke of a millennium in the future, the average Roman continued to think of a "Golden
Age" in the past, just as Homer had.
As a consequence of the fact that Christian religion came into a society with an
incompatible philosophic outlook, the Christian religion was ravaged by theological and
dogmatic disputes and shot through with "otherworldly" heresies. In general, these
heresies felt that God was so perfect and so remote and man was so imperfect and such a
worm that the gap between God and man could not be bridged by any act of man, that
salvation depended on grace rather than on good works, and that, if God ever did so
lower Himself as to occupy a human body, this was not an ordinary body, and that,
accordingly, Christ could be either True God or True Man but could not be both. This
point of view was opposed by the Christian Fathers of the Church, not always
successfully; but in the decisive battle, at the first Church Council, held at Nicaea in 325,
the Christian point of view was enacted into the formal dogma of the Church. Although
the Church continued to exist for centuries thereafter in a society whose philosophic
outlook was ill adapted to the Christian religion, and obtained a compatible philosophy
only in the medieval period, the basic outlook of Christianity reinforced the experience of
the Dark Ages to create the outlook of Western Civilization. Some of the elements of this
outlook which were of great importance were the following: (1) the importance of the
individual, since he alone is saved; (2) the potential goodness of the material world and of
the body; (3) the need to seek salvation by use of the body and the senses in this world
(good works); (4) faith in the reliability of the senses (which contributed much to
Western science); (5) faith in the reality of ideas (which contributed much to Western
mathematics); (6) mundane optimism and millennianism (which contributed much to
faith in the future and the idea of progress); (7) the belief that God (and not the devil)
reigns over this world by a system of established rules (which contributed much to the
ideas of natural law, natural science, and the rule of law).
These ideas which became part of the tradition of the West did not become part of the
tradition of Russia. The influence of Greek philosophic thought remained strong in the
East. The Latin West before goo used a language which was not, at that time, fitted for
abstract discussion, and almost all the dogmatic debates which arose from the
incompatibility of Greek philosophy and Christian religion were carried on in the Greek
language and fed on the Greek philosophic tradition. In the West the Latin language
reflected a quite different tradition, based on the Roman emphasis on administrative
procedures and ethical ideas about human behavior to one's fellow man. As a result, the
Greek philosophic tradition remained strong in the East, continued to permeate the
Greek-speaking Church, and went with that Church into the Slavic north. The schism
between the Latin Church and the Greek Church strengthened their different points of
view, the former being more this-worldly, more concerned with human behavior, and
continuing to believe in the efficacy of good works, while the latter was more
otherworldly, more concerned with God's majesty and power, and emphasized the
evilness and weakness of the body and the world and the efficacy of God's grace. As a
result, the religious outlook and, accordingly, the world outlook of Slav religion and
philosophy developed in quite a different direction from that in the West. The body, this
world, pain, personal comfort, and even death were of little importance; man could do
little to change his lot, which was determined by forces more powerful than he;
resignation to Fate, pessimism, and a belief in the overwhelming power of sin and of the
devil dominated the East.
To this point we have seen the Slavs formed into Russian civilization as the result of
several factors. Before we go on we should, perhaps, recapitulate. The Slavs were
subjected at first to the Viking exploitative system. These Vikings copied Byzantine
culture, and did it very consciously, in their religion, in their writing, in their state, in
their laws, in art, architecture, philosophy, and literature. These rulers were outsiders who
innovated all the political, religious, economic, and intellectual life of the new
civilization. There was no state: foreigners brought one in. There was no organized
religion: one was imported from Byzantium and imposed on the Slavs. The Slav
economic life was on a low level, a forest subsistence economy with hunting and
rudimentary agriculture: on this the Vikings imposed an international trading system.
There was no religious-philosophic outlook: the new State-Church superstructure
imposed on the Slavs an outlook derived from Greek dualistic idealism. And, finally, the
East never experienced a Dark Ages to show it that society is distinct from the state and
more fundamental than the state.
This summary brings Russian society down to about 1200. In the next six hundred
years new experiences merely intensified the Russian development. These experiences
arose from the fact that the new Russian society found itself caught between the
population pressures of the raiders from the steppes to the east and the pressure of the
advancing technology of Western Civilization.
The pressure of the Ural-Altaic speakers from the eastern steppes culminated in the
Mongol (Tarter) invasions after 1200. The Mongols conquered Russia and established a
tribute-gathering system which continued for generations. Thus there continued to be a
foreign exploiting system imposed over the Slav people. In time the Mongols made the
princes of Moscow their chief tribute collectors for most of Russia. A little later the
Mongols made a court of highest appeal in Moscow, so that both money and judicial
cases flowed to Moscow. These continued to flow even after the princes of Moscow
(1380) led the successful revolt which ejected the Mongols.
As the population pressure from the East decreased, the technological pressure from
the West increased (after 1500). By Western technology we mean such things as
gunpowder and firearms, better agriculture, counting and public finance, sanitation,
printing, and the spread of education. Russia did not get the full impact of these pressures
until late, and then from secondary sources, such as Sweden and Poland, rather than from
England or France. However, Russia was hammered out between the pressures from the
East and those from the West. The result of this hammering was the Russian autocracy, a
military, tribute-gathering machine superimposed on the Slav population. The poverty of
this population made it impossible for them to get firearms or any other advantages of
Western technology. Only the state had these things, but the state could afford them only
by draining wealth from the people. This draining of wealth from below upward provided
arms and Western technology for the rulers but kept the ruled too poor to obtain these
things, so that all power was concentrated at the top. The continued pressure from the
West made it impossible for the rulers to use the wealth that accumulated in their hands
to finance economic improvements which might have raised the standards of living of the
ruled, since this accumulation had to be used to increase Russian power rather than
Russian wealth. As a consequence, pressure downward increased and the autocracy
became more autocratic. In order to get a bureaucracy for the army and for government
service, the landlords were given personal powers over the peasants, creating a system of
serfdom in the East just at the time that medieval serfdom was disappearing in the West.
Private property, personal freedom, and direct contact with the state (for taxation or for
justice) were lost to the Russian serfs. The landlords were given these powers so that the
landlords would be free to fight and willing to fight for Moscow or to serve in Moscow's
autocracy.
By 1730 the direct pressure of the West upon Russia began to weaken somewhat
because of the decline of Sweden, of Poland, and of Turkey, while Prussia was too
occupied with Austria and with France to press very forcibly on Russia. Thus, the Slavs,
using an adopted Western technology of a rudimentary character, were able to impose
their supremacy on the peoples to the East. The peasants of Russia, seeking to escape
from the pressures of serfdom in the area west of the Urals, began to flee eastward, and
eventually reached the Pacific. The Russian state made every effort to stop this
movement because it felt that the peasants must remain to work the land and pay taxes if
the landlords were to be able to maintain the military autocracy which was considered
necessary. Eventually the autocracy followed the peasants eastward, and Russian society
came to occupy the whole of northern Asia.
As the pressure from the East and the pressure from the West declined, the autocracy,
inspired perhaps by powerful religious feelings, began to have a bad conscience toward
its own people. At the same time it still sought to westernize itself. It became increasingly
clear that this process of westernization could not be restricted to the autocracy itself, but
must be extended downward to include the Russian people. The autocracy found, in
1812, that it could not defeat Napoleon's army without calling on the Russian people. Its
inability to defeat the Western allies in the Crimean War of 1854-1856, and the growing
threat of the Central Powers after the Austro-German alliance of 1879, made it clear that
Russia must be westernized, in technology if not in ideology, throughout all classes of the
society, in order to survive. This meant, very specifically, that Russia had to obtain the
Agricultural Revolution and industrialism; but these in turn required that ability to read
and write be extended to the peasants and that the rural population be reduced and the
urban population be increased. These needs, again, meant that serfdom had to be
abolished and that modern sanitation had to be introduced. Thus one need led to another,
so that the whole society had to be reformed. In typically Russian fashion all these things
were undertaken by government action, but as one reform led to another it became a
question whether the autocracy and the landed upper classes would be willing to allow
the reform movement to go so far as to jeopardize their power and privileges. For
example, the abolition of serfdom made it necessary for the landed nobility to cease to
regard the peasants as private property whose only contact with the state was through
themselves. Similarly, industrialism and urbanism would create new social classes of
bourgeoisie and workers. These new classes inevitably would make political and social
demands very distasteful to the autocracy and the landed nobility. If the reforms led to
demands for nationalism, how could a dynastic monarchy such as the Romanov
autocracy yield to such demands without risking the loss of Finland, Poland, the Ukraine,
or Armenia?
As long as the desire to westernize and the bad conscience of the upper classes worked
together, reform advanced. But as soon as the lower classes began to make demands,
reaction appeared. On this basis the history of Russia was an alternation of reform and
reaction from the eighteenth century to the Revolution of 1917. Peter the Great (1689-
1725) and Catherine the Great (1762-1796) were supporters of westernization and
reform. Paul I (1796-1801) was a reactionary. Alexander I (1801-1825) and Alexander II
(1855-1881) were reformers, while Nicholas I (1825-1855) and Alexander III (1881-
1894) were reactionaries. As a consequence of these various activities, by 1864 serfdom
had been abolished, and a fairly modern system of law, of justice, and of education had
been established; local government had been somewhat modernized; a fairly good
financial and fiscal system had been established; and an army based on universal military
service (but lacking in equipment) had been created. On the other hand, the autocracy
continued, with full power in the hands of weak men, subject to all kinds of personal
intrigues of the basest kind; the freed serfs had no adequate lands; the newly literate were
subject to a ruthless censorship which tried to control their reading, writing, and thinking;
the newly freed and newly urbanized were subject to constant police supervision; the
non-Russian peoples of the empire were subjected to waves of Russification and Pan-Slavism; the judicial system and the fiscal system were administered with an arbitrary
disregard of all personal rights or equity; and, in general, the autocracy was both
tyrannical and weak.
The first period of reform in the nineteenth century, that under Alexander I, resulted
from a fusion of two factors: the "conscience-stricken gentry" and the westernizing
autocracy. Alexander himself represented both factors. As a result of his reforms and
those of his grandmother, Catherine the Great, even earlier, there appeared in Russia, for
the first time, a new educated class which was wider than the gentry, being recruited from
sons of Orthodox priests or of state officials (including army officers) and, in general,
from the fringes of the autocracy and the gentry. When the autocracy became reactionary
under Nicholas I, this newly educated group, with some support from the conscience stricken gentry, formed a revolutionary group generally called the "Intelligentsia." At first
this new group was pro-Western, but later it became increasingly anti-Western and
"Slavophile" because of its disillusionment with the West. In general, the Westernizers
argued that Russia was merely a backward and barbaric fringe of Western Civilization,
that it had made no cultural contribution of its own in its past, and that it must pass
through the same economic, political, and social developments as the West. The
Westernizers wished to speed up these developments.
The Slavophiles insisted that Russia was an entirely different civilization from
Western Civilization and was much superior because it had a profound spirituality (as
contrasted with Western materialism), it had a deep irrationality in intimate touch with
vital forces and simple living virtues (in contrast to Western rationality, artificiality, and
hypocrisy), it had its own native form of social organization, the peasant village
(commune) providing a fully satisfying social and emotional life (in contrast to Western
frustration of atomistic individualism in sordid cities); and that a Socialist society could
be built in Russia out of the simple self-governing, cooperative peasant commune without
any need to pass along the Western route marked by industrialism, bourgeoisie
supremacy, or parliamentary democracy.
As industrialism grew in the West, in the period 1830-1850, the Russian Westernizers
like P. Y. Chaadayev (1793-1856) and Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) became
increasingly disillusioned with the West, especially with its urban slums, factory system,
social disorganization, middle-class money-grubbing and pettiness, its absolutist state,
and its advanced weapons. Originally the Westernizers in Russia had been inspired by
French thinkers, while the Slavophiles had been inspired by German thinkers like
Schelling and Hegel, so that the shift from Westernizers to Slavophiles marked a shift
from French to Germanic teachers.
The Slavophiles supported orthodoxy and monarchy, although they were very critical
of the existing Orthodox Church and of the existing autocracy. They claimed that the
latter was a Germanic importation, and that the former, instead of remaining a native
organic growth of Slavic spirituality, had become little more than a tool of autocracy.
Instead of supporting these institutions, many Slavophiles went out into the villages to get
in touch with pure Slavic spirituality and virtue in the shape of the untutored peasant.
These missionaries, called "narodniki," were greeted with unconcealed suspicion and
distaste by the peasants, because they were city-bred strangers, were educated, and
expressed anti-Church and anti-governmental ideas.
Already disillusioned with the West, the Church, and the government, and now
rejected by the peasants, the Intelligentsia could find no social group on which to base a
reform program. The result was the growth of nihilism and of anarchism Nihilism was a rejection of all conventions in the name of individualism, both of these
concepts understood in a Russian sense. Since man is a man and not an animal because of
his individual development and growth in a society made up of conventions, the nihilist
rejection of conventions served to destroy man rather than to liberate him as they
expected. The destruction of conventions would not raise man to be an angel, but would
lower him to be an animal. Moreover, the individual that the nihilists sought to liberate
by this destruction of conventions was not what Western culture understands by the word
"individual." Rather it was "humanity." The nihilists had no respect whatever for the
concrete individual or for individual personality. Rather, by destroying all conventions
and stripping all persons naked of all conventional distinctions, they hoped to sink
everyone, and especially themselves, into the amorphous, indistinguishable mass of
humanity. The nihilists were completely atheist materialist, irrational, doctrinaire,
despotic, and violent. They rejected all thought of self so long as humanity suffered; they
"became atheists because they could not accept a Creator Who made an evil, incomplete
world full of suffering"; they rejected all thought, all art, all idealism, all conventions,
because these were superficial, unnecessary luxuries and therefore evil; they rejected
marriage, because it was conventional bondage on the freedom of love; they rejected
private property, because it was a tool of individual oppression; some even rejected
clothing as a corruption of natural innocence; they rejected vice and licentiousness as
unnecessary upper-class luxuries; as Nikolai Berdyaev put it: "It is Orthodox asceticism
turned inside out, and asceticism without Grace. At the base of Russian nihilism, when
grasped in its purity and depth, lies the Orthodox rejection of the world . . ., the
acknowledgment of the sinfulness of all riches and luxury, of all creative profusion in art
and in thought.... Nihilism considers as sinful luxury not only art, metaphysics, and
spiritual values, but religion also.... Nihilism is a demand for nakedness, for the stripping
of oneself of all the trappings of culture, for the annihilation of all historical traditions,
for the setting free of the natural man.... The intellectual asceticism of nihilism found
expression in materialism; any more subtle philosophy was proclaimed a sin.... Not to be
a materialist was to be taken as a moral suspect. If you were not a materialist, then you
were in favour of the enslavement of man both intellectually and politically." [N.
Berdyaev, Origin of Russian Communism (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1948), p. 45.]
This fantastic philosophy is of great significance because it prepared the ground for
Bolshevism. Out of the same spiritual sickness which produced nihilism emerged
anarchism. To the anarchist, as revealed by the founder of the movement, Mikhail
Bakunin (1814-1876), the chief of all enslaving and needless conventionalities was the
state. The discovery that the state was not identical with society, a discovery which the
West had made a thousand years earlier than Russia, could have been a liberating
discovery to Russia if, like the West, the Russians had been willing to accept both state
and society, each in its proper place. But this was quite impossible in the Russian
tradition of fanatical totalitarianism. To this tradition the totalitarian state had been found
evil and must, accordingly, be completely destroyed, and replaced by the totalitarian
society in which the individual could be absorbed. Anarchism was the next step after the
disillusionment of the narodniki and the agitations of the nihilists. The revolutionary
Intelligentsia, unable to find any social group on which to base a reform program, and
convinced of the evil of all conventional establishments and of the latent perfection in the
Russian masses, adopted a program of pure political direct action of the simplest kind:
assassination. Merely by killing the leaders of states (not only in Russia but throughout
the world), governments could be eliminated and the masses freed for social cooperation
and agrarian Socialism. From this background came the assassination of Czar Alexander
II in 1881, of King Humbert of Italy in 1900, of President McKinley in 1901, as well as
many anarchist outrages in Russia, Spain, and Italy in the period 1890-1910. The failure
of governments to disappear in the face of this terrorist agitation, especially in Russia,
where the oppression of autocracy increased after 1881, led, little by little, to a fading of
the Intelligentsia’s faith in destructive violence as a constructive action, as well as in the
satisfying peasant commune, and in the survival of natural innocence in the unthinking
masses.
Just at this point, about 1890, a great change began in Russia. Western industrialism
began to grow under governmental and foreign auspices; an urban proletariat began to
appear, and Marxist social theory came in from Germany. The growth of industrialism
settled the violent academic dispute between Westerners and Slavophiles as to whether
Russia must follow the path of Western development or could escape it by falling back
on some native Slavic solutions hidden in the peasant commune; the growth of a
proletariat gave the revolutionaries once again a social group on which to build; and
Marxist theory gave the Intelligentsia an ideology which they could fanatically embrace.
These new developments, by lifting Russia from the impasse it had reached in 1885, were
generally welcomed. Even the autocracy lifted the censorship to allow Marxist theory to
circulate, in the belief that it would alleviate terrorist pressure since it eschewed direct
political action, especially assassination, and postponed revolution until after
industrialization had proceeded far enough to create a fully developed bourgeois class
and a fully developed proletariat. To be sure, the theory created by Marx's mid-nineteenth
century Germanic background was (as we shall see) gradually changed by the age-long
Russian outlook, at first by the Leninist Bolshevik triumph over the Mensheviks and later
by Stalin's Russian nationalist victory over Lenin's more Western rationalism, but in the
period 1890-1914 the stalemate of opposed violence was broken, and progress,
punctuated by violence and intolerance, appeared.
This period of progress punctuated by violence which lasted from 1890 to 1914 has a
number of aspects. Of these, the economic and social development will be discussed first,
followed by the political and, lastly, the ideological.
As late as the liberation of the serfs in 1863, Russia was practically untouched by the
industrial process, and was indeed more backward by far than Britain and France had
been before the invention of the steam engine itself. Owing to lack of roads,
transportation was very poor except for the excellent system of rivers, and these were
frozen for months each year. Mud tracks, impassable for part of the year and only barely
passable for the rest of the time, left villages relatively isolated, with the result that
almost all handicraft products and much agricultural produce were locally produced and
locally consumed. The serfs were impoverished after liberation, and held at a low
standard of living by having a large part of their produce taken from them as rents to
landlords and as taxes to the state bureaucracy. This served to drain a considerable
fraction of the country's agricultural and mineral production to the cities and to the export
market. This fraction provided capital for the growth of a modern economy after 1863,
being exported to pay for the import of the necessary machinery and industrial raw
materials. This was supplemented by the direct importation of capital from abroad,
especially from Belgium and France, while much capital, especially for railroads, was
provided by the government. Foreign capital amounted to about one-third of all industrial
capital in 1890 and rose to almost one-half by 1900. The proportions varied from one
activity to another, the foreign portion being, in 1900, at 70 percent in the field of mining,
42 percent in the field of metallurgical industry, but less than lo percent in textiles. At the
same date the entire capital of the railroads amounted to 4,700 million rubles, of which
3,500 belonged to the government. These two sources were of very great importance
because, except in textiles, most industrial development was based on the railroads, and
the earliest enterprises in heavy industry, apart from the old charcoal metallurgy of the
Ural Mountains, were foreign. The first great railroad concession, that of the Main
Company for 2,650 miles of line, was given to a French company in 1857. A British
corporation opened the exploitation of the great southern iron ore basin at Krivoi Rog,
while the German Nobel brothers began the development of the petroleum industry at
Baku (both about 1880).
As a consequence of these factors the Russian economy remained largely, but
decreasingly, a colonial economy for most of the period 1863-1914. There was a very
low standard of living for the Russian people, with excessive exportation of consumers'
commodities, even those badly needed by the Russian people themselves, these being
used to obtain foreign exchange to buy industrial or luxury commodities of foreign origin
to be owned by the very small ruling class. This pattern of Russian economic
organization has continued under the Soviet regime since 1917.
The first Russian railroad opened in 1838, but growth was slow until the establishment
of a rational plan of development in 1857. This plan sought to penetrate the chief
agricultural regions, especially the black-earth region of the south, in order to connect
them with the chief cities of the north and the export ports. At that time there were only
663 miles of railroads, but this figure went up over tenfold by 1871, doubled again by
1881 (with 14,000 miles), reached 37,000 by 1901, and 46,600 by 1915. This building
took place in two great waves, the first in the decade 18661875 and the second in the
fifteen years 1891-1905. In these two periods averages of over 1,400 miles of track were
constructed annually, while in the intervening fifteen years, from 1876 to 1890, the
average construction was only 631 miles per year. The decrease in this middle period
resulted from the "great depression" in western Europe in 1873-1893, and culminated, in
Russia, in the terrible famine of 1891. After this last date, railroad construction was
pushed vigorously by Count Sergei Witte, who advanced from station-master to Minister
of Finance, holding the latter post from 1892 to 1903. His greatest achievement was the
single-tracked Trans-Siberian line, which ran 6,365 miles from the Polish frontier to
Vladivostok and was built in the fourteen years 1891-1905. This line, by permitting
Russia to increase her political pressure in the Far East, brought Britain into an alliance
with Japan (1902) and brought Russia into war with Japan (1904-1905).
The railroads had a most profound effect on Russia from every point of view, binding
one-sixth of the earth's surface into a single political unit and transforming that country's
economic, political, and social life. New areas, chiefly in the steppes, which had
previously been too far from markets to be used for any purpose but pastoral activities,
were brought under cultivation (chiefly for grains and cotton), thus competing with the
central black-soil area. The drain of wealth from the peasants to the urban and export
markets was increased, especially in the period before 1890. This process was assisted hy
the advent of a money economy to those rural areas which had previously been closer to a
self-sufficient or a barter basis. This increased agricultural specialization and weakened
handicraft activities. The collection of rural products, which had previously been in the
hands of a few large commercial operators who worked slowly on a long-term basis,
largely through Russia's more than six thousand annual fairs, were, after 1870, thanks to
the railroad replaced by a horde of small, quick-turnover middlemen who swarmed like
ants through the countryside, offering the contents of their small pouches of money for
grain, hemp, hides, fats, bristles, and feathers. This drain of goods from the rural areas
was encouraged by the government through quotas and restrictions, price differentials
and different railroad rates and taxes for the same commodities with different
destinations. As a result, Russian sugar sold in London for about 40 percent of its price in
Russia itself. Russia, with a domestic consumption of 10.5 pounds of sugar per capita
compared to England’s 92 pounds per capita, nevertheless exported in 1900 a quarter of
its total production of 1,802 million pounds. In the same year Russia exported almost 12
million pounds of cotton goods (chiefly to Persia and China), although domestic
consumption of cotton in Russia was only 5.3 pounds per capita compared to England's
39 pounds. In petroleum products, where Russia had 48 percent of the total world
production in 1900, about 13.3 percent was exported, although Russian consumption was
only 12 pounds per capita each year compared to Germany’s 42 pounds. In one of these
products kerosene (where Russia had the strongest potential domestic demand), almost 60
percent of the domestic production was exported. The full extent of this drain of wealth
from the rural areas can be judged from the export figures in general. In 1891-1895 rural
products formed 75 percent (and cereals 40 percent) of the total value of all Russian
exports. Moreover, it was the better grains which were exported, a quarter of the wheat
drop compared to one-fifteenth of the crop in 1900. That there was a certain improvement
in this respect, as time passed, can be seen from the fact that the portion of the wheat crop
exported fell from half in the 1800's to one-sixth in 1912-1913.
This policy of siphoning wealth into the export market gave Russia a favorable
balance of trade (that is, excess of exports over imports) for the whole period after 1875,
providing gold and foreign exchange which allowed the country to build up its gold
reserve and to provide capital for its industrial development. In addition, billions of
rubles were obtained by sales of bonds of the Russian government, largely in France as
part of the French effort to build up the Triple Entente. The State Bank, which had
increased its gold reserve from 475 million to 1,095 million rubles in the period 1890-
1897, was made a bank of issue in 1897 and was required by law to redeem its notes in
gold, thus placing Russia on the international gold standard. The number of corporations
in Russia increased from 504 with 912 million rubles capital (of which 215 million was
foreign) in 1889 to 1,181 corporations with 1,737 million rubles capital (of which over
800 million was foreign) in 1899. The proportion of industrial concerns among these
corporations steadily increased, being 58 percent of the new capital flotations in 1874-
1881 as compared to only 11 percent in 1861-1873.
Much of the impetus to industrial advance came from the railroads, since these, in the
last decade of the nineteenth century, were by far tile chief purchasers of ferrous metals,
coal, and petroleum products. As a result, there was a spectacular outburst of economic
productivity in this decade, followed by a decade of lower prosperity after 1900. The
production of pig iron in the period 1860-1870 ranged about 350 thousand tons a year,
rose to 997 thousand tons in 1890, to almost 1.6 million tons in 1895, and reached a peak
of 3.3 million tons in 1900. During this period, iron production shifted from the charcoal
foundries of the Urals to the modern coke furnaces of the Ukraine, the percentages of the
total Russian production being 67 percent from the Urals to 6 percent from the south in
1870 and 20 percent from the Urals with 67 percent from the south in 1913. The
production figure for 1900 was not exceeded during the next decade, but rose after 1909
to reach 4.6 million tons in 1913. This compared with 14.4 million tons in Germany, 31.5
million in the United States, or almost 9 million in the United Kingdom.
Coal production presents a somewhat similar picture, except that its growth continued
through the decade 1900-1910. Production rose from 750 thousand tons in 1870 to over
3.6 million tons in 1880 and reached almost 7 million in 1890 and almost 17.5 million in
1900. From this point, coal production, unlike pig iron, continued upward to 26.2 million
tons in 1908 and to 36 million in 1913. This last figure compares to Germany's
production of 190 million tons, American production of 517 million tons, and British
production of 287 million tons in that same year of 1913. In coal, as in pig iron, there was
a geographic shift of the center of production, one-third of the Russian coal coming from
the Donetz area in 1860 while more than two-thirds came from that area in 1900 and 70
percent in 1913.
In petroleum there was a somewhat similar geographic shift in the center of
production, Baku having better than go percent of the total in every year from 1870 until
after 1900 when the new Grozny fields and a steady decline in Baku's output reduced the
latter's percentage to 85 in 1910 and to 83 in 1913. Because of this decline in Baku's
output, Russian production of petroleum, which soared until 1901, declined after that
year. Production was only 35,000 tons in 1 870, rose to 600,000 tons in 1880, then leaped
to 4.8 million tons in 1890, to 11.3 million in 1900, and reached its peak of over 12
million tons in the following year. For the next twelve years output hovered somewhat
below 8.4 million tons.
Because the industrialization of Russia came so late, it was (except in textiles) on a large-scale basis from the beginning and was organized on a basis of financial capitalism after 1870 and of monopoly capitalism after 1902. Although factories employing over 500 workers amounted to only 3 percent of all factories in the 1890's, 4 percent in 1903, and 5 percent in 1910, these factories generally employed over half of all factory workers. This was a far higher percentage than in Germany or the United States, and made it easier for labor agitators to organize the workers in these Russian factories. Moreover, although Russia as a whole was not highly industrialized and output per worker or per unit for Russia as a whole was low (because of the continued existence of older forms of production), the new Russian factories were built with the most advanced technological equipment, sometimes to a degree which the untrained labor supply could not utilize. In 1912 the output of pig iron per furnace in the Ukraine was higher than in western Europe by a large margin, although smaller than in the United States by an equally large margin. Although the quantity of mechanical power available on a per capita basis for the average Russian was low in 1908 compared to western Europe or America (being only 1.6 horsepower per 100 persons in Russia compared to 25 in the United States, 24 in England, and 13 in Germany), the horsepower per industrial worker was higher in Russia than in any other continental country (being 92 horsepower per 100 workers in Russia compared to 85 in France, 73 in Germany, 153 in England, and 282 in the United States). All this made the Russian economy an economy of contradictions. Though the range of technical methods was very wide, advanced techniques were lacking completely in some fields, and even whole fields of necessary industrial activities (such as machine tools or automobiles) were lacking. The economy was poorly integrated, was extremely dependent on foreign trade (both for markets and for essential products), and was very dependent on government assistance, especially on government spending.
While the great mass of the Russian people continued, as late as 1914, to live much as they had lived for generations, a small number lived in a new, and very insecure, world of industrialism, where they were at the mercy of foreign or governmental forces over which they had little control. The managers of this new world sought to improve their positions, not by any effort to create a mass market in the other, more primitive, Russian economic world by improved methods of distribution, by reduction of prices, or by rising standards of living, but rather sought to increase their own profit margins on a narrow market by ruthless reduction of costs, especially wages, and by monopolistic combinations to raise prices. These efforts led to labor agitation on one hand and to monopolistic capitalism on the other. Economic progress, except in some lines, was slowed up for these reasons during the whole decade 1900-1909. Only in 1909, when a largely monopolistic structure of industry had been created, was the increase in output of goods resumed and the struggle with labor somewhat abated. The earliest Russian cartels were formed with the encouragement of the Russian government and in those activities where foreign interests were most prevalent. In 1887 a sugar cartel was formed in order to permit foreign dumping of this commodity. A similar agency was set up for kerosene in 1892, but the great period of formation of such organizations (usually in the form of joint-selling agencies) began after the crisis of 1901. In 1902 a cartel created by a dozen iron and steel firms handled almost three-fourths of all Russian sales of these products. It was controlled by four foreign banking groups. A similar cartel, ruled from Berlin, took over the sales of almost all Russian production of iron pipe. Six Ukraine iron-ore firms in 1908 set up a cartel controlling 80 percent of Russia's ore production. In 1907 a cartel was created to control about three-quarters of Russia's agricultural implements. Others handled 97 percent of railway cars, 94 percent of locomotives, and 94 percent of copper sales. Eighteen Donetz coal firms in 1906 set up a cartel which sold three-quarters of the coal output of that area.
The creation of monopoly was aided by a change in tariff policy. Free trade, which had been established in the tariff of 1857, was curtailed in 1877 and abandoned in 1891. The protective tariff of this latter year resulted in a severe tariff war with Germany as the Germans sought to exclude Russian agricultural products in retaliation for the Russian tariff on manufactured goods. This "war" was settled in 1894 by a series of compromises, but the reopening of the German market to Russian grain led to political agitation for protection on the part of German landlords. They were successful, as we shall see, in 1900 as a result of a deal with the German industrialists to support Tirpitz's naval building program.
On the eve of the First World War, the Russian economy was in a very dubious state of health. As we have said, it was a patchwork affair, very much lacking in integration, very dependent on foreign and government support, racked by labor disturbances, and, what was even more threatening, by labor disturbances based on political rather than on economic motives, and shot through with all kinds of technological weaknesses and discords. As an example of the last, we might mention the fact that over half of Russia's pig iron was made with charcoal as late as 1900 and some of Russia's most promising natural resources were left unused as a result of the restrictive outlook of monopoly capitalists. The failure to develop a domestic market left costs of distribution fantastically high and left the Russian per capita consumption of almost all important commodities fantastically low. Moreover, to make matters worse, Russia as a consequence of these things was losing ground in the race of production with France, Germany, and the United States.
These economic developments had profound political effects under the weak-willed Czar Nicholas II (1894-1917). For about a decade Nicholas tried to combine ruthless civil repression, economic advance, and an imperialist foreign policy in the Balkans and the Far East, with pious worldwide publicity for peace and universal disarmament, domestic distractions like anti-Semitic massacres (pogroms), forged terroristic documents, and faked terroristic attempts on the lives of high officials, including himself. This unlikely melange collapsed completely in 1905-1908. When Count Witte attempted to begin some kind of constitutional development by getting in touch with the functioning units of local government (the zemstvos, which had been effective in the famine of 1891), he was ousted from his position by an intrigue led by the murderous Minister of Interior Vyacheslav Plehve (1903). The civil head of the Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) persecuted all dissenting religions, while allowing the Orthodox Church to become enveloped in ignorance and corruption. Most Roman Catholic monasteries in Poland were confiscated, while priests of that religion were forbidden to leave their villages. In Finland construction of Lutheran churches was forbidden, and schools of this religion were taken over by the Moscow government. The Jews were persecuted, restricted to certain provinces (the Pale), excluded from most economic activities, subjected to heavy taxes (even on their religious activities), and allowed to form only ten percent of the pupils in schools (eve in villages which were almost completely Jewish and where the schools were supported entirely by Jewish taxes). Hundreds of Jews were massacred and thousands of their buildings wrecked in systematic three-day pogroms tolerated and sometimes encouraged by the police. Marriages (and children) of Roman Catholic Uniates were made illegitimate. The Moslems in Asia and elsewhere were also persecuted.
Every effort was made to Russify non-Russian national groups, especially on the western frontiers. The Finns, Baltic Germans, and Poles were not allowed to use their own languages in public life, and had to use Russian even in private schools and even on the primary level. Administrative autonomy in these areas, even that solemnly promised to Finland long before, was destroyed, and they were dominated by Russian police, Russian education, and the Russian Army. The peoples of these areas were subjected to military conscription more rigorously than the Russians themselves, and were Russified while in the ranks.
Against the Russians themselves, unbelievable extremes of espionage, counterespionage, censorship, provocation, imprisonment without trial, and outright brutality were employed. The revolutionaries responded with similar measures crowned by assassination. No one could trust anyone else, because revolutionaries were in the police, and members of the police were in the highest ranks of the revolutionaries. Georgi Gapon, a priest secretly in the pay of the government, was encouraged to form labor unions and lead workers' agitations in order to increase the employers' dependence on the autocracy, but when, in 1905, Gapon led a mass march of workers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the czar, they were attacked by the troops and hundreds were shot. Gapon was murdered the following year by the revolutionaries as a traitor. In order to discredit the revolutionaries, the central Police Department in St. Petersburg "printed at the government expense violent appeals to riot" which were circulated all over the country by an organization of reactionaries. In one year (1906) the government exiled 35,000 persons without trial and executed over 600 persons under a new decree which fixed the death penalty for ordinary crimes like robbery or insults to officials. In the three years 1906-1908, 5,140 officials were killed or wounded, and 2,328 arrested persons were executed. In 1909 it was revealed that a police agent, Azeff, had been a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionaries for years and had participated in plots to murder high officials, including Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergius, without warning these. The former chief of police who revealed this fact was sent to prison for doing so.
Under conditions such as these no sensible government was possible and all appeals for moderation were crushed between the extremists from both sides. The defeats of Russian forces in the war with Japan in 1904-1905 brought events to a head. All dissatisfied groups began to agitate, culminating in a successful general strike in October 1905. The emperor began to offer political reforms, although what was extended one day was frequently taken back shortly after. A consultative assembly, the Duma, was established, elected on a broad suffrage but by very complicated procedures designed to reduce the democratic element. In the face of agrarian atrocities, endless strikes, and mutinies in both the army and navy, the censorship was temporarily lifted, and the first Duma met (May 1906). It had a number of able men and was dominated by two hastily organized political parties, the Cadets (somewhat left of Center) and the Octobrists (somewhat right of Center). Plans for wholesale reform were in the wind, and, when the czar's chief minister rejected such plans, he was overwhelmingly censured by the Duma. After weeks of agitation the czar tried to form an Octobrist ministry, but this group refused to govern without Cadet cooperation, and the latter refused to join a coalition government. The czar named Pëtr Stolypin chief minister, dissolved the first Duma, and called for election of a new one. Stolypin was a severe man, willing to move slowly in the direction of economic and political reform but determined to crush without mercy any suspicion of violence or illegal actions. The full power of the government was used to get a second Duma more to its taste, outlawing most of the Cadets, previously the largest party, and preventing certain classes and groups from campaigning or voting. The result was a new Duma of much less ability, much less discipline, and with many unknown faces. The Cadets were reduced from 150 to 123, the Octobrists from about 42 to 32, while there were 46 extreme Right, 54 Marxist Social Democrats, 35 Social Revolutionaries, at least 100 assorted Laborites, and scattered others. This group devoted much of its time to debating whether terrorist violence should be condemned. W hen Stolypin demanded that the Social Democrats (Marxists) should be kicked out, the Duma referred the matter to a committee; the assembly was immediately dissolved, and new elections were fixed for a third Duma (June, 1908). Under powerful government intimidation, which included sending 31 Social Democrats to Siberia, the third Duma was elected. It was mostly an upper-class and upper-middle-class body, with the largest groups being 154 Octobrists and 54 Cadets. This body was sufficiently docile to remain for five years (1907-1912). During this period both the Duma and the government followed a policy of drift, except for Stolypin. Until 1910 this energetic administrator continued his efforts to combine oppression and reform, especially agrarian reform. Rural credit banks were established; various measures were taken to place larger amounts of land in the hands of peasants; restrictions on the migration of peasants, especially to Siberia, were removed; participation in local government was opened to lower social classes previously excluded; education, especially technical education, was made more accessible; and certain provisions for social insurance were enacted into law. After the Bosnian crisis of 1908 (to be discussed later), foreign affairs became increasingly absorbing, and by 1910 Stolypin had lost his enthusiasm for reform, replacing it by senseless efforts at Russification of the numerous minority groups. He was assassinated in the presence of the czar in 1911.
The fourth Duma (1912-1916) was similar to the third, elected by complicated procedures and on a restricted suffrage. The policy of drift continued, and was more obvious since no energetic figure like Stolypin was to be found. On the contrary, the autocracy sank deeper into a morass of superstition and corruption. The influence of the czarina became more pervasive, and through her was extended the power of a number of religious mystics and charlatans, especially Rasputin. The imperial couple had ardently desired a son from their marriage in 1894. After the births of four daughters, their wish was fulfilled in 1904. Unfortunately, the new czarevich, Alexis, had inherited from his mother an incurable disease, hemophilia. Since his blood would not clot, the slightest cut endangered his life. This weakness merely exaggerated the czarina's fanatical devotion to her son and her determination to see him become czar with the powers of that office undiminished by any constitutional or parliamentary innovations. After 1907 she fell under the influence of a strange wanderer, Rasputin, a man whose personal habits and appearance were both vicious and filthy but who had the power, she believed, to stop the czarevich’s bleeding. The czarina fell completely under Rasputin’s control and, since the czar was completely under her control, Rasputin became the ruler of Russia, intermittently at first, but then completely. This situation lasted until he was murdered in December 1916. Rasputin used his power to satisfy his personal vices, to accumulate wealth by corruption, and to interfere in every branch of the government, always in a destructive and unprogressive sense. As Sir Bernard Pares put it, speaking of the czarina, "Her letters to Nicholas day by day contain the instructions which Rasputin gave on every detail of administration of the Empire—the Church, the Ministers, finance, railways, food supply, appointments, military operations, and above all the Duma, and a simple comparison of the dates with the events which followed shows that in almost every case they were carried out. In all her recommendations for ministerial posts, most of which are adopted, one of the primary considerations is always the attitude of the given candidate to Rasputin."
