Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [110]
For the coronation of Edward the Caresser, an Eton schoolmaster, A. C. Benson, produced words to accompany Elgar’s stirring Pomp and Circumstance march. The resulting anthem, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, was a hymn to empire, still sung at that festival of faded nationalism, the Last Night of the Proms. But it was out of joint with the times even when written, for in Edward’s reign the bounds of empire were hardly set wider still. There were a few administrative changes – a preposterous condominium with France in the New Hebrides,* altered status for British Somaliland, and so on, but no great tracts of territory were added to the motley variety of places marked in red. Indeed, when Francis Younghusband marched into the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, in 1904, the government was so worried about imperial overstretch that it told him to march out again, with the consolation prize of a minor decoration and more time to explore his strange ideas about mysticism. It was as if, having collected together an empire, no one was any longer quite sure what it was for. As H. G. Wells pointed out in 1914, the empire had ‘no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and outlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot be held together.’
It would be a few years until everyone realized this was a trick that would never be pulled off, but in the meantime the smell of empire was almost permanently on the nation’s breath. If enthusiasm flagged, there was always the imperial foghorn sounding in the Daily Mail, with its noisy proprietor Alfred Harmsworth crying, ‘Empire first and parish after.’ Yet the louder the huzzas of the imperialists, the more resonant came the howls of dissent. For there was now an increasingly vocal body of opinion questioning the moral and political basis of the entire enterprise. It was forty years or more since the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, Goldwin Smith, had declared that holding colonies wasn’t even protecting the national economy: the future lay with free trade. (The Times dismissed his ideas as being on a par with unworldly ‘projects for general disarmament or for equalizing the political rights of the sexes’.) Now, working people – the value of whose labour was undercut by colonial enterprise and who provided the cannon-fodder for imperial armies – had a vehicle for their own anxieties about what was being done in the country’s name. To the recently formed Independent Labour party, which brought working men into the House of Commons, the ‘civilizing mission’ was nonsense: ‘We can no more send our civilisation to central Africa than we can send our climate there,’ as one group of members put it. The true purpose of empire was to put off the day of reckoning between capital and labour. Clarion, newspaper of cycling and singing socialism, declared that it was on the side of those patriots who proclaimed ‘England for the English’, and would like to hear more of the less commonly shouted slogan, ‘Africa for the Africans’. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt marked 31 December 1900 by correctly prophesying that the newly dawning twentieth century would see the end of the British Empire.
Even the true believers in empire were anxious. Lord Curzon shuddered to himself when he foresaw a Britain teeming with the starving unemployed, to which foreign tourists would flock to gaze upon the wonders of a dead civilization. The Boer War had shown how the mightiest power on earth could be brought low by a bunch of farmers, and recruitment for the army had demonstrated the appalling physical state of many of the slum-dwellers who were supposed to defend the flag. The nation could no longer feed itself, and the Germans were expanding their naval fleet. The upper classes were infiltrated by arrivistes who cared more for money than