Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [109]
The endorsement of the ruling class of the time and the uniforms, hierarchies and badges were sufficient to condemn the movement in the growing ranks of critics of empire.* But Scouting became the most successful youth organization of all time not because it was part of a scheme for world domination but because it recognized the universal appetite for what seem to be adventures. By the second decade of the twenty-first century it had 400,000 members in the UK with 28 million others scattered across 216 countries, some – like the 4 million in India and the 4.5 million in the United States – citizens of former imperial possessions, but millions more – like the 17 million in Indonesia – who belong to nations which were never part of the empire. What’s not to like about an organization whose members are instructed to perpetrate a random good deed each day? (‘Such small things as these: sprinkle sand on a frozen road where horses are liable to slip; remove orange or banana skins from the pavement, as they are apt to throw people down …’)
When Baden-Powell’s health collapsed he took himself off to live in Kenya, where the climate made it easier to sleep under the stars with his mouth shut. Even as he became frailer, he remained, in many ways, a child to the end, self-obsessed, enjoying nothing more than knots, campfires, songs and jokes. His final message to the Scouts of the world was written some time before his death and contains the advice that ‘happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence … the real way to get happiness is by giving out happiness to other people. Try and leave the world a little better than you found it and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate you have not wasted your time but have done your best.’ He signed it: ‘Your Friend, Robert Baden-Powell.’
Chapter Eleven
‘A thousand years scarce serve to form a state; An hour may lay it in the dust’
Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 1812
It was not Edward VII’s fault that his mother kept him from the throne by living such an unconscionably long time. But it was certainly his fault that he chose to spend so much of that apprenticeship at the card table, on the shooting field or in bed with other men’s wives. Just inside the front door at Sandringham were installed a set of sit-down scales, the kind that were used to weigh jockeys before a race: Edward wanted to make sure the guests at his shooting parties had eaten so well that they left heavier than they had been on arrival. From an empire point of view, his entire reign seems to have been spent in digestion.
His inheritance was enormous. But it was quite strange. In India the British ruled an entire subcontinent, but in China they were contained in a few treaty ports. They had given up territories like the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, but clung to the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic. They held Egypt, but not Persia, Burma but not Siam. The flag flew over enormous swathes of Africa and on tiny Pacific islands foisted on them by overexcited missionaries. As some jingoistic bean-counter at the St James’s Gazette delightedly pointed out when Edward succeeded his mother in 1901:
His Majesty rules over one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers and ten thousand islands. Queen Victoria ascended the throne of an Empire embracing 8,329,000 square miles;