As the autocracy became increasingly corrupt and irresponsible in this way, the slow growth toward a constitutional system which might have developed from the zemstvo system of local government and the able membership of the first Duma was destroyed. The resumption of economic expansion after 1909 could not counterbalance the pernicious influence of the political paralysis. This situation was made even more hopeless by the growing importance of foreign affairs after 1908 and the failure of intellectual life to grow in any constructive fashion. The first of these complications will be discussed later; the second deserves a few words here.
The general trend of intellectual development in Russia in the years before 1914 could hardly be regarded as hopeful. To be sure, there were considerable advances in some fields such as literacy, natural science, mathematics, and economic thought, but these contributed little to any growth of moderation or to Russia's greatest intellectual need, a more integrated outlook on life. The influence of the old Orthodox religious attitude continued even in those who most emphatically rejected it. The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity. This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the "key" to life and to truth. Once this "key" has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity. To make matters worse' many Russian thinkers sought to analyze the complexities of human experience by polarizing these into antitheses of mutually exclusive dualisms: Westerners versus Slavophiles, individualism versus community, freedom versus fate, revolutionary versus reactionary, nature versus conventions, autocracy versus anarchy, and such. There was no logical correlation between these, so that individual thinkers frequently embraced either side of any antithesis, forming an incredible mixture of emotionally held faiths. Moreover, individual thinkers frequently shifted from one side to another, or even oscillated back and forth between the extremes of these dualisms. In the most typical Russian minds both extremes were held simultaneously, regardless of logical compatibility, in some kind of higher mystic unity beyond rational analysis. Thus, Russian thought provides us with striking examples of God-intoxicated atheists, revolutionary reactionaries, violent non-resisters, belligerent pacifists, compulsory liberators, and individualistic totalitarians.
The basic characteristic of Russian thought is its extremism. This took two forms: (1) any portion of human experience to which allegiance was given became the whole truth, demanding total allegiance, all else being evil deception; and (2) every living person was expected to accept this same portion or be damned as a minion of anti-Christ. Those who embraced the state were expected to embrace it as an autocracy in which the individual had no rights, else their allegiance was not pure; those who denied the state were expected to reject it utterly by adopting anarchism. Those who became materialists had to become complete nihilists without place for any convention, ceremony, or sentiment. Those who questioned some minor aspect of the religious system were expected to become militant atheists, and if they did not take this step themselves, were driven to it by the clergy. Those who were considered to be spiritual or said they were spiritual were forgiven every kind of corruption and lechery (like Rasputin) because such material aspects were irrelevant. Those who sympathized with the oppressed were expected to bury themselves in the masses, living like them, eating dike them, dressing like them, and renouncing all culture and thought (if they believed the masses lacked these things).
The extremism of Russian thinkers can be seen in their attitudes toward such basic aspects of human experience as property, reason, the state, art, sex, or power. Always there was a fanatical tendency to eliminate as sinful and evil anything except the one aspect which the thinker considered to be the key to the cosmos. Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860), a Slavophile, wanted to reject reason completely, regarding it as “the mortal sin of the West,” while Fëdor Dostoevski (1821-1881) went so far in this direction that he wished to destroy all logic and all arithmetic, seeking, he said, “to free humanity from the tyranny of two plus two equals four.” Many Russian thinkers, long before the Soviets, regarded all property as sinful. Others felt the same way about sex. Leo Tolstoi, the great novelist and essayist (1828-1910), considered all property and all sex to be evil. Western thought, which has usually tried to find a place in the cosmos for everything and has felt that anything is acceptable in its proper place, recoils from such fanaticism. The West, for example, has rarely felt it necessary to justify the existence of art, but many thinkers in Russia (like Plato long ago) have rejected all art as evil. Tolstoi, among others, had moments (as in the essay What Is Art? Of 1897 or On Shakespeare and the Drama of 1903) when he denounced most art and literature, including his own novels, as vain, irrelevant, and satanic. Similarly the West, while it has sometimes looked askance at sex and more frequently has over-emphasized it, has generally felt that sex had a proper function in its proper place. In Russia, however, many thinkers including once again Tolstoi (The Kreutzer Sonata of 1889), have insisted that sex was evil in all places and under all circumstances, and most sinful in marriage. The disruptive effects of such ideas upon social or family life can be seen in the later years of Tolstoi's personal life, culminating in his last final hatred of his long-suffering wife whom he came to regard as the instrument of his fall from grace. But while Tolstoi praised marriage without sex, other Russians, with even greater vehemence, praised sex without marriage, regarding this social institution as an unnecessary impediment in the path of pure human impulse.
In some ways we find in Tolstoi the culmination of Russian thought. He rejected all power, all violence, most art, all sex, all public authority, and all property as evil. To him the key of the universe was to he found in Christ's injunction, "Resist not evil." All other aspects of Christ's teachings except those which flow directly from this were rejected, including any belief in Christ's divinity or in a personal God. From this injunction flowed Tolstoi's ideas of nonviolence and nonresistance and his faith that only in this way could man's capacity for a spiritual love so powerful that it could solve all social problems he liberated. This idea of Tolstoi, although based on Christ's injunction, is not so much a reflection of Christianity as it is of the basic Russian assumption that any physical defeat must represent a spiritual victory, and that the latter could be achieved only through the former.
Such a point of view could be held only by persons to whom all prosperity or happiness is not only irrelevant but sinful. And this point of view could be held with such fanaticism only by persons to whom life, family, or any objective gain is worthless. This is a dominant idea in all the Russian Intelligentsia, an idea going back through Plato to ancient Asia: All objective reality is of no importance except as symbols for some subjective truth. This was, of course, the point of view of the Neoplatonic thinkers of the early Christian period. It was generally the point of view of the early Christian heretics and of those Western heretics like the Cathari (Albigenses) who were derived from this Eastern philosophic position. In modern Russian thought it is well represented by Dostoevski, who while chronologically earlier than Tolstoi is spiritually later. To Dostoevski every object and every act is merely a symbol for some elusive spiritual truth. From this point of view comes an outlook which makes his characters almost incomprehensible to the average person in the Western tradition: if such a character obtains a fortune, he cries, "I am ruined!" If he is acquitted on a murder charge, or seems likely to be, he exclaims, "I am condemned," and seeks to incriminate himself in order to ensure the punishment which is so necessary for his own spiritual self-acquittal. If he deliberately misses his opponent in a duel, he has a guilty conscience, and says, "I should not have injured him thus; I should have killed him!" In each case the speaker cares nothing about property, punishment, or life. He cares only about spiritual values: asceticism, guilt, remorse, injury to one's self-respect. In the same way, the early religious thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, regarded all objects as symbols for spiritual values, all temporal success as an inhibition on spiritual life, and felt that wealth could be obtained only by getting rid of property, life could be found only by dying (a direct quotation from Plato), eternity could be found only if time ended, and the soul could be freed only if the body were enslaved. Thus, as late as 1910 when Tolstoi died, Russia remained true to its Greek-Byzantine intellectual tradition.
We have noted that Dostoevski, who lived slightly before Tolstoi, nevertheless had ideas which were chronologically in advance of Tolstoi's ideas. In fact, in many ways, Dostoevski was a precursor of the Bolsheviks. Concentrating his attention on poverty, crime, and human misery, always seeking the real meaning behind every overt act or word, he eventually reached a position where the distinction between appearance and significance became so wide that these two were in contradiction with each other. This contradiction was really the struggle between God and the Devil in the soul of man. Since this struggle is without end, there is no solution to men's problems except to face suffering resolutely. Such suffering purges men of all artificiality and joins them together in one mass. In this mass the Russian people, because of their greater suffering and their greater spirituality, are the hope of the world and must save the world from the materialism, violence, and selfishness of Western civilization. The Russian people, on the other hand, filled with self-sacrifice, and with no allegiance to luxury or material gain, and purified by suffering which makes them the brothers of all other suffering people, will save the world by taking up the sword of righteousness against the forces of evil stemming from Europe. Constantinople will be seized, all the Slavs will be liberated, and Europe and the world will be forced into freedom by conquest, so that Moscow many become the Third Rome. Before Russia is fit to save the world in this way, however, the Russian intellectuals must merge themselves in the great mass of the suffering Russian people, and the Russian people must adopt Europe's science and technology uncontaminated by any European ideology. The blood spilled in this effort to extend Slav brotherhood to the whole world by force will aid the cause, for suffering shared will make men one.
This mystical Slav imperialism with its apocalyptical overtones was by no means uniquely Dostoevski's. It was held in a vague and implicit fashion by many Russian thinkers, and had a wide appeal to the unthinking masses. It was implied in much of the propaganda of Pan-Slavism, and became semiofficial with the growth of this propaganda after 1908. It was widespread among the Orthodox clergy, who emphasized the reign of righteousness which would follow the millennialist establishment of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It was explicitly stated in a book, Russia and Europe, published in 1869 by Nicholas Danilevsky (1822-1885). Such ideas, as we shall see, did not die out with the passing of the Romanov autocracy in 1917, but became even more influential, merging with the Leninist revision of Marxism to provide the ideology of Soviet Russia after 1917.
At the turn of the twentieth century the first cracklings of impending disaster were emitted from this power structure but were generally ignored: in 1896 the Italians were massacred by the Ethiopians at Adowa; in 1899-1902 the whole might of Britain was held in check by the small Boer republics in the South African War; and in 1904-1905 Russia was defeated by a resurgent Japan. These omens were generally not heeded, and European civilization continued on its course to Armageddon.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the power structure of the world presented a quite different picture. In this new situation the world consisted of three great zones: (1) Orthodox civilization under the Soviet Empire, occupying the heartland of Eurasia; (2) surrounding this, a fringe of dying and shattered cultures: Islamic, Hindu, Malayan, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and others: and (3) outside this fringe, and chiefly responsible for shattering its cultures, Western Civilization. Moreover, Western Civilization had been profoundly modified. In 1900 it had consisted of a core area in Europe with peripheral areas in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the fringes of Africa. By 1950 Western Civilization had its center of power in America, the fringes in Africa were being lost, and Europe had been so reduced in power, in wealth, and in prestige that it seemed to many that it must make a choice between becoming a satellite in an American-dominated Western Civilization or joining with the buffer fringe to try to create a Third Force able to hold a balance of power between America and the Soviet bloc. This impression was mistaken, and by the late 1950's Europe was in a position, once again, to play an independent role in world affairs.
In previous chapters we have examined the background of Western Civilization and of the Russian Empire to the second decade of the twentieth century. In the present chapter we shall examine the situation in the buffer fringe until about the end of that same decade. At the beginning of the twentieth century the areas which were to become the buffer fringe consisted of (1) the Near East dominated by the Ottoman Empire, (2) the Middle East dominated by the British Empire in India, and (3) the Far East, consisting of two old civilizations, China and Japan. On the outskirts of these were the lesser colonial areas of Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia. At this point we shall consider the three major areas of the buffer fringe with a brief glance at Africa.
The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the period 1526-1533 with the conquest of Hungary and the first siege of Vienna. A second siege, also unsuccessful, came in 1683. From this point Turkish power declined and Turkish sovereignty withdrew, but unfortunately the decline was much more rapid than the withdrawal, with the result that subject peoples were encouraged to revolt and foreign Powers were encouraged to intervene because of the weakness of Turkish power in areas which were still nominally under the sultan's sovereignty.
At its height the Ottoman Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in both area and population. South of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco to the Persian Gulf; north of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea, including the Balkans as far north as Poland and the whole northern shore of the Black Sea. This vast empire was divided into twenty-one governments and subdivided into seventy vilayets, each under a pasha. The whole structure was held together as a tribute-gathering military system by the fact that the rulers in all parts were Muslims. The supreme ruler in Constantinople was not only sultan (and thus head of the empire) but was also caliph (and thus defender of the Muslim creed). In most of the empire the mass of the people were Muslims like their rulers, but in much of the empire the masses of the peoples were non-Muslims, being Roman Christians, Orthodox Christians, Jews, or other creeds.
Linguistic variations were even more notable than religious distinctions. Only the peoples of Anatolia generally spoke Turkish, while those of North Africa and the Near East spoke various Semitic and Hamitic dialects of which the most prevalent was Arabic. From Syria to the Caspian Sea across the base of Anatolia were several languages, of which the chief were Kurdish and Armenian. The shores of the Aegean Sea, especially the western, were generally Greek-speaking. The northern shore was a confused mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian speaking peoples. The eastern shore of the Adriatic was Greek-speaking up to the 40th parallel, then Albanian for almost three degrees of latitude, merging gradually into various South Slav languages like Croat, Slovens, and (in the interior) Serb. The Dalmatian shore and Istria had many Italian speakers. On the Black Sea shore Thrace itself was a mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgar from the Bosporus to the 42nd parallel where there was a solid mass of Bulgarians. The central Balkans w as a confused area, especially in Macedonia where Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Serb, and Bulgar met and mingled. North of the Bulgarian-speaking groups, and generally separated from them by the Danube, were Romanians. North of the Croatians and Serbs, and generally separated from them by the Drava River, were the Hungarians. The district where the Hungarians and Romanians met, Transylvania, was confused, with great blocs of one language being separated from their fellows by blocs of the other, the confusion being compounded by the presence of considerable numbers of Germans and Gypsies.
The religious and linguistic divisions of the Ottoman Empire were complicated by geographic, social, and cultural divisions, especially in the Balkans. This last-named area provided such contrasts as the relatively advanced commercial and mercantile activities of the Greeks; primitive pastoral groups like Albanian goat-herders; subsistence farmers scratching a living from small plots of Macedonia's rocky soils; peasant-size farms on the better soils of Serbia and Romania; great rich landed estates producing for a commercial market and worked by serf labor in Hungary and Romania. Such diversity made any hopes of political unity by consent or by federation almost impossible in the Balkans. Indeed, it was almost impossible to draw any political lines which would coincide with geographic and linguistic or religious lines, because linguistic and religious distinctions frequently indicated class distinctions. Thus the upper and lower classes or the commercial and the agricultural groups even in the same district often had different languages or different religions. Such a pattern of diversity could be held together most easily by a simple display of military force. This was what the Turks provided. Militarism and fiscalism were the two keynotes of Turkish rule, and were quite sufficient to hold the empire together as long as both remained effective and the empire was free from outside interference. But in the course of the eighteenth century Turkish administration became ineffective and outside interference became important.
The sultan, who was a completely absolute ruler, became very quickly a completely arbitrary ruler. This characteristic extended to all his activities. He filled his harem with any women who pleased his fancy, without any formal ceremony. Such numerous and temporary liaisons produced numerous children, of whom many were neglected or even forgotten. Accordingly, the succession to the throne never became established and was never based on primogeniture. As a consequence, the sultan came to fear murder from almost any direction. To avoid this, he tended to surround himself with persons who could have no possible chance of succeeding him: women, children, Negroes, eunuchs, and Christians. All the sultans from 1451 onward were born of slave mothers and only one sultan after this date even bothered to contract a formal marriage. Such a way of life isolated the sultan from his subjects completely.
This isolation applied to the process of government as well as to the ruler's personal life. Most of the sultans paid little heed to government, leaving this to their grand viziers and the local pashas. The former had no tenure, being appointed or removed in accordance with the whims of harem intrigue. The pashas tended to become increasingly independent, since they collected local taxes and raised local military forces. The fact that the sultan was also caliph (and thus religious successor to Muhammad), and the religious belief that the government was under divine guidance and should be obeyed, however unjust and tyrannical, made all religious thinking on political or social questions take the form of justification of the status quo, and made any kind of reform almost impossible. Reform could come only from the Sultan, but his ignorance and isolation from society made reform unlikely. In consequence the whole system became increasingly weak and corrupt. The administration was chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. Almost nothing could be done without gifts and bribes to officials, and it was not always possible to know what official or series of officials were the correct ones to reward.
The chaos and weakness which we have described were in full blossom by the seventeenth century, and grew worse during the next two hundred years. As early as 1699 the sultan lost Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to the Habsburgs, parts of the western Balkans to Venice, and districts in the north to Poland. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired areas north of the Black Sea, notably the Crimea.
During the nineteenth century, the Near East question became increasingly acute. Russia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as a Great Power, able to increase its pressure on Turkey. This pressure resulted from three motivations. Russian imperialism sought to win an outlet to open waters in the south by dominating the Black Sea and by winning access to the Aegean through the acquisition of the Straits and Constantinople. Later this effort was supplemented by economic and diplomatic pressure on Persia in order to reach the Persian Gulf. At the same time, Russia regarded itself as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and as early as 1774 had obtained the sultan's consent to this protective role. Moreover, as the most powerful Slav state, Russia had ambitions to be regarded as the protector of the Slavs in the sultan's domains.
These Russian ambitions could never have been thwarted by the sultan alone, but he did not need to stand alone. He generally found support from Britain and increasingly from France. Britain was obsessed with the need to defend India, which was a manpower pool and military staging area vital to the defense of the whole empire. From 1840 to 1907, it faced the nightmare possibility that Russia might attempt to cross Afghanistan to northwest India, or cross Persia to the Persian Gulf, or penetrate through the Dardanelles and the Aegean onto the British "lifeline to India" by way of the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the importance of this Mediterranean route to the east in British eyes. It was protected by British forces in Gibraltar, Malta (acquired 1800), Cyprus (1878), and Egypt (1882). In general, in spite of English humanitarian sympathy for the peoples subject to the tyranny of the Turk, and in spite of England's regard for the merits of good government, British imperial policy considered that its interests would be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up into small independent states which might fall under the influence of the Great Powers.
The French concern with the Near East was parallel to, but weaker than, that of Britain. They had cultural and trade relations with the Levant going back, in some cases, to the Crusades. In addition the French had ancient claims, revived in 1854, to he considered the protectors of Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire and of the "holy places" in Jerusalem.
Three other influences which became increasingly strong in the Near East were the growth of nationalism and the growing interests of Austria (after 1866) and of Germany (after 1889). The first stirrings of Balkan nationalism can be seen in the revolt of the Serbs in 1804-1812. By seizing Bessarabia from Turkey in 1812, Russia won the right for local self-government for the Serbs. Unfortunately, these latter began almost immediately to fight one another, the chief split being between a Russophile group led by Milan Obrenovich and a Serb nationalist group led by George Petroviæ (better known as Karageorge). The Serb state, formally established in 1830, was bounded by the rivers Dvina, Save, Danube, and Timok. With local autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, it continued to pay tribute to the sultan and to support garrisons of Turkish troops. The vicious feud between Obrenovich and Karageorgevic continued after Serbia obtained complete independence in 1878. The Obrenovich dynasty ruled in 1817-1842 and 1858- 1903, while the Karageorgevic group ruled in 1842-1858 and 1903-1945. The intrigues of these two against each other broadened into a constitutional conflict in which the Obrenovich group supported the somewhat less liberal constitution of 1869, while the Karageorgevic group supported the somewhat more liberal constitution of 1889. The former constitution was in effect in 1869 1889 and again in 1894-1903, while the latter was in effect in 1889-1894 and again in 1903-1921. In order to win popular support by an appeal to nationalist sentiments, both groups plotted against Turkey and later against Austria-Hungary.
A second example of Balkan nationalism appeared in the Greek struggle for independence from the sultan (1821-1830). After Greeks and Muslims had massacred each other by the thousands, Greek independence was established with a constitutional monarchy under the guarantee of the three Great Powers. A Bavarian prince was placed on the throne and began to establish a centralized, bureaucratic, constitutional state which was quite unsuited for a country with such unconstitutional traditions, poor transportation and communications, a low level of literacy, and a high level of partisan localism. After thirty turbulent years (1832-1862), Otto of Bavaria was deposed and replaced by a Danish prince and a completely democratic unicameral government which functioned only slightly better. The Danish dynasty continues to rule, although supplanted by a republic in 1924-1935 and by military dictatorships on sundry occasions, notably that of Joannes Metaxas (1936-1941).
The first beginnings of Balkan nationalism must not be overemphasized. While the inhabitants of the area have always been unfriendly to outsiders and resentful of burdensome governments, these sentiments deserve to be regarded as provincialism or localism rather than nationalism. Such feelings are prevalent among all primitive peoples and must not be regarded as nationalism unless they are so wide as to embrace loyalty to all peoples of the same language and culture and are organized in such fashion that this loyalty is directed toward the state as the core of nationalist strivings. Understood in this way, nationalism became a very potent factor in the disruption of the Ottoman Empire only after 1878.
Closely related to the beginnings of Balkan nationalism were the beginnings of PanSlavism and the various "pan-movements" in reaction to this, such as Pan-Islamism. These rose to a significant level only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Simply defined, Pan-Slavism was a movement for cultural unity, and, perhaps in the long run, political unity among the Slavs. In practice it came to mean the right of Russia to assume the role of protector of the Slav peoples outside Russia itself. At times it was difficult for some peoples, especially Russia's enemies, to distinguish between Pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. Equally simply defined, Pan-Islamism was a movement for unity or at least cooperation among all the Muslim peoples in order to resist the encroachments of the European Powers on Muslim territories. In concrete terms it sought to give the caliph a religious leadership, and perhaps in time a political leadership such as he had really never previously possessed. Both of these pan-movements are of no importance until the end of the nineteenth century, while Balkan nationalism was only slightly earlier than they in its rise to importance.
These Balkan nationalists had romantic dreams about uniting peoples of the same language, and generally looked back, with a distorted historical perspective, to some period when their co-linguists had played a more important political role. The Greeks dreamed of a revived Byzantine state or even of a Periclean Athenian Empire. The Serbs dreamed of the days of Stephen Dushan, while the Bulgars went further back to the days of the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon in the early tenth century. However, we must remember that even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century such dreams were found only among the educated minority of Balkan peoples. In the nineteenth century, agitation in the Balkans was much more likely to be caused by Turkish misgovernment than by any stirrings of national feeling. Moreover, when national feeling did appear it was just as likely to appear as a feeling of animosity against neighbors who were different, rather than a feeling of unity with peoples who were the same in culture and religion. And at all times localism and class antagonisms (especially rural hostility against urban groups) remained at a high level.
Russia made war on Turkey five times in the nineteenth century. On the last two occasions the Great Powers intervened to prevent Russia from imposing its will on the sultan. The first intervention led to the Crimean War (1854-1856) and the Congress of Paris (1856), while the second intervention, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, rewrote a peace treaty which the czar had just imposed on the sultan (Treaty of San Stefano, 1877) .
In 1853 the czar, as protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia north of the Danube and east of the Carpathians. Under British pressure the sultan declared war on Russia, and was supported by Britain, France, and Sardinia in the ensuing "Crimean War." Under threat of joining the anti-Russian forces, Austria forced the czar to evacuate the principalities and occupied them herself, thus exposing an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans which continued for two generations and ultimately precipitated the World War of 1914-1918.
The Congress of Paris of 1856 sought to remove all possibility of any future Russian intervention in Turkish affairs. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, Russia gave up its claim as protector of the sultan's Christian subjects, the Black Sea was "neutralized" by prohibiting all naval vessels and naval arsenals on its waters and shores, an International Commission was set up to assure free navigation of the Danube, and in 1862, after several years of indecision, the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, along with Bessarabia, were allowed to form the state of Romania. The new state remained technically under Turkish suzerainty until 1878. It was the most progressive of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, with advanced educational and judicial systems based on those of Napoleonic France, and a thorough-going agrarian reform. This last, which was executed in two stages (1863-1866 and 1918-1921), divided up the great estates of the Church and the nobility, and wiped away all vestiges of manorial dues or serfdom. Under a liberal, but not democratic, constitution, a German prince, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1866-1914), established a new dynasty which was ended only in 1948. During this whole period the cultural and educational systems of the country continued to be orientated toward France in sharp contrast to the inclinations of the ruling dynasty, which had German sympathies. The Romanian possession of Bessarabia and their general pride in their Latin heritage, as reflected in the name of the country, set up a barrier to good relations with Russia, although the majority of Romanians were members of the Orthodox Church.
The political and military weakness of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Russian pressure and Balkan nationalisms made it obvious that it must westernize and it must reform, if it was going to survive. Broad verbal promises in this direction were made by the sultan in the period 1839-1877, and there were even certain efforts to execute these promises. The army was reorganized on a European basis with the assistance of Prussia. Local government was reorganized and centralized, and the fiscal system greatly improved, chiefly by curtailing the use of tax farmers; government officials were shifted from a fee-paid basis to a salaried basis; the slave market was abolished, although this meant a large reduction in the sultan's income; the religious monopoly in education was curtailed and a considerable impetus given to secular technical education. Finally, in 1856, in an edict forced on the sultan by the Great Powers, an effort was made to establish a secular state in Turkey by abolishing all inequalities based on creed in respect to personal freedom, law, property, taxation, and eligibility for office or military service.
In practice, none of these paper reforms was very effective. It was not possible to change the customs of the Turkish people by paper enactments. Indeed, any attempt to do so aroused the anger of many Muslims to the point where their personal conduct toward non-Muslims became worse. At the same time, these promises led the non-Muslims to expect better treatment, so that relations between the various groups were exacerbated. Even if the sultan had had every intention of carrying out his stated reforms, he would have had extraordinary difficulties in doing so because of the structure of Turkish society and the complete lack of trained administrators or even of literate people. The Turkish state was a theocratic state, and Turkish society was a patriarchal or even a tribal society. Any movement toward secularization or toward social equality could easily result, not in reform, but in complete destruction of the society by dissolving the religious and authoritarian relationships which held both the state and society together. But the movement toward reform lacked the wholehearted support of the sultan; it aroused the opposition of the more conservative, and in some ways more loyal, groups of Muslims; it aroused the opposition of many liberal Turks because it was derived from Western pressure on Turkey; it aroused opposition from many Christian or non-Turkish groups who feared that a successful reform might weaken their chances of breaking up the Ottoman Empire completely; and the efforts at reform, being aimed at the theocratic character of the Turkish state, counteracted the sultan's efforts to make himself the leader of Pan-Islamism and to use his title of caliph to mobilize non-Ottoman Muslims in India, Russia, and the East to support him in his struggles with the European Great Powers.
On the other hand, it was equally clear that Turkey could not meet any European state on a basis of military equality until it was westernized. At the same time, the cheap machinery-made industrial products of the Western Powers began to pour into Turkey and to destroy the ability of the handicraft artisans of Turkey to make a living. This could not be prevented by tariff protection because the sultan was bound by international agreements to keep his customs duties at a low level. At the same time, the appeal of Western ways of life began to be felt by some of the sultan's subjects who knew them. These began to agitate for industrialism or for railroad construction, for wider opportunities in education, especially technical education, for reforms in the Turkish language, and for new, less formal, kinds of Turkish literature, for honest and impersonal methods of administration in justice and public finance, and for all those things which, by making the Western Powers strong, made them a danger to Turkey.
The sultan made feeble efforts to reform in the period 1838-1875, but by the latter date he was completely disillusioned with these efforts, and shifted over to a policy of ruthless censorship and repression; this repression led, at last, to the so-called "Young Turk" rebellion of 1908.
The shift from feeble reform to merciless repression coincided with a renewal of the Russian attacks on Turkey. These attacks were incited by Turkish butchery of Bulgarian agitators in Macedonia and a successful Turkish war on Serbia. Appealing to the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, Russia came to the rescue of the Bulgars and Serbs, and quickly defeated the Turks, forcing them to accept the Treaty of San Stefano before any of the Western Powers could intervene (1877). Among other provisions, this treaty set up a large state of Bulgaria, including much of Macedonia, independent of Turkey and under Russian military occupation.
This Treaty of San Stefano, especially the provision for a large Bulgarian state, which, it was feared, would be nothing more than a Russian tool, was completely unacceptable to England and Austria. Joining with France, Germany, and Italy, they forced Russia to come to a conference at Berlin where the treaty was completely rewritten (1878). The independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania was accepted, as were the Russian acquisitions of Kars and Batum, east of the Black Sea. Romania had to give Bessarabia to Russia, but received Dobruja from the sultan. Bulgaria itself, the crucial issue of the conference, was divided into three parts: (a) the strip between the Danube and the Balkan mountains was set up as an autonomous and tribute-paying state under Turkish suzerainty; (b) the portion of Bulgaria south of the mountains was restored to the sultan as the province of Eastern Rumelia to be ruled by a Christian governor approved by the Powers; and (c) Macedonia, still farther south, was restored to Turkey in return for promises of administrative reforms. Austria was given the right to occupy Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi-Bazar (a strip between Serbia and Montenegro). The English, by a separate agreement with Turkey, received the island of Cyprus to hold as long as Russia held Batum and Kars. The other states received nothing, although Greece submitted claims to Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia, while France talked about her interest in Tunis, and Italy made no secret of her ambitions in Tripoli and Albania. Only Germany asked for nothing, and received the sultan's thanks and friendship for its moderation.
The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 was a disaster from almost every point of view because it left every state, except Austria, with its appetite whetted and its hunger unsatisfied. The Pan-Slavs, the Romanians, the Bulgars, the South Slavs, the Greeks, and the Turks were all disgruntled with the settlement. The agreement turned the Balkans into an open powder keg from which the spark was kept away only with great difficulty and only for twenty years. It also opened up the prospect of the liquidation of the Turkish possessions in North Africa, thus inciting a rivalry between the Great Powers which was a constant danger to the peace in the period 1878-1912. The Romanian loss of Bessarabia, the Bulgarian loss of Eastern Rumelia, the South Slav loss of its hope of reaching the Adriatic or even of reaching Montenegro (because of the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Novi-Bazar), the Greek failure to get Thessaly or Crete, and the complete discomfiture of the Turks created an atmosphere of general dissatisfaction. In the midst of this, the promise of reforms to Macedonia without any provision for enforcing this promise called forth hopes and agitations which could neither be satisfied nor quieted. Even Austria, which, on the face of it, had obtained more than she could really have expected, had obtained in Bosnia the instrument which was to lead eventually to the total destruction of the Habsburg Empire. This acquisition had been encouraged by Bismarck as a method of diverting Austrian ambitions southward to the Adriatic and out of Germany. But by placing Austria, in this way, in the position of being the chief obstacle in the path of the South Slav dreams of unity, Bismarck was also creating the occasion for the destruction of the Hohenzollern Empire. It is clear that European diplomatic history from 1878 to 1919 is little more than a commentary on the mistakes of the Congress of Berlin.
To Russia the events of 1878 were a bitter disappointment. Even the small Bulgarian state which emerged from the settlement gave them little satisfaction. With a constitution dictated by Russia and under a prince, Alexander of Battenberg, who was a nephew of the czar, the Bulgarians showed an uncooperative spirit which profoundly distressed the Russians. As a result, when Eastern Rumelia revolted in 188; and demanded union with Bulgaria, the change was opposed by Russia and encouraged by Austria. Serbia, in its bitterness, went to war with Bulgaria but was defeated and forced to make peace by Austria. The union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia was accepted, on face-saving terms, by the sultan. Russian objections were kept within limits by the power of Austria and England but were strong enough to force the abdication of Alexander of Battenberg. Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was elected to succeed Alexander, but was unacceptable to Russia and was recognized by none of the Powers until his reconciliation with Russia in 1896. The state was generally in turmoil during this period, plots and assassinations steadily following one another. A Macedonian revolutionary organization known as IMRO, working for independence for their area, adopted an increasingly terrorist policy, killing any Bulgarian or Romanian statesman who did not work wholeheartedly in cooperation with their efforts. Agitated Bulgarians formed insurgent bands which made raids into Macedonia, and insurrection became endemic in the province, bursting out in full force in 1902. By that date Serb and Greek bands had joined in the confusion. The Powers intervened at that point to inaugurate a program of reform in Macedonia under Austro-Russian supervision.
The Congress of Berlin began the liquidation of the Turkish position in North Africa. France, which had been occupying Algeria since 1830, established a French protectorate over Tunis as well in 1881. This led to the British occupation of Egypt the following year. Not to be outdone, Italy put in a claim for Tripoli but could get no more than an exchange of notes, known as the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887, by which England, Italy, Austria, Spain, and Germany promised to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean, and the Black seas, unless all parties agreed to changes. The only concrete advantage to Italy in this was a British promise of support in North Africa in return for Italian support of the British position in Egypt. This provided only tenuous satisfaction for the Italian ambitions in Tripoli, but it was reinforced in 1900 by a French-Italian agreement by which Italy gave France a free hand in Morocco in return for a free hand in Tripoli.
For Turkey itself the railway was equally significant. Strategically it made it possible, for the first time, for Turkey to mobilize her full power in the Balkans, the Caucasus area, the Persian Gulf, or the Levant. It greatly increased the economic prosperity of the whole country; it could be run (as it was after 1911) on Mesopotamian petroleum; it provided markets and thus incentives for increased production of agricultural and mineral products; it greatly reduced political discontent, public disorder, and banditry in the areas through which it ran; it greatly increased the revenues of the Ottoman treasury in spite of the government's engagement to pay subsidies to the railroad for each mile of track built and for a guaranteed income per mile each year.
The old statement that England acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness is amusing but does not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth: much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. The motives which impelled the government to annex areas which its citizens had been exploiting were varied, both in time and in place, and were frequently much different from what an outsider might believe.
Britain acquired the world's greatest empire because it possessed certain advantages which other countries lacked. We mention three of these advantages: (1) that itmmm was an island, (2) that it was in the Atlantic, and (3) that its social traditions at home produced the will and the talents for imperial acquisition.
Britain's position on the Atlantic, combined with her naval control of the sea, gave her a great advantage when the new lands to the west of that ocean became one of the chief sources of commercial and naval wealth in the period after 1588. Lumber, tar, and ships were supplied from the American colonies to Britain in the period before the advent of iron, steam-driven ships (after 1860), and these ships helped to establish Britain's mercantile supremacy. At the same time, Britain's insular position deprived her monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional monarchs. Britain's security behind her navy allowed this struggle to go to a decision without any important outside interference, and permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.
The Landed Oligarchy in Britain
Britain's security combined with the political triumph of the landed oligarchy to create a social tradition entirely unlike that on the Continent. One result of these two factors was that England did not obtain a bureaucracy such as appeared on the Continent. This lack of a separate bureaucracy loyal to the monarch can be seen in the weakness of the professional army (already mentioned) and also in the lack of a bureaucratic judicial system. In England, the gentry and the younger sons of the landed oligarchy studied law in the Inns of Court and obtained a feeling for tradition and the sanctity of due process of law while still remaining a part of the landed class. In fact this class became the landed class in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities, the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.
Until 1870 there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but because he talked also about the empire and England's downtrodden masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things as moral issues. Until the end of the nineteenth century the poverty-stricken masses in the cities of England lived in want, ignorance, and crime very much as they have been described by Charles Dickens. Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the empire.
In the meantime, in 1884, acting under Ruskin's inspiration, a group which included Arnold Toynbee, Milner, Gell, Grey, Seeley, and Michael Glazebrook founded the first "settlement house," an organization by which educated, upper-class people could live in the slums in order to assist, instruct, and guide the poor, with particular emphasis on social welfare and adult education. The new enterprise, set up in East London with P. L. Gell as chairman, was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold Toynbee who died, aged 31, in 1883. This was the original model for the thousands of settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, now found throughout the world, and was one of the seeds from which the modern movement for adult education and university extension grew.
The extravagances of the Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), which had compelled the sale of his Suez Canal shares, led ultimately to the creation of an Anglo-French condominium to manage the Egyptian foreign debt and to the deposition of the khedive by his suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey. The condominium led to disputes and finally to open fighting between Egyptian nationalists and Anglo-French forces. When the French refused to join the British in a joint bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, the condominium was broken, and Britain reorganized the country in such a fashion that, while all public positions were held by Egyptians, a British army was in occupation, British "advisers" controlled all the chief governmental posts, and a British "resident," Sir Evelyn Baring (known as Lord Cromer after 1892), controlled all finances and really ruled the country until 1907.
Inspired by fanatical Muslim religious agitators (dervishes), the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed led a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian control in 1883, massacred a British force under General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon at Khartoum, and maintained an independent Sudan for fifteen years. In 1898 a British force under (Lord) Kitchener, seeking to protect the Nile water supply of Egypt, fought its way southward against fanatical Sudanese tribesmen and won a decisive victory at Omdurman. An Anglo-Egyptian convention established a condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the area between Egypt and the Congo River. This area, which had lived in disorder for centuries, was gradually pacified, brought under the rule of law, irrigated by extensive hydraulic works, and brought under cultivation, producing, chiefly, long staple cotton.
Rhodes's plans received a terrible blow in 1890-1891 when Lord Salisbury sought to end the African disputes with Germany and Portugal by delimiting their territorial claims in South and East Africa. The Portuguese agreement of 1891 was never ratified, but the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 blocked Rhodes's route to Egypt by extending German East Africa (Tanganyika) west to the Belgium Congo. By the same agreement Germany abandoned Nyasaland, Uganda, and Zanzibar to Britain in return for the island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea and an advantageous boundary in German Southwest Africa.
As soon as the German agreement was published, Lugard was sent by the British East Africa Company to overcome the resistance of native chiefs and slavers in Uganda (1890-1894). The bankruptcy of this company in 1895 seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of Uganda because of the Little Englander sentiment in the Liberal Party (which was in office in 1892-1895). Rhodes offered to take the area over himself and run it for £25,000 a year, but was refused. As a result of complex and secret negotiations in which Lord Rosebery was the chief figure, Britain kept Uganda, Rhodes was made a privy councilor, Rosebery replaced his father-in-law, Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes's secret group and was made a Trustee under Rhodes's next (and last) will. Rosebery tried to obtain a route for Rhodes's railway to the north across the Belgian Congo; Rosebery was informed of Rhodes's plans to finance an uprising of the English within the Transvaal (Boer) Republic and to send Dr. Jameson on a raid into that country "to restore order"; and, finally, Rhodes found the money to finance Kitchener's railway from Egypt to Uganda, using the South African gauge and engines given by Rhodes.
The economic strength which allowed Rhodes to do these things rested in his diamond and gold mines, the latter in the Transvaal, and thus not in British territory. North of Cape Colony, across the Orange River, was a Boer republic, the Orange Free State. Beyond this, and separated by the Vaal River, was another Boer republic, the Transvaal. Beyond this, across the Limpopo River and continuing northward to the Zambezi River, was the savage native kingdom of the Matabeles. With great personal daring, unscrupulous opportunism, and extravagant expenditure of money, Rhodes obtained an opening to the north, passing west of the Boer republics, by getting British control in Griqualand West (1880), Bechuanaland, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885). In 1888 Rhodes obtained a vague but extensive mining concession from the Matabeles' chief, Lobengula, and gave it to the British South Africa Company organized for the purpose (1889). Rhodes obtained a charter so worded that the company had very extensive powers in an area without any northern limits beyond Bechuanaland Protectorate. Four years later the Matabeles were attacked and destroyed by Dr. Jameson, and their lands taken by the company. The company, however, was not a commercial success, and paid no dividends for thirty-five years (1889-1924) and only 12.5 shillings in forty-six years. This compares with 793.5 percent dividends paid by Rhodes's Consolidated Gold Fields in the five years 1889-1894 and the 125 percent dividend it paid in 1896. Most of the South Africa Company's money was used on public improvements like roads and schools, and no rich mines were found in its territory (known as Rhodesia) compared to those farther south in the Transvaal.
In spite of the terms of the Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a political democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives, or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage and even to a non-secret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for the future of the empire he loved.
By 1895 the Transvaal Republic presented an acute problem. All political control was in the hands of a rural, backward, Bible-reading, racist minority of Boers, while all economic wealth was in the hands of a violent, aggressive majority of foreigners (Uitlanders), most of whom lived in the new city of Johannesburg. The Uitlanders, who were twice as numerous as the Boers and owned two-thirds of the land and nine-tenths of the wealth of the country, were prevented from participating in political life or from becoming citizens (except after fourteen years' residence) and were irritated by a series of minor pinpricks and extortions such as tax differentials, a dynamite monopoly, and transportation restrictions) and by rumors that the Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, was intriguing to obtain some kind of German intervention and protection. At this point in 1895, Rhodes made his plans to overthrow Kruger's government by an uprising in Johannesburg, financed by himself and Beit, and led by his brother Frank Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and other supporters, followed by an invasion of the Transvaal by a force led by Jameson from Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Flora Shaw used The Times to prepare public opinion in England, while Albert Grey and others negotiated with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the official support that was necessary. Unfortunately, when the revolt fizzled out in Johannesburg, Jameson raided anyway in an effort to revive it, and was easily captured by the Boers. The public officials involved denounced the plot, loudly proclaimed their surprise at the event, and were able to whitewash most of the participants in the subsequent parliamentary inquiry. A telegram from the German Kaiser to President Kruger of the Transvaal, congratulating him on his success "in preserving the independence of his country without the need to call for aid from his friends," was built up by The Times into an example of brazen German interference in British affairs, and almost eclipsed Jameson's aggression.
Rhodes was stopped only temporarily, but he had lost the support of many of the Boers. For almost two years he and his friends stayed quiet, waiting for the storm to blow over. Then they began to act again. Propaganda, most of it true, about the plight of Uitlanders in the Transvaal Republic flooded England and South Africa from Flora Shaw, W. T. Stead, Edmund Garrett, and others; Milner was made high commissioner of South Africa (1897); Brett worked his way into the confidence of the monarchy to become its chief political adviser during a period of more than twenty-five years (he wrote almost daily letters of advice to King Edward during his reign, 1901-1910). By a process whose details are still obscure, a brilliant, young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950, went to the Transvaal and, by violent anti-British agitation, became state secretary of that country (although a British subject) and chief political adviser to President Kruger; Milner made provocative troop movements on the Boer frontiers in spite of the vigorous protests of his commanding general in South Africa, who had to be removed; and, finally, war was precipitated when Smuts drew up an ultimatum insisting that the British troop movements cease and when this was rejected by Milner.
The Boer War (1899-1902) was one of the most important events in British imperial history. The ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British for three years, inflicting a series of defeats on them over that period, destroyed faith in British power. Although the Boer republics were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain's confidence was so shaken that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East the other signer would come to the rescue. This treaty, which allowed Japan to attack Russia in 1904, lasted for twenty years, being extended to the Middle East in 1912. At the same time Germany's obvious sympathy with the Boers, combined with the German naval construction program of 1900, alienated the British people from the Germans and contributed greatly toward the Anglo-French entente of 1904.
Milner took over the two defeated Boer republics and administered them as occupied territory until 1905, using a civil service of young men recruited for the purpose. This group, known as "Milner's Kindergarten," reorganized the government and administration of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and played a major role in South African life generally. When Milner left public life in 1905 to devote himself to international finance and the Rhodes enterprises, Lord Selborne, his successor as high commissioner, took over the Kindergarten and continued to use it. In 1906 a new Liberal government in London granted self-government to the two Boer states. The Kindergarten spent the next four years in a successful effort to create a South African Federation. The task was not an easy one, even with such powerful backing as Selborne, Smuts (who was now the dominant political figure in the Transvaal, although Botha held the position of prime minister), and Jameson (who was the prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1904-1908). The subject was broached through a prearranged public interchange of letters between Jameson and Selborne. Then Selborne published a memorandum, written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, calling for a union of the four colonies. Kerr founded a periodical (The State, financed by Sir Abe Bailey) which advocated federation in every issue; Curtis and others scurried about organizing "Closer Union" societies; Robert H. (Lord) Brand and (Sir) Patrick Duncan laid the groundwork for the new constitution. At the Durban constitutional convention (where Duncan and B. K. Long were legal advisers) the Transvaal delegation was controlled by Smuts and the Kindergarten. This delegation, which was heavily financed, tightly organized, and knew exactly what it wanted, dominated the convention, wrote the constitution for the Union of South Africa, and succeeded in having it ratified (1910). Local animosities were compromised in a series of ingenious arrangements, including one by which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the new government were placed in three different cities. The Rhodes-Milner group recognized that Boer nationalism and color intolerance were threats to the future stability and loyalty of South Africa, but they had faith in the political influence of Smuts and Botha, of Rhodes's allies, and of the four members of the Kindergarten who stayed in South Africa to hold off these problems until time could moderate the irreconcilable Boers. In this they were mistaken, because, as men like Jameson (1917), Botha (1919), Duncan (1943), Long (1943), and Smuts (1950) died off, they were not replaced by men of equal loyalty and ability, with the result that the Boer extremists under D. F. Malan came to power in 1948.
The first Cabinet of the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by the South African Party, which was largely Boer, with Louis Botha as prime minister. The real master of the government was Smuts, who held three out of nine portfolios, all important ones, and completely dominated Botha. Their policy of reconciliation with the English and of loyal support for the British connection was violently opposed by the Boer Nationalists within the party led by J. B. M. Hertzog. Hertzog was eager to get independence from Britain and to reserve political control in a South African republic to Boers only. He obtained growing support by agitating on the language and educational issues, insisting that all government officials must speak Afrikaans and that it be a compulsory language in schools, with English a voluntary, second language.
The opposition party, known as Unionist, was largely English and was led by Jameson supported by Duncan, Richard Feetham, Hugh Wyndham, and Long. Financed by Milner's allies and the Rhodes Trust, its leaders considered that their chief task was "to support the prime minister against the extremists of his own party." Long, as the best speaker, was ordered to attack Hertzog constantly. When Hertzog struck back with too violent language in 1912, he was dropped from the Cabinet and soon seceded from the South African Party, joining with the irreconcilable Boer republicans like Christiaan De Wet to form the Nationalist Party. The new party adopted an extremist anti-English and anti-native platform.
Jameson's party, under his successor, Sir Thomas Smartt (a paid agent of the Rhodes organization), had dissident elements because of the growth of white labor unions which insisted on anti-native legislation. By 1914 these formed a separate Labour Party under F. H. P. Creswell, and were able to win from Smuts a law excluding natives from most semiskilled or skilled work or any high-paving positions (1911). The natives were compelled to work for wages, however low, by the need to obtain cash for taxes and by the inadequacy of the native reserves to support them from their own agricultural activities. By the Land Act of 1913 about 7 percent of the land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the other 93 percent for purchase by whites. At that time the native population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.
As a result of such discriminations, the wages of natives were about one-tenth those of whites. This discrepancy in remuneration permitted white workers to earn salaries comparable to those earned in North America, although national income was low and productivity per capita was very low (about $125 per year).
The Botha-Smuts government of 1910-1924 did little to cope with the almost insoluble problems which faced South Africa. As it became weaker, and the Hertzog Nationalists grew stronger, it had to rely with increasing frequency on the support of the Unionist party. In 1920 a coalition was formed, and three members of the Unionist party, including Duncan, took seats in Smuts's Cabinet. In the next election in 1924 Cresswell's Labourites and Hertzog's Nationalists formed an agreement which dropped the republican-imperial issue and emphasized the importance of economic and native questions. This alliance defeated Smuts's party and formed a Cabinet which held office for nine years. It was replaced in March 1933 by a Smuts-Hertzog coalition formed to deal with the economic crisis arising from the world depression of 1929-1935.
The defeat of the Smuts group in 1924 resulted from four factors, besides his own imperious personality. These were (1 ) his violence toward labor unions and strikers; (2) his strong support for the imperial connection, especially during the war of 1914-1918; (3) his refusal to show any enthusiasm for an anti-native program, and (4) the economic hardships of the postwar depression and the droughts of 1919-1923. A miners' strike in 1913 was followed by a general strike in 1914; in both, Smuts used martial law and machine-gun bullets against the strikers and in the latter case illegally deported nine union leaders to England. This problem had hardly subsided before the government entered the war against Germany and actively participated in the conquest of German Africa as well as in the fighting in France. Opposition from Boer extremists to this evidence of the English connection was so violent that it resulted in open revolt against the government and mutiny by various military contingents which sought to join the small German forces in Southwest Africa. The rebels were crushed, and thousands of their supporters lost their political rights for ten years.
Botha and, even more, Smuts played major roles in the Imperial War Cabinet in London and at the Peace Conference of 1919. The former died as soon as he returned home, leaving Smuts, as prime minister, to face the acute postwar problems. The economic collapse of 1920-1923 was especially heavy in South Africa as the ostrich feather and diamond markets were wiped out, the gold and export markets were badly injured, and years of drought were prevalent. Efforts to reduce costs in the mines by increased use of native labor led to strikes and eventually to a revolution on the Rand (1922). Over 200 rebels were killed. As a result, the popularity of Smuts in his own country reached a low ebb just at the time when he was being praised almost daily in England as one of the world's greatest men.
These political shifts in South Africa's domestic affairs did little to relieve any of the acute economic and social problems which faced that country. On the contrary these grew worse year by year. In 1921 the Union had only 1.5 million whites, 4.7 million natives, 545 thousand mulattoes ("coloured"), and 166 thousand Indians. By 1936 the whites had increased by only half a million, while the number of natives had gone up almost two million. These natives lived on inadequate and eroded reserves or in horrible urban slums, and were drastically restricted in movements, residence, or economic opportunities, and had almost no political or even civil rights. By 1950 most of the native workers of Johannesburg lived in a distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily "detribalized," abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs (including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the whites. Indeed, they were generally excluded from this because of the obstacles placed in their path to education or property ownership. The result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and reproduction.
Almost half of the whites and many of the blacks were farmers, but agricultural practices were so deplorable that water shortages and erosion grew with frightening rapidity, and rivers which had flowed steadily in 1880 largely disappeared by 1950. As lands became too dry to farm, they were turned to grazing, especially under the spur of high wool prices during the two great wars, but the soil continued to drift away as dust.
Because of low standards of living for the blacks, there was little domestic market either for farm products or for industrial goods. As a result, most products of both black and white labor were exported, the receipts being used to pay for goods which were locally unavailable or for luxuries for whites. But most of the export trade was precarious. The gold mines and diamond mines had to dig so deeply (below 7,000-foot levels) that costs arose sharply, while the demand for both products fluctuated widely, since neither was a necessity of life. Nonetheless, each year over half of the Union's annual production of all goods was exported, with about one-third of the total represented by gold.
The basic problem was lack of labor, not so much the lack of hands but the low level of productivity of those hands. This in turn resulted from lack of capitalization and from the color bar which refused to allow native labor to become skilled. Moreover, the cheapness of unskilled labor, especially on the farms, meant that most work was left to blacks, and many whites fell into lazy habits. Unskilled whites, unwilling and unable to compete as labor with the blacks, became indolent "poor whites." Milner's Kindergarten had, at the end of the Boer War, the sum of £3 million provided by the peace treaty to be used to restore Boer families from concentration camps to their farms. They were shocked to discover that one-tenth of the Boers were "poor whites," had no land and wanted none. The Kindergarten decided that this sad condition resulted from the competition of cheap black labor, a conclusion which was incorporated into the report of a commission established by Selborne to study the problem.
This famous Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, published in 1908, was written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and republished by the Union government twenty years later. About the same time, the group became convinced that black labor not only demoralized white labor and prevented it from acquiring the physical skills necessary for self-reliance and high personal morale but that blacks were capable of learning such skills as well as whites were. As Curtis expressed it in 1952: "I came to see how the colour bar reacted on Whites and Blacks. Exempt from drudgery by custom and law, Whites acquire no skill in crafts, because the school of skill is drudgery. The Blacks, by doing drudgery, acquire skill. All skilled work in mines such as rock-drilling was done by miners imported from Cornwall who worked subject to the colour bar. The heavy drills were fixed and driven under their direction by Natives. These Cornish miners earned £1 a day, the Natives about 2s. The Cornish miners struck for higher pay, but the Blacks, who in doing the drudgery had learned how to work the drills, kept the mines running at a lower cost."
Accordingly, the Milner-Round Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international state or administrative body "would take over the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa.... Its policy would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the salvation of the Whites." Although this project has not been achieved, it provides the key to Britain's native and central-African policies from 1917 onward. For example, in 1937-1939 Britain made many vain efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany's colonial claims under which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be allowed to participate as a member of an international administration of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in which native rights would be paramount.
The British tradition of fair conduct toward natives and nonwhites generally was found most frequently among the best educated of the English upper class and among those lower-class groups, such as missionaries, where religious influences were strongest. This tradition was greatly strengthened by the actions of the Rhodes-Milner group, especially after 1920. Rhodes aroused considerable ill-feeling among the whites of South Africa when he announced that his program included "equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi," and went on to indicate that "civilized men" included ambitious, literate Negroes. When Milner took over the Boer states in 1901, he tried to follow the same policy. The peace treaty of 1902 promised that the native franchise would not be forced on the defeated Boers, but Milner tried to organize the governments of municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could vote. This was blocked by the Kindergarten (led by Curtis who was in charge of municipal reorganization in 1901-1906) because they considered reconciliation with the Boers as a preliminary to a South African Union to be more urgent. Similarly, Smuts as the chief political figure in South Africa after 1910 had to play down native rights in order to win Boer and English labor support for the rest of his program.
The Rhodes-Milner group, however, was in a better position to carry out its plans in the non-self-governing portions of Africa outside the Union. In South Africa the three native protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland were retained by the imperial authorities as areas where native rights were paramount and where tribal forms of living could be maintained at least partially. However, certain tribal customs, such as those which required a youth to prove his manhood by undergoing inhuman suffering or engaging in warfare or cattle stealing before he could marry or become a full-fledged member of the tribe, had to be curtailed. They were replaced in the twentieth century by the custom of taking work in the mines of South Africa as contract laborers for a period of years. Such labor was as onerous and killing as tribal warfare had been earlier because deaths from disease and accident were very high. But, by undergoing this test for about five years, the survivors obtained sufficient savings to allow them to return to their tribes and buy sufficient cattle and wives to support them as full members of the tribe for the rest of their days. Unfortunately, this procedure did not result in good agricultural practices but rather in overgrazing, growing drought and erosion, and great population pressure in the native reserves. It also left the mines without any assured labor supply so that it became necessary to recruit contract labor farther and farther north. Efforts by the Union government to set northern limits beyond which labor recruiting was forbidden led to controversy with employers, frequent changes in regulations, and widespread evasions. As a consequence of an agreement made by Milner with Portuguese authorities, about a quarter of the natives working in South African mines came from Portuguese East Africa even as late as 1936.
For several years (1910 1916) the Round Table groups worked desperately trying to find an acceptable formula for federating the empire. Three books and many articles emerged from these discussions, but gradually it became clear that federation was not acceptable to the English-speaking dependencies. Gradually, it was decided to dissolve all formal bonds between these dependencies, except, perhaps, allegiance to the Crow-n, and depend on the common outlook of Englishmen to keep the empire together. This involved changing the name "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations," as in the title of Curtis's book of 1916, giving the chief dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence (but gradually- and by free gift rather than under duress), working to bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.
Efforts to bring the dependencies into a closer relationship with the mother country were by no means new in 1910, nor were they supported only by the Rhodes-Milner group. Nevertheless, the actions of this group were all-pervasive. The poor military performance of British forces during the Boer War led to the creation of a commission to investigate the South African War, with Lord Esher (Brett) as chairman (1903). Among other items, this commission recommended creation of a permanent Committee of Imperial Defence. Esher became (unofficial) chairman of this committee, holding the position for the rest of his life (1905-1930). He was able to establish an Imperial General Staff in 1907 and to get a complete reorganization of the military forces of New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa so that they could be incorporated into the imperial forces in an emergency (1909- 1912). On the committee itself he created an able secretariat which cooperated loyally with the Rhodes-Milner group thereafter. These men included (Sir) Maurice (later Lord) Hankey and (Sir) Ernest Swinton (who invented the tank in 1915). When, in 1916-1917, Milner and Esher persuaded the Cabinet to create a secretariat for the first time, the task was largely given to this secretariat from the Committee on Imperial Defence. Thus Hankey was secretary to the committee for thirty years (1908- 1938), to the Cabinet for twenty-two years (1916-1938), clerk to the Privy Council for fifteen years (1923-1938), secretary-general of the five imperial conferences held between 1921 and 1937, secretary to the British delegation to almost every important international conference held between the Versailles Conference of 1919 and the Lausanne Conference of 1932, and one of the leading advisers to the Conservative governments after 1939.
Until 1907 the overseas portions of the Empire (except India) communicated with the imperial government through the secretary of state for colonies. To supplement this relationship, conferences of the prime ministers of the self-governing colonies were held in London to discuss common problems in 1887, 1897, 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, and 1918. In 1907 it was decided to hold such conferences every four years, to call the selfgoverning colonies "Dominions," and to by-pass the Colonial Secretary by establishing a new Dominion Department. Ruskin's influence, among others, could be seen in the emphasis of the Imperial Conference of 1911 that the Empire rested on a triple foundation of (1) rule of law, (2) local autonomy, and (3) trusteeship of the interests and fortunes of those fellow subjects who had not yet attained self -government.
The Conference of 1915 could not be held because of the war, but as soon as Milner became one of the four members of the War Cabinet in 1915 his influence began to be felt everywhere. We have mentioned that he established a Cabinet secretariat in 1916- 1917 consisting of two proteges of Esher (Hankey and Swinton) and two of his own (his secretaries, Leopold Amery and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech). At the same time he gave the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, a secretariat from the Round Table, consisting of Kerr (Lothian), Grigg (Lord Altrincham), W. G. S. Adams (Fellow of All Souls College), and Astor. He created an Imperial War Cabinet by adding Dominion Prime Ministers (particularly Smuts) to the United Kingdom War Cabinet. He also called the Imperial Conferences of 1917 and 1918 and invited the dominions to establish Resident Ministers in London. A' the war drew to a close in 1918, Milner took the office of Colonia] Secretary, with Amery as his assistant, negotiated an agreement providing independence for Egypt, set up a new self-government constitution in Malta, sent Curtis to India (where he drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919), appointed Curtis to the post of Adviser on Irish Affairs (where he played an important role in granting dominion status to southern Ireland in 1921), gave Canada permission to establish separate diplomatic relations with the United States (the first minister being the son-in-law of Milner's closest collaborator on the Rhodes Trust), and called the Imperial Conference of 1921.
During this decade 1919-1929 the Rhodes-Milner group gave the chief impetus toward transforming the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations and launching India on the road to responsible self-government. The creation of the Round Table groups by Milner's Kindergarten in 1909-1913 opened a new day in both these fields, although the whole group was so secretive that, even today, many close students of the subject are not aware of its significance. These men had formed their intellectual growth at Oxford on Pericle's funeral oration as described in a book by a member of the group, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth (1911), on Edmund Burke's On Conciliation with America, on Sir J. B. Seeley's Growth of British Policy, on A. V. Dicey's The Law and Custom of the Constitution, and on The New Testament's "Sermon on the Mount." The last was especially influential on Lionel Curtis. He had a fanatical conviction that with the proper spirit and the proper organization (local self-government and federalism), the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. He was sure that if people were trusted just a bit beyond what they deserve they would respond by proving worthy of such trust. As he wrote in The Problem of a Commonwealth (1916), "if political power is granted to groups before they are fit they will tend to rise to the need." This was the spirit which Milner's group tried to use toward the Boers in 1902-1910, toward India in 1910 1947, and, unfortunately, toward Hitler in 1933-1939. This point of view was reflected in Curtis's three volumes on world history, published as Civitas Dei in 1938. In the case of Hitler, at least, these high ideals led to disaster; this seems also to be the case in South Africa; whether this group succeeded in transforming the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations or merely succeeded in destroying the British Empire is not yet clear, but one seems as likely as the other.
That these ideas were not solely those of Curtis but were held by the group as a whole will be clear to all who study it. When Lord Lothian died in Washington in 1940, Curtis published a volume of his speeches and included the obituary which Grigg had written for The Round Table. Of Lothian this said, "He held that men should strive to build the Kingdom of Heaven here upon this earth, and that the leadership in that task must fall first and foremost upon the English-speaking peoples." Other attitudes of this influential group can be gathered from some quotations from four books published by Curtis in 1916-1920: "The rule of law as contrasted with the rule of an individual is the distinguishing mark of the Commonwealth. In despotisms government rests on the authority of the ruler or of the invisible and uncontrollable power behind him. In a commonwealth rulers derive their authority from the law, and the law from a public opinion which is competent to change it . . . The idea that the principle of the Commonwealth implies universal suffrage betrays an ignorance of its real nature. That principle simply means that government rests on the duty of the citizens to each other, and is to be vested in those who are capable of setting public interests before their own.... The task of preparing for freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those who can. It is the spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except as a means to it.... The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled in the management of their national affairs.... The whole effect of the war [of 1914-1918] has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden head.... Companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smouldering resentment against the presumption that Europeans are destined to dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into flames. . . . Personally I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome, especially to ourselves.... The world is in the throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown the merely national state and, as surely as day follows night or night the day, will pass either to a Commonwealth of Nations or else to an empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies rests with us."
In this spirit the Rhodes-Milner group tried to draw plans for a federation of the British Empire in 1909-1916. Gradually this project was replaced or postponed in favor of the commonwealth project of free cooperation. Milner seems to have accepted the lesser aim after a meeting, sponsored by the Empire Parliamentary Association, on July 28, 1916, at which he outlined the project for federation with many references to the writings of Curtis, but found that not one Dominion member present would accept it. At the Imperial Conference of 1917, under his guidance, it was resolved that "any readjustment of constitutional relations . . . should be based on a full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth and of India as an important portion of the same, should recognize the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern." Another resolution called for full representation for India in future Imperial Conferences. This was done in 1918. At this second wartime Imperial Conference it was resolved that Prime Ministers of Dominions could communicate directly with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that each dominion (and India) could establish Resident Ministers in London who would have seats on the Imperial War Cabinet. Milner was the chief motivating force in these developments. He hoped that the Imperial War Cabinet would continue to meet annually after the war but this did not occur.
During these years 1917-1918, a declaration was drawn up establishing complete independence for the dominions except for allegiance to the crown. This was not issued until 1926. Instead, on July 9, 1919 Milner issued an official statement which said, "The United Kingdom and the Dominions are partner nations; not yet indeed of equal power, but for good and all of equal status.... The only possibility of a continuance of the British Empire is on a basis of absolute out-and-out equal partnership between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation whatsoever." This point of view was restated in the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1926 and was enacted into law as the Statute of Westminster in 1931. B. K. Long of the South African Round Table group (who was Colonial Editor of The Times in 1913-1921 and Editor of Rhodes's paper, The Cape Times, in South Africa in 1922-1935) tells us that the provisions of the declaration of 1926 were agreed on in 1917 during the Imperial Conference convoked by Milner. They were formulated by John W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press for 43 years and the most influential journalist in Canada for much of that period. Dafoe persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, to accept his ideas and then brought in Long and Dawson (Editor of The Times). Dawson negotiated the agreement with Milner, Smuts, and others. Although Australia and New Zealand were far from satisfied, the influence of Canada and of South Africa carried the agreement. Nine years later it was issued under Balfour's name at a conference convoked by Amery.
In the course of the 1920's the Round Table program for East Africa was paralyzed by a debate on the priority which should be given to the three aspects of group’s project for a Negro Dominion north of the Zambezi. The three parts were (1) native rights, (2) “Closer Union,” and (3) international trusteeship. Generally, the group gave priority to Closer Union (federation of Kenya with Uganda and Tanganyika), but the ambiguity of their ideas on native rights made it possible for Dr. Joseph H. Oldham, spokesman for the organized Nonconformist missionary groups, to organize a successful opposition movement to federation of East Africa. In this effort Oldham found a powerful ally in Lord Lugard, and considerable support from other informed persons, including Margery Perham.
The Round Tablers, who had no firsthand knowledge of native life or even of tropical Africa, were devoted supporters of the English way of life, and could see no greater benefit conferred on natives than to help them to move in that direction. This, however, would inevitably destroy the tribal organization of life, as well as the native systems of land tenure, which were generally based on tribal holding of land. The white settlers were eager to see these things disappear, since they generally wished to bring the native labor force and African lands into the commercial market. Oldham and Lugard opposed this, since they felt it would lead to white ownership of large tracts of land on which detribalized and demoralized natives would subsist as wage slaves. Moreover, to Lugard, economy in colonial administration required that natives be governed under his system of "indirect rule" through tribal chiefs. Closer Union became a controversial target in this dispute because it involved a gradual increase in local self-government which would lead to a greater degree of white settler rule.
The opposition to Closer Union in East Africa was successful in holding up this project in spite of the Round Table domination of the Colonial Office, chiefly because of Prime Minister Baldwin's refusal to move quickly. This delayed change until the Labour government took over in 1929; in this the pro-native, nonconformist (especially Quaker) influence was stronger.
The trusteeship issue came into this controversy because Britain was bound, as a mandate Power, to maintain native rights in Tanganyika to the satisfaction of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. This placed a major obstacle in the path of Round Table efforts to join Tanganyika with Kenya and Uganda into a Negro Dominion which would be under quite a different kind of trusteeship of the African colonial Powers. Father south, in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, the Round Table obsession with federation did not meet this obstacle, and that area was eventually federated, over native protests, in 1953, but this creation, the Central African Federation, broke up again in 1964. Strangely enough, the League of Nations Mandate System which became such an obstacle to the Round Table plans was largely a creation of the Round Table itself.
The Milner Group used the defeat of Germany in 1918 as an opportunity to impose an international obligation on certain Powers to treat the natives fairly in the regions taken from Germany. This opportunity was of great significance because just at that time the earlier impetus in this direction arising from missionaries was beginning to weaken as a consequence of the general weakening of religious feeling in European culture.[so we are witness to a falling away,underway now for over 100 years.DC]
The chief problem in East Africa arose from the position of the white settlers of Kenya. Although this colony rests directly on the equator, its interior highlands, 4,000 to 10,000 feet up, were well adapted to white settlement and to European agricultural methods. The situation was dangerous by 1920, and grew steadily worse as the years passed, until by 1950 Kenya had the most critical native problem in Africa. It differed from South Africa in that it lacked self-government, rich mines, or a divided white population, but it had many common problems, such as overcrowded native reserves, soil erosion, and discontented and detribalized blacks working for low wages on lands owned by whites. It had about two million blacks and only 3,000 whites in 1910. Forty years later it had about 4 million blacks, 100,000 Indians, 24,000 Arabs, and only 30,000 whites (of which 40 percent were government employees). But what the whites lacked in numbers they made up in determination. The healthful highlands were reserved for white ownership as early as 1908, although they were not delimited and guaranteed until 1939. They were organized as very large, mostly undeveloped, farms of which there were only 2,000 covering 10,000 square miles in 1940. Many of these farms were of more than 30,000 acres and had been obtained from the government, either by purchase or on very long (999-year) leases for only nominal costs (rents about two cents per year per acre). The native reserves amounted to about 50,000 square miles of generally poorer land, or five times as much land for the blacks, although they had at least 150 times as many people. The Indians, chiefly in commerce and crafts, were so industrious that they gradually came to own most of the commercial areas both in the towns and in the native reserves.
The two great subjects of controversy in Kenya were concerned with the supply of labor and the problem of self-government, although less agitated problems, like agricultural technology, sanitation, and education were of vital significance. The whites tried to increase the pressure on natives to work on white farms rather than to seek to make a living on their own lands within the reserves, by forcing them to pay taxes in cash, by curtailing the size or quality of the reserves, by restricting improvements in native agricultural techniques, and by personal and political pressure and compulsion. The effort to use political compulsion reached a peak in 1919 and was stopped by Milner, although his group, like Rhodes in South Africa, was eager to make natives more industrious and more ambitious by any kinds of social, educational, or economic pressures. The settlers encouraged natives to live off the reserves in various ways: for example, hy permitting them to settle as squatters on white estates in return for at least 180 days of work a year at the usual low wage rates. To help both back and white farmers, not only in Kenya but throughout the world, Milner created, as a research organization, an Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture at Trinidad in 1919.
As a consequence of various pressures which we have mentioned, notably the need to pay taxes which averaged, perhaps, one month's wages a year and, in the aggregate, took from the natives a larger sum than that realized from the sale of native products, the percentage of adult males working off the reservations increased from about 35 percent in 1925 to over 80 percent in 1940. This had very deleterious effects on tribal life, family life, native morality, and family discipline, although it seems to have had beneficial effects on native health and general education.
The real crux of controversy before the Mau Mau uprising of 1948-1955 was the problem of self-government. Pointing to South Africa, the settlers in Kenya demanded self-rule which would allow them to enforce restrictions on nonwhites. A local colonial government was organized under the Colonial Office in 1906; as was usual in such cases it consisted of an appointive governor assisted by an appointed Executive Council and advised by a legislative Council. The latter had, also as usual, a majority of officials and a minority of "unofficial" outsiders. Only in 1922 did the unofficial portion become elective, and only in 1949 did it become a majority of the whole body. The efforts to establish an elective element in the Legislative Council in 1919-1923 resulted in violent controversy. The draft drawn by the council itself provided for only European members elected by a European electorate. Milner added two Indian members elected by a separate Indian electorate. In the resulting controversy the settlers sought to obtain their original plan, while London sought a single electoral roll restricted in size by educational and property qualifications but without mention of race. To resist this, the settlers organized a Vigilance Committee and planned to seize the colony, abduct the governor, and form a republic federated in some way with South Africa. From this controversy came eventually a compromise, the famous Kenya White Paper of 1923, and the appointment of Sir Edward Grigg as governor for the period of 1925-1931. The compromise gave Kenya a Legislative Council containing representatives of the imperial government, the white settlers, the Indians, the Arabs, and a white missionary to represent the blacks. Except for the settlers and Indians, most of these were nominated rather than elected, but by 1949, as the membership was enlarged, election was extended, and only the official and Negro members (4 out of 41) were nominated.
The Kenya White Paper of 1923 arose from a specific problem in a single colony, but remained the formal statement of imperial policy in tropical Africa. It said: "Primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.... In the administration of Kenya His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races."
As a result of these troubles in Kenya and the continued encroachment of white settlers on native reserves, Amery sent one of the most important members of Milner's group to the colony as governor and commander in chief. This was Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), who had been a member of Milner's Kindergarten, an editor of The Round Table and of The Times (1903-1905, 1908-1913), a secretary to Lloyd George and to the Rhodes Trustees (1923-1925), and a prolific writer on British imperial, colonial, and foreign affairs. In Kenya he tried to protect native reserves while still forcing natives to develop habits of industry by steady work, to shift white attention from political to technical problems such as agriculture, and to work toward a consolidation of tropical Africa into a single territorial unit. He forced through the Colonial Legislature in 1930 the Native Land Trust Ordinance which guaranteed native reserves. But these reserves remained inadequate and were increasingly damaged by bad agricultural practices. Only in 1925 did any sustained effort to improve such practices by natives begin. About the same time efforts were made to extend the use of native courts, native advisory councils, and to train natives for an administrative service. All of these met slow, varied, and (on the whole) indifferent success, chiefly because of natives' reluctance to cooperate and the natives' growing suspicion of white men's motives even when these whites were most eager to help. The chief cause of this growing suspicion (which in some cases reached a psychotic level) would seem to be the native's insatiable hunger for religion and his conviction that the whites were hypocrites who taught a religion that they did not obey, were traitors to Christ's teachings, and were using these to control the natives and to betray their interests, under cover of religious ideas which the whites themselves did not observe in practice.[and their observation was spot on DC]
Although the East India Company was a commercial firm, primarily interested in profits, and thus reluctant to assume a political role in this chaotic countryside, it had to intervene again and again to restore order, replacing one nominal ruler by another and even taking over the government of those areas where it was more immediately concerned. In addition the cupidity of many of its employees led them to intervene as political powers in order to divert to their own pockets some of the fabulous wealth which they saw flowing by. For these two reasons the areas under company rule, although not contiguous, expanded steadily until by 1858 they covered three-fifths of the country. Outside the British areas were over five hundred princely domains, some no larger than a single village but others as extensive as some states of Europe. At this point, in 1857-1858, a sudden, violent insurrection of native forces, known as the Great Mutiny, resulted in the end of the Mogul Empire and of the East India Company, the British government taking over their political activities. From this flowed a number of important consequences. Annexation of native principalities ceased, leaving 562 outside British India, but under British protection and subject to British intervention to ensure good government; within British India itself, good government became increasingly dominant and commercial profit decreasingly so for the whole period 1858-1947; British political prestige rose to new heights from 1858 to 1890 and then began to dwindle, failing precipitously in 1919-1922.
The task of good government in India was not an easy one. In this great subcontinent with a population amounting to almost one-fifth of the human race were to be found an almost unbelievable diversity of cultures, religions, languages, and attitudes. Even in 1950 modern locomotives linked together great cities with advanced industrial production by passing through jungles inhabited by tigers, elephants, and primitive pagan tribes. The population, which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in 1941 and reached 530 million in 1961, spoke more than a dozen major languages divided into hundreds of dialects, and were members of dozens of antithetical religious beliefs. There were, in 1941, 255 million Hindus, 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.7 million Sikhs, 1.5 million Jains, and almost 26 million pagan animists of various kinds. In addition, the Hindus and even some of the non-Hindus were divided into four major hereditary castes subdivided into thousands of sub-castes, plus a lowest group of outcastes ("untouchables"), amounting to at least 30 million persons in 1900 and twice this number in 1950. These thousands of groups were endogamous, practiced hereditary economic activities, frequently had distinctive marks or garb, and were usually forbidden to marry, eat or drink with, or even to associate with, persons of different caste. Untouchables were generally forbidden to come in contact, even indirectly, with members of other groups and were, accordingly, forbidden to enter many temples or public buildings, to draw water from the public wells, even to allow their shadows to fall on any person of a different group, and were subject to other restrictions, all designed to avoid a personal pollution which could be removed only by religious rituals of varying degrees of elaborateness. Most sub-castes were occupational groups covering all kinds of activities, so that there were hereditary groups of carrion collectors, thieves, high-way robbers, or murderers (thugs), as well a farmers, fishermen, storekeepers, drug mixers, or copper smelters. For most peoples of India, cast was the most important fact of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to death. As a result, India, even as late as 1900, was a society in which status was dominant, each individual having a place in a group which, in turn, had a place in society. This place, known to all and accepted by all, operated by established procedures in its relationships with other groups so that there was in spite of diversity, a minimum of intergroup friction and a certain peaceful tolerance so long as intergroup etiquette was known and accepted.
The diversity of social groups and beliefs was naturally reflected in an extraordinarily wide range of social behavior from the most degraded and bestial activities based on crude superstitions to even more astounding levels of exalted spiritual self-sacrifice and cooperation. Although the British refrained from interfering with religious practices, in the course of the nineteenth century they abolished or greatly reduced the practice of thuggism (in which a secret caste strangled strangers in honor of the goddess Kali), suttee (in which the widow of a deceased Hindu was expected to destroy herself on his funeral pyre), infanticide, temple prostitution, and child marriages. At the other extreme, most Hindus abstained from all violence; many had such a respect for life that they would eat no meat, not even eggs, while a few carried this belief so far that they would not molest a cobra about to strike, a mosquito about to sting, or even walk about at night, less they unknowingly step on an ant or worm. Hindus, who considered cows so sacred that the worse crime would be to cause the death of one (even by accident), who allowed millions of these beasts to have free run of the country to the great detriment of cleanliness or standards of living, who would not wear shoes of leather, and would rather die than taste beef, ate pork and associated daily with Muslims who ate beef but considered pigs to be polluting. In general, most Indians lived in abject poverty and want; only about one in a hundred could read in 1858, while considerably less could understand the English language. The overwhelming majority at that time were peasants, pressed down by onerous taxes and rents, isolated in small villages unconnected by roads, and decimated at irregular intervals by famine or disease.
British rule in the period 1858-1947 tied India together by railroads, roads, and telegraph lines. It brought the country into contact with the Western world, and especially with world markets, by establishing a uniform system of money, steamboat connections with Europe by the Suez Canal, cable connections throughout the world, and the use of English as the language of government and administration. Best of all, Britain established the rule of law, equality before the law, and a tradition of judicial fairness to replace the older practice of inequality and arbitrary, violence. A certain degree of efficiency, and a certain ambitious, if discontented, energy directed toward change replaced the older abject resignation to inevitable fate.
The modern postal, telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each year. The railroad grew from 200 miles in 1855 to 9,000 in 1880, to 25,000 in 1901, and to 43,000 in 1939. This, the third largest railroad system in the world, carried 600 million passengers and 60 million tons of freight a year. About the same time, the dirt tracks of 1858 had been partly replaced by over 300,000 miles of highways, of which only about a quarter could be rated as first class. From 1925 onward, these highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of the villages.
Improved communications and public order served to merge the isolated village markets, smoothing out the earlier alternations of scarcity and glut with their accompanying phenomena of waste and of starvation in the midst of plenty. All this led to a great extension of cultivation into more remote areas and the growing of a greater variety of crops. Sparsely settled areas of forests and hills, especially in Assam and the Northwest Provinces, were occupied, without the devastation of deforestation (as in China or in non-Indian Nepal) because of a highly developed forestry conservation service. Migration, permanent and seasonal, became regular features of Indian life, the earnings of the migrants being sent back to their families in the villages they had left. A magnificent system of canals, chiefly for irrigation, was constructed, populating desolate wastes, especially in the northwestern parts of the country, and encouraging whole tribes which had previously been pastoral freebooters to settle down as cultivators. By 1939 almost 60 million acres of land were irrigated. For this and other reasons, the sown area of India increased from 195 to 228 million acres in about forty years (1900-1939). Increases in yields were much less satisfactory because of reluctance to change, lack of knowledge or capital, and organizational problems.
The tax on land traditionally had been the major part of public revenue in India, and remained near so percent as late as 1900. Under the Moguls these land revenues had been collected by tax farmers. In many areas, notably Bengal, the British tended to regard these land revenues as rents rather than taxes, and thus regarded the revenue collectors as the owners of the land. Once this was established, these new landlords used their powers to raise rents, to evict cultivators who had been on the same land for years or even generations, and to create an unstable rural proletariat of tenants and laborers unable or unwilling to improve their methods. Numerous legislative enactments sought, without great success, to improve these conditions. Such efforts were counterbalanced by the growth of population, the great rise in the value of land, the inability of industry or commerce to drain surplus population from the land as fast as it increased, the tendency of the government to favor industry or commerce over agriculture by tariffs, taxation, and public expenditures, the growing frequency of famines (from droughts), of malaria (from irrigation projects), and of plague (from trade with the Far East) which wiped out in one year gains made in several years, the growing burden of peasant debt at onerous terms and at high interest rates, and the growing inability to supplement incomes from cultivation by incomes from household crafts because of the growing competition from cheap industrial goods. Although slavery was abolished in 1843, many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor.
All of these misfortunes culminated in the period 1895-1901. There had been a long period of declining prices in 1873-1896, which increased the burden on debtors and stagnated economic activities. In 1897 the monsoon rains failed, with a loss of 18 million tons of food crops and of one million lives from famine. This disaster was repeated in 1899-1900. Bubonic plague was introduced to Bombay from China in 1895 and killed about two million persons in the next six years.
From this low point in 1901, economic conditions improved fairly steadily, except for a brief period in 1919-1922 and the long burden of the world depression in 1929-1934. The rise in prices in 1900-1914 benefitted India more than others, as the prices of her exports rose more rapidly. The war of 1914-1918 gave India a great economic opportunity, especially by increasing the demand for her textiles. Tariffs were raised steadily after 1916, providing protection for industry, especially in metals, textiles, cement, and paper. The customs became the largest single source of revenue, alleviating to some extent the pressure of taxation on cultivators. However, the agrarian problem remained acute, for most of the factors listed above remained in force. In 1931 it was estimated that, in the United Provinces, 30 percent of the cultivators could not make a living from their holdings even in good years, while 52 percent could make a living in good years but not in bad ones.
There was great economic advance in mining, industry, commerce, and finance in the period after 1900. Coal output went up from 6 to 21 million tons in 1900-1924, and petroleum output (chiefly from Burma) \vent up from 37 to 294 million gallons. Production in the protected industries also improved in the same period until, by 1932, India could produce three-quarters of her cotton cloth, three-quarters of her steel, and most of her cement, matches, and sugar. In one product, jute, India became the chief source for the world's supply, and this became the leading export after 1925.
A notable feature of the growth of manufacturing in India after 1900 lies in the fact that Hindu capital largely replaced British capital, chiefly for political reasons. In spite of India's poverty, there was a considerable volume of saving, arising chiefly from the inequitable distribution of income to the landlord class and to the moneylenders (if these two groups can be separated in this way). Naturally, these groups preferred to invest their incomes back in the activities whence they had been derived, but, after 1919, nationalist agitation and especially Gandhi's influence inclined many Hindus to make contributions to their country's strength by investing in industry.
The growth of industry should not be exaggerated, and its influences were considerably less than one might believe at first glance. There was little growth of an urban proletariat or of a permanent class of factory workers, although this did exist. Increases in output came largely from power production rather than from increases in the labor force. This labor force continued to be rural in its psychological and social orientation, being generally temporary migrants from the villages, living under urban industrial conditions only for a few years, with every intention of returning to the village eventually, and generally sending savings back to their families and visiting them for weeks or even months each year (generally at the harvest season). This class of industrial laborers did not adopt either an urban or a proletarian point of view, were almost wholly illiterate, formed labor organizations only reluctantly (because of refusal to pay dues), and rarely acquired industrial skills. After 1915 labor unions did appear, but membership remained small, and they were organized and controlled by non-laboring persons, frequently middle-class intellectuals. Moreover, industry remained a widely scattered activity found in a few cities but absent from the rest. Although India had 35 cities of over 100,000 population in 1911, most of these remained commercial and administrative centers and not manufacturing centers. That the chief emphasis remained on rural activities can be seen from the fact that these 35 centers of population had a total of 8.2 million inhabitants compared to 310.7 million outside their limits in 1921. In fact, only 30 million persons lived in the 1,623 centers of over 5,000 persons each, while 289 million lived in centers smaller than 5,000 persons.
One of the chief ways in which the impact of Western culture reached India was by education. The charge has frequently been made that the British neglected education in India or that they made an error in emphasizing education in English for the upper classes rather than education in the vernacular languages for the masses of the people. History does not sustain the justice of these charges. In England itself the government assumed little responsibility for education until 1902, and in general had a more advanced policy in this field in India than in England until well into the present century. Until 1835 the English did try to encourage native traditions of education, but their vernacular schools failed from lack of patronage; the Indians themselves objected to being excluded, as they regarded it, from English education. Accordingly, from 1835 the British offered Englishlanguage education on the higher levels in the hope that Western science, technology, and political attitudes could be introduced without disrupting religious or social life and that these innovations would "infiltrate" downward into the population. Because of the expense, government-sponsored education had to be restricted to the higher levels, although encouragement for vernacular schools on the lower levels began (without much financial obligation) in 1854. The "infiltration downward" theory was quite mistaken because those who acquired knowledge of English used it as a passport to advancement in government service or professional life and became renegades from, rather than missionaries to, the lower classes of Indian society. In a sense the use of English on the university level of education did not lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two. The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by opening the door to public service or the professions created a veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).
The British had little choice but to use English as the language of government and higher education. In India the languages used in these two fields had been foreign ones for centuries. The language of government and of the courts was Persian until 1837. Advanced and middle-level education had always been foreign, in Sanskrit for the Hindus and in Arabic for the Muslims. Sanskrit, a "dead" language, was that of Hindu religious literature, while Arabic was the language of the Koran, the only writing the ordinary Muslim would wish to read. In fact, the allegiance of the Muslims to the Koran and to Arabic was so intense that they refused to participate in the new English-language educational system and, in consequence, had been excluded from government, the professions, and much of the economic life of the country by 1900.
No vernacular language could have been used to teach the really valuable contributions of the West, such as science, technology, economics, agricultural science, or political science, because the necessary vocabulary was lacking in the vernaculars. When the university of the native state of Hyderabad tried to translate Western works into Urdu for teaching purposes after 1920, it was necessary to create about 40,000 new words. Moreover, the large number of vernacular languages would have made the choice of any one of them for the purpose of higher education invidious. And, finally, the natives themselves had no desire to learn to read their vernacular languages, at least during the nineteenth century; they wanted to learn English because it provided access to knowledge, to government positions, and to social advancement as no vernacular could. But it must be remembered that it was the exceptional Indian, not the average one, who wanted to learn to read at all. The average native was content to remain illiterate, at least until deep into the twentieth century. Only then did the desire to read spread under the stimulus of growing nationalism, political awareness, and growing concern with political and religious tensions. These fostered the desire to read, in order to read newspapers, but this had adverse effects: each political or religious group had its own press and presented its own biased version of world events so that, by 1940, these different groups had entirely different ideas of reality.
Moreover, the new enthusiasm for the vernacular languages, the influence of extreme Hindu nationalists like B. G. Tilak (1859-1920) or anti-Westerners like M. K. Gandhi (1869-1948), led to a wholesale rejection of all that was best in British or in European culture. At the same time, those who sought power, advancement, or knowledge continued to learn English as the key to these ambitions. Unfortunately, these semiwesternized Indians neglected much of the practical side of the European way of life and tended to be intellectualist and doctrinaire and to despise practical learning and physical labor. They lived, as we have said, in a middle world which was neither Indian nor Western, spoiled for the Indian way of life, but often unable to find a position in Indian society which would allow them to live their own version of a Western way of life. At the university they studied literature, law, and political science, all subjects which emphasized verbal accomplishments. Since India did not provide sufficient jobs for such accomplishments, there was a great deal of ''academic unemployment," with resulting discontent and growing radicalism. The career of Gandhi was a result of the efforts of one man to avoid this problem by fusing certain elements of Western teaching with a purified Hinduism to create a nationalist Indian way of life on a basically moral foundation.
It is obvious that one of the chief effects of British educational policy has been to increase the social tensions within India and to give them a political orientation. This change is usually called the "rise of Indian nationalism," but it is considerably more complex than this simple name might imply. It began to rise about 1890, possibly under the influence of the misfortunes at the end of the century, grew steadily until it reached the crisis stage after 1917, and finally emerged in the long-drawn crisis of 1930-1947.
India's outlook was fundamentally religious, just as the British outlook was fundamentally political. The average Indian derived from his religious outlook a profound conviction that the material world and physical comfort were irrelevant and unimportant in contrast with such spiritual matters as the proper preparation for the life to come after the body's death. From his English education the average Indian student derived the conviction that liberty and self-government were the highest goods of life and must be sought by such resistance to authority as had been shown in the Magna Carta, the opposition to Charles I, the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, the writings of John Locke and of John Stuart Mill, and the general resistance to public authority found in nineteenth century liberalism and laissez-faire. These two points of view tended to merge in the minds of Indian intellectuals into a point of view in which it seemed that English political ideals should be sought by Indian methods of religious fervor, self-sacrifice, and contempt for material welfare or physical comforts. As a result, political and social tensions were acerbated between British and Indians, between Westernizers and Nationalists, between Hindus and Muslims, between Brahmins and lower castes, and between caste members and outcastes.
In the early part of the nineteenth century there had been a revival of interest in Indian languages and literatures. This revival soon revealed that many Hindu ideas and practices had no real support in the earliest evidence. Since these later innovations included some of the most objectionable features of Hindu life, such as suttee, child marriage, female inferiority, image worship, and extreme polytheism, a movement began that sought to free Hinduism from these extraneous elements and to restore it to its earlier "purity" by emphasizing ethics, monotheism, and an abstract idea of deity. This tendency was reinforced by the influence of Christianity and of Islam, so that the revived Hinduism w as really a synthesis of these three religions. As a consequence of these influences, the old, and basic, Hindu idea of Karma was played down. This idea maintained that each individual soul reappeared again and again, throughout eternity, in a different physical form and in a different social status, each difference being a reward or punishment for the soul's conduct at its previous appearance. There was no real hope for escape from this cycle, except by a gradual improvement through a long series of successive appearances to the ultimate goal of complete obliteration of personality (Nirvana) by ultimate mergence in the soul of the universe (Brahma). This release (moksha) from the endless cycle of existence could be achieved only by the suppression of all desire, of all individuality, and of all will to live.
The belief in Karma was the key to Hindu ideology and to Hindu society, explaining not only the emphasis on fate and resignation to fate, the idea that man was a part of nature and brother to the beasts, the submergence of individuality and the lack of personal ambition, but also specific social institutions such as caste or even suttee. How could castes be ended if these are God-given gradations for the rewards or punishments earned in an earlier existence? How could suttee be ended if a wife is a wife through all eternity, and must pass from one life to another when her husband does?
A British official who foresaw this movement toward violent nationalism as early as 1878 sought to divert it into more legal and more constructive channels by establishing the Indian National Congress in 1885. The official in question, Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), had the secret support of the viceroy, Lord Dufferin. They hoped to assemble each year an unofficial congress of Indian leaders to discuss Indian political matters in the hope that this experience would provide training in the working of representative institutions and parliamentary government. For twenty years the Congress agitated for extension of Indian participation in the administration, and for the extension of representation and eventually of parliamentary government within the British system. It is notable that this movement renounced violent methods, did not seek separation from Britain, and aspired to form a government based on the British pattern.
Support for the movement grew very slowly at first, even among Hindus, and there was open opposition, led by Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan, among the Muslims. As the movement gathered momentum, after 1890, many British officials began to oppose it. At the same time, under pressure from Tilak, the Congress itself advanced its demands and began to use economic pressure to obtain these. As a result, after 1900, fewer Muslims joined the Congress: there were 156 Muslims out of 702 delegates in 1890, but only 17 out of 756 in 1905. All these forces came to a head in 1904-1907 when the Congress, for the first time, demanded self-government within the empire for India and approved the use of economic pressures (boycott) against Britain.
The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, which was regarded as an Asiatic triumph over Europe, the Russian revolt of 1905, the growing power of Tilak over Gokhale in the Indian National Congress, and public agitation over Lord Curzon's efforts to push through an administrative division of the huge-province of Bengal (population 78 million) brought matters to a head. There was open agitation by Hindu extremists to spill English blood to satisfy the goddess of destruction, Kali. In the Indian National Congress of 1907, the followers of Tilak stormed the platform and disrupted the meeting. Much impressed with the revolutionary violence in Russia against the czar and in Ireland against the English, this group advocated the use of terrorism rather than of petitions in India. The viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was wounded by a bomb in 1912. For many Nears, racial intolerance against Indians by English residents in India had been growing, and was increasingly manifested in studied insults and even physical assaults. In 1906 a Muslim League was formed in opposition to tile Hindu extremists and in support of the British position, but in 1913 it also demanded self-government. Tilak's group boycotted the Indian National Congress for nine years (1907-1916), and Tilak himself was in prison for sedition for six years (1908-1914).
The constitutional development of India did not stand still during this tumult. In 1861 appointive councils with advisory powers had been created, both at the center to assist the viceroy and in the provinces. These had nonofficial as well as official members, and the provincial ones had certain legislative powers, but all these activities were under strict executive control and veto. In 1892 these powers were widened to allow discussion of administrative questions, and various non-governmental groups (called "communities") were allowed to suggest individuals for the unofficial seats in the councils.
A third act, of 1909, passed by the Liberal government with John (Lord) Morley as secretary of state and Lord Minto as viceroy, enlarged the councils, making a nonofficial majority in the provincial councils, allowed the councils to vote on all issues, and gave the right to elect the nonofficial members to various communal groups, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, on a fixed ratio. This last provision was a disaster. By establishing separate electoral lists for various religious groups, it encouraged religious extremism in all groups, made it likely that the more extremist candidates would be successful, and made religious differences the basic and irreconcilable fact of political life. By giving religious minorities more seats than their actual proportions of the electorate entitled them to (a principle known as "weightage"), it made it politically advantageous to he a minority. By emphasizing minority rights (in which they did believe) over majority rule (in which they did not believe) the British made religion a permanently disruptive force in political life, and encouraged the resulting acerbated extremism to work out its rivalries outside the constitutional framework and the scope of legal action in riots rather than at the polls or in political assemblies. Moreover, as soon as the British had given the Muslims this special constitutional position in 1909 they lost the support of the Muslim community in 1911-1919. This loss of Muslim support was the result of several factors. Curzon's division of Bengal, which the Muslims had supported (since it gave them East Bengal as a separate area with a Muslim majority) was countermanded in 1911 without any notice to the Muslims. British foreign policy after 1911 was increasingly antiTurkish, and thus opposed to the caliph (the religious leader of the Muslims). As a result the Muslim League called for self-government for India for the first time in 1913, and four years later formed an alliance with the Indian National Congress which continued until 1924.
In 1909, while Philip Kerr (Lothian), Lionel Curtis, and (Sir) William Marris were in Canada laying the foundations for the Round Table organization there, Marris persuaded Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant was the only intelligible goal of British policy in India...the existence of political unrest in India, so far from being a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending western education to India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves." Four years later the Round Table group in London decided to investigate how this could be done. It formed a study group of eight members, under Curtis, adding to the group three officials from the India Office. This group decided, in 1915, to issue a public declaration favoring "the progressive realization of responsible government in India." A declaration to this effect was drawn up by Lord Milner and was issued on August 20, 1917, by Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu. It said that "the policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."[he has quite the way of whitewashing the imperalism of it all,like the brits were doing the indians a favor DC]
This declaration was revolutionary because, for the first time, it specifically enunciated British hopes for India's future and because it used, for the first time, the words "responsible government." The British had spoken vaguely for over a century about "self-government" for India; they had spoken increasingly about "representative government"; but they had consistently avoided the expression "responsible government." This latter term meant parliamentary government, which most English conservatives regarded as quite unsuited for Indian conditions, since it required, they believed, an educated electorate and a homogeneous social system, both of which were lacking in India. The conservatives had talked for years about ultimate self-government for India on some indigenous Indian model, but had done nothing to find such a model. Then, without any clear conception of where they were going, they had introduced "representative government," in which the executive consulted with public opinion through representatives of the people (either appointed, as in 1871, or elected, as in 1909), but with the executive still autocratic and in no way responsible to these representatives. The use of the expression "responsible government" in the declaration of 1917 went back to the Round Table group and ultimately to the Marris-Curtis conversation in the Canadian Rockies in 1909.
In the meantime, the Round Table study-group had worked for three years (1913- 1916) on methods for carrying out this promise. Through the influence of Curtis and F. S. Oliver the federal constitution of the United States contributed a good deal to the drafts which were made, especially to provisions for dividing governmental activities into central and provincial portions, with gradual Indianization of the latter and 166 ultimately of the former. This approach to the problem was named "dyarchy" by Curtis. The Round Table draft was sent to the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Chelmsford, a Fellow of All Souls College, who believed that it came from an official committee of the India Office. After he accepted it in principle he was made Viceroy of India in 1916. Curtis went to India immediately to consult with local authorities there (including Meston, Marris, Hailey, and the retired Times Foreign Editor, Sir Valentine Chirol) as well as with Indians. From these conferences emerged a report, written by Marris, which was issued as the Montagu-Chelmsford Report in 1917. The provisions of this report were drawn up as a bill, passed by Parliament (after substantial revision by a Joint Committee under Lord Selborne) and became the Government of India Act of 1919.
The Act of 1919 was the most important law in Indian constitutional history before 1935. It divided governmental activities into "central" and "provincial." The former included defense, foreign affairs, railways and communications, commerce, civil and criminal law and procedures and others; the latter included public order and police, irrigation, forests, education, public health, public works, and other activities. Furthermore, the provincial activities were divided into "transferred" departments and "reserved" departments, the former being entrusted to native ministers who were responsible to provincial assemblies. The central government remained in the hands of the governor-general and viceroy, who was responsible to Britain and not to the Indian Legislature. His Cabinet (Executive Council) usually had three Indian members after 1921. The legislature was bicameral, consisting of a Council of State and a Legislative Assembly. In both, some members were appointed officials, but the majority were elected on a very restricted suffrage. There were, on the electoral lists, no more than 900,000 voters for the lower chamber and only 16,000 for the upper chamber. The provincial unicameral legislatures had a wider, but still limited, franchise, with about a million on the list of voters in Bengal, half as many in Bombay. Moreover, certain seats, on the principle of "weightage," were reserved to Muslims elected by a separate Muslim electoral list. Both legislatures had the power to enact laws, subject to rather extensive powers of veto and of decree in the hands of the governor-general and the appointed provincial governors. Only the "transferred" departments of the provincial governments were responsible to elective assemblies, the "reserved" activities on the provincial level and all activities in the central administration being responsible to the appointed governors and governor-general and ultimately to Britain.
It was hoped that the Act of 1919 would provide opportunities in parliamentary
procedures, responsible government, and administration to Indians so that self-government could be extended by successive steps later, but these hopes were destroyed
in the disasters of 1919-1922. The violence of British reactionaries collided with the
nonviolent refusal to cooperate of Mahatma Gandhi, crushing out the hopes of the Round
Table reformers between them.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), known as "Mahatma," or "Great Soul," was the son and grandson of prime ministers of a minute princely state in western India. Of the Vaisya caste (third of the four), he grew up in a very religious and ascetic atmosphere of Hinduism. Married at thirteen and a father at fifteen, Gandhi was sent to England to study law by his older brother when he was seventeen. Such a voyage was forbidden by the rules of his caste, and he was expelled from it for going. Before he left he gave a vow to his family not to touch wine, women, or meat. After three years in England he passed the bar at Inner Temple. Most of his time in Europe was passed in dilettante fads, experimenting with vegetarian diets and self-administered medicines or in religious or ethical discussions with English faddists and Indiophiles. He was much troubled by religious scruples and feelings of guilt. Back in India in 1891, he was a failure as a lawyer because of his inarticulate lack of assurance and his real lack of interest in the law. In 1893 a Muslim firm sent him to Natal, South Africa, on a case. There Gandhi found his vocation.
The population of Natal in 1896 consisted of 50,000 Europeans, mostly English, 400,000 African natives, and 51,000 Indians, chiefly outcastes. The last group had been imported from India, chiefly as indentured workers on three or five-year contracts, to work the humid low land plantations where the Negroes refused to work. Most of the Indians stayed, after their contracts were fulfilled, and were so industrious and intelligent that they began to rise very rapidly in an economic sense, especially in the retail trades. The whites, who were often indolent, resented such competition from dark-skinned persons and were generally indignant at Indian economic success. As Lionel Curtis told Gandhi in the Transvaal in 1903, "It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country fear but their virtues."
When Gandhi first arrived in Natal in 1893, he found that that country, like most of South Africa, was rent with color hatred and group animosities. All political rights were in the hands of whites, while the nonwhites were subjected to various kinds of social and economic discriminations and segregations. When Gandhi first appeared in court. the judge ordered him to remove his turban (worn with European clothes); Gandhi refused, and left. Later, traveling on business in a first-class railway carriage to the Transvaal, he was ejected from the train at the insistence of a white passenger. He spent a bitterly cold night on the railway platform rather than move to a second- or third-class compartment when he had been sold a first-class ticket. For the rest of his life he traveled only third class. In the Transvaal he was unable to get a room in a hotel because of his color. These episodes gave him his new vocation: to establish that Indians were citizens of the British Empire and therefore entitled to equality under its laws. He was determined to use only peaceful methods of passive mass non-cooperation to achieve his goal. His chief weapon would be love and submissiveness, even to those who treated him most brutally. His refusal to fear death or to avoid pain and his efforts to return love to those who tried to inflict injuries upon him made a powerful weapon, especially if it were practiced on a mass basis.
Gandhi's methods were really derived from his own Hindu tradition, but certain elements in this tradition had been reinforced by reading Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and the Sermon on the Mount. When he was brutally beaten by whites in Natal in 1897, he refused to prosecute, saying that it was not their fault that they had been taught evil ideas.
These methods gave the Indians of South Africa a temporary respite from the burden of intolerance under Gandhi's leadership in the period 1893-1914. When the Transvaal proposed an ordinance compelling all Indians to register, be fingerprinted, and carry identity cards at all times, Gandhi organized a mass, peaceful refusal to register. Hundreds went to jail. Smuts worked out a compromise with Gandhi: if the Indians would register "voluntarily" the Transvaal would repeal the ordinance. After Gandhi had persuaded his compatriots to register, Smuts failed to carry out his part of the agreement, and the Indians solemnly burned their registration cards at a mass meeting. Then, to test the Transvaal ban on Indian immigration, Gandhi organized mass marches of Indians into the Transvaal from Natal. Others went from the Transvaal to Natal and returned, being arrested for crossing the frontier. At one time 2,500 of the 13,000 Indians in the Transvaal were in jail and 6,000 were in exile.
The struggle was intensified after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 because the Transvaal restrictions on Indians, which forbade them to own land, to live outside segregated districts, or to vote, were not repealed, and a Supreme Court decision of 1913 declared all non-Christian marriages to be legally invalid. This last decision deprived most nonwhite wives and children of all legal protection of their family rights. Mass civil disobedience by Indians increased, including a march by 6,000 from Natal to the Transvaal. Finally, after much controversy, Gandhi and Smuts worked out an elaborate compromise agreement in 1914. This revoked some of the discriminations against Indians in South Africa, recognized Indian marriages, annulled a discriminatory £3 annual tax on Indians, and stopped all importation of indentured labor from India in 1920. Peace was restored in this civil controversy just in time to permit a united front in the external war with Germany. But in South Africa by 1914 Gandhi had worked out the techniques he would use against the British in India after 1919.
Until 1919 Gandhi Noms very loyal to the British connection. Both in South Africa and in India he had found that the English from England were much more tolerant and understanding than most of the English-speaking whites of middle-class origin in the overseas areas. In the Boer War he was the active leader of an 1,100-man Indian ambulance corps which worked with inspiring courage even under fire on the field of battle. During World War I, he worked constantly on recruiting campaigns for the British forces. On one of these in 1915 he said, "I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience." By 1918 this apostle of nonviolence was saying: "We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn to use arms.... Partnership in the Empire is our definite goal. We should suffer to the utmost of our ability and even lay down our lives to defend the Empire. If the Empire perishes, with it perishes our cherished aspiration."
During this period Gandhi's asceticism and his opposition to all kinds of discrimination were winning him an outstanding moral position among the Indian people. He was opposed to all violence and bloodshed, to alcohol, meat, and tobacco, even to the eating of milk and eggs, and to sex (even in marriage). More than this, he was opposed to Western industrialism, to Western science and medicine, and to the use of Western rather than Indian languages. He demanded that his followers make fixed quotas of homespun cotton each day, wore a minimum of homespun clothing himself, spun on a small wheel throughout all his daily activities, and took the small hand spinning wheel as the symbol of his movement— all this in order to signify the honorable nature of handwork, the need for Indian economic self-sufficiency, and his opposition to Western industrialism. He worked for equality for the untouchables, calling them "God's children" (Harijans), associating with them whenever he could, taking them into his own home, even adopting one as his own daughter. He worked to relieve economic oppression, organizing strikes against low wages or miserable working conditions, supporting the strikers with money he had gathered from India's richest Hindu industrialists. He attacked Western medicine and sanitation, supported all kinds of native medical nostrums and even quackery, yet went to a Western-trained surgeon for an operation when he had appendicitis himself. Similarly he preached against the use of milk, but drank goat's milk for his health much of his life. These inconsistencies he attributed to his own weak sinfulness. Similarly, he permitted hand-spun cotton to be sewn on Singer sewing machines, and conceded that Western-type factories were necessary to provide such machines.
During this period he discovered that his personal fasts from food, which he had long practiced, could be used as moral weapons against those who opposed him while they strengthened his moral hold over those who supported him. "I fasted," he said, "to reform those who loved me. You cannot fast against a tyrant." Gandhi never seemed to recognize that his fasting and nonviolent civil disobedience were effective against the British in India and in South Africa only to the degree that the British had the qualities of humanity, decency, generosity, and fair play which he most admired, but that by attacking the British through these virtues he was weakening Britain and the class which possessed these virtues and making it more likely that they would be replaced by nations and by leaders who did not have these virtues. Certainly Hitler and the Germans who exterminated six million Jews in cold blood during World War II would not have shared the reluctance of Smuts to imprison a few thousand Indians or Lord Halifax's reluctance to see Gandhi starve himself to death. This was the fatal weakness of Gandhi's aims and his methods, but these aims and methods were so dear to Indian hearts and so selflessly pursued by Gandhi that he rapidly became the spiritual leader of the Indian National Congress after Gokhale's death in 1915. In this position Gandhi by his spiritual power succeeded in something which no earlier Indian leader had achieved and few had hoped for: he spread political awareness and nationalist feeling from the educated class down into the great uneducated mass of the Indian people.
This mass and Gandhi expected and demanded a greater degree of self-government after the end of World War I. The Act of 1919 provided that, and probably provided as much of it as the political experience of Indians entitled them to. Moreover, the Act anticipated expansion of the areas of self-government as Indian political experience increased. But the Act was largely a failure, because Gandhi had aroused political ambitions in great masses of Indians who lacked experience in political activities, and these demands gave rise to intense opposition to Indian self-government in British circles which did not share the ideals of the Round Table group. Finally, the actions of this British opposition drove Gandhi from "nonresistance" through complete "non- cooperation," to "civil disobedience," thus destroying the whole purpose of the Act of 1919.
Many British conservatives both at home and in India opposed the Act of 1919. Lord Ampthill, who had long experience in India and had valiantly supported Gandhi in South Africa, attacked the Act and Lionel Curtis for making it. In the House of Lords he said: "The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive mania for constitution-mongering [Curtis], nobody in the world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint [Selborne] Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived." In India men like the governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, were even more emphatically opposed to Indian self-government or Indian nationalist agitation. Many Conservatives who were determined to maintain the empire intact could not see how this could be done without India as the major jewel in it, as in the nineteenth century. India not only provided a large share of the manpower in the peacetime imperial army, hut this army was largely stationed in India and paid for out of the revenues of the Government of India. Moreover, this self-paying manpower pool was beyond the scrutiny of the British reformer as well as the British taxpayers. The older Tories, with their strong army connections, and others, like Winston Churchill, with an appreciation of military matters, did not see how England could face the military demands of the twentieth century without Indian military manpower, at least in colonial areas. [Indians the original cannon fodder for England DC]
Instead of getting more freedom at the end of the war in 1918, the Indians got less. The conservative group pushed through the Rowlatt Act in March 1919. This continued most of the wartime restrictions on civil liberties in India, to be used to control nationalist agitations. Gandhi called for civil disobedience and a series of scattered local general strikes (hartels) in protest. These actions led to violence, especially to Indian attacks on the British. Gandhi bewailed this violence, and inflicted a seventy-two-hour fast on himself as penance.
In Amritsar an Englishwoman was attacked in the street (April 10, 1919). The Congress Party leaders in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings; then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress (April 13, 1919). He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square with inadequate exits, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met death. Leaving the wounded untended on the ground, General Dyer returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week before must do so by crawling on hands and knees. There is no doubt that General Dyer was looking for trouble. In his own words: "I had made up my mind I would do all men to death.... It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab."
The situation might still have been saved from Dyer's barbarity but the Hunter Committee, which investigated the atrocity, refused to condemn Dyer except for "a grave error of judgment" and "an honest but mistaken conception of duty." A majority of the House of Lords approved his action by refusing to censure him, and, when the government forced him to resign from the army, his admirers in England presented him with a sword and a purse of 120,000.
At this point Gandhi committed a grave error of judgment. In order to solidify the alliance of Hindu and Muslim which had been in existence since 1917, he supported the Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims to obtain a lenient peace treaty for the Turkish sultan (and caliph) following World War I. Gandhi suggested that the Khilafat adopt "non-cooperation" against Britain to enforce its demands. This would have involved a boycott of British goods, schools, law courts, offices, honors, and of all goods subject to British taxes (such as alcohol). This was an error of judgment because the sultan was soon overthrown by his own people organized in a Turkish Nationalist movement and seeking a secularized Turkish state, in spite of all Britain was already doing (both in public and in private) to support him. Thus, the Khilafat movement was seeking to force Britain to do something it already wanted to do and was not able to do. Moreover, by bringing up "non-cooperation" as a weapon against the British, Gandhi had opened a number of doors he had no desire to open, with very bad consequences for India.
At the Indian National Congress of December, 1919, Tilak and Gandhi were the leading figures. Both were willing to accept the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Tilak because he believed this would be the best way to prove that they were not adequate. But on August I, 1920, Gandhi proclaimed "non-cooperation" in behalf of the Khilafat movement. On the same day Tilak died, leaving Gandhi as undisputed leader of the Congress. At the 1920 meeting he won unanimous approval for "non-cooperation," and then moved a resolution for swaraj (self-rule) either within or outside the British Empire. The Muslims in Congress, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, refused to accept an independent India outside the British Empire because this would subject the Muslims to a Hindu majority without Britain's protecting restraint. As a result, from that point, many Muslims left the Congress.
Non-cooperation was a great public success. But it did not get self-rule for India, and made the country less fitted for self-rule by making it impossible for Indians to get experience in government under the Act of 1919. Thousands of Indians gave up medals and honors, gave up the practice of law in British courts, left the British schools, and burned British goods. Gandhi held great mass meetings at which thousands of persons stripped themselves of their foreign clothing to throw it on raging bonfires. This did not, however, give them training in government. It merely roused nationalist violence. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi informed the viceroy that he was about to begin mass civil disobedience, in one district at a time, beginning in Bardoli near Bombay. Civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes or obey the laws, was a step beyond noncooperation, since it involved illegal acts rather than legal ones. On February 5, 1922, a Hindu mob attacked twenty-two police constables and killed them by burning the police station down over their heads. In horror Gandhi canceled the campaign against Britain. He was at once arrested and condemned to six years in prison for sedition.
Very great damage had been done by the events of 1919-1922. Britain and India were alienated to the point where they no longer trusted one another. The Congress Party itself had been split, the moderates forming a new group called the Indian Liberal Federation. The Muslims had also left the Congress Party to a large extent and gone to strengthen the Muslim League. From this point onward, Muslim-Hindu riots were annual occurrences in India. And finally the boycott had crippled the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, almost two-thirds of the eligible voters refusing to vote in the Councils elections of November, 1920.
Beginning with Gladstone's Land Act of 1870, the agrarian problems were slowly alleviated and, by 1914, were well in hand. The religious problem arose from the fact that Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and resented being ruled by persons of a different religion. Moreover, until the Irish (Episcopal) Church was dis-established in 1869, Irish Catholics had to support a structure of Anglican clergy and bishops, most of whom had few or no parishioners in Ireland and resided in England, supported by incomes from Ireland. Finally, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, with representatives in the Parliament at Westminster.
By 1871 those representatives who were opposed to union with England formed the Irish Home Rule Party. It sought to obtain separation by obstructing the functions of Parliament and disrupting its proceedings. At times this group exercised considerable influence in Parliament by holding a balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives. The Gladstone Liberals were willing to give Ireland Home Rule, with no representatives at Westminster; the Conservatives (with the support of a majority of Englishmen) were opposed to Home Rule; the Rhodes-Milner group wanted self-government for the Irish in their home affairs with Irish representatives retained at Westminster for foreign and imperial matters. The Liberal government of 1906- 1916 tried to enact a Home Rule bill with continued Irish representation in the House of Commons, but was repeatedly blocked by the opposition of the House of Lords; the bill did not become law until September, 1914.
The chief opposition arose from the fact that Protestant Ulster (Northern Ireland) would be submerged in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. The Ulster opposition, led by Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, organized a private army, armed it with guns smuggled from Germany, and prepared to seize control of Belfast at a signal from London. Carson was on his way to the telegraph station to send this signal in 1914 when he received a message from the prime minister that war was about to break out with Germany. Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was canceled and the Home Rule Act was suspended until six months after the peace with Germany. As a consequence the revolt with German arms in Ireland was made by the Irish Nationalists in 1916, instead of by their Ulster opponents in 1914. This so-called Easter Revolt of 1916 was crushed and its leaders executed, but discontent continued to simmer in Ireland, with violence only slightly below the surface.
In the parliamentary election of 1918, Ireland elected 6 Nationalists (who wanted Home Rule for all Ireland), 73 Sinn Fein (who wanted an Irish Republic free from England), and 23 Unionists (who wanted to remain part of Britain). Instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein organized their own Parliament in Dublin. Efforts to arrest its members led to open civil war. This was a struggle of assassination, treachery, and reprisal, fought out in back alleys and on moonlit fields. Sixty thousand British troops could not maintain order. Thousands of lives were lost, with brutal inhumanity on both sides, and property damage rose to £50 million in value.
Lionel Curtis, who helped edit The Round Table in 1919-1921, advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, but was rejected by the Irish Republicans led by Eamon de Valera. The civil war continued. The Round Table group worked valiantly to stop the extremists on both sides, but with only moderate success. Amery's brother-in-law, Hamar (Lord) Greenwood, was appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the last incumbent of that post, while Curtis was appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office (which was headed by Milner and Amery). The Times and The Round Table condemned British repression in Ireland, the latter saying, "If the British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the principle for which it has stood." But British violence could not be curtailed until Irish violence could be curtailed. One of the chief leaders of the Irish Republicans was Erskine Childers, an old schoolboy friend of Curtis who had been with him in South Africa, but nothing could be done through him, since he had become fanatically anti-British. Accordingly, Smuts was called in. He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status since 1910, saying: "Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege, more power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal nations than in a small, nervous republic having all the time to rely on the good will and perhaps the assistance of foreigners. What sort of independence do you call that?"
Smuts arranged an armistice and a conference to negotiate a settlement. From this conference, at which Curtis was secretary, came the Articles of Agreement of December, 1921, which gave Southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland continuing under the Act of 1920. The boundary line between the two countries was drawn by a committee of three of which the British member (and chairman) was Richard Feetham of Milner's Kindergarten and the Round Table group, later Supreme Court judge in South Africa.
De Valera's Irish Republicans refused to accept the settlement, and went into insurrection, this time against the moderate Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Collins was assassinated, and Griffith died, exhausted by the strain, but the Irish people themselves were now tired of turmoil. De Valera's forces were driven underground and were defeated in the election of 1922. When De Valera's party' the Fianna Fail, did win an election in 1932 and he became President of Ireland, he abolished the oath of loyalty to the king and the office of governor-general, ended annual payments on seized English lands and appeals to the Privy Council, engaged in a bitter tariff war with Britain, and continued to demand the annexation of Ulster. One of the last links with Britain was ended in 1938, when the British naval bases in Eire were turned over to the Irish, to the great benefit of German submarines in 1939-1945.
next
Chapter 10—The Far East to World War I The Collapse of China to 1920 158S
Because the industrialization of Russia came so late, it was (except in textiles) on a large-scale basis from the beginning and was organized on a basis of financial capitalism after 1870 and of monopoly capitalism after 1902. Although factories employing over 500 workers amounted to only 3 percent of all factories in the 1890's, 4 percent in 1903, and 5 percent in 1910, these factories generally employed over half of all factory workers. This was a far higher percentage than in Germany or the United States, and made it easier for labor agitators to organize the workers in these Russian factories. Moreover, although Russia as a whole was not highly industrialized and output per worker or per unit for Russia as a whole was low (because of the continued existence of older forms of production), the new Russian factories were built with the most advanced technological equipment, sometimes to a degree which the untrained labor supply could not utilize. In 1912 the output of pig iron per furnace in the Ukraine was higher than in western Europe by a large margin, although smaller than in the United States by an equally large margin. Although the quantity of mechanical power available on a per capita basis for the average Russian was low in 1908 compared to western Europe or America (being only 1.6 horsepower per 100 persons in Russia compared to 25 in the United States, 24 in England, and 13 in Germany), the horsepower per industrial worker was higher in Russia than in any other continental country (being 92 horsepower per 100 workers in Russia compared to 85 in France, 73 in Germany, 153 in England, and 282 in the United States). All this made the Russian economy an economy of contradictions. Though the range of technical methods was very wide, advanced techniques were lacking completely in some fields, and even whole fields of necessary industrial activities (such as machine tools or automobiles) were lacking. The economy was poorly integrated, was extremely dependent on foreign trade (both for markets and for essential products), and was very dependent on government assistance, especially on government spending.
While the great mass of the Russian people continued, as late as 1914, to live much as they had lived for generations, a small number lived in a new, and very insecure, world of industrialism, where they were at the mercy of foreign or governmental forces over which they had little control. The managers of this new world sought to improve their positions, not by any effort to create a mass market in the other, more primitive, Russian economic world by improved methods of distribution, by reduction of prices, or by rising standards of living, but rather sought to increase their own profit margins on a narrow market by ruthless reduction of costs, especially wages, and by monopolistic combinations to raise prices. These efforts led to labor agitation on one hand and to monopolistic capitalism on the other. Economic progress, except in some lines, was slowed up for these reasons during the whole decade 1900-1909. Only in 1909, when a largely monopolistic structure of industry had been created, was the increase in output of goods resumed and the struggle with labor somewhat abated. The earliest Russian cartels were formed with the encouragement of the Russian government and in those activities where foreign interests were most prevalent. In 1887 a sugar cartel was formed in order to permit foreign dumping of this commodity. A similar agency was set up for kerosene in 1892, but the great period of formation of such organizations (usually in the form of joint-selling agencies) began after the crisis of 1901. In 1902 a cartel created by a dozen iron and steel firms handled almost three-fourths of all Russian sales of these products. It was controlled by four foreign banking groups. A similar cartel, ruled from Berlin, took over the sales of almost all Russian production of iron pipe. Six Ukraine iron-ore firms in 1908 set up a cartel controlling 80 percent of Russia's ore production. In 1907 a cartel was created to control about three-quarters of Russia's agricultural implements. Others handled 97 percent of railway cars, 94 percent of locomotives, and 94 percent of copper sales. Eighteen Donetz coal firms in 1906 set up a cartel which sold three-quarters of the coal output of that area.
The creation of monopoly was aided by a change in tariff policy. Free trade, which had been established in the tariff of 1857, was curtailed in 1877 and abandoned in 1891. The protective tariff of this latter year resulted in a severe tariff war with Germany as the Germans sought to exclude Russian agricultural products in retaliation for the Russian tariff on manufactured goods. This "war" was settled in 1894 by a series of compromises, but the reopening of the German market to Russian grain led to political agitation for protection on the part of German landlords. They were successful, as we shall see, in 1900 as a result of a deal with the German industrialists to support Tirpitz's naval building program.
On the eve of the First World War, the Russian economy was in a very dubious state of health. As we have said, it was a patchwork affair, very much lacking in integration, very dependent on foreign and government support, racked by labor disturbances, and, what was even more threatening, by labor disturbances based on political rather than on economic motives, and shot through with all kinds of technological weaknesses and discords. As an example of the last, we might mention the fact that over half of Russia's pig iron was made with charcoal as late as 1900 and some of Russia's most promising natural resources were left unused as a result of the restrictive outlook of monopoly capitalists. The failure to develop a domestic market left costs of distribution fantastically high and left the Russian per capita consumption of almost all important commodities fantastically low. Moreover, to make matters worse, Russia as a consequence of these things was losing ground in the race of production with France, Germany, and the United States.
These economic developments had profound political effects under the weak-willed Czar Nicholas II (1894-1917). For about a decade Nicholas tried to combine ruthless civil repression, economic advance, and an imperialist foreign policy in the Balkans and the Far East, with pious worldwide publicity for peace and universal disarmament, domestic distractions like anti-Semitic massacres (pogroms), forged terroristic documents, and faked terroristic attempts on the lives of high officials, including himself. This unlikely melange collapsed completely in 1905-1908. When Count Witte attempted to begin some kind of constitutional development by getting in touch with the functioning units of local government (the zemstvos, which had been effective in the famine of 1891), he was ousted from his position by an intrigue led by the murderous Minister of Interior Vyacheslav Plehve (1903). The civil head of the Orthodox Church, Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) persecuted all dissenting religions, while allowing the Orthodox Church to become enveloped in ignorance and corruption. Most Roman Catholic monasteries in Poland were confiscated, while priests of that religion were forbidden to leave their villages. In Finland construction of Lutheran churches was forbidden, and schools of this religion were taken over by the Moscow government. The Jews were persecuted, restricted to certain provinces (the Pale), excluded from most economic activities, subjected to heavy taxes (even on their religious activities), and allowed to form only ten percent of the pupils in schools (eve in villages which were almost completely Jewish and where the schools were supported entirely by Jewish taxes). Hundreds of Jews were massacred and thousands of their buildings wrecked in systematic three-day pogroms tolerated and sometimes encouraged by the police. Marriages (and children) of Roman Catholic Uniates were made illegitimate. The Moslems in Asia and elsewhere were also persecuted.
Every effort was made to Russify non-Russian national groups, especially on the western frontiers. The Finns, Baltic Germans, and Poles were not allowed to use their own languages in public life, and had to use Russian even in private schools and even on the primary level. Administrative autonomy in these areas, even that solemnly promised to Finland long before, was destroyed, and they were dominated by Russian police, Russian education, and the Russian Army. The peoples of these areas were subjected to military conscription more rigorously than the Russians themselves, and were Russified while in the ranks.
Against the Russians themselves, unbelievable extremes of espionage, counterespionage, censorship, provocation, imprisonment without trial, and outright brutality were employed. The revolutionaries responded with similar measures crowned by assassination. No one could trust anyone else, because revolutionaries were in the police, and members of the police were in the highest ranks of the revolutionaries. Georgi Gapon, a priest secretly in the pay of the government, was encouraged to form labor unions and lead workers' agitations in order to increase the employers' dependence on the autocracy, but when, in 1905, Gapon led a mass march of workers to the Winter Palace to present a petition to the czar, they were attacked by the troops and hundreds were shot. Gapon was murdered the following year by the revolutionaries as a traitor. In order to discredit the revolutionaries, the central Police Department in St. Petersburg "printed at the government expense violent appeals to riot" which were circulated all over the country by an organization of reactionaries. In one year (1906) the government exiled 35,000 persons without trial and executed over 600 persons under a new decree which fixed the death penalty for ordinary crimes like robbery or insults to officials. In the three years 1906-1908, 5,140 officials were killed or wounded, and 2,328 arrested persons were executed. In 1909 it was revealed that a police agent, Azeff, had been a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Revolutionaries for years and had participated in plots to murder high officials, including Plehve and the Grand Duke Sergius, without warning these. The former chief of police who revealed this fact was sent to prison for doing so.
Under conditions such as these no sensible government was possible and all appeals for moderation were crushed between the extremists from both sides. The defeats of Russian forces in the war with Japan in 1904-1905 brought events to a head. All dissatisfied groups began to agitate, culminating in a successful general strike in October 1905. The emperor began to offer political reforms, although what was extended one day was frequently taken back shortly after. A consultative assembly, the Duma, was established, elected on a broad suffrage but by very complicated procedures designed to reduce the democratic element. In the face of agrarian atrocities, endless strikes, and mutinies in both the army and navy, the censorship was temporarily lifted, and the first Duma met (May 1906). It had a number of able men and was dominated by two hastily organized political parties, the Cadets (somewhat left of Center) and the Octobrists (somewhat right of Center). Plans for wholesale reform were in the wind, and, when the czar's chief minister rejected such plans, he was overwhelmingly censured by the Duma. After weeks of agitation the czar tried to form an Octobrist ministry, but this group refused to govern without Cadet cooperation, and the latter refused to join a coalition government. The czar named Pëtr Stolypin chief minister, dissolved the first Duma, and called for election of a new one. Stolypin was a severe man, willing to move slowly in the direction of economic and political reform but determined to crush without mercy any suspicion of violence or illegal actions. The full power of the government was used to get a second Duma more to its taste, outlawing most of the Cadets, previously the largest party, and preventing certain classes and groups from campaigning or voting. The result was a new Duma of much less ability, much less discipline, and with many unknown faces. The Cadets were reduced from 150 to 123, the Octobrists from about 42 to 32, while there were 46 extreme Right, 54 Marxist Social Democrats, 35 Social Revolutionaries, at least 100 assorted Laborites, and scattered others. This group devoted much of its time to debating whether terrorist violence should be condemned. W hen Stolypin demanded that the Social Democrats (Marxists) should be kicked out, the Duma referred the matter to a committee; the assembly was immediately dissolved, and new elections were fixed for a third Duma (June, 1908). Under powerful government intimidation, which included sending 31 Social Democrats to Siberia, the third Duma was elected. It was mostly an upper-class and upper-middle-class body, with the largest groups being 154 Octobrists and 54 Cadets. This body was sufficiently docile to remain for five years (1907-1912). During this period both the Duma and the government followed a policy of drift, except for Stolypin. Until 1910 this energetic administrator continued his efforts to combine oppression and reform, especially agrarian reform. Rural credit banks were established; various measures were taken to place larger amounts of land in the hands of peasants; restrictions on the migration of peasants, especially to Siberia, were removed; participation in local government was opened to lower social classes previously excluded; education, especially technical education, was made more accessible; and certain provisions for social insurance were enacted into law. After the Bosnian crisis of 1908 (to be discussed later), foreign affairs became increasingly absorbing, and by 1910 Stolypin had lost his enthusiasm for reform, replacing it by senseless efforts at Russification of the numerous minority groups. He was assassinated in the presence of the czar in 1911.
The fourth Duma (1912-1916) was similar to the third, elected by complicated procedures and on a restricted suffrage. The policy of drift continued, and was more obvious since no energetic figure like Stolypin was to be found. On the contrary, the autocracy sank deeper into a morass of superstition and corruption. The influence of the czarina became more pervasive, and through her was extended the power of a number of religious mystics and charlatans, especially Rasputin. The imperial couple had ardently desired a son from their marriage in 1894. After the births of four daughters, their wish was fulfilled in 1904. Unfortunately, the new czarevich, Alexis, had inherited from his mother an incurable disease, hemophilia. Since his blood would not clot, the slightest cut endangered his life. This weakness merely exaggerated the czarina's fanatical devotion to her son and her determination to see him become czar with the powers of that office undiminished by any constitutional or parliamentary innovations. After 1907 she fell under the influence of a strange wanderer, Rasputin, a man whose personal habits and appearance were both vicious and filthy but who had the power, she believed, to stop the czarevich’s bleeding. The czarina fell completely under Rasputin’s control and, since the czar was completely under her control, Rasputin became the ruler of Russia, intermittently at first, but then completely. This situation lasted until he was murdered in December 1916. Rasputin used his power to satisfy his personal vices, to accumulate wealth by corruption, and to interfere in every branch of the government, always in a destructive and unprogressive sense. As Sir Bernard Pares put it, speaking of the czarina, "Her letters to Nicholas day by day contain the instructions which Rasputin gave on every detail of administration of the Empire—the Church, the Ministers, finance, railways, food supply, appointments, military operations, and above all the Duma, and a simple comparison of the dates with the events which followed shows that in almost every case they were carried out. In all her recommendations for ministerial posts, most of which are adopted, one of the primary considerations is always the attitude of the given candidate to Rasputin."
As the autocracy became increasingly corrupt and irresponsible in this way, the slow growth toward a constitutional system which might have developed from the zemstvo system of local government and the able membership of the first Duma was destroyed. The resumption of economic expansion after 1909 could not counterbalance the pernicious influence of the political paralysis. This situation was made even more hopeless by the growing importance of foreign affairs after 1908 and the failure of intellectual life to grow in any constructive fashion. The first of these complications will be discussed later; the second deserves a few words here.
The general trend of intellectual development in Russia in the years before 1914 could hardly be regarded as hopeful. To be sure, there were considerable advances in some fields such as literacy, natural science, mathematics, and economic thought, but these contributed little to any growth of moderation or to Russia's greatest intellectual need, a more integrated outlook on life. The influence of the old Orthodox religious attitude continued even in those who most emphatically rejected it. The basic attitude of the Western tradition had grown toward diversity and toleration, based on the belief that every aspect of life and of human experience and every individual has some place in the complex structure of reality if that place can only be found and that, accordingly, unity of the whole of life can be reached by way of diversity rather than by any compulsory uniformity. This idea was entirely foreign to the Russian mind. Any Russian thinker, and hordes of other Russians with no capacity for thought, were driven by an insatiable thirst to find the "key" to life and to truth. Once this "key" has been found, all other aspects of human experience must be rejected as evil, and all men must be compelled to accept that key as the whole of life in a dreadful unity of uniformity. To make matters worse' many Russian thinkers sought to analyze the complexities of human experience by polarizing these into antitheses of mutually exclusive dualisms: Westerners versus Slavophiles, individualism versus community, freedom versus fate, revolutionary versus reactionary, nature versus conventions, autocracy versus anarchy, and such. There was no logical correlation between these, so that individual thinkers frequently embraced either side of any antithesis, forming an incredible mixture of emotionally held faiths. Moreover, individual thinkers frequently shifted from one side to another, or even oscillated back and forth between the extremes of these dualisms. In the most typical Russian minds both extremes were held simultaneously, regardless of logical compatibility, in some kind of higher mystic unity beyond rational analysis. Thus, Russian thought provides us with striking examples of God-intoxicated atheists, revolutionary reactionaries, violent non-resisters, belligerent pacifists, compulsory liberators, and individualistic totalitarians.
The basic characteristic of Russian thought is its extremism. This took two forms: (1) any portion of human experience to which allegiance was given became the whole truth, demanding total allegiance, all else being evil deception; and (2) every living person was expected to accept this same portion or be damned as a minion of anti-Christ. Those who embraced the state were expected to embrace it as an autocracy in which the individual had no rights, else their allegiance was not pure; those who denied the state were expected to reject it utterly by adopting anarchism. Those who became materialists had to become complete nihilists without place for any convention, ceremony, or sentiment. Those who questioned some minor aspect of the religious system were expected to become militant atheists, and if they did not take this step themselves, were driven to it by the clergy. Those who were considered to be spiritual or said they were spiritual were forgiven every kind of corruption and lechery (like Rasputin) because such material aspects were irrelevant. Those who sympathized with the oppressed were expected to bury themselves in the masses, living like them, eating dike them, dressing like them, and renouncing all culture and thought (if they believed the masses lacked these things).
The extremism of Russian thinkers can be seen in their attitudes toward such basic aspects of human experience as property, reason, the state, art, sex, or power. Always there was a fanatical tendency to eliminate as sinful and evil anything except the one aspect which the thinker considered to be the key to the cosmos. Alexei Khomyakov (1804-1860), a Slavophile, wanted to reject reason completely, regarding it as “the mortal sin of the West,” while Fëdor Dostoevski (1821-1881) went so far in this direction that he wished to destroy all logic and all arithmetic, seeking, he said, “to free humanity from the tyranny of two plus two equals four.” Many Russian thinkers, long before the Soviets, regarded all property as sinful. Others felt the same way about sex. Leo Tolstoi, the great novelist and essayist (1828-1910), considered all property and all sex to be evil. Western thought, which has usually tried to find a place in the cosmos for everything and has felt that anything is acceptable in its proper place, recoils from such fanaticism. The West, for example, has rarely felt it necessary to justify the existence of art, but many thinkers in Russia (like Plato long ago) have rejected all art as evil. Tolstoi, among others, had moments (as in the essay What Is Art? Of 1897 or On Shakespeare and the Drama of 1903) when he denounced most art and literature, including his own novels, as vain, irrelevant, and satanic. Similarly the West, while it has sometimes looked askance at sex and more frequently has over-emphasized it, has generally felt that sex had a proper function in its proper place. In Russia, however, many thinkers including once again Tolstoi (The Kreutzer Sonata of 1889), have insisted that sex was evil in all places and under all circumstances, and most sinful in marriage. The disruptive effects of such ideas upon social or family life can be seen in the later years of Tolstoi's personal life, culminating in his last final hatred of his long-suffering wife whom he came to regard as the instrument of his fall from grace. But while Tolstoi praised marriage without sex, other Russians, with even greater vehemence, praised sex without marriage, regarding this social institution as an unnecessary impediment in the path of pure human impulse.
In some ways we find in Tolstoi the culmination of Russian thought. He rejected all power, all violence, most art, all sex, all public authority, and all property as evil. To him the key of the universe was to he found in Christ's injunction, "Resist not evil." All other aspects of Christ's teachings except those which flow directly from this were rejected, including any belief in Christ's divinity or in a personal God. From this injunction flowed Tolstoi's ideas of nonviolence and nonresistance and his faith that only in this way could man's capacity for a spiritual love so powerful that it could solve all social problems he liberated. This idea of Tolstoi, although based on Christ's injunction, is not so much a reflection of Christianity as it is of the basic Russian assumption that any physical defeat must represent a spiritual victory, and that the latter could be achieved only through the former.
Such a point of view could be held only by persons to whom all prosperity or happiness is not only irrelevant but sinful. And this point of view could be held with such fanaticism only by persons to whom life, family, or any objective gain is worthless. This is a dominant idea in all the Russian Intelligentsia, an idea going back through Plato to ancient Asia: All objective reality is of no importance except as symbols for some subjective truth. This was, of course, the point of view of the Neoplatonic thinkers of the early Christian period. It was generally the point of view of the early Christian heretics and of those Western heretics like the Cathari (Albigenses) who were derived from this Eastern philosophic position. In modern Russian thought it is well represented by Dostoevski, who while chronologically earlier than Tolstoi is spiritually later. To Dostoevski every object and every act is merely a symbol for some elusive spiritual truth. From this point of view comes an outlook which makes his characters almost incomprehensible to the average person in the Western tradition: if such a character obtains a fortune, he cries, "I am ruined!" If he is acquitted on a murder charge, or seems likely to be, he exclaims, "I am condemned," and seeks to incriminate himself in order to ensure the punishment which is so necessary for his own spiritual self-acquittal. If he deliberately misses his opponent in a duel, he has a guilty conscience, and says, "I should not have injured him thus; I should have killed him!" In each case the speaker cares nothing about property, punishment, or life. He cares only about spiritual values: asceticism, guilt, remorse, injury to one's self-respect. In the same way, the early religious thinkers, both Christian and non-Christian, regarded all objects as symbols for spiritual values, all temporal success as an inhibition on spiritual life, and felt that wealth could be obtained only by getting rid of property, life could be found only by dying (a direct quotation from Plato), eternity could be found only if time ended, and the soul could be freed only if the body were enslaved. Thus, as late as 1910 when Tolstoi died, Russia remained true to its Greek-Byzantine intellectual tradition.
We have noted that Dostoevski, who lived slightly before Tolstoi, nevertheless had ideas which were chronologically in advance of Tolstoi's ideas. In fact, in many ways, Dostoevski was a precursor of the Bolsheviks. Concentrating his attention on poverty, crime, and human misery, always seeking the real meaning behind every overt act or word, he eventually reached a position where the distinction between appearance and significance became so wide that these two were in contradiction with each other. This contradiction was really the struggle between God and the Devil in the soul of man. Since this struggle is without end, there is no solution to men's problems except to face suffering resolutely. Such suffering purges men of all artificiality and joins them together in one mass. In this mass the Russian people, because of their greater suffering and their greater spirituality, are the hope of the world and must save the world from the materialism, violence, and selfishness of Western civilization. The Russian people, on the other hand, filled with self-sacrifice, and with no allegiance to luxury or material gain, and purified by suffering which makes them the brothers of all other suffering people, will save the world by taking up the sword of righteousness against the forces of evil stemming from Europe. Constantinople will be seized, all the Slavs will be liberated, and Europe and the world will be forced into freedom by conquest, so that Moscow many become the Third Rome. Before Russia is fit to save the world in this way, however, the Russian intellectuals must merge themselves in the great mass of the suffering Russian people, and the Russian people must adopt Europe's science and technology uncontaminated by any European ideology. The blood spilled in this effort to extend Slav brotherhood to the whole world by force will aid the cause, for suffering shared will make men one.
This mystical Slav imperialism with its apocalyptical overtones was by no means uniquely Dostoevski's. It was held in a vague and implicit fashion by many Russian thinkers, and had a wide appeal to the unthinking masses. It was implied in much of the propaganda of Pan-Slavism, and became semiofficial with the growth of this propaganda after 1908. It was widespread among the Orthodox clergy, who emphasized the reign of righteousness which would follow the millennialist establishment of Moscow as the "Third Rome." It was explicitly stated in a book, Russia and Europe, published in 1869 by Nicholas Danilevsky (1822-1885). Such ideas, as we shall see, did not die out with the passing of the Romanov autocracy in 1917, but became even more influential, merging with the Leninist revision of Marxism to provide the ideology of Soviet Russia after 1917.
Part Four—
The Buffer Fringe
In the first half of the twentieth century the power structure of the world was entirely
transformed. In 1900, European civilization, led by Britain and followed by other states at
varying distances, was still spreading outward, disrupting the cultures of other societies
unable to resist and frequently without any desire to resist. The European structure which
pushed outward formed a hierarchy of power, wealth, and prestige with Britain at the top,
followed by a secondary rank of other Great Powers, by a tertiary rank of the wealthy
secondary Powers (like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden), and by a quaternary rank
of the lesser or decadent Powers (like Portugal or Spain, whose world positions were
sustained by British power). At the turn of the twentieth century the first cracklings of impending disaster were emitted from this power structure but were generally ignored: in 1896 the Italians were massacred by the Ethiopians at Adowa; in 1899-1902 the whole might of Britain was held in check by the small Boer republics in the South African War; and in 1904-1905 Russia was defeated by a resurgent Japan. These omens were generally not heeded, and European civilization continued on its course to Armageddon.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the power structure of the world presented a quite different picture. In this new situation the world consisted of three great zones: (1) Orthodox civilization under the Soviet Empire, occupying the heartland of Eurasia; (2) surrounding this, a fringe of dying and shattered cultures: Islamic, Hindu, Malayan, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and others: and (3) outside this fringe, and chiefly responsible for shattering its cultures, Western Civilization. Moreover, Western Civilization had been profoundly modified. In 1900 it had consisted of a core area in Europe with peripheral areas in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the fringes of Africa. By 1950 Western Civilization had its center of power in America, the fringes in Africa were being lost, and Europe had been so reduced in power, in wealth, and in prestige that it seemed to many that it must make a choice between becoming a satellite in an American-dominated Western Civilization or joining with the buffer fringe to try to create a Third Force able to hold a balance of power between America and the Soviet bloc. This impression was mistaken, and by the late 1950's Europe was in a position, once again, to play an independent role in world affairs.
In previous chapters we have examined the background of Western Civilization and of the Russian Empire to the second decade of the twentieth century. In the present chapter we shall examine the situation in the buffer fringe until about the end of that same decade. At the beginning of the twentieth century the areas which were to become the buffer fringe consisted of (1) the Near East dominated by the Ottoman Empire, (2) the Middle East dominated by the British Empire in India, and (3) the Far East, consisting of two old civilizations, China and Japan. On the outskirts of these were the lesser colonial areas of Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia. At this point we shall consider the three major areas of the buffer fringe with a brief glance at Africa.
Chapter 8
The Near East to 1914
For the space of over a century, from shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in
1815 until 1922, the relationships of the Great Powers were exacerbated by what was
known as the "Near East Question." This problem, which arose from the growing
weakness of the Ottoman Empire, was concerned with the question of what would
become of the lands and peoples left without government by the retreat of Turkish power.
The problem was made more complex by the fact that Turkish power did not withdraw
but rather decayed right where it was, so that in many areas it continued to exist in law
when it had already ceased to function in fact because of the weakness and corruption of
the sultan's government. The Turks themselves sought to maintain their position, not by
remedying their weakness and corruption by reform, but by playing off one European
state against another and by using cruel and arbitrary actions against any of their subject
peoples who dared to become restive under their rule. The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the period 1526-1533 with the conquest of Hungary and the first siege of Vienna. A second siege, also unsuccessful, came in 1683. From this point Turkish power declined and Turkish sovereignty withdrew, but unfortunately the decline was much more rapid than the withdrawal, with the result that subject peoples were encouraged to revolt and foreign Powers were encouraged to intervene because of the weakness of Turkish power in areas which were still nominally under the sultan's sovereignty.
At its height the Ottoman Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in both area and population. South of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco to the Persian Gulf; north of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea, including the Balkans as far north as Poland and the whole northern shore of the Black Sea. This vast empire was divided into twenty-one governments and subdivided into seventy vilayets, each under a pasha. The whole structure was held together as a tribute-gathering military system by the fact that the rulers in all parts were Muslims. The supreme ruler in Constantinople was not only sultan (and thus head of the empire) but was also caliph (and thus defender of the Muslim creed). In most of the empire the mass of the people were Muslims like their rulers, but in much of the empire the masses of the peoples were non-Muslims, being Roman Christians, Orthodox Christians, Jews, or other creeds.
Linguistic variations were even more notable than religious distinctions. Only the peoples of Anatolia generally spoke Turkish, while those of North Africa and the Near East spoke various Semitic and Hamitic dialects of which the most prevalent was Arabic. From Syria to the Caspian Sea across the base of Anatolia were several languages, of which the chief were Kurdish and Armenian. The shores of the Aegean Sea, especially the western, were generally Greek-speaking. The northern shore was a confused mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian speaking peoples. The eastern shore of the Adriatic was Greek-speaking up to the 40th parallel, then Albanian for almost three degrees of latitude, merging gradually into various South Slav languages like Croat, Slovens, and (in the interior) Serb. The Dalmatian shore and Istria had many Italian speakers. On the Black Sea shore Thrace itself was a mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgar from the Bosporus to the 42nd parallel where there was a solid mass of Bulgarians. The central Balkans w as a confused area, especially in Macedonia where Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Serb, and Bulgar met and mingled. North of the Bulgarian-speaking groups, and generally separated from them by the Danube, were Romanians. North of the Croatians and Serbs, and generally separated from them by the Drava River, were the Hungarians. The district where the Hungarians and Romanians met, Transylvania, was confused, with great blocs of one language being separated from their fellows by blocs of the other, the confusion being compounded by the presence of considerable numbers of Germans and Gypsies.
The religious and linguistic divisions of the Ottoman Empire were complicated by geographic, social, and cultural divisions, especially in the Balkans. This last-named area provided such contrasts as the relatively advanced commercial and mercantile activities of the Greeks; primitive pastoral groups like Albanian goat-herders; subsistence farmers scratching a living from small plots of Macedonia's rocky soils; peasant-size farms on the better soils of Serbia and Romania; great rich landed estates producing for a commercial market and worked by serf labor in Hungary and Romania. Such diversity made any hopes of political unity by consent or by federation almost impossible in the Balkans. Indeed, it was almost impossible to draw any political lines which would coincide with geographic and linguistic or religious lines, because linguistic and religious distinctions frequently indicated class distinctions. Thus the upper and lower classes or the commercial and the agricultural groups even in the same district often had different languages or different religions. Such a pattern of diversity could be held together most easily by a simple display of military force. This was what the Turks provided. Militarism and fiscalism were the two keynotes of Turkish rule, and were quite sufficient to hold the empire together as long as both remained effective and the empire was free from outside interference. But in the course of the eighteenth century Turkish administration became ineffective and outside interference became important.
The sultan, who was a completely absolute ruler, became very quickly a completely arbitrary ruler. This characteristic extended to all his activities. He filled his harem with any women who pleased his fancy, without any formal ceremony. Such numerous and temporary liaisons produced numerous children, of whom many were neglected or even forgotten. Accordingly, the succession to the throne never became established and was never based on primogeniture. As a consequence, the sultan came to fear murder from almost any direction. To avoid this, he tended to surround himself with persons who could have no possible chance of succeeding him: women, children, Negroes, eunuchs, and Christians. All the sultans from 1451 onward were born of slave mothers and only one sultan after this date even bothered to contract a formal marriage. Such a way of life isolated the sultan from his subjects completely.
This isolation applied to the process of government as well as to the ruler's personal life. Most of the sultans paid little heed to government, leaving this to their grand viziers and the local pashas. The former had no tenure, being appointed or removed in accordance with the whims of harem intrigue. The pashas tended to become increasingly independent, since they collected local taxes and raised local military forces. The fact that the sultan was also caliph (and thus religious successor to Muhammad), and the religious belief that the government was under divine guidance and should be obeyed, however unjust and tyrannical, made all religious thinking on political or social questions take the form of justification of the status quo, and made any kind of reform almost impossible. Reform could come only from the Sultan, but his ignorance and isolation from society made reform unlikely. In consequence the whole system became increasingly weak and corrupt. The administration was chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. Almost nothing could be done without gifts and bribes to officials, and it was not always possible to know what official or series of officials were the correct ones to reward.
The chaos and weakness which we have described were in full blossom by the seventeenth century, and grew worse during the next two hundred years. As early as 1699 the sultan lost Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to the Habsburgs, parts of the western Balkans to Venice, and districts in the north to Poland. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired areas north of the Black Sea, notably the Crimea.
During the nineteenth century, the Near East question became increasingly acute. Russia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as a Great Power, able to increase its pressure on Turkey. This pressure resulted from three motivations. Russian imperialism sought to win an outlet to open waters in the south by dominating the Black Sea and by winning access to the Aegean through the acquisition of the Straits and Constantinople. Later this effort was supplemented by economic and diplomatic pressure on Persia in order to reach the Persian Gulf. At the same time, Russia regarded itself as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and as early as 1774 had obtained the sultan's consent to this protective role. Moreover, as the most powerful Slav state, Russia had ambitions to be regarded as the protector of the Slavs in the sultan's domains.
These Russian ambitions could never have been thwarted by the sultan alone, but he did not need to stand alone. He generally found support from Britain and increasingly from France. Britain was obsessed with the need to defend India, which was a manpower pool and military staging area vital to the defense of the whole empire. From 1840 to 1907, it faced the nightmare possibility that Russia might attempt to cross Afghanistan to northwest India, or cross Persia to the Persian Gulf, or penetrate through the Dardanelles and the Aegean onto the British "lifeline to India" by way of the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the importance of this Mediterranean route to the east in British eyes. It was protected by British forces in Gibraltar, Malta (acquired 1800), Cyprus (1878), and Egypt (1882). In general, in spite of English humanitarian sympathy for the peoples subject to the tyranny of the Turk, and in spite of England's regard for the merits of good government, British imperial policy considered that its interests would be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up into small independent states which might fall under the influence of the Great Powers.
The French concern with the Near East was parallel to, but weaker than, that of Britain. They had cultural and trade relations with the Levant going back, in some cases, to the Crusades. In addition the French had ancient claims, revived in 1854, to he considered the protectors of Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire and of the "holy places" in Jerusalem.
Three other influences which became increasingly strong in the Near East were the growth of nationalism and the growing interests of Austria (after 1866) and of Germany (after 1889). The first stirrings of Balkan nationalism can be seen in the revolt of the Serbs in 1804-1812. By seizing Bessarabia from Turkey in 1812, Russia won the right for local self-government for the Serbs. Unfortunately, these latter began almost immediately to fight one another, the chief split being between a Russophile group led by Milan Obrenovich and a Serb nationalist group led by George Petroviæ (better known as Karageorge). The Serb state, formally established in 1830, was bounded by the rivers Dvina, Save, Danube, and Timok. With local autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, it continued to pay tribute to the sultan and to support garrisons of Turkish troops. The vicious feud between Obrenovich and Karageorgevic continued after Serbia obtained complete independence in 1878. The Obrenovich dynasty ruled in 1817-1842 and 1858- 1903, while the Karageorgevic group ruled in 1842-1858 and 1903-1945. The intrigues of these two against each other broadened into a constitutional conflict in which the Obrenovich group supported the somewhat less liberal constitution of 1869, while the Karageorgevic group supported the somewhat more liberal constitution of 1889. The former constitution was in effect in 1869 1889 and again in 1894-1903, while the latter was in effect in 1889-1894 and again in 1903-1921. In order to win popular support by an appeal to nationalist sentiments, both groups plotted against Turkey and later against Austria-Hungary.
A second example of Balkan nationalism appeared in the Greek struggle for independence from the sultan (1821-1830). After Greeks and Muslims had massacred each other by the thousands, Greek independence was established with a constitutional monarchy under the guarantee of the three Great Powers. A Bavarian prince was placed on the throne and began to establish a centralized, bureaucratic, constitutional state which was quite unsuited for a country with such unconstitutional traditions, poor transportation and communications, a low level of literacy, and a high level of partisan localism. After thirty turbulent years (1832-1862), Otto of Bavaria was deposed and replaced by a Danish prince and a completely democratic unicameral government which functioned only slightly better. The Danish dynasty continues to rule, although supplanted by a republic in 1924-1935 and by military dictatorships on sundry occasions, notably that of Joannes Metaxas (1936-1941).
The first beginnings of Balkan nationalism must not be overemphasized. While the inhabitants of the area have always been unfriendly to outsiders and resentful of burdensome governments, these sentiments deserve to be regarded as provincialism or localism rather than nationalism. Such feelings are prevalent among all primitive peoples and must not be regarded as nationalism unless they are so wide as to embrace loyalty to all peoples of the same language and culture and are organized in such fashion that this loyalty is directed toward the state as the core of nationalist strivings. Understood in this way, nationalism became a very potent factor in the disruption of the Ottoman Empire only after 1878.
Closely related to the beginnings of Balkan nationalism were the beginnings of PanSlavism and the various "pan-movements" in reaction to this, such as Pan-Islamism. These rose to a significant level only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Simply defined, Pan-Slavism was a movement for cultural unity, and, perhaps in the long run, political unity among the Slavs. In practice it came to mean the right of Russia to assume the role of protector of the Slav peoples outside Russia itself. At times it was difficult for some peoples, especially Russia's enemies, to distinguish between Pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. Equally simply defined, Pan-Islamism was a movement for unity or at least cooperation among all the Muslim peoples in order to resist the encroachments of the European Powers on Muslim territories. In concrete terms it sought to give the caliph a religious leadership, and perhaps in time a political leadership such as he had really never previously possessed. Both of these pan-movements are of no importance until the end of the nineteenth century, while Balkan nationalism was only slightly earlier than they in its rise to importance.
These Balkan nationalists had romantic dreams about uniting peoples of the same language, and generally looked back, with a distorted historical perspective, to some period when their co-linguists had played a more important political role. The Greeks dreamed of a revived Byzantine state or even of a Periclean Athenian Empire. The Serbs dreamed of the days of Stephen Dushan, while the Bulgars went further back to the days of the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon in the early tenth century. However, we must remember that even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century such dreams were found only among the educated minority of Balkan peoples. In the nineteenth century, agitation in the Balkans was much more likely to be caused by Turkish misgovernment than by any stirrings of national feeling. Moreover, when national feeling did appear it was just as likely to appear as a feeling of animosity against neighbors who were different, rather than a feeling of unity with peoples who were the same in culture and religion. And at all times localism and class antagonisms (especially rural hostility against urban groups) remained at a high level.
Russia made war on Turkey five times in the nineteenth century. On the last two occasions the Great Powers intervened to prevent Russia from imposing its will on the sultan. The first intervention led to the Crimean War (1854-1856) and the Congress of Paris (1856), while the second intervention, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, rewrote a peace treaty which the czar had just imposed on the sultan (Treaty of San Stefano, 1877) .
In 1853 the czar, as protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia north of the Danube and east of the Carpathians. Under British pressure the sultan declared war on Russia, and was supported by Britain, France, and Sardinia in the ensuing "Crimean War." Under threat of joining the anti-Russian forces, Austria forced the czar to evacuate the principalities and occupied them herself, thus exposing an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans which continued for two generations and ultimately precipitated the World War of 1914-1918.
The Congress of Paris of 1856 sought to remove all possibility of any future Russian intervention in Turkish affairs. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, Russia gave up its claim as protector of the sultan's Christian subjects, the Black Sea was "neutralized" by prohibiting all naval vessels and naval arsenals on its waters and shores, an International Commission was set up to assure free navigation of the Danube, and in 1862, after several years of indecision, the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, along with Bessarabia, were allowed to form the state of Romania. The new state remained technically under Turkish suzerainty until 1878. It was the most progressive of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, with advanced educational and judicial systems based on those of Napoleonic France, and a thorough-going agrarian reform. This last, which was executed in two stages (1863-1866 and 1918-1921), divided up the great estates of the Church and the nobility, and wiped away all vestiges of manorial dues or serfdom. Under a liberal, but not democratic, constitution, a German prince, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1866-1914), established a new dynasty which was ended only in 1948. During this whole period the cultural and educational systems of the country continued to be orientated toward France in sharp contrast to the inclinations of the ruling dynasty, which had German sympathies. The Romanian possession of Bessarabia and their general pride in their Latin heritage, as reflected in the name of the country, set up a barrier to good relations with Russia, although the majority of Romanians were members of the Orthodox Church.
The political and military weakness of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Russian pressure and Balkan nationalisms made it obvious that it must westernize and it must reform, if it was going to survive. Broad verbal promises in this direction were made by the sultan in the period 1839-1877, and there were even certain efforts to execute these promises. The army was reorganized on a European basis with the assistance of Prussia. Local government was reorganized and centralized, and the fiscal system greatly improved, chiefly by curtailing the use of tax farmers; government officials were shifted from a fee-paid basis to a salaried basis; the slave market was abolished, although this meant a large reduction in the sultan's income; the religious monopoly in education was curtailed and a considerable impetus given to secular technical education. Finally, in 1856, in an edict forced on the sultan by the Great Powers, an effort was made to establish a secular state in Turkey by abolishing all inequalities based on creed in respect to personal freedom, law, property, taxation, and eligibility for office or military service.
In practice, none of these paper reforms was very effective. It was not possible to change the customs of the Turkish people by paper enactments. Indeed, any attempt to do so aroused the anger of many Muslims to the point where their personal conduct toward non-Muslims became worse. At the same time, these promises led the non-Muslims to expect better treatment, so that relations between the various groups were exacerbated. Even if the sultan had had every intention of carrying out his stated reforms, he would have had extraordinary difficulties in doing so because of the structure of Turkish society and the complete lack of trained administrators or even of literate people. The Turkish state was a theocratic state, and Turkish society was a patriarchal or even a tribal society. Any movement toward secularization or toward social equality could easily result, not in reform, but in complete destruction of the society by dissolving the religious and authoritarian relationships which held both the state and society together. But the movement toward reform lacked the wholehearted support of the sultan; it aroused the opposition of the more conservative, and in some ways more loyal, groups of Muslims; it aroused the opposition of many liberal Turks because it was derived from Western pressure on Turkey; it aroused opposition from many Christian or non-Turkish groups who feared that a successful reform might weaken their chances of breaking up the Ottoman Empire completely; and the efforts at reform, being aimed at the theocratic character of the Turkish state, counteracted the sultan's efforts to make himself the leader of Pan-Islamism and to use his title of caliph to mobilize non-Ottoman Muslims in India, Russia, and the East to support him in his struggles with the European Great Powers.
On the other hand, it was equally clear that Turkey could not meet any European state on a basis of military equality until it was westernized. At the same time, the cheap machinery-made industrial products of the Western Powers began to pour into Turkey and to destroy the ability of the handicraft artisans of Turkey to make a living. This could not be prevented by tariff protection because the sultan was bound by international agreements to keep his customs duties at a low level. At the same time, the appeal of Western ways of life began to be felt by some of the sultan's subjects who knew them. These began to agitate for industrialism or for railroad construction, for wider opportunities in education, especially technical education, for reforms in the Turkish language, and for new, less formal, kinds of Turkish literature, for honest and impersonal methods of administration in justice and public finance, and for all those things which, by making the Western Powers strong, made them a danger to Turkey.
The sultan made feeble efforts to reform in the period 1838-1875, but by the latter date he was completely disillusioned with these efforts, and shifted over to a policy of ruthless censorship and repression; this repression led, at last, to the so-called "Young Turk" rebellion of 1908.
The shift from feeble reform to merciless repression coincided with a renewal of the Russian attacks on Turkey. These attacks were incited by Turkish butchery of Bulgarian agitators in Macedonia and a successful Turkish war on Serbia. Appealing to the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, Russia came to the rescue of the Bulgars and Serbs, and quickly defeated the Turks, forcing them to accept the Treaty of San Stefano before any of the Western Powers could intervene (1877). Among other provisions, this treaty set up a large state of Bulgaria, including much of Macedonia, independent of Turkey and under Russian military occupation.
This Treaty of San Stefano, especially the provision for a large Bulgarian state, which, it was feared, would be nothing more than a Russian tool, was completely unacceptable to England and Austria. Joining with France, Germany, and Italy, they forced Russia to come to a conference at Berlin where the treaty was completely rewritten (1878). The independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania was accepted, as were the Russian acquisitions of Kars and Batum, east of the Black Sea. Romania had to give Bessarabia to Russia, but received Dobruja from the sultan. Bulgaria itself, the crucial issue of the conference, was divided into three parts: (a) the strip between the Danube and the Balkan mountains was set up as an autonomous and tribute-paying state under Turkish suzerainty; (b) the portion of Bulgaria south of the mountains was restored to the sultan as the province of Eastern Rumelia to be ruled by a Christian governor approved by the Powers; and (c) Macedonia, still farther south, was restored to Turkey in return for promises of administrative reforms. Austria was given the right to occupy Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi-Bazar (a strip between Serbia and Montenegro). The English, by a separate agreement with Turkey, received the island of Cyprus to hold as long as Russia held Batum and Kars. The other states received nothing, although Greece submitted claims to Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia, while France talked about her interest in Tunis, and Italy made no secret of her ambitions in Tripoli and Albania. Only Germany asked for nothing, and received the sultan's thanks and friendship for its moderation.
The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 was a disaster from almost every point of view because it left every state, except Austria, with its appetite whetted and its hunger unsatisfied. The Pan-Slavs, the Romanians, the Bulgars, the South Slavs, the Greeks, and the Turks were all disgruntled with the settlement. The agreement turned the Balkans into an open powder keg from which the spark was kept away only with great difficulty and only for twenty years. It also opened up the prospect of the liquidation of the Turkish possessions in North Africa, thus inciting a rivalry between the Great Powers which was a constant danger to the peace in the period 1878-1912. The Romanian loss of Bessarabia, the Bulgarian loss of Eastern Rumelia, the South Slav loss of its hope of reaching the Adriatic or even of reaching Montenegro (because of the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Novi-Bazar), the Greek failure to get Thessaly or Crete, and the complete discomfiture of the Turks created an atmosphere of general dissatisfaction. In the midst of this, the promise of reforms to Macedonia without any provision for enforcing this promise called forth hopes and agitations which could neither be satisfied nor quieted. Even Austria, which, on the face of it, had obtained more than she could really have expected, had obtained in Bosnia the instrument which was to lead eventually to the total destruction of the Habsburg Empire. This acquisition had been encouraged by Bismarck as a method of diverting Austrian ambitions southward to the Adriatic and out of Germany. But by placing Austria, in this way, in the position of being the chief obstacle in the path of the South Slav dreams of unity, Bismarck was also creating the occasion for the destruction of the Hohenzollern Empire. It is clear that European diplomatic history from 1878 to 1919 is little more than a commentary on the mistakes of the Congress of Berlin.
To Russia the events of 1878 were a bitter disappointment. Even the small Bulgarian state which emerged from the settlement gave them little satisfaction. With a constitution dictated by Russia and under a prince, Alexander of Battenberg, who was a nephew of the czar, the Bulgarians showed an uncooperative spirit which profoundly distressed the Russians. As a result, when Eastern Rumelia revolted in 188; and demanded union with Bulgaria, the change was opposed by Russia and encouraged by Austria. Serbia, in its bitterness, went to war with Bulgaria but was defeated and forced to make peace by Austria. The union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia was accepted, on face-saving terms, by the sultan. Russian objections were kept within limits by the power of Austria and England but were strong enough to force the abdication of Alexander of Battenberg. Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was elected to succeed Alexander, but was unacceptable to Russia and was recognized by none of the Powers until his reconciliation with Russia in 1896. The state was generally in turmoil during this period, plots and assassinations steadily following one another. A Macedonian revolutionary organization known as IMRO, working for independence for their area, adopted an increasingly terrorist policy, killing any Bulgarian or Romanian statesman who did not work wholeheartedly in cooperation with their efforts. Agitated Bulgarians formed insurgent bands which made raids into Macedonia, and insurrection became endemic in the province, bursting out in full force in 1902. By that date Serb and Greek bands had joined in the confusion. The Powers intervened at that point to inaugurate a program of reform in Macedonia under Austro-Russian supervision.
The Congress of Berlin began the liquidation of the Turkish position in North Africa. France, which had been occupying Algeria since 1830, established a French protectorate over Tunis as well in 1881. This led to the British occupation of Egypt the following year. Not to be outdone, Italy put in a claim for Tripoli but could get no more than an exchange of notes, known as the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887, by which England, Italy, Austria, Spain, and Germany promised to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean, and the Black seas, unless all parties agreed to changes. The only concrete advantage to Italy in this was a British promise of support in North Africa in return for Italian support of the British position in Egypt. This provided only tenuous satisfaction for the Italian ambitions in Tripoli, but it was reinforced in 1900 by a French-Italian agreement by which Italy gave France a free hand in Morocco in return for a free hand in Tripoli.
Berlin to Baghdad
Railroad Scheme
By 1900 an entirely new factor began to intrude into the Eastern Question. Under
Bismarck (1862-1890) Germany had avoided all non-European adventures. Under
William II (1888-1918) any kind of adventure, especially a remote and uncertain one,
was welcomed. In the earlier period Germany had concerned itself with the Near East
Question only as a member of the European "concert of Powers" and with a few
incidental issues such as the use of German officers to train the Turkish Army. After
1889 the situation was different. Economically, the Germans began to invade Anatolia by
establishing trading agencies and banking facilities; politically, Germany sought to
strengthen Turkey's international position in every way. This effort was symbolized by
the German Kaiser's two visits to the sultan in 1889 and 1898. On the latter occasion he
solemnly promised his friendship to "the Sultan Abdul Hamid and the three hundred
million Muhammadans who revere him as caliph." Most important, perhaps, was the
projected "Berlin to Baghdad" railway scheme which completed its main trunk line from
the Austro-Hungarian border to Nusaybin in northern Mesopotamia by September 1918.
This project was of the greatest economic, strategic, and political importance not only to
the Ottoman Empire and the Near East but to the whole of Europe. Economically, it
tapped a region of great mineral and agricultural resources, including the world's greatest
petroleum reserves. These were brought into contact with Constantinople and, beyond
that, with central and northwestern Europe. Germany, which was industrialized late, had
a great, unsatisfied demand for food and raw materials and a great capacity to
manufacture industrial products which could be exported to pay for such food and raw
materials. Efforts had been made and continued to be made by Germany to find a solution
to this problem by opening trade relations with South America, the Far East, and North
America. Banking facilities and a merchant marine were being established to encourage
such trade relations. But the Germans, with their strong strategic sense, knew well that
relations with the areas mentioned were at the mercy of the British fleet, which would,
almost unquestionably, control the seas during wartime. The Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway
solved these crucial problems. It put the German metallurgical industry in touch with the
great metal resources of Anatolia; it put the German textile industry in touch with the
supplies of wool, cotton, and hemp of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia; in fact, it
brought to almost every branch of German industry the possibility of finding a solution
for its critical market and raw-material problems. Best of all, these connections, being
almost entirely overland, would be within reach of the German Army and beyond the
reach of the British Navy.[the only 'scheme' I see here and ahead was on the part of England to interfere in the economic affairs of others.DC]For Turkey itself the railway was equally significant. Strategically it made it possible, for the first time, for Turkey to mobilize her full power in the Balkans, the Caucasus area, the Persian Gulf, or the Levant. It greatly increased the economic prosperity of the whole country; it could be run (as it was after 1911) on Mesopotamian petroleum; it provided markets and thus incentives for increased production of agricultural and mineral products; it greatly reduced political discontent, public disorder, and banditry in the areas through which it ran; it greatly increased the revenues of the Ottoman treasury in spite of the government's engagement to pay subsidies to the railroad for each mile of track built and for a guaranteed income per mile each year.
The Ottoman Empire Was Divided into Exclusive Spheres of
Influence by Money Powers
The Great Powers showed mild approval of the Baghdad Railway until about 1900.
Then, for more than ten years, Russia, Britain, and France showed violent disapproval,
and did all they could to obstruct the project. After 1910 this disapproval was largely
removed by a series of agreements by which the Ottoman Empire was divided into
exclusive spheres of influence. During the period of disapproval the Great Powers
concerned issued such a barrage of propaganda against the plan that it is necessary, even
today, to warn against its influence. They described the Baghdad Railway as the entering
wedge of German imperialist aggression seeking to weaken and destroy the Ottoman
Empire and the stakes of the other Powers in the area. The evidence shows quite the
contrary. Germany was the only Great Power which wanted the Ottoman Empire to be
strong and intact. Britain wanted it to be weak and intact. France generally shared the
British point of view, although the French, with a $500,000,000 investment in the area,
wanted Turkey to be prosperous as well. Russia wanted it to be weak and partitioned, a
view which was shared by the Italians and, to some extent, by the Austrians.
The Baghdad Railway
The Germans were not only favorably inclined toward Turkey; their conduct seems to
have been completely fair in regard to the administration of the Baghdad Railway itself.
At a time when American and other railways were practicing wholesale discrimination
between customers in regard to rates and freight handling, the Germans had the same
rates and same treatment for all, including Germans and non-Germans. They worked to
make the railroad efficient and profitable, although their income from it was guaranteed
by the Turkish government. In consequence the Turkish payments to the railroad steadily
declined, and the government was able to share in its profits to the extent of almost three
million francs in 1914. Moreover, the Germans did not seek to monopolize control of the
railroad, offering to share equally with France and England and eventually with other
Powers. France accepted this offer in 1899, but Britain continued to refuse, and placed
every obstacle in the path of the project. When the Ottoman government in 1911 sought
to raise their customs duties from 1 l to 14 percent in order to finance the continued
construction of the railway, Britain prevented this. In order to carry on the project, the Germans sold their railroad interests in the Balkans and gave up the Ottoman building
subsidy of $275,000 a kilometer. In striking contrast to this attitude, the Russians forced
the Turks to change the original route of the line from northern Anatolia to southern
Anatolia by threatening to take immediate measures to collect all the arrears, amounting
to over 57 million francs, due to the czar from Turkey under the Treaty of 1878. The
Russians regarded the projected railway as a strategic threat to their Armenian frontier.
Ultimately, in 1900, they forced the sultan to promise to grant no concessions to build
railways in northern Anatolia or Armenia except with Russian approval. The French
government, in spite of the French investments in Turkey of :.5 billion francs, refused to
allow Baghdad Railway securities to be handled on the Paris Stock Exchange: To block
the growth of German Catholic missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire, the French
persuaded the Pope to issue an encyclical ordering all missionaries in that empire to
communicate with the Vatican through the French consulates. The British opposition
became intense only in April, 1903. Early in that month Prime Minister Arthur Balfour
and Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne made an agreement for joint German, French,
and British control of the railroad. Within three weeks this agreement was repudiated by
the government because of newspaper protests against it, although it would have reduced
the Turks and Germans together to only fourteen out of thirty votes on the board of
directors of the railway. When the Turkish government in 1910 tried to borrow abroad
$30 million, secured by the customs receipts of the country, it was summarily rebuffed in
Paris and London, but obtained the sum without hesitation in Berlin. In view of these
facts, the growth of German prestige and the decline in favor of the Western Powers at
the sultan's court is not surprising, and goes far to explain the Turkish intervention on the
side of the Central Powers in the war of 1914-1918.
Secret Agreement Divides Turkey
into Spheres of Foreign Influence
The Baghdad Railway played no real role in the outbreak of the war of 1914 because
the Germans in the period 1910-1914 were able to reduce the Great Powers' objections to
the scheme. This was done through a series of agreements which divided Turkey into
spheres of foreign influence. In November, 1910, a German-Russian agreement at
Potsdam gave Russia a free hand in northern Persia, withdrew all Russian opposition to
the Baghdad Railway, and pledged both parties to support equal trade opportunities for
all (the "open-door" policy) in their respective areas of influence in the Near East. The
French were given 2,000 miles of railway concessions in western and northern Anatolia
and in Syria in 1910-1912 and signed a secret agreement with the Germans in February
1914, by which these regions were recognized as French "spheres of influence," while the
route of the Baghdad Railway was recognized as a German sphere of influence; both
Powers promised to work to increase the Ottoman tax receipts; the French withdrew their
opposition to the railway; and the French gave the Germans the 70-million-franc
investment which the French already had in the Baghdad Railway in return for an equal
amount in the Turkish bond issue of 1911, which France had earlier rebuffed, plus a
lucrative discount on a new Ottoman bond issue of 1914.
Various Monopolies Over
Natural Resources Established
The British drove a much harder bargain with the Germans. By an agreement of June
1914, Britain withdrew her opposition to the Baghdad Railway, allowed Turkey to raise
her customs from 11 percent to 15 percent, and accepted a German sphere of interest
along the railway route in return for promises (1) that the railway would not be extended
to the Persian Gulf route would stop at Basra on the Tigris River, (2) that British capitalists
would be given a monopoly on the navigation of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and
exclusive control over irrigation projects based on these rivers, (3) that two British
subjects would be given seats on the board of directors of the Baghdad Railway, (4) that
Britain would have exclusive control over the commercial activities of Kuwait, the only
good port on the upper Persian Gulf: (5) that a monopoly over the oil resources of the
area from Mosul to Baghdad would be given to a new corporation in which British
finances would have a half-interest, Royal Dutch Shell Company a quarter-interest, and
the Germans a quarter-interest; and (6) that both Powers would support the "open-door"
policy in commercial activities in Asiatic Turkey. Unfortunately, this agreement, as well
as the earlier ones with other Powers, became worthless with the outbreak of the First
World War in 1914. However, it is still important to recognize that the Entente Powers
forced upon the Germans a settlement dividing Turkey into "spheres of interest" in place
of the projected German settlement based on international cooperation in the economic
reconstruction of the area.
The Struggles of the Money
Powers for Profit and Influence
These struggles of the Great Powers for profit and influence in the wreckage of the
Ottoman Empire could not fail to have profound effects in Turkish domestic affairs.
Probably the great mass of the sultan's subjects were still untouched by these events, but
an animated minority was deeply stirred. This minority received no encouragement from
the despotic Abdul-Hamid II, sultan from 1876 to 1909. While eager for economic
improvements, Abdul-Hamid II was opposed to the spread of the Western ideas of
liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, or democracy, and did all he could to prevent
their propagation by censorship, by restrictions on foreign travel or study abroad by
Turks, and by an elaborate system of arbitrary police rule and governmental espionage.
As a result, the minority of liberal, nationalistic, or progressive Turks had to organize
abroad. This they did at Geneva in 1891 in a group which is generally known as the
"Young Turks." Their chief difficulty was to reconcile the animosities which existed
between the many linguistic groups among the sultan's subjects. This was done in a series
of congresses held in Paris, notably in 1905 and in 1907. At the latter meeting were
representatives of the Turks, Armenians, Bulgars, Jews, Arabs, and Albanians. In the
meantime, this secret organization had penetrated the sultan's army, which was seething
with discontent. The plotters were so successful that they were able to revolt in July
1908, and force the sultan to reestablish the Constitution of 1876. At once divisions
appeared among the rebel leaders, notably between those who wished a centralized state
and those who accepted the subject nationalities' demands for decentralization. Moreover,
the orthodox Muslims formed a league to resist secularization, and the army soon saw
that its chief demands for better pay and improved living conditions were not going to be
met. Abdul-Hamid took advantage of these divisions to organize a violent
counterrevolution (April 1909). It was crushed, the sultan was deposed, and the Young Turks began to impose their ideas of a dictatorial Turkish national state with ruthless
severity. A wave of resistance arose from the non-Turkish groups and the orthodox
Muslims. No settlement of these disputes was achieved by the outbreak of the World War
in 1914. Indeed, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908
precipitated a series of international crises of which the outbreak of war in 1914 was the
latest and most disastrous.
Chapter 9
The British Imperial Crisis:
Africa, Ireland, and India
to 1926
IntroductionThe old statement that England acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness is amusing but does not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth: much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. The motives which impelled the government to annex areas which its citizens had been exploiting were varied, both in time and in place, and were frequently much different from what an outsider might believe.
Britain acquired the world's greatest empire because it possessed certain advantages which other countries lacked. We mention three of these advantages: (1) that itmmm was an island, (2) that it was in the Atlantic, and (3) that its social traditions at home produced the will and the talents for imperial acquisition.
English Channel Provides
Security for Britain
As an island off the coast of Europe, Britain had security as long as it had control of
the narrow seas. It had such control from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 until
the creation of new weapons based on air power in the period after 1935. The rise of the
German Air Force under Hitler, the invention of the long-range rocket projectiles (V-2
weapon) in 1944, and the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1945-1955
destroyed England's security by reducing the defensive effectiveness of the English
Channel. But in the period 1588-1942, in which Britain controlled the seas, the Channel
gave England security and made its international position entirely different from that of
any continental Power. Because Britain had security, it had freedom of action. That
means it had a choice whether to intervene or to stay out of the various disputes which
arose on the Continent of Europe or elsewhere in the world. Moreover, if it intervened, it
could do so on a limited commitment, restricting its contribution of men, energy, money,
and wealth to whatever amount it wished. If such a limited commitment were exhausted
or lost, so long as the British fleet controlled the seas, Britain had security, and thus had
freedom to choose if it would break off its intervention or increase its commitment.
Moreover, England could make even a small commitment of its resources of decisive
importance by using this commitment in support of the second strongest Power on the
Continent against the strongest Power, thus hampering the strongest Power and making
the second Power temporarily the strongest, as long as it acted in accord with Britain's
wishes. In this way, by following balance-of-power tactics, Britain was able to play a decisive role on the Continent, keep the Continent divided and embroiled in its own
disputes, and do this with a limited commitment of Britain's own resources, leaving a
considerable surplus of energy, manpower, and wealth available for acquiring an empire
overseas. In addition, Britain's unique advantage in having security through a limited
commitment of resources by control of the sea was one of the contributing factors which
allowed Britain to develop its unique social structure, its parliamentary system, its wide
range of civil liberties, and its great economic advance.
European Wars
The Powers on the Continent had none of these advantages. Since each could be
invaded by its neighbors at any time, each had security, and thus freedom of action, only
on rare and brief occasions. When the security of a continental Power was threatened by a
neighbor, it had no freedom of action, but had to defend itself with all its resources.
Clearly, it would be impossible for France to say to itself, "We shall oppose German
hegemony on the Continent only to the extent of 50,000 men or of $10 million." Yet as
late as 1939, Chamberlain informed France that England's commitment on the Continent
for this purpose would be no more than two divisions.
European Powers Focus
on the Continent
Since the continental Powers had neither security nor freedom of action, their position
on the Continent always was paramount over their ambitions for world empire, and these
latter always had to be sacrificed for the sake of the former whenever a conflict arose.
France was unable to hold on to its possessions in India or in North America in the
eighteenth century because so much of its resources had to be used to bolster French
security against Prussia or Austria. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803
because his primary concern had to be his position on the Continent. Bismarck tried to
discourage Germany from embarking on any overseas adventures in the period after 1871
because he saw that Germany must be a continental power or be nothing. Again, France
in 1882 had to yield Egypt to Britain, and in 1898 had to yield the Sudan in the same
way, because it saw that it could not engage in any colonial dispute with Britain while the
German Army stood across the Rhineland. This situation was so clear that all the lesser
continental Powers with overseas colonial possessions, such as Portugal, Belgium, or the
Netherlands, had to collaborate with Britain, or, at the very least, be carefully neutral. So
long as the ocean highway from these countries to their overseas empires was controlled
by the British fleet, they could not afford to embark on a policy hostile to Britain,
regardless of their personal feelings on the subject. It is no accident that Britain's most
constant international backing in the two centuries following the Methuen Treaty of 1703
came from Portugal and that Britain has felt free to negotiate with a third Power, like
Germany, regarding the disposition of the Portuguese colonies, as she did in 1898 and
tried to do in 1937-1939.
Britain's Control of the Sea
Britain's position on the Atlantic, combined with her naval control of the sea, gave her a great advantage when the new lands to the west of that ocean became one of the chief sources of commercial and naval wealth in the period after 1588. Lumber, tar, and ships were supplied from the American colonies to Britain in the period before the advent of iron, steam-driven ships (after 1860), and these ships helped to establish Britain's mercantile supremacy. At the same time, Britain's insular position deprived her monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional monarchs. Britain's security behind her navy allowed this struggle to go to a decision without any important outside interference, and permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.
The Landed Oligarchy in Britain
Britain's security combined with the political triumph of the landed oligarchy to create a social tradition entirely unlike that on the Continent. One result of these two factors was that England did not obtain a bureaucracy such as appeared on the Continent. This lack of a separate bureaucracy loyal to the monarch can be seen in the weakness of the professional army (already mentioned) and also in the lack of a bureaucratic judicial system. In England, the gentry and the younger sons of the landed oligarchy studied law in the Inns of Court and obtained a feeling for tradition and the sanctity of due process of law while still remaining a part of the landed class. In fact this class became the landed class in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities, the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.
The Unique Status of the
Landed Oligarchy in Britain
The landed oligarchy which arose in England differed from the landed aristocracy of
continental Europe in the three points already mentioned: (1) it got control of the
government; (2) it was not opposed by a professional army, a bureaucracy, or a
professional judicial system, but, on the contrary, it took over the control of these
adjuncts of government itself, generally serving without pay, and making access to these
positions difficult for outsiders by making such access expensive; and (3) it obtained
complete control of the land as well as political, religious, and social control of the
villages. In addition, the landed oligarchy of England was different from that on the
Continent because it was not a nobility. This lack was reflected in three important factors. On the Continent a noble was excluded from marrying outside his class or from engaging
in commercial enterprise; moreover, access to the nobility by persons of non-noble birth
was very difficult, and could hardly be achieved in much less than three generations. In
England, the landed oligarchy could engage in any kind of commerce or business and
could marry anyone without question (provided she was rich); moreover, while access to
the gentry in England was a slow process which might require generations of effort
acquiring land-holdings in a single locality, access to the peerage by act of the
government took only a moment, and could be achieved on the basis of either wealth or
service. As a consequence of all these differences, the landed upper class in England was
open to the influx of new talent, new money, and new blood, while the continental
nobility was deprived of these valuable acquisitions.
England Developed an Aristocracy
While the landed upper class of England was unable to become a nobility (that is, a
caste based on exalted birth), it was able to become an aristocracy (that is, an upper class
distinguished by traditions and behavior). The chief attributes of this aristocratic upper
class in England were (1) that it should be trained in an expensive, exclusive, masculine,
and relatively Spartan educational system centering about the great boys' schools like
Eton, Harrow, or Winchester; (2) that it should imbibe from this educational system
certain distinctive attitudes of leadership, courage, sportsmanship, team play, self-sacrifice, disdain for physical comforts, and devotion to duty; (3) that it should be
prepared in later life to devote a great deal of time and energy to unpaid tasks of public
significance, as justices of the peace, on county councils, in the county militia, or in other
services. Since all the sons of the upper classes received the same training, while only the
oldest, by primogeniture, was entitled to take over the income-yielding property of the
family, all the younger sons had to go out into the world to seek their fortunes, and, as
likely as not, would do their seeking overseas. At the same time, the uneventful life of the
typical English village or county, completely controlled by the upperclass oligarchy,
made it necessary for the more ambitious members of the lower classes to seek
advancement outside the county and even outside England. From these two sources were
recruited the men who acquired Britain's empire and the men who colonized it.
The British Empire
The English have not always been unanimous in regarding the empire as a source of
pride and benefit. In fact, the middle generation of the nineteenth century was filled with
persons, such as Gladstone, who regarded the empire with profound suspicion. They felt
that it was a source of great expense; they were convinced that it involved England in
remote strategic problems which could easily lead to wars England had no need to fight;
they could see no economic advantage in having an empire, since the existence of free
trade (which this generation accepted) would allow commerce to flow no matter who
held colonial areas; they were convinced that any colonial areas, no matter at what cost
they might be acquired, would eventually separate from the mother country, voluntarily if
they were given the rights of Englishmen, or by rebellion, as the American colonies had done, if they were deprived of such rights. In general, the "Little Englanders," as they
were called, were averse to colonial expansion on the grounds of cost.
Colonies Could Be a
Source of Riches
Although upholders of the "Little England" point of view, men like Gladstone or Sir
William Harcourt, continued in political prominence until 1895, this point of view was in
steady retreat after 1870. In the Liberal Party the Little Englanders were opposed by
imperialists like Lord Rosebery even before 1895; after that date, a younger group of
imperialists, like Asquith, Grey, and Haldane took over the party. In the Conservative
Party, where the anti-imperialist idea had never been strong, moderate imperialists like
Lord Salisbury were followed by more active imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain, or
Lords Curzon, Selborne, and Milner. There were many factors which led to the growth of
imperialism after 1870, and many obvious manifestations of that growth. The Royal
Colonial Institute was founded in 1868 to fight the "Little England" idea; Disraeli as
prime minister (1874-1880) dramatized the profit and glamour of empire by such acts as
the purchase of control of the Suez Canal and by granting Queen Victoria the title of
Empress of India; after 1870 it became increasingly evident that, however expensive
colonies might be to a government, they could be fantastically profitable to individuals
and companies supported by such governments; moreover, with the spread of democracy
and the growing influence of the press and the expanding need for campaign
contributions, individuals who made fantastic profits in overseas adventures could obtain
favorable support from their governments by contributing some part of their profits to
politicians' expenses; the efforts of King Leopold II of Belgium, using Henry Stanley, to
obtain the Congo area as his own preserve in 1876-1880, started a contagious fever of
colony-grabbing in Africa which lasted for more than thirty years; the discovery of
diamonds (in 1869) and of gold (in 1886) in South Africa, especially in the Boer
Transvaal Republic, intensified this fever.
John Ruskin
The new imperialism after 1870 was quite different in tone from that which the Little
Englanders had opposed earlier. The chief changes were that it was justified on grounds
of moral duty and of social reform and not, as earlier, on grounds of missionary activity
and material advantage. The man most responsible for this change was John Ruskin. Until 1870 there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but because he talked also about the empire and England's downtrodden masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things as moral issues. Until the end of the nineteenth century the poverty-stricken masses in the cities of England lived in want, ignorance, and crime very much as they have been described by Charles Dickens. Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the empire.
Cecil Rhodes Sets Up a
Monopoly Over the Gold
and
Diamond Mines in South Africa
Ruskin's message had a sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in
longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years.
Rhodes (1853-1902) feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of South Africa,
rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political
parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and in South Africa, and sought to
win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to
join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to Cairo Railway. Rhodes inspired devoted support for his goals from others in South Africa
and in England. With financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was
able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as De Beers Consolidated Mines
and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated Gold Fields. In the middle
1890's Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then
about five million dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he
was usually overdrawn on his account. These purposes centered on his desire to federate
the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under
their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes
Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the
English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted.
Cecil Rhodes Organized a
Secret Society in 1891
Among Ruskin's most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends
including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later
Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough.
These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out
his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord
Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by
Ruskin's message and devoted their lives to extension of the British Empire and uplift of
England's urban masses as two parts of one project which they called "extension of the
English-speaking idea." They were remarkably successful in these aims because
England's most sensational journalist William T. Stead (1849-1912), an ardent social
reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association
was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret
society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society
Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive
committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a "Circle of Initiates"; while there
was to be an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers" (later organized by
Milner as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the
same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Both accepted
with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March
1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was,
apparently, not organized until 1909-1913.
Financial Backing of
the Secret Society
This group was able to get access to Rhodes's money after his death in 1902 and also
to the funds of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe Bailey
(1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute the ideals that Rhodes
had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin
was Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as
well as others with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa Company.
They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends of Stead's like Lord Grey,
Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to
describe here, Miss Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of The Times while
still remaining on the payroll of Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, In this post she played a major
role in the next ten years in carrying into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil
Rhodes, to whom Stead had introduced her in 1889.
The Toynbee Hall Is Set Up
In the meantime, in 1884, acting under Ruskin's inspiration, a group which included Arnold Toynbee, Milner, Gell, Grey, Seeley, and Michael Glazebrook founded the first "settlement house," an organization by which educated, upper-class people could live in the slums in order to assist, instruct, and guide the poor, with particular emphasis on social welfare and adult education. The new enterprise, set up in East London with P. L. Gell as chairman, was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold Toynbee who died, aged 31, in 1883. This was the original model for the thousands of settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, now found throughout the world, and was one of the seeds from which the modern movement for adult education and university extension grew.
Roundtable Group Established
As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905,
Milner recruited a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to
assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to
win influential posts in government and international finance and became the dominant
influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa
they were known as Milner's Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semisecret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the
United States. These still function in eight countries. They kept in touch with each other
by personal correspondence and frequent visits, and through an influential quarterly magazine, The Round Table, founded in 1910 and largely supported by Sir Abe Bailey's
money.
The Royal Institute and
Council on Foreign
Relations Are Set Up
In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for
which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of
The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief
British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign
Relations) in the period 1919-1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of
organizations, known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries
holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each British dominion existing on an
interlocking basis with the Round Table Group and the Royal Institute of International
Affairs in the same country. In Canada the nucleus of this group consisted of Milner's
undergraduate friends at Oxford (such as Arthur Glazebrook and George Parkin), while
in South Africa and India the nucleus was made up of former members of Milner's
Kindergarten. These included (Sir) Patrick Duncan, B. K. Long, Richard Feetham, and
(Sir) Dougal Malcolm in South Africa and (Sir) William Marris, James (Lord) Meston,
and their friend Malcolm (Lord) Hailey in India. The groups in Australia and New
Zealand had been recruited by Stead (through his magazine The Review of Reviews) as
early as 1890-1893; by Parkin, at Milner instigation, in the period 1889-1910, and by
Lionel Curtis, also at Milner's request, in 1910-1919. The power and influence of this
Rhodes-Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889,
although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated. We might mention as an
example that this group dominated The Times from 1890 to 1910, and has controlled it
completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922). Because The Times has been
owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-Milner group was sometimes spoken
of as the "Cliveden Set," named after the Astor country house where they sometimes
assembled. Numerous other papers and journals have been under the control or influence
of this group since 1889. They have also established and influenced numerous university
and other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. Some of these are the Beit
chairs at Oxford, the Montague Burton chair at Oxford, the Rhodes chair at London, the
Stevenson chair at Chatham House, the Wilson chair at Aberystwyth, and others, as well
as such important sources of influence as Rhodes House at Oxford.
Roundtable Groups Seek to
Extend the British Empire
From 1884 to about 1915 the members of this group worked valiantly to extend the
British Empire and to organize it in a federal system. They were constantly harping on
the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of
the Canadian federation of 1867, and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire as
seemed feasible, then confederate the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single
organization. They also hoped to bring the United States into this organization to
whatever degree was possible. Stead was able to get Rhodes to accept, in principle, a
solution which might have made Washington the capital of the whole organization or
allow parts of the empire to become states of the American Union. The varied character
of the British imperial possessions, the backwardness of many of the native peoples
involved, the independence of many of the white colonists overseas, and the growing
international tension which culminated in the First World War made it impossible to
carry out the plan for Imperial Federation, although the five colonies in Australia were
joined into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and the four colonies in South Africa
were joined into the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Egypt and the Sudan to 1922
Disraeli's purchase, with Rothschild money, of 176,602 shares of Suez Canal stock for
£3,680,000 from the Khedive of Egypt in 1875 was motivated by concern for the British
communications with India, just as the British acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope in
1814 had resulted from the same concern. But in imperial matters one step leads to
another, and every acquisition obtained to protect an earlier acquisition requires a new
advance at a later date to protect it. This was clearly true in Africa where such
motivations gradually extended British control southward from Egypt and northward
from the Cape until these were joined in central Africa with the conquest of German
Tanganyika in 1916. The extravagances of the Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), which had compelled the sale of his Suez Canal shares, led ultimately to the creation of an Anglo-French condominium to manage the Egyptian foreign debt and to the deposition of the khedive by his suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey. The condominium led to disputes and finally to open fighting between Egyptian nationalists and Anglo-French forces. When the French refused to join the British in a joint bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, the condominium was broken, and Britain reorganized the country in such a fashion that, while all public positions were held by Egyptians, a British army was in occupation, British "advisers" controlled all the chief governmental posts, and a British "resident," Sir Evelyn Baring (known as Lord Cromer after 1892), controlled all finances and really ruled the country until 1907.
Inspired by fanatical Muslim religious agitators (dervishes), the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed led a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian control in 1883, massacred a British force under General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon at Khartoum, and maintained an independent Sudan for fifteen years. In 1898 a British force under (Lord) Kitchener, seeking to protect the Nile water supply of Egypt, fought its way southward against fanatical Sudanese tribesmen and won a decisive victory at Omdurman. An Anglo-Egyptian convention established a condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the area between Egypt and the Congo River. This area, which had lived in disorder for centuries, was gradually pacified, brought under the rule of law, irrigated by extensive hydraulic works, and brought under cultivation, producing, chiefly, long staple cotton.
East Central Africa to 1910
South and east of the Sudan the struggle for a British Africa was largely in the hands
of H. H. (Sir Harry) Johnston (1858-1927) and Frederick (later Lord) Lugard (1858-
1945). These two, chiefly using private funds but frequently holding official positions, fought all over tropical Africa, ostensibly seeking to pacify it and to wipe out the Arab
slave trade, but always possessing a burning desire to extend British rule. Frequently,
these ambitions led to rivalries with supporters of French and German ambitions in the
same regions. In 1884 Johnston obtained many concessions from native chiefs in the
Kenya area, turning these over to the British East Africa Company in 1887. When this
company went bankrupt in 1895, most of its rights were taken over by the British
government. In the meantime, Johnston had moved south, into a chaos of Arab slavers'
intrigues and native unrest in Nyasaland (1888). Here his exploits were largely financed
by Rhodes (1889-1893) in order to prevent the Portuguese Mozambique Company from
pushing westward toward the Portuguese West African colony of Angola to block the
Cape-to-Cairo route. Lord Salisbury made Nyasaland a British Protectorate after a deal
with Rhodes in which the South African promised to pay £1,000 a year toward the cost of
the new territory. About the same time Rhodes gave the Liberal Party a substantial
financial contribution in return for a promise that they would not abandon Egypt. He had
already (1888) given £10,000 to the Irish Home Rule Party on condition that it seek
Home Rule for Ireland while keeping Irish members in the British Parliament as a step
toward Imperial Federation. Rhodes's plans received a terrible blow in 1890-1891 when Lord Salisbury sought to end the African disputes with Germany and Portugal by delimiting their territorial claims in South and East Africa. The Portuguese agreement of 1891 was never ratified, but the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 blocked Rhodes's route to Egypt by extending German East Africa (Tanganyika) west to the Belgium Congo. By the same agreement Germany abandoned Nyasaland, Uganda, and Zanzibar to Britain in return for the island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea and an advantageous boundary in German Southwest Africa.
As soon as the German agreement was published, Lugard was sent by the British East Africa Company to overcome the resistance of native chiefs and slavers in Uganda (1890-1894). The bankruptcy of this company in 1895 seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of Uganda because of the Little Englander sentiment in the Liberal Party (which was in office in 1892-1895). Rhodes offered to take the area over himself and run it for £25,000 a year, but was refused. As a result of complex and secret negotiations in which Lord Rosebery was the chief figure, Britain kept Uganda, Rhodes was made a privy councilor, Rosebery replaced his father-in-law, Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes's secret group and was made a Trustee under Rhodes's next (and last) will. Rosebery tried to obtain a route for Rhodes's railway to the north across the Belgian Congo; Rosebery was informed of Rhodes's plans to finance an uprising of the English within the Transvaal (Boer) Republic and to send Dr. Jameson on a raid into that country "to restore order"; and, finally, Rhodes found the money to finance Kitchener's railway from Egypt to Uganda, using the South African gauge and engines given by Rhodes.
The economic strength which allowed Rhodes to do these things rested in his diamond and gold mines, the latter in the Transvaal, and thus not in British territory. North of Cape Colony, across the Orange River, was a Boer republic, the Orange Free State. Beyond this, and separated by the Vaal River, was another Boer republic, the Transvaal. Beyond this, across the Limpopo River and continuing northward to the Zambezi River, was the savage native kingdom of the Matabeles. With great personal daring, unscrupulous opportunism, and extravagant expenditure of money, Rhodes obtained an opening to the north, passing west of the Boer republics, by getting British control in Griqualand West (1880), Bechuanaland, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885). In 1888 Rhodes obtained a vague but extensive mining concession from the Matabeles' chief, Lobengula, and gave it to the British South Africa Company organized for the purpose (1889). Rhodes obtained a charter so worded that the company had very extensive powers in an area without any northern limits beyond Bechuanaland Protectorate. Four years later the Matabeles were attacked and destroyed by Dr. Jameson, and their lands taken by the company. The company, however, was not a commercial success, and paid no dividends for thirty-five years (1889-1924) and only 12.5 shillings in forty-six years. This compares with 793.5 percent dividends paid by Rhodes's Consolidated Gold Fields in the five years 1889-1894 and the 125 percent dividend it paid in 1896. Most of the South Africa Company's money was used on public improvements like roads and schools, and no rich mines were found in its territory (known as Rhodesia) compared to those farther south in the Transvaal.
In spite of the terms of the Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a political democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives, or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage and even to a non-secret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for the future of the empire he loved.
South Africa, 1895-1933
By 1895 the Transvaal Republic presented an acute problem. All political control was in the hands of a rural, backward, Bible-reading, racist minority of Boers, while all economic wealth was in the hands of a violent, aggressive majority of foreigners (Uitlanders), most of whom lived in the new city of Johannesburg. The Uitlanders, who were twice as numerous as the Boers and owned two-thirds of the land and nine-tenths of the wealth of the country, were prevented from participating in political life or from becoming citizens (except after fourteen years' residence) and were irritated by a series of minor pinpricks and extortions such as tax differentials, a dynamite monopoly, and transportation restrictions) and by rumors that the Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, was intriguing to obtain some kind of German intervention and protection. At this point in 1895, Rhodes made his plans to overthrow Kruger's government by an uprising in Johannesburg, financed by himself and Beit, and led by his brother Frank Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and other supporters, followed by an invasion of the Transvaal by a force led by Jameson from Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Flora Shaw used The Times to prepare public opinion in England, while Albert Grey and others negotiated with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the official support that was necessary. Unfortunately, when the revolt fizzled out in Johannesburg, Jameson raided anyway in an effort to revive it, and was easily captured by the Boers. The public officials involved denounced the plot, loudly proclaimed their surprise at the event, and were able to whitewash most of the participants in the subsequent parliamentary inquiry. A telegram from the German Kaiser to President Kruger of the Transvaal, congratulating him on his success "in preserving the independence of his country without the need to call for aid from his friends," was built up by The Times into an example of brazen German interference in British affairs, and almost eclipsed Jameson's aggression.
Rhodes was stopped only temporarily, but he had lost the support of many of the Boers. For almost two years he and his friends stayed quiet, waiting for the storm to blow over. Then they began to act again. Propaganda, most of it true, about the plight of Uitlanders in the Transvaal Republic flooded England and South Africa from Flora Shaw, W. T. Stead, Edmund Garrett, and others; Milner was made high commissioner of South Africa (1897); Brett worked his way into the confidence of the monarchy to become its chief political adviser during a period of more than twenty-five years (he wrote almost daily letters of advice to King Edward during his reign, 1901-1910). By a process whose details are still obscure, a brilliant, young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950, went to the Transvaal and, by violent anti-British agitation, became state secretary of that country (although a British subject) and chief political adviser to President Kruger; Milner made provocative troop movements on the Boer frontiers in spite of the vigorous protests of his commanding general in South Africa, who had to be removed; and, finally, war was precipitated when Smuts drew up an ultimatum insisting that the British troop movements cease and when this was rejected by Milner.
The Boer War (1899-1902) was one of the most important events in British imperial history. The ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British for three years, inflicting a series of defeats on them over that period, destroyed faith in British power. Although the Boer republics were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain's confidence was so shaken that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East the other signer would come to the rescue. This treaty, which allowed Japan to attack Russia in 1904, lasted for twenty years, being extended to the Middle East in 1912. At the same time Germany's obvious sympathy with the Boers, combined with the German naval construction program of 1900, alienated the British people from the Germans and contributed greatly toward the Anglo-French entente of 1904.
Milner took over the two defeated Boer republics and administered them as occupied territory until 1905, using a civil service of young men recruited for the purpose. This group, known as "Milner's Kindergarten," reorganized the government and administration of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and played a major role in South African life generally. When Milner left public life in 1905 to devote himself to international finance and the Rhodes enterprises, Lord Selborne, his successor as high commissioner, took over the Kindergarten and continued to use it. In 1906 a new Liberal government in London granted self-government to the two Boer states. The Kindergarten spent the next four years in a successful effort to create a South African Federation. The task was not an easy one, even with such powerful backing as Selborne, Smuts (who was now the dominant political figure in the Transvaal, although Botha held the position of prime minister), and Jameson (who was the prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1904-1908). The subject was broached through a prearranged public interchange of letters between Jameson and Selborne. Then Selborne published a memorandum, written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, calling for a union of the four colonies. Kerr founded a periodical (The State, financed by Sir Abe Bailey) which advocated federation in every issue; Curtis and others scurried about organizing "Closer Union" societies; Robert H. (Lord) Brand and (Sir) Patrick Duncan laid the groundwork for the new constitution. At the Durban constitutional convention (where Duncan and B. K. Long were legal advisers) the Transvaal delegation was controlled by Smuts and the Kindergarten. This delegation, which was heavily financed, tightly organized, and knew exactly what it wanted, dominated the convention, wrote the constitution for the Union of South Africa, and succeeded in having it ratified (1910). Local animosities were compromised in a series of ingenious arrangements, including one by which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the new government were placed in three different cities. The Rhodes-Milner group recognized that Boer nationalism and color intolerance were threats to the future stability and loyalty of South Africa, but they had faith in the political influence of Smuts and Botha, of Rhodes's allies, and of the four members of the Kindergarten who stayed in South Africa to hold off these problems until time could moderate the irreconcilable Boers. In this they were mistaken, because, as men like Jameson (1917), Botha (1919), Duncan (1943), Long (1943), and Smuts (1950) died off, they were not replaced by men of equal loyalty and ability, with the result that the Boer extremists under D. F. Malan came to power in 1948.
The first Cabinet of the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by the South African Party, which was largely Boer, with Louis Botha as prime minister. The real master of the government was Smuts, who held three out of nine portfolios, all important ones, and completely dominated Botha. Their policy of reconciliation with the English and of loyal support for the British connection was violently opposed by the Boer Nationalists within the party led by J. B. M. Hertzog. Hertzog was eager to get independence from Britain and to reserve political control in a South African republic to Boers only. He obtained growing support by agitating on the language and educational issues, insisting that all government officials must speak Afrikaans and that it be a compulsory language in schools, with English a voluntary, second language.
The opposition party, known as Unionist, was largely English and was led by Jameson supported by Duncan, Richard Feetham, Hugh Wyndham, and Long. Financed by Milner's allies and the Rhodes Trust, its leaders considered that their chief task was "to support the prime minister against the extremists of his own party." Long, as the best speaker, was ordered to attack Hertzog constantly. When Hertzog struck back with too violent language in 1912, he was dropped from the Cabinet and soon seceded from the South African Party, joining with the irreconcilable Boer republicans like Christiaan De Wet to form the Nationalist Party. The new party adopted an extremist anti-English and anti-native platform.
Jameson's party, under his successor, Sir Thomas Smartt (a paid agent of the Rhodes organization), had dissident elements because of the growth of white labor unions which insisted on anti-native legislation. By 1914 these formed a separate Labour Party under F. H. P. Creswell, and were able to win from Smuts a law excluding natives from most semiskilled or skilled work or any high-paving positions (1911). The natives were compelled to work for wages, however low, by the need to obtain cash for taxes and by the inadequacy of the native reserves to support them from their own agricultural activities. By the Land Act of 1913 about 7 percent of the land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the other 93 percent for purchase by whites. At that time the native population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.
As a result of such discriminations, the wages of natives were about one-tenth those of whites. This discrepancy in remuneration permitted white workers to earn salaries comparable to those earned in North America, although national income was low and productivity per capita was very low (about $125 per year).
The Botha-Smuts government of 1910-1924 did little to cope with the almost insoluble problems which faced South Africa. As it became weaker, and the Hertzog Nationalists grew stronger, it had to rely with increasing frequency on the support of the Unionist party. In 1920 a coalition was formed, and three members of the Unionist party, including Duncan, took seats in Smuts's Cabinet. In the next election in 1924 Cresswell's Labourites and Hertzog's Nationalists formed an agreement which dropped the republican-imperial issue and emphasized the importance of economic and native questions. This alliance defeated Smuts's party and formed a Cabinet which held office for nine years. It was replaced in March 1933 by a Smuts-Hertzog coalition formed to deal with the economic crisis arising from the world depression of 1929-1935.
The defeat of the Smuts group in 1924 resulted from four factors, besides his own imperious personality. These were (1 ) his violence toward labor unions and strikers; (2) his strong support for the imperial connection, especially during the war of 1914-1918; (3) his refusal to show any enthusiasm for an anti-native program, and (4) the economic hardships of the postwar depression and the droughts of 1919-1923. A miners' strike in 1913 was followed by a general strike in 1914; in both, Smuts used martial law and machine-gun bullets against the strikers and in the latter case illegally deported nine union leaders to England. This problem had hardly subsided before the government entered the war against Germany and actively participated in the conquest of German Africa as well as in the fighting in France. Opposition from Boer extremists to this evidence of the English connection was so violent that it resulted in open revolt against the government and mutiny by various military contingents which sought to join the small German forces in Southwest Africa. The rebels were crushed, and thousands of their supporters lost their political rights for ten years.
Botha and, even more, Smuts played major roles in the Imperial War Cabinet in London and at the Peace Conference of 1919. The former died as soon as he returned home, leaving Smuts, as prime minister, to face the acute postwar problems. The economic collapse of 1920-1923 was especially heavy in South Africa as the ostrich feather and diamond markets were wiped out, the gold and export markets were badly injured, and years of drought were prevalent. Efforts to reduce costs in the mines by increased use of native labor led to strikes and eventually to a revolution on the Rand (1922). Over 200 rebels were killed. As a result, the popularity of Smuts in his own country reached a low ebb just at the time when he was being praised almost daily in England as one of the world's greatest men.
These political shifts in South Africa's domestic affairs did little to relieve any of the acute economic and social problems which faced that country. On the contrary these grew worse year by year. In 1921 the Union had only 1.5 million whites, 4.7 million natives, 545 thousand mulattoes ("coloured"), and 166 thousand Indians. By 1936 the whites had increased by only half a million, while the number of natives had gone up almost two million. These natives lived on inadequate and eroded reserves or in horrible urban slums, and were drastically restricted in movements, residence, or economic opportunities, and had almost no political or even civil rights. By 1950 most of the native workers of Johannesburg lived in a distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily "detribalized," abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs (including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the whites. Indeed, they were generally excluded from this because of the obstacles placed in their path to education or property ownership. The result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and reproduction.
Almost half of the whites and many of the blacks were farmers, but agricultural practices were so deplorable that water shortages and erosion grew with frightening rapidity, and rivers which had flowed steadily in 1880 largely disappeared by 1950. As lands became too dry to farm, they were turned to grazing, especially under the spur of high wool prices during the two great wars, but the soil continued to drift away as dust.
Because of low standards of living for the blacks, there was little domestic market either for farm products or for industrial goods. As a result, most products of both black and white labor were exported, the receipts being used to pay for goods which were locally unavailable or for luxuries for whites. But most of the export trade was precarious. The gold mines and diamond mines had to dig so deeply (below 7,000-foot levels) that costs arose sharply, while the demand for both products fluctuated widely, since neither was a necessity of life. Nonetheless, each year over half of the Union's annual production of all goods was exported, with about one-third of the total represented by gold.
The basic problem was lack of labor, not so much the lack of hands but the low level of productivity of those hands. This in turn resulted from lack of capitalization and from the color bar which refused to allow native labor to become skilled. Moreover, the cheapness of unskilled labor, especially on the farms, meant that most work was left to blacks, and many whites fell into lazy habits. Unskilled whites, unwilling and unable to compete as labor with the blacks, became indolent "poor whites." Milner's Kindergarten had, at the end of the Boer War, the sum of £3 million provided by the peace treaty to be used to restore Boer families from concentration camps to their farms. They were shocked to discover that one-tenth of the Boers were "poor whites," had no land and wanted none. The Kindergarten decided that this sad condition resulted from the competition of cheap black labor, a conclusion which was incorporated into the report of a commission established by Selborne to study the problem.
This famous Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, published in 1908, was written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and republished by the Union government twenty years later. About the same time, the group became convinced that black labor not only demoralized white labor and prevented it from acquiring the physical skills necessary for self-reliance and high personal morale but that blacks were capable of learning such skills as well as whites were. As Curtis expressed it in 1952: "I came to see how the colour bar reacted on Whites and Blacks. Exempt from drudgery by custom and law, Whites acquire no skill in crafts, because the school of skill is drudgery. The Blacks, by doing drudgery, acquire skill. All skilled work in mines such as rock-drilling was done by miners imported from Cornwall who worked subject to the colour bar. The heavy drills were fixed and driven under their direction by Natives. These Cornish miners earned £1 a day, the Natives about 2s. The Cornish miners struck for higher pay, but the Blacks, who in doing the drudgery had learned how to work the drills, kept the mines running at a lower cost."
Accordingly, the Milner-Round Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international state or administrative body "would take over the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa.... Its policy would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the salvation of the Whites." Although this project has not been achieved, it provides the key to Britain's native and central-African policies from 1917 onward. For example, in 1937-1939 Britain made many vain efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany's colonial claims under which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be allowed to participate as a member of an international administration of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in which native rights would be paramount.
The British tradition of fair conduct toward natives and nonwhites generally was found most frequently among the best educated of the English upper class and among those lower-class groups, such as missionaries, where religious influences were strongest. This tradition was greatly strengthened by the actions of the Rhodes-Milner group, especially after 1920. Rhodes aroused considerable ill-feeling among the whites of South Africa when he announced that his program included "equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi," and went on to indicate that "civilized men" included ambitious, literate Negroes. When Milner took over the Boer states in 1901, he tried to follow the same policy. The peace treaty of 1902 promised that the native franchise would not be forced on the defeated Boers, but Milner tried to organize the governments of municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could vote. This was blocked by the Kindergarten (led by Curtis who was in charge of municipal reorganization in 1901-1906) because they considered reconciliation with the Boers as a preliminary to a South African Union to be more urgent. Similarly, Smuts as the chief political figure in South Africa after 1910 had to play down native rights in order to win Boer and English labor support for the rest of his program.
The Rhodes-Milner group, however, was in a better position to carry out its plans in the non-self-governing portions of Africa outside the Union. In South Africa the three native protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland were retained by the imperial authorities as areas where native rights were paramount and where tribal forms of living could be maintained at least partially. However, certain tribal customs, such as those which required a youth to prove his manhood by undergoing inhuman suffering or engaging in warfare or cattle stealing before he could marry or become a full-fledged member of the tribe, had to be curtailed. They were replaced in the twentieth century by the custom of taking work in the mines of South Africa as contract laborers for a period of years. Such labor was as onerous and killing as tribal warfare had been earlier because deaths from disease and accident were very high. But, by undergoing this test for about five years, the survivors obtained sufficient savings to allow them to return to their tribes and buy sufficient cattle and wives to support them as full members of the tribe for the rest of their days. Unfortunately, this procedure did not result in good agricultural practices but rather in overgrazing, growing drought and erosion, and great population pressure in the native reserves. It also left the mines without any assured labor supply so that it became necessary to recruit contract labor farther and farther north. Efforts by the Union government to set northern limits beyond which labor recruiting was forbidden led to controversy with employers, frequent changes in regulations, and widespread evasions. As a consequence of an agreement made by Milner with Portuguese authorities, about a quarter of the natives working in South African mines came from Portuguese East Africa even as late as 1936.
Making the Commonwealth, 1910-1926
As soon as South Africa was united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to
try to federate the whole empire by the same methods. They were in a hurry to achieve
this before the war with Germany which they believed to be approaching. With Abe
Bailey money they founded The Round Table under Kerr's (Lothian's) editorship, met in
formal conclaves presided over by Milner to decide the fate of the empire, and recruited
new members to their group, chiefly from New College, of which Milner was a fellow.
The new recruits included a historian, F. S. Oliver, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern, (Sir) Reginald
Coupland, Lord Lovat, and Waldorf (Lord) Astor. Curtis and others were sent around the
world to organize Round Table groups in the chief British dependencies. For several years (1910 1916) the Round Table groups worked desperately trying to find an acceptable formula for federating the empire. Three books and many articles emerged from these discussions, but gradually it became clear that federation was not acceptable to the English-speaking dependencies. Gradually, it was decided to dissolve all formal bonds between these dependencies, except, perhaps, allegiance to the Crow-n, and depend on the common outlook of Englishmen to keep the empire together. This involved changing the name "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations," as in the title of Curtis's book of 1916, giving the chief dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence (but gradually- and by free gift rather than under duress), working to bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.
Efforts to bring the dependencies into a closer relationship with the mother country were by no means new in 1910, nor were they supported only by the Rhodes-Milner group. Nevertheless, the actions of this group were all-pervasive. The poor military performance of British forces during the Boer War led to the creation of a commission to investigate the South African War, with Lord Esher (Brett) as chairman (1903). Among other items, this commission recommended creation of a permanent Committee of Imperial Defence. Esher became (unofficial) chairman of this committee, holding the position for the rest of his life (1905-1930). He was able to establish an Imperial General Staff in 1907 and to get a complete reorganization of the military forces of New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa so that they could be incorporated into the imperial forces in an emergency (1909- 1912). On the committee itself he created an able secretariat which cooperated loyally with the Rhodes-Milner group thereafter. These men included (Sir) Maurice (later Lord) Hankey and (Sir) Ernest Swinton (who invented the tank in 1915). When, in 1916-1917, Milner and Esher persuaded the Cabinet to create a secretariat for the first time, the task was largely given to this secretariat from the Committee on Imperial Defence. Thus Hankey was secretary to the committee for thirty years (1908- 1938), to the Cabinet for twenty-two years (1916-1938), clerk to the Privy Council for fifteen years (1923-1938), secretary-general of the five imperial conferences held between 1921 and 1937, secretary to the British delegation to almost every important international conference held between the Versailles Conference of 1919 and the Lausanne Conference of 1932, and one of the leading advisers to the Conservative governments after 1939.
Until 1907 the overseas portions of the Empire (except India) communicated with the imperial government through the secretary of state for colonies. To supplement this relationship, conferences of the prime ministers of the self-governing colonies were held in London to discuss common problems in 1887, 1897, 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, and 1918. In 1907 it was decided to hold such conferences every four years, to call the selfgoverning colonies "Dominions," and to by-pass the Colonial Secretary by establishing a new Dominion Department. Ruskin's influence, among others, could be seen in the emphasis of the Imperial Conference of 1911 that the Empire rested on a triple foundation of (1) rule of law, (2) local autonomy, and (3) trusteeship of the interests and fortunes of those fellow subjects who had not yet attained self -government.
The Conference of 1915 could not be held because of the war, but as soon as Milner became one of the four members of the War Cabinet in 1915 his influence began to be felt everywhere. We have mentioned that he established a Cabinet secretariat in 1916- 1917 consisting of two proteges of Esher (Hankey and Swinton) and two of his own (his secretaries, Leopold Amery and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech). At the same time he gave the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, a secretariat from the Round Table, consisting of Kerr (Lothian), Grigg (Lord Altrincham), W. G. S. Adams (Fellow of All Souls College), and Astor. He created an Imperial War Cabinet by adding Dominion Prime Ministers (particularly Smuts) to the United Kingdom War Cabinet. He also called the Imperial Conferences of 1917 and 1918 and invited the dominions to establish Resident Ministers in London. A' the war drew to a close in 1918, Milner took the office of Colonia] Secretary, with Amery as his assistant, negotiated an agreement providing independence for Egypt, set up a new self-government constitution in Malta, sent Curtis to India (where he drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919), appointed Curtis to the post of Adviser on Irish Affairs (where he played an important role in granting dominion status to southern Ireland in 1921), gave Canada permission to establish separate diplomatic relations with the United States (the first minister being the son-in-law of Milner's closest collaborator on the Rhodes Trust), and called the Imperial Conference of 1921.
During this decade 1919-1929 the Rhodes-Milner group gave the chief impetus toward transforming the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations and launching India on the road to responsible self-government. The creation of the Round Table groups by Milner's Kindergarten in 1909-1913 opened a new day in both these fields, although the whole group was so secretive that, even today, many close students of the subject are not aware of its significance. These men had formed their intellectual growth at Oxford on Pericle's funeral oration as described in a book by a member of the group, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth (1911), on Edmund Burke's On Conciliation with America, on Sir J. B. Seeley's Growth of British Policy, on A. V. Dicey's The Law and Custom of the Constitution, and on The New Testament's "Sermon on the Mount." The last was especially influential on Lionel Curtis. He had a fanatical conviction that with the proper spirit and the proper organization (local self-government and federalism), the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. He was sure that if people were trusted just a bit beyond what they deserve they would respond by proving worthy of such trust. As he wrote in The Problem of a Commonwealth (1916), "if political power is granted to groups before they are fit they will tend to rise to the need." This was the spirit which Milner's group tried to use toward the Boers in 1902-1910, toward India in 1910 1947, and, unfortunately, toward Hitler in 1933-1939. This point of view was reflected in Curtis's three volumes on world history, published as Civitas Dei in 1938. In the case of Hitler, at least, these high ideals led to disaster; this seems also to be the case in South Africa; whether this group succeeded in transforming the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations or merely succeeded in destroying the British Empire is not yet clear, but one seems as likely as the other.
That these ideas were not solely those of Curtis but were held by the group as a whole will be clear to all who study it. When Lord Lothian died in Washington in 1940, Curtis published a volume of his speeches and included the obituary which Grigg had written for The Round Table. Of Lothian this said, "He held that men should strive to build the Kingdom of Heaven here upon this earth, and that the leadership in that task must fall first and foremost upon the English-speaking peoples." Other attitudes of this influential group can be gathered from some quotations from four books published by Curtis in 1916-1920: "The rule of law as contrasted with the rule of an individual is the distinguishing mark of the Commonwealth. In despotisms government rests on the authority of the ruler or of the invisible and uncontrollable power behind him. In a commonwealth rulers derive their authority from the law, and the law from a public opinion which is competent to change it . . . The idea that the principle of the Commonwealth implies universal suffrage betrays an ignorance of its real nature. That principle simply means that government rests on the duty of the citizens to each other, and is to be vested in those who are capable of setting public interests before their own.... The task of preparing for freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those who can. It is the spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except as a means to it.... The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled in the management of their national affairs.... The whole effect of the war [of 1914-1918] has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden head.... Companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smouldering resentment against the presumption that Europeans are destined to dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into flames. . . . Personally I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome, especially to ourselves.... The world is in the throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown the merely national state and, as surely as day follows night or night the day, will pass either to a Commonwealth of Nations or else to an empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies rests with us."
In this spirit the Rhodes-Milner group tried to draw plans for a federation of the British Empire in 1909-1916. Gradually this project was replaced or postponed in favor of the commonwealth project of free cooperation. Milner seems to have accepted the lesser aim after a meeting, sponsored by the Empire Parliamentary Association, on July 28, 1916, at which he outlined the project for federation with many references to the writings of Curtis, but found that not one Dominion member present would accept it. At the Imperial Conference of 1917, under his guidance, it was resolved that "any readjustment of constitutional relations . . . should be based on a full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth and of India as an important portion of the same, should recognize the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern." Another resolution called for full representation for India in future Imperial Conferences. This was done in 1918. At this second wartime Imperial Conference it was resolved that Prime Ministers of Dominions could communicate directly with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that each dominion (and India) could establish Resident Ministers in London who would have seats on the Imperial War Cabinet. Milner was the chief motivating force in these developments. He hoped that the Imperial War Cabinet would continue to meet annually after the war but this did not occur.
During these years 1917-1918, a declaration was drawn up establishing complete independence for the dominions except for allegiance to the crown. This was not issued until 1926. Instead, on July 9, 1919 Milner issued an official statement which said, "The United Kingdom and the Dominions are partner nations; not yet indeed of equal power, but for good and all of equal status.... The only possibility of a continuance of the British Empire is on a basis of absolute out-and-out equal partnership between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation whatsoever." This point of view was restated in the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1926 and was enacted into law as the Statute of Westminster in 1931. B. K. Long of the South African Round Table group (who was Colonial Editor of The Times in 1913-1921 and Editor of Rhodes's paper, The Cape Times, in South Africa in 1922-1935) tells us that the provisions of the declaration of 1926 were agreed on in 1917 during the Imperial Conference convoked by Milner. They were formulated by John W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press for 43 years and the most influential journalist in Canada for much of that period. Dafoe persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, to accept his ideas and then brought in Long and Dawson (Editor of The Times). Dawson negotiated the agreement with Milner, Smuts, and others. Although Australia and New Zealand were far from satisfied, the influence of Canada and of South Africa carried the agreement. Nine years later it was issued under Balfour's name at a conference convoked by Amery.
East Africa, 1910-1931
In the dependent empire, especially in tropical Africa north of the Zambezi River, the
Rhodes-Milner group was unable to achieve most of its desires, but was able to win wide
publicity for them, especially for its views on native questions. It dominated the Colonial
Office in London, at least for the decade 1919-1929. There Milner was secretary of state
in 1919-1921 and Amery in 1924-1929, while the post of parliamentary under-secretary
was held by three members of the group for most of the decade. Publicity for their views
on civilizing the natives and training them for eventual self-government received wide
dissemination, not only by official sources but also by the academic, scholarly, and
journalistic organizations they dominated. As examples of this we might mention the
writings of Coupland, Hailey, Curtis, Grigg, Amery, and Lothian, all Round Tablers. In
1938 Lord Hailey edited a gigantic volume of 1,837 pages called An Africa Survey. This
work was first suggested by Smuts at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1929, had a foreword by
Lothian, and an editorial board of Lothian, Hailey, Coupland, Curtis, and others. It
remains the greatest single book on modern Africa. These people, and others, through
The Times, The Round Table, The Observer, Chatham House, and other conduits,
became the chief source of ideas on colonial problems in the English-speaking world.
Nevertheless, they were unable to achieve their program.In the course of the 1920's the Round Table program for East Africa was paralyzed by a debate on the priority which should be given to the three aspects of group’s project for a Negro Dominion north of the Zambezi. The three parts were (1) native rights, (2) “Closer Union,” and (3) international trusteeship. Generally, the group gave priority to Closer Union (federation of Kenya with Uganda and Tanganyika), but the ambiguity of their ideas on native rights made it possible for Dr. Joseph H. Oldham, spokesman for the organized Nonconformist missionary groups, to organize a successful opposition movement to federation of East Africa. In this effort Oldham found a powerful ally in Lord Lugard, and considerable support from other informed persons, including Margery Perham.
The Round Tablers, who had no firsthand knowledge of native life or even of tropical Africa, were devoted supporters of the English way of life, and could see no greater benefit conferred on natives than to help them to move in that direction. This, however, would inevitably destroy the tribal organization of life, as well as the native systems of land tenure, which were generally based on tribal holding of land. The white settlers were eager to see these things disappear, since they generally wished to bring the native labor force and African lands into the commercial market. Oldham and Lugard opposed this, since they felt it would lead to white ownership of large tracts of land on which detribalized and demoralized natives would subsist as wage slaves. Moreover, to Lugard, economy in colonial administration required that natives be governed under his system of "indirect rule" through tribal chiefs. Closer Union became a controversial target in this dispute because it involved a gradual increase in local self-government which would lead to a greater degree of white settler rule.
The opposition to Closer Union in East Africa was successful in holding up this project in spite of the Round Table domination of the Colonial Office, chiefly because of Prime Minister Baldwin's refusal to move quickly. This delayed change until the Labour government took over in 1929; in this the pro-native, nonconformist (especially Quaker) influence was stronger.
The trusteeship issue came into this controversy because Britain was bound, as a mandate Power, to maintain native rights in Tanganyika to the satisfaction of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. This placed a major obstacle in the path of Round Table efforts to join Tanganyika with Kenya and Uganda into a Negro Dominion which would be under quite a different kind of trusteeship of the African colonial Powers. Father south, in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, the Round Table obsession with federation did not meet this obstacle, and that area was eventually federated, over native protests, in 1953, but this creation, the Central African Federation, broke up again in 1964. Strangely enough, the League of Nations Mandate System which became such an obstacle to the Round Table plans was largely a creation of the Round Table itself.
The Milner Group used the defeat of Germany in 1918 as an opportunity to impose an international obligation on certain Powers to treat the natives fairly in the regions taken from Germany. This opportunity was of great significance because just at that time the earlier impetus in this direction arising from missionaries was beginning to weaken as a consequence of the general weakening of religious feeling in European culture.[so we are witness to a falling away,underway now for over 100 years.DC]
The chief problem in East Africa arose from the position of the white settlers of Kenya. Although this colony rests directly on the equator, its interior highlands, 4,000 to 10,000 feet up, were well adapted to white settlement and to European agricultural methods. The situation was dangerous by 1920, and grew steadily worse as the years passed, until by 1950 Kenya had the most critical native problem in Africa. It differed from South Africa in that it lacked self-government, rich mines, or a divided white population, but it had many common problems, such as overcrowded native reserves, soil erosion, and discontented and detribalized blacks working for low wages on lands owned by whites. It had about two million blacks and only 3,000 whites in 1910. Forty years later it had about 4 million blacks, 100,000 Indians, 24,000 Arabs, and only 30,000 whites (of which 40 percent were government employees). But what the whites lacked in numbers they made up in determination. The healthful highlands were reserved for white ownership as early as 1908, although they were not delimited and guaranteed until 1939. They were organized as very large, mostly undeveloped, farms of which there were only 2,000 covering 10,000 square miles in 1940. Many of these farms were of more than 30,000 acres and had been obtained from the government, either by purchase or on very long (999-year) leases for only nominal costs (rents about two cents per year per acre). The native reserves amounted to about 50,000 square miles of generally poorer land, or five times as much land for the blacks, although they had at least 150 times as many people. The Indians, chiefly in commerce and crafts, were so industrious that they gradually came to own most of the commercial areas both in the towns and in the native reserves.
The two great subjects of controversy in Kenya were concerned with the supply of labor and the problem of self-government, although less agitated problems, like agricultural technology, sanitation, and education were of vital significance. The whites tried to increase the pressure on natives to work on white farms rather than to seek to make a living on their own lands within the reserves, by forcing them to pay taxes in cash, by curtailing the size or quality of the reserves, by restricting improvements in native agricultural techniques, and by personal and political pressure and compulsion. The effort to use political compulsion reached a peak in 1919 and was stopped by Milner, although his group, like Rhodes in South Africa, was eager to make natives more industrious and more ambitious by any kinds of social, educational, or economic pressures. The settlers encouraged natives to live off the reserves in various ways: for example, hy permitting them to settle as squatters on white estates in return for at least 180 days of work a year at the usual low wage rates. To help both back and white farmers, not only in Kenya but throughout the world, Milner created, as a research organization, an Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture at Trinidad in 1919.
As a consequence of various pressures which we have mentioned, notably the need to pay taxes which averaged, perhaps, one month's wages a year and, in the aggregate, took from the natives a larger sum than that realized from the sale of native products, the percentage of adult males working off the reservations increased from about 35 percent in 1925 to over 80 percent in 1940. This had very deleterious effects on tribal life, family life, native morality, and family discipline, although it seems to have had beneficial effects on native health and general education.
The real crux of controversy before the Mau Mau uprising of 1948-1955 was the problem of self-government. Pointing to South Africa, the settlers in Kenya demanded self-rule which would allow them to enforce restrictions on nonwhites. A local colonial government was organized under the Colonial Office in 1906; as was usual in such cases it consisted of an appointive governor assisted by an appointed Executive Council and advised by a legislative Council. The latter had, also as usual, a majority of officials and a minority of "unofficial" outsiders. Only in 1922 did the unofficial portion become elective, and only in 1949 did it become a majority of the whole body. The efforts to establish an elective element in the Legislative Council in 1919-1923 resulted in violent controversy. The draft drawn by the council itself provided for only European members elected by a European electorate. Milner added two Indian members elected by a separate Indian electorate. In the resulting controversy the settlers sought to obtain their original plan, while London sought a single electoral roll restricted in size by educational and property qualifications but without mention of race. To resist this, the settlers organized a Vigilance Committee and planned to seize the colony, abduct the governor, and form a republic federated in some way with South Africa. From this controversy came eventually a compromise, the famous Kenya White Paper of 1923, and the appointment of Sir Edward Grigg as governor for the period of 1925-1931. The compromise gave Kenya a Legislative Council containing representatives of the imperial government, the white settlers, the Indians, the Arabs, and a white missionary to represent the blacks. Except for the settlers and Indians, most of these were nominated rather than elected, but by 1949, as the membership was enlarged, election was extended, and only the official and Negro members (4 out of 41) were nominated.
The Kenya White Paper of 1923 arose from a specific problem in a single colony, but remained the formal statement of imperial policy in tropical Africa. It said: "Primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.... In the administration of Kenya His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races."
As a result of these troubles in Kenya and the continued encroachment of white settlers on native reserves, Amery sent one of the most important members of Milner's group to the colony as governor and commander in chief. This was Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), who had been a member of Milner's Kindergarten, an editor of The Round Table and of The Times (1903-1905, 1908-1913), a secretary to Lloyd George and to the Rhodes Trustees (1923-1925), and a prolific writer on British imperial, colonial, and foreign affairs. In Kenya he tried to protect native reserves while still forcing natives to develop habits of industry by steady work, to shift white attention from political to technical problems such as agriculture, and to work toward a consolidation of tropical Africa into a single territorial unit. He forced through the Colonial Legislature in 1930 the Native Land Trust Ordinance which guaranteed native reserves. But these reserves remained inadequate and were increasingly damaged by bad agricultural practices. Only in 1925 did any sustained effort to improve such practices by natives begin. About the same time efforts were made to extend the use of native courts, native advisory councils, and to train natives for an administrative service. All of these met slow, varied, and (on the whole) indifferent success, chiefly because of natives' reluctance to cooperate and the natives' growing suspicion of white men's motives even when these whites were most eager to help. The chief cause of this growing suspicion (which in some cases reached a psychotic level) would seem to be the native's insatiable hunger for religion and his conviction that the whites were hypocrites who taught a religion that they did not obey, were traitors to Christ's teachings, and were using these to control the natives and to betray their interests, under cover of religious ideas which the whites themselves did not observe in practice.[and their observation was spot on DC]
India to 1926
In the decade 1910-1920, the two greatest problems to be faced in creating a
Commonwealth of Nations were India and Ireland. There can be no doubt that India
provided a puzzle infinitely more complex, as it was more remote and less clearly
envisioned, than Ireland. When the British East India Company became the dominant
power in India about the middle of the eighteenth century, the Mogul Empire was in the
last stages of disintegration. Provincial rulers had only nominal titles, sufficient to bring
them immense treasure in taxes and rents, but they generally lacked either the will or the
strength to maintain order. The more vigorous tried to expand their domains at the
expense of the more feeble, oppressing the peace-loving peasantry in the process, while
all legal power was challenged by roaming upstart bands and plundering tribes. Of these
willful tribes, the most important were the Marathas. These systematically devastated
much of south-central India in the last half of the eighteenth century, forcing each village
to buy temporary immunity from destruction, but steadily reducing the capacity of the
countryside to meet their demands because of the trail of death and economic
disorganization they left in their wake. By 1900 only one-fifth of the land in some areas
was cultivated. Although the East India Company was a commercial firm, primarily interested in profits, and thus reluctant to assume a political role in this chaotic countryside, it had to intervene again and again to restore order, replacing one nominal ruler by another and even taking over the government of those areas where it was more immediately concerned. In addition the cupidity of many of its employees led them to intervene as political powers in order to divert to their own pockets some of the fabulous wealth which they saw flowing by. For these two reasons the areas under company rule, although not contiguous, expanded steadily until by 1858 they covered three-fifths of the country. Outside the British areas were over five hundred princely domains, some no larger than a single village but others as extensive as some states of Europe. At this point, in 1857-1858, a sudden, violent insurrection of native forces, known as the Great Mutiny, resulted in the end of the Mogul Empire and of the East India Company, the British government taking over their political activities. From this flowed a number of important consequences. Annexation of native principalities ceased, leaving 562 outside British India, but under British protection and subject to British intervention to ensure good government; within British India itself, good government became increasingly dominant and commercial profit decreasingly so for the whole period 1858-1947; British political prestige rose to new heights from 1858 to 1890 and then began to dwindle, failing precipitously in 1919-1922.
The task of good government in India was not an easy one. In this great subcontinent with a population amounting to almost one-fifth of the human race were to be found an almost unbelievable diversity of cultures, religions, languages, and attitudes. Even in 1950 modern locomotives linked together great cities with advanced industrial production by passing through jungles inhabited by tigers, elephants, and primitive pagan tribes. The population, which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in 1941 and reached 530 million in 1961, spoke more than a dozen major languages divided into hundreds of dialects, and were members of dozens of antithetical religious beliefs. There were, in 1941, 255 million Hindus, 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.7 million Sikhs, 1.5 million Jains, and almost 26 million pagan animists of various kinds. In addition, the Hindus and even some of the non-Hindus were divided into four major hereditary castes subdivided into thousands of sub-castes, plus a lowest group of outcastes ("untouchables"), amounting to at least 30 million persons in 1900 and twice this number in 1950. These thousands of groups were endogamous, practiced hereditary economic activities, frequently had distinctive marks or garb, and were usually forbidden to marry, eat or drink with, or even to associate with, persons of different caste. Untouchables were generally forbidden to come in contact, even indirectly, with members of other groups and were, accordingly, forbidden to enter many temples or public buildings, to draw water from the public wells, even to allow their shadows to fall on any person of a different group, and were subject to other restrictions, all designed to avoid a personal pollution which could be removed only by religious rituals of varying degrees of elaborateness. Most sub-castes were occupational groups covering all kinds of activities, so that there were hereditary groups of carrion collectors, thieves, high-way robbers, or murderers (thugs), as well a farmers, fishermen, storekeepers, drug mixers, or copper smelters. For most peoples of India, cast was the most important fact of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to death. As a result, India, even as late as 1900, was a society in which status was dominant, each individual having a place in a group which, in turn, had a place in society. This place, known to all and accepted by all, operated by established procedures in its relationships with other groups so that there was in spite of diversity, a minimum of intergroup friction and a certain peaceful tolerance so long as intergroup etiquette was known and accepted.
The diversity of social groups and beliefs was naturally reflected in an extraordinarily wide range of social behavior from the most degraded and bestial activities based on crude superstitions to even more astounding levels of exalted spiritual self-sacrifice and cooperation. Although the British refrained from interfering with religious practices, in the course of the nineteenth century they abolished or greatly reduced the practice of thuggism (in which a secret caste strangled strangers in honor of the goddess Kali), suttee (in which the widow of a deceased Hindu was expected to destroy herself on his funeral pyre), infanticide, temple prostitution, and child marriages. At the other extreme, most Hindus abstained from all violence; many had such a respect for life that they would eat no meat, not even eggs, while a few carried this belief so far that they would not molest a cobra about to strike, a mosquito about to sting, or even walk about at night, less they unknowingly step on an ant or worm. Hindus, who considered cows so sacred that the worse crime would be to cause the death of one (even by accident), who allowed millions of these beasts to have free run of the country to the great detriment of cleanliness or standards of living, who would not wear shoes of leather, and would rather die than taste beef, ate pork and associated daily with Muslims who ate beef but considered pigs to be polluting. In general, most Indians lived in abject poverty and want; only about one in a hundred could read in 1858, while considerably less could understand the English language. The overwhelming majority at that time were peasants, pressed down by onerous taxes and rents, isolated in small villages unconnected by roads, and decimated at irregular intervals by famine or disease.
British rule in the period 1858-1947 tied India together by railroads, roads, and telegraph lines. It brought the country into contact with the Western world, and especially with world markets, by establishing a uniform system of money, steamboat connections with Europe by the Suez Canal, cable connections throughout the world, and the use of English as the language of government and administration. Best of all, Britain established the rule of law, equality before the law, and a tradition of judicial fairness to replace the older practice of inequality and arbitrary, violence. A certain degree of efficiency, and a certain ambitious, if discontented, energy directed toward change replaced the older abject resignation to inevitable fate.
The modern postal, telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each year. The railroad grew from 200 miles in 1855 to 9,000 in 1880, to 25,000 in 1901, and to 43,000 in 1939. This, the third largest railroad system in the world, carried 600 million passengers and 60 million tons of freight a year. About the same time, the dirt tracks of 1858 had been partly replaced by over 300,000 miles of highways, of which only about a quarter could be rated as first class. From 1925 onward, these highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of the villages.
Improved communications and public order served to merge the isolated village markets, smoothing out the earlier alternations of scarcity and glut with their accompanying phenomena of waste and of starvation in the midst of plenty. All this led to a great extension of cultivation into more remote areas and the growing of a greater variety of crops. Sparsely settled areas of forests and hills, especially in Assam and the Northwest Provinces, were occupied, without the devastation of deforestation (as in China or in non-Indian Nepal) because of a highly developed forestry conservation service. Migration, permanent and seasonal, became regular features of Indian life, the earnings of the migrants being sent back to their families in the villages they had left. A magnificent system of canals, chiefly for irrigation, was constructed, populating desolate wastes, especially in the northwestern parts of the country, and encouraging whole tribes which had previously been pastoral freebooters to settle down as cultivators. By 1939 almost 60 million acres of land were irrigated. For this and other reasons, the sown area of India increased from 195 to 228 million acres in about forty years (1900-1939). Increases in yields were much less satisfactory because of reluctance to change, lack of knowledge or capital, and organizational problems.
The tax on land traditionally had been the major part of public revenue in India, and remained near so percent as late as 1900. Under the Moguls these land revenues had been collected by tax farmers. In many areas, notably Bengal, the British tended to regard these land revenues as rents rather than taxes, and thus regarded the revenue collectors as the owners of the land. Once this was established, these new landlords used their powers to raise rents, to evict cultivators who had been on the same land for years or even generations, and to create an unstable rural proletariat of tenants and laborers unable or unwilling to improve their methods. Numerous legislative enactments sought, without great success, to improve these conditions. Such efforts were counterbalanced by the growth of population, the great rise in the value of land, the inability of industry or commerce to drain surplus population from the land as fast as it increased, the tendency of the government to favor industry or commerce over agriculture by tariffs, taxation, and public expenditures, the growing frequency of famines (from droughts), of malaria (from irrigation projects), and of plague (from trade with the Far East) which wiped out in one year gains made in several years, the growing burden of peasant debt at onerous terms and at high interest rates, and the growing inability to supplement incomes from cultivation by incomes from household crafts because of the growing competition from cheap industrial goods. Although slavery was abolished in 1843, many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor.
All of these misfortunes culminated in the period 1895-1901. There had been a long period of declining prices in 1873-1896, which increased the burden on debtors and stagnated economic activities. In 1897 the monsoon rains failed, with a loss of 18 million tons of food crops and of one million lives from famine. This disaster was repeated in 1899-1900. Bubonic plague was introduced to Bombay from China in 1895 and killed about two million persons in the next six years.
From this low point in 1901, economic conditions improved fairly steadily, except for a brief period in 1919-1922 and the long burden of the world depression in 1929-1934. The rise in prices in 1900-1914 benefitted India more than others, as the prices of her exports rose more rapidly. The war of 1914-1918 gave India a great economic opportunity, especially by increasing the demand for her textiles. Tariffs were raised steadily after 1916, providing protection for industry, especially in metals, textiles, cement, and paper. The customs became the largest single source of revenue, alleviating to some extent the pressure of taxation on cultivators. However, the agrarian problem remained acute, for most of the factors listed above remained in force. In 1931 it was estimated that, in the United Provinces, 30 percent of the cultivators could not make a living from their holdings even in good years, while 52 percent could make a living in good years but not in bad ones.
There was great economic advance in mining, industry, commerce, and finance in the period after 1900. Coal output went up from 6 to 21 million tons in 1900-1924, and petroleum output (chiefly from Burma) \vent up from 37 to 294 million gallons. Production in the protected industries also improved in the same period until, by 1932, India could produce three-quarters of her cotton cloth, three-quarters of her steel, and most of her cement, matches, and sugar. In one product, jute, India became the chief source for the world's supply, and this became the leading export after 1925.
A notable feature of the growth of manufacturing in India after 1900 lies in the fact that Hindu capital largely replaced British capital, chiefly for political reasons. In spite of India's poverty, there was a considerable volume of saving, arising chiefly from the inequitable distribution of income to the landlord class and to the moneylenders (if these two groups can be separated in this way). Naturally, these groups preferred to invest their incomes back in the activities whence they had been derived, but, after 1919, nationalist agitation and especially Gandhi's influence inclined many Hindus to make contributions to their country's strength by investing in industry.
The growth of industry should not be exaggerated, and its influences were considerably less than one might believe at first glance. There was little growth of an urban proletariat or of a permanent class of factory workers, although this did exist. Increases in output came largely from power production rather than from increases in the labor force. This labor force continued to be rural in its psychological and social orientation, being generally temporary migrants from the villages, living under urban industrial conditions only for a few years, with every intention of returning to the village eventually, and generally sending savings back to their families and visiting them for weeks or even months each year (generally at the harvest season). This class of industrial laborers did not adopt either an urban or a proletarian point of view, were almost wholly illiterate, formed labor organizations only reluctantly (because of refusal to pay dues), and rarely acquired industrial skills. After 1915 labor unions did appear, but membership remained small, and they were organized and controlled by non-laboring persons, frequently middle-class intellectuals. Moreover, industry remained a widely scattered activity found in a few cities but absent from the rest. Although India had 35 cities of over 100,000 population in 1911, most of these remained commercial and administrative centers and not manufacturing centers. That the chief emphasis remained on rural activities can be seen from the fact that these 35 centers of population had a total of 8.2 million inhabitants compared to 310.7 million outside their limits in 1921. In fact, only 30 million persons lived in the 1,623 centers of over 5,000 persons each, while 289 million lived in centers smaller than 5,000 persons.
One of the chief ways in which the impact of Western culture reached India was by education. The charge has frequently been made that the British neglected education in India or that they made an error in emphasizing education in English for the upper classes rather than education in the vernacular languages for the masses of the people. History does not sustain the justice of these charges. In England itself the government assumed little responsibility for education until 1902, and in general had a more advanced policy in this field in India than in England until well into the present century. Until 1835 the English did try to encourage native traditions of education, but their vernacular schools failed from lack of patronage; the Indians themselves objected to being excluded, as they regarded it, from English education. Accordingly, from 1835 the British offered Englishlanguage education on the higher levels in the hope that Western science, technology, and political attitudes could be introduced without disrupting religious or social life and that these innovations would "infiltrate" downward into the population. Because of the expense, government-sponsored education had to be restricted to the higher levels, although encouragement for vernacular schools on the lower levels began (without much financial obligation) in 1854. The "infiltration downward" theory was quite mistaken because those who acquired knowledge of English used it as a passport to advancement in government service or professional life and became renegades from, rather than missionaries to, the lower classes of Indian society. In a sense the use of English on the university level of education did not lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two. The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by opening the door to public service or the professions created a veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).
The British had little choice but to use English as the language of government and higher education. In India the languages used in these two fields had been foreign ones for centuries. The language of government and of the courts was Persian until 1837. Advanced and middle-level education had always been foreign, in Sanskrit for the Hindus and in Arabic for the Muslims. Sanskrit, a "dead" language, was that of Hindu religious literature, while Arabic was the language of the Koran, the only writing the ordinary Muslim would wish to read. In fact, the allegiance of the Muslims to the Koran and to Arabic was so intense that they refused to participate in the new English-language educational system and, in consequence, had been excluded from government, the professions, and much of the economic life of the country by 1900.
No vernacular language could have been used to teach the really valuable contributions of the West, such as science, technology, economics, agricultural science, or political science, because the necessary vocabulary was lacking in the vernaculars. When the university of the native state of Hyderabad tried to translate Western works into Urdu for teaching purposes after 1920, it was necessary to create about 40,000 new words. Moreover, the large number of vernacular languages would have made the choice of any one of them for the purpose of higher education invidious. And, finally, the natives themselves had no desire to learn to read their vernacular languages, at least during the nineteenth century; they wanted to learn English because it provided access to knowledge, to government positions, and to social advancement as no vernacular could. But it must be remembered that it was the exceptional Indian, not the average one, who wanted to learn to read at all. The average native was content to remain illiterate, at least until deep into the twentieth century. Only then did the desire to read spread under the stimulus of growing nationalism, political awareness, and growing concern with political and religious tensions. These fostered the desire to read, in order to read newspapers, but this had adverse effects: each political or religious group had its own press and presented its own biased version of world events so that, by 1940, these different groups had entirely different ideas of reality.
Moreover, the new enthusiasm for the vernacular languages, the influence of extreme Hindu nationalists like B. G. Tilak (1859-1920) or anti-Westerners like M. K. Gandhi (1869-1948), led to a wholesale rejection of all that was best in British or in European culture. At the same time, those who sought power, advancement, or knowledge continued to learn English as the key to these ambitions. Unfortunately, these semiwesternized Indians neglected much of the practical side of the European way of life and tended to be intellectualist and doctrinaire and to despise practical learning and physical labor. They lived, as we have said, in a middle world which was neither Indian nor Western, spoiled for the Indian way of life, but often unable to find a position in Indian society which would allow them to live their own version of a Western way of life. At the university they studied literature, law, and political science, all subjects which emphasized verbal accomplishments. Since India did not provide sufficient jobs for such accomplishments, there was a great deal of ''academic unemployment," with resulting discontent and growing radicalism. The career of Gandhi was a result of the efforts of one man to avoid this problem by fusing certain elements of Western teaching with a purified Hinduism to create a nationalist Indian way of life on a basically moral foundation.
It is obvious that one of the chief effects of British educational policy has been to increase the social tensions within India and to give them a political orientation. This change is usually called the "rise of Indian nationalism," but it is considerably more complex than this simple name might imply. It began to rise about 1890, possibly under the influence of the misfortunes at the end of the century, grew steadily until it reached the crisis stage after 1917, and finally emerged in the long-drawn crisis of 1930-1947.
India's outlook was fundamentally religious, just as the British outlook was fundamentally political. The average Indian derived from his religious outlook a profound conviction that the material world and physical comfort were irrelevant and unimportant in contrast with such spiritual matters as the proper preparation for the life to come after the body's death. From his English education the average Indian student derived the conviction that liberty and self-government were the highest goods of life and must be sought by such resistance to authority as had been shown in the Magna Carta, the opposition to Charles I, the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, the writings of John Locke and of John Stuart Mill, and the general resistance to public authority found in nineteenth century liberalism and laissez-faire. These two points of view tended to merge in the minds of Indian intellectuals into a point of view in which it seemed that English political ideals should be sought by Indian methods of religious fervor, self-sacrifice, and contempt for material welfare or physical comforts. As a result, political and social tensions were acerbated between British and Indians, between Westernizers and Nationalists, between Hindus and Muslims, between Brahmins and lower castes, and between caste members and outcastes.
In the early part of the nineteenth century there had been a revival of interest in Indian languages and literatures. This revival soon revealed that many Hindu ideas and practices had no real support in the earliest evidence. Since these later innovations included some of the most objectionable features of Hindu life, such as suttee, child marriage, female inferiority, image worship, and extreme polytheism, a movement began that sought to free Hinduism from these extraneous elements and to restore it to its earlier "purity" by emphasizing ethics, monotheism, and an abstract idea of deity. This tendency was reinforced by the influence of Christianity and of Islam, so that the revived Hinduism w as really a synthesis of these three religions. As a consequence of these influences, the old, and basic, Hindu idea of Karma was played down. This idea maintained that each individual soul reappeared again and again, throughout eternity, in a different physical form and in a different social status, each difference being a reward or punishment for the soul's conduct at its previous appearance. There was no real hope for escape from this cycle, except by a gradual improvement through a long series of successive appearances to the ultimate goal of complete obliteration of personality (Nirvana) by ultimate mergence in the soul of the universe (Brahma). This release (moksha) from the endless cycle of existence could be achieved only by the suppression of all desire, of all individuality, and of all will to live.
The belief in Karma was the key to Hindu ideology and to Hindu society, explaining not only the emphasis on fate and resignation to fate, the idea that man was a part of nature and brother to the beasts, the submergence of individuality and the lack of personal ambition, but also specific social institutions such as caste or even suttee. How could castes be ended if these are God-given gradations for the rewards or punishments earned in an earlier existence? How could suttee be ended if a wife is a wife through all eternity, and must pass from one life to another when her husband does?
pos pedophile
In time these movements became increasingly nationalistic and anti-Western, tending
to defend orthodox Hinduism rather than to purify it and to oppose Westerners rather than
to copy them. This tendency culminated in Bal Gangathar Tilak (1859-1920), a Marathi
journalist of Poona, who started his career in mathematics and law but slowly developed
a passionate love for Hinduism, even in its most degrading details, and insisted that it
must be defended against outsiders, even with violence. He was not opposed to reforms
which appeared as spontaneous developments of Indian sentiment, but he was violently
opposed to any attempt to legislate reform from above or to bring in foreign influences
from European or Christian sources. He first became a political figure in 1891 when he
vigorously opposed a government bill which would have curtailed child marriage by
fixing the age of consent for girls at twelve years. By 1897 he was using his paper to
incite to murder and riots against government officials.A British official who foresaw this movement toward violent nationalism as early as 1878 sought to divert it into more legal and more constructive channels by establishing the Indian National Congress in 1885. The official in question, Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), had the secret support of the viceroy, Lord Dufferin. They hoped to assemble each year an unofficial congress of Indian leaders to discuss Indian political matters in the hope that this experience would provide training in the working of representative institutions and parliamentary government. For twenty years the Congress agitated for extension of Indian participation in the administration, and for the extension of representation and eventually of parliamentary government within the British system. It is notable that this movement renounced violent methods, did not seek separation from Britain, and aspired to form a government based on the British pattern.
Support for the movement grew very slowly at first, even among Hindus, and there was open opposition, led by Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan, among the Muslims. As the movement gathered momentum, after 1890, many British officials began to oppose it. At the same time, under pressure from Tilak, the Congress itself advanced its demands and began to use economic pressure to obtain these. As a result, after 1900, fewer Muslims joined the Congress: there were 156 Muslims out of 702 delegates in 1890, but only 17 out of 756 in 1905. All these forces came to a head in 1904-1907 when the Congress, for the first time, demanded self-government within the empire for India and approved the use of economic pressures (boycott) against Britain.
The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, which was regarded as an Asiatic triumph over Europe, the Russian revolt of 1905, the growing power of Tilak over Gokhale in the Indian National Congress, and public agitation over Lord Curzon's efforts to push through an administrative division of the huge-province of Bengal (population 78 million) brought matters to a head. There was open agitation by Hindu extremists to spill English blood to satisfy the goddess of destruction, Kali. In the Indian National Congress of 1907, the followers of Tilak stormed the platform and disrupted the meeting. Much impressed with the revolutionary violence in Russia against the czar and in Ireland against the English, this group advocated the use of terrorism rather than of petitions in India. The viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was wounded by a bomb in 1912. For many Nears, racial intolerance against Indians by English residents in India had been growing, and was increasingly manifested in studied insults and even physical assaults. In 1906 a Muslim League was formed in opposition to tile Hindu extremists and in support of the British position, but in 1913 it also demanded self-government. Tilak's group boycotted the Indian National Congress for nine years (1907-1916), and Tilak himself was in prison for sedition for six years (1908-1914).
The constitutional development of India did not stand still during this tumult. In 1861 appointive councils with advisory powers had been created, both at the center to assist the viceroy and in the provinces. These had nonofficial as well as official members, and the provincial ones had certain legislative powers, but all these activities were under strict executive control and veto. In 1892 these powers were widened to allow discussion of administrative questions, and various non-governmental groups (called "communities") were allowed to suggest individuals for the unofficial seats in the councils.
A third act, of 1909, passed by the Liberal government with John (Lord) Morley as secretary of state and Lord Minto as viceroy, enlarged the councils, making a nonofficial majority in the provincial councils, allowed the councils to vote on all issues, and gave the right to elect the nonofficial members to various communal groups, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, on a fixed ratio. This last provision was a disaster. By establishing separate electoral lists for various religious groups, it encouraged religious extremism in all groups, made it likely that the more extremist candidates would be successful, and made religious differences the basic and irreconcilable fact of political life. By giving religious minorities more seats than their actual proportions of the electorate entitled them to (a principle known as "weightage"), it made it politically advantageous to he a minority. By emphasizing minority rights (in which they did believe) over majority rule (in which they did not believe) the British made religion a permanently disruptive force in political life, and encouraged the resulting acerbated extremism to work out its rivalries outside the constitutional framework and the scope of legal action in riots rather than at the polls or in political assemblies. Moreover, as soon as the British had given the Muslims this special constitutional position in 1909 they lost the support of the Muslim community in 1911-1919. This loss of Muslim support was the result of several factors. Curzon's division of Bengal, which the Muslims had supported (since it gave them East Bengal as a separate area with a Muslim majority) was countermanded in 1911 without any notice to the Muslims. British foreign policy after 1911 was increasingly antiTurkish, and thus opposed to the caliph (the religious leader of the Muslims). As a result the Muslim League called for self-government for India for the first time in 1913, and four years later formed an alliance with the Indian National Congress which continued until 1924.
In 1909, while Philip Kerr (Lothian), Lionel Curtis, and (Sir) William Marris were in Canada laying the foundations for the Round Table organization there, Marris persuaded Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant was the only intelligible goal of British policy in India...the existence of political unrest in India, so far from being a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending western education to India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves." Four years later the Round Table group in London decided to investigate how this could be done. It formed a study group of eight members, under Curtis, adding to the group three officials from the India Office. This group decided, in 1915, to issue a public declaration favoring "the progressive realization of responsible government in India." A declaration to this effect was drawn up by Lord Milner and was issued on August 20, 1917, by Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu. It said that "the policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."[he has quite the way of whitewashing the imperalism of it all,like the brits were doing the indians a favor DC]
This declaration was revolutionary because, for the first time, it specifically enunciated British hopes for India's future and because it used, for the first time, the words "responsible government." The British had spoken vaguely for over a century about "self-government" for India; they had spoken increasingly about "representative government"; but they had consistently avoided the expression "responsible government." This latter term meant parliamentary government, which most English conservatives regarded as quite unsuited for Indian conditions, since it required, they believed, an educated electorate and a homogeneous social system, both of which were lacking in India. The conservatives had talked for years about ultimate self-government for India on some indigenous Indian model, but had done nothing to find such a model. Then, without any clear conception of where they were going, they had introduced "representative government," in which the executive consulted with public opinion through representatives of the people (either appointed, as in 1871, or elected, as in 1909), but with the executive still autocratic and in no way responsible to these representatives. The use of the expression "responsible government" in the declaration of 1917 went back to the Round Table group and ultimately to the Marris-Curtis conversation in the Canadian Rockies in 1909.
In the meantime, the Round Table study-group had worked for three years (1913- 1916) on methods for carrying out this promise. Through the influence of Curtis and F. S. Oliver the federal constitution of the United States contributed a good deal to the drafts which were made, especially to provisions for dividing governmental activities into central and provincial portions, with gradual Indianization of the latter and 166 ultimately of the former. This approach to the problem was named "dyarchy" by Curtis. The Round Table draft was sent to the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Chelmsford, a Fellow of All Souls College, who believed that it came from an official committee of the India Office. After he accepted it in principle he was made Viceroy of India in 1916. Curtis went to India immediately to consult with local authorities there (including Meston, Marris, Hailey, and the retired Times Foreign Editor, Sir Valentine Chirol) as well as with Indians. From these conferences emerged a report, written by Marris, which was issued as the Montagu-Chelmsford Report in 1917. The provisions of this report were drawn up as a bill, passed by Parliament (after substantial revision by a Joint Committee under Lord Selborne) and became the Government of India Act of 1919.
The Act of 1919 was the most important law in Indian constitutional history before 1935. It divided governmental activities into "central" and "provincial." The former included defense, foreign affairs, railways and communications, commerce, civil and criminal law and procedures and others; the latter included public order and police, irrigation, forests, education, public health, public works, and other activities. Furthermore, the provincial activities were divided into "transferred" departments and "reserved" departments, the former being entrusted to native ministers who were responsible to provincial assemblies. The central government remained in the hands of the governor-general and viceroy, who was responsible to Britain and not to the Indian Legislature. His Cabinet (Executive Council) usually had three Indian members after 1921. The legislature was bicameral, consisting of a Council of State and a Legislative Assembly. In both, some members were appointed officials, but the majority were elected on a very restricted suffrage. There were, on the electoral lists, no more than 900,000 voters for the lower chamber and only 16,000 for the upper chamber. The provincial unicameral legislatures had a wider, but still limited, franchise, with about a million on the list of voters in Bengal, half as many in Bombay. Moreover, certain seats, on the principle of "weightage," were reserved to Muslims elected by a separate Muslim electoral list. Both legislatures had the power to enact laws, subject to rather extensive powers of veto and of decree in the hands of the governor-general and the appointed provincial governors. Only the "transferred" departments of the provincial governments were responsible to elective assemblies, the "reserved" activities on the provincial level and all activities in the central administration being responsible to the appointed governors and governor-general and ultimately to Britain.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), known as "Mahatma," or "Great Soul," was the son and grandson of prime ministers of a minute princely state in western India. Of the Vaisya caste (third of the four), he grew up in a very religious and ascetic atmosphere of Hinduism. Married at thirteen and a father at fifteen, Gandhi was sent to England to study law by his older brother when he was seventeen. Such a voyage was forbidden by the rules of his caste, and he was expelled from it for going. Before he left he gave a vow to his family not to touch wine, women, or meat. After three years in England he passed the bar at Inner Temple. Most of his time in Europe was passed in dilettante fads, experimenting with vegetarian diets and self-administered medicines or in religious or ethical discussions with English faddists and Indiophiles. He was much troubled by religious scruples and feelings of guilt. Back in India in 1891, he was a failure as a lawyer because of his inarticulate lack of assurance and his real lack of interest in the law. In 1893 a Muslim firm sent him to Natal, South Africa, on a case. There Gandhi found his vocation.
The population of Natal in 1896 consisted of 50,000 Europeans, mostly English, 400,000 African natives, and 51,000 Indians, chiefly outcastes. The last group had been imported from India, chiefly as indentured workers on three or five-year contracts, to work the humid low land plantations where the Negroes refused to work. Most of the Indians stayed, after their contracts were fulfilled, and were so industrious and intelligent that they began to rise very rapidly in an economic sense, especially in the retail trades. The whites, who were often indolent, resented such competition from dark-skinned persons and were generally indignant at Indian economic success. As Lionel Curtis told Gandhi in the Transvaal in 1903, "It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country fear but their virtues."
When Gandhi first arrived in Natal in 1893, he found that that country, like most of South Africa, was rent with color hatred and group animosities. All political rights were in the hands of whites, while the nonwhites were subjected to various kinds of social and economic discriminations and segregations. When Gandhi first appeared in court. the judge ordered him to remove his turban (worn with European clothes); Gandhi refused, and left. Later, traveling on business in a first-class railway carriage to the Transvaal, he was ejected from the train at the insistence of a white passenger. He spent a bitterly cold night on the railway platform rather than move to a second- or third-class compartment when he had been sold a first-class ticket. For the rest of his life he traveled only third class. In the Transvaal he was unable to get a room in a hotel because of his color. These episodes gave him his new vocation: to establish that Indians were citizens of the British Empire and therefore entitled to equality under its laws. He was determined to use only peaceful methods of passive mass non-cooperation to achieve his goal. His chief weapon would be love and submissiveness, even to those who treated him most brutally. His refusal to fear death or to avoid pain and his efforts to return love to those who tried to inflict injuries upon him made a powerful weapon, especially if it were practiced on a mass basis.
Gandhi's methods were really derived from his own Hindu tradition, but certain elements in this tradition had been reinforced by reading Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and the Sermon on the Mount. When he was brutally beaten by whites in Natal in 1897, he refused to prosecute, saying that it was not their fault that they had been taught evil ideas.
These methods gave the Indians of South Africa a temporary respite from the burden of intolerance under Gandhi's leadership in the period 1893-1914. When the Transvaal proposed an ordinance compelling all Indians to register, be fingerprinted, and carry identity cards at all times, Gandhi organized a mass, peaceful refusal to register. Hundreds went to jail. Smuts worked out a compromise with Gandhi: if the Indians would register "voluntarily" the Transvaal would repeal the ordinance. After Gandhi had persuaded his compatriots to register, Smuts failed to carry out his part of the agreement, and the Indians solemnly burned their registration cards at a mass meeting. Then, to test the Transvaal ban on Indian immigration, Gandhi organized mass marches of Indians into the Transvaal from Natal. Others went from the Transvaal to Natal and returned, being arrested for crossing the frontier. At one time 2,500 of the 13,000 Indians in the Transvaal were in jail and 6,000 were in exile.
The struggle was intensified after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 because the Transvaal restrictions on Indians, which forbade them to own land, to live outside segregated districts, or to vote, were not repealed, and a Supreme Court decision of 1913 declared all non-Christian marriages to be legally invalid. This last decision deprived most nonwhite wives and children of all legal protection of their family rights. Mass civil disobedience by Indians increased, including a march by 6,000 from Natal to the Transvaal. Finally, after much controversy, Gandhi and Smuts worked out an elaborate compromise agreement in 1914. This revoked some of the discriminations against Indians in South Africa, recognized Indian marriages, annulled a discriminatory £3 annual tax on Indians, and stopped all importation of indentured labor from India in 1920. Peace was restored in this civil controversy just in time to permit a united front in the external war with Germany. But in South Africa by 1914 Gandhi had worked out the techniques he would use against the British in India after 1919.
Until 1919 Gandhi Noms very loyal to the British connection. Both in South Africa and in India he had found that the English from England were much more tolerant and understanding than most of the English-speaking whites of middle-class origin in the overseas areas. In the Boer War he was the active leader of an 1,100-man Indian ambulance corps which worked with inspiring courage even under fire on the field of battle. During World War I, he worked constantly on recruiting campaigns for the British forces. On one of these in 1915 he said, "I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience." By 1918 this apostle of nonviolence was saying: "We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn to use arms.... Partnership in the Empire is our definite goal. We should suffer to the utmost of our ability and even lay down our lives to defend the Empire. If the Empire perishes, with it perishes our cherished aspiration."
During this period Gandhi's asceticism and his opposition to all kinds of discrimination were winning him an outstanding moral position among the Indian people. He was opposed to all violence and bloodshed, to alcohol, meat, and tobacco, even to the eating of milk and eggs, and to sex (even in marriage). More than this, he was opposed to Western industrialism, to Western science and medicine, and to the use of Western rather than Indian languages. He demanded that his followers make fixed quotas of homespun cotton each day, wore a minimum of homespun clothing himself, spun on a small wheel throughout all his daily activities, and took the small hand spinning wheel as the symbol of his movement— all this in order to signify the honorable nature of handwork, the need for Indian economic self-sufficiency, and his opposition to Western industrialism. He worked for equality for the untouchables, calling them "God's children" (Harijans), associating with them whenever he could, taking them into his own home, even adopting one as his own daughter. He worked to relieve economic oppression, organizing strikes against low wages or miserable working conditions, supporting the strikers with money he had gathered from India's richest Hindu industrialists. He attacked Western medicine and sanitation, supported all kinds of native medical nostrums and even quackery, yet went to a Western-trained surgeon for an operation when he had appendicitis himself. Similarly he preached against the use of milk, but drank goat's milk for his health much of his life. These inconsistencies he attributed to his own weak sinfulness. Similarly, he permitted hand-spun cotton to be sewn on Singer sewing machines, and conceded that Western-type factories were necessary to provide such machines.
During this period he discovered that his personal fasts from food, which he had long practiced, could be used as moral weapons against those who opposed him while they strengthened his moral hold over those who supported him. "I fasted," he said, "to reform those who loved me. You cannot fast against a tyrant." Gandhi never seemed to recognize that his fasting and nonviolent civil disobedience were effective against the British in India and in South Africa only to the degree that the British had the qualities of humanity, decency, generosity, and fair play which he most admired, but that by attacking the British through these virtues he was weakening Britain and the class which possessed these virtues and making it more likely that they would be replaced by nations and by leaders who did not have these virtues. Certainly Hitler and the Germans who exterminated six million Jews in cold blood during World War II would not have shared the reluctance of Smuts to imprison a few thousand Indians or Lord Halifax's reluctance to see Gandhi starve himself to death. This was the fatal weakness of Gandhi's aims and his methods, but these aims and methods were so dear to Indian hearts and so selflessly pursued by Gandhi that he rapidly became the spiritual leader of the Indian National Congress after Gokhale's death in 1915. In this position Gandhi by his spiritual power succeeded in something which no earlier Indian leader had achieved and few had hoped for: he spread political awareness and nationalist feeling from the educated class down into the great uneducated mass of the Indian people.
This mass and Gandhi expected and demanded a greater degree of self-government after the end of World War I. The Act of 1919 provided that, and probably provided as much of it as the political experience of Indians entitled them to. Moreover, the Act anticipated expansion of the areas of self-government as Indian political experience increased. But the Act was largely a failure, because Gandhi had aroused political ambitions in great masses of Indians who lacked experience in political activities, and these demands gave rise to intense opposition to Indian self-government in British circles which did not share the ideals of the Round Table group. Finally, the actions of this British opposition drove Gandhi from "nonresistance" through complete "non- cooperation," to "civil disobedience," thus destroying the whole purpose of the Act of 1919.
Many British conservatives both at home and in India opposed the Act of 1919. Lord Ampthill, who had long experience in India and had valiantly supported Gandhi in South Africa, attacked the Act and Lionel Curtis for making it. In the House of Lords he said: "The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive mania for constitution-mongering [Curtis], nobody in the world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint [Selborne] Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived." In India men like the governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, were even more emphatically opposed to Indian self-government or Indian nationalist agitation. Many Conservatives who were determined to maintain the empire intact could not see how this could be done without India as the major jewel in it, as in the nineteenth century. India not only provided a large share of the manpower in the peacetime imperial army, hut this army was largely stationed in India and paid for out of the revenues of the Government of India. Moreover, this self-paying manpower pool was beyond the scrutiny of the British reformer as well as the British taxpayers. The older Tories, with their strong army connections, and others, like Winston Churchill, with an appreciation of military matters, did not see how England could face the military demands of the twentieth century without Indian military manpower, at least in colonial areas. [Indians the original cannon fodder for England DC]
Instead of getting more freedom at the end of the war in 1918, the Indians got less. The conservative group pushed through the Rowlatt Act in March 1919. This continued most of the wartime restrictions on civil liberties in India, to be used to control nationalist agitations. Gandhi called for civil disobedience and a series of scattered local general strikes (hartels) in protest. These actions led to violence, especially to Indian attacks on the British. Gandhi bewailed this violence, and inflicted a seventy-two-hour fast on himself as penance.
In Amritsar an Englishwoman was attacked in the street (April 10, 1919). The Congress Party leaders in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings; then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress (April 13, 1919). He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square with inadequate exits, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met death. Leaving the wounded untended on the ground, General Dyer returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week before must do so by crawling on hands and knees. There is no doubt that General Dyer was looking for trouble. In his own words: "I had made up my mind I would do all men to death.... It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab."
The situation might still have been saved from Dyer's barbarity but the Hunter Committee, which investigated the atrocity, refused to condemn Dyer except for "a grave error of judgment" and "an honest but mistaken conception of duty." A majority of the House of Lords approved his action by refusing to censure him, and, when the government forced him to resign from the army, his admirers in England presented him with a sword and a purse of 120,000.
At this point Gandhi committed a grave error of judgment. In order to solidify the alliance of Hindu and Muslim which had been in existence since 1917, he supported the Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims to obtain a lenient peace treaty for the Turkish sultan (and caliph) following World War I. Gandhi suggested that the Khilafat adopt "non-cooperation" against Britain to enforce its demands. This would have involved a boycott of British goods, schools, law courts, offices, honors, and of all goods subject to British taxes (such as alcohol). This was an error of judgment because the sultan was soon overthrown by his own people organized in a Turkish Nationalist movement and seeking a secularized Turkish state, in spite of all Britain was already doing (both in public and in private) to support him. Thus, the Khilafat movement was seeking to force Britain to do something it already wanted to do and was not able to do. Moreover, by bringing up "non-cooperation" as a weapon against the British, Gandhi had opened a number of doors he had no desire to open, with very bad consequences for India.
At the Indian National Congress of December, 1919, Tilak and Gandhi were the leading figures. Both were willing to accept the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Tilak because he believed this would be the best way to prove that they were not adequate. But on August I, 1920, Gandhi proclaimed "non-cooperation" in behalf of the Khilafat movement. On the same day Tilak died, leaving Gandhi as undisputed leader of the Congress. At the 1920 meeting he won unanimous approval for "non-cooperation," and then moved a resolution for swaraj (self-rule) either within or outside the British Empire. The Muslims in Congress, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, refused to accept an independent India outside the British Empire because this would subject the Muslims to a Hindu majority without Britain's protecting restraint. As a result, from that point, many Muslims left the Congress.
Non-cooperation was a great public success. But it did not get self-rule for India, and made the country less fitted for self-rule by making it impossible for Indians to get experience in government under the Act of 1919. Thousands of Indians gave up medals and honors, gave up the practice of law in British courts, left the British schools, and burned British goods. Gandhi held great mass meetings at which thousands of persons stripped themselves of their foreign clothing to throw it on raging bonfires. This did not, however, give them training in government. It merely roused nationalist violence. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi informed the viceroy that he was about to begin mass civil disobedience, in one district at a time, beginning in Bardoli near Bombay. Civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes or obey the laws, was a step beyond noncooperation, since it involved illegal acts rather than legal ones. On February 5, 1922, a Hindu mob attacked twenty-two police constables and killed them by burning the police station down over their heads. In horror Gandhi canceled the campaign against Britain. He was at once arrested and condemned to six years in prison for sedition.
Very great damage had been done by the events of 1919-1922. Britain and India were alienated to the point where they no longer trusted one another. The Congress Party itself had been split, the moderates forming a new group called the Indian Liberal Federation. The Muslims had also left the Congress Party to a large extent and gone to strengthen the Muslim League. From this point onward, Muslim-Hindu riots were annual occurrences in India. And finally the boycott had crippled the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, almost two-thirds of the eligible voters refusing to vote in the Councils elections of November, 1920.
Ireland to 1939
While the Indian crisis was at its height in 1919-1922, an even more violent crisis was
raging in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland had been agitated by
grievances of long standing. The three major problems were agrarian, religious, and
political. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century had transferred
much Irish land, as plunder of war, to absentee English landlords. In consequence high
rents, insecure tenure, lack of improvements, and legalized economic exploitation,
supported by English judges and English soldiers, gave rise to violent agrarian unrest and
rural atrocities against English lives and properties.Beginning with Gladstone's Land Act of 1870, the agrarian problems were slowly alleviated and, by 1914, were well in hand. The religious problem arose from the fact that Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and resented being ruled by persons of a different religion. Moreover, until the Irish (Episcopal) Church was dis-established in 1869, Irish Catholics had to support a structure of Anglican clergy and bishops, most of whom had few or no parishioners in Ireland and resided in England, supported by incomes from Ireland. Finally, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, with representatives in the Parliament at Westminster.
By 1871 those representatives who were opposed to union with England formed the Irish Home Rule Party. It sought to obtain separation by obstructing the functions of Parliament and disrupting its proceedings. At times this group exercised considerable influence in Parliament by holding a balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives. The Gladstone Liberals were willing to give Ireland Home Rule, with no representatives at Westminster; the Conservatives (with the support of a majority of Englishmen) were opposed to Home Rule; the Rhodes-Milner group wanted self-government for the Irish in their home affairs with Irish representatives retained at Westminster for foreign and imperial matters. The Liberal government of 1906- 1916 tried to enact a Home Rule bill with continued Irish representation in the House of Commons, but was repeatedly blocked by the opposition of the House of Lords; the bill did not become law until September, 1914.
The chief opposition arose from the fact that Protestant Ulster (Northern Ireland) would be submerged in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. The Ulster opposition, led by Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, organized a private army, armed it with guns smuggled from Germany, and prepared to seize control of Belfast at a signal from London. Carson was on his way to the telegraph station to send this signal in 1914 when he received a message from the prime minister that war was about to break out with Germany. Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was canceled and the Home Rule Act was suspended until six months after the peace with Germany. As a consequence the revolt with German arms in Ireland was made by the Irish Nationalists in 1916, instead of by their Ulster opponents in 1914. This so-called Easter Revolt of 1916 was crushed and its leaders executed, but discontent continued to simmer in Ireland, with violence only slightly below the surface.
In the parliamentary election of 1918, Ireland elected 6 Nationalists (who wanted Home Rule for all Ireland), 73 Sinn Fein (who wanted an Irish Republic free from England), and 23 Unionists (who wanted to remain part of Britain). Instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein organized their own Parliament in Dublin. Efforts to arrest its members led to open civil war. This was a struggle of assassination, treachery, and reprisal, fought out in back alleys and on moonlit fields. Sixty thousand British troops could not maintain order. Thousands of lives were lost, with brutal inhumanity on both sides, and property damage rose to £50 million in value.
Lionel Curtis, who helped edit The Round Table in 1919-1921, advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, but was rejected by the Irish Republicans led by Eamon de Valera. The civil war continued. The Round Table group worked valiantly to stop the extremists on both sides, but with only moderate success. Amery's brother-in-law, Hamar (Lord) Greenwood, was appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the last incumbent of that post, while Curtis was appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office (which was headed by Milner and Amery). The Times and The Round Table condemned British repression in Ireland, the latter saying, "If the British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the principle for which it has stood." But British violence could not be curtailed until Irish violence could be curtailed. One of the chief leaders of the Irish Republicans was Erskine Childers, an old schoolboy friend of Curtis who had been with him in South Africa, but nothing could be done through him, since he had become fanatically anti-British. Accordingly, Smuts was called in. He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status since 1910, saying: "Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege, more power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal nations than in a small, nervous republic having all the time to rely on the good will and perhaps the assistance of foreigners. What sort of independence do you call that?"
Smuts arranged an armistice and a conference to negotiate a settlement. From this conference, at which Curtis was secretary, came the Articles of Agreement of December, 1921, which gave Southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland continuing under the Act of 1920. The boundary line between the two countries was drawn by a committee of three of which the British member (and chairman) was Richard Feetham of Milner's Kindergarten and the Round Table group, later Supreme Court judge in South Africa.
De Valera's Irish Republicans refused to accept the settlement, and went into insurrection, this time against the moderate Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Collins was assassinated, and Griffith died, exhausted by the strain, but the Irish people themselves were now tired of turmoil. De Valera's forces were driven underground and were defeated in the election of 1922. When De Valera's party' the Fianna Fail, did win an election in 1932 and he became President of Ireland, he abolished the oath of loyalty to the king and the office of governor-general, ended annual payments on seized English lands and appeals to the Privy Council, engaged in a bitter tariff war with Britain, and continued to demand the annexation of Ulster. One of the last links with Britain was ended in 1938, when the British naval bases in Eire were turned over to the Irish, to the great benefit of German submarines in 1939-1945.
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Chapter 10—The Far East to World War I The Collapse of China to 1920 158S
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