THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

5

I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my

developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new

trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I

had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other

men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that

otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality

than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other

questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that

came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,

Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the

imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little

Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just

a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official

by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said

he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens

then-and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional

representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes-the lids

had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds-to

see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his

predominant nose.

The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were

pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of

reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up

the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,

that sooner or later something must happen there-something very

serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He

was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is

inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be

annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his

chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of

the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse."

Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and

seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement

we could still go on talking of war.

All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international

conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses

that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental

journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."

That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,

mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and

sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands

of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly

civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a

good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing

capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained

constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced

the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a

wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for

example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts-

"We want eight

And we won't wait,"

but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent,

our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous

criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the

quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost

universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility

and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have

poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because

our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost

unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every

matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended

sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because

in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for

quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my

paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had

flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some

of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the

Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character;

its backbone, that is to say,-especially in the visceral region-is

bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so.

We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and if the

joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half

awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly."

"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.

"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."

And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which

haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to

blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as

I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and

brains, crept nearer and nearer…

I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that

apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very

humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but

I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing

class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in

English life-it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial

endurance-is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and

diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where

we can and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our

upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest

character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite

honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man,

that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage

upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of

evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a larger population,

a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual

training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to

a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all.

The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may

end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall

proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part,

since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of

soul, I pray for a chastening war-I wouldn't mind her flag in the

dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to

shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable

destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war

would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.

In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,

disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most

extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are

there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an

elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until

something happens he remains. Our functions in India are absurd.

We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make

nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We

suppress our own literature there. Most English people cannot even

go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it. If

Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester

operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average

English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the

Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I

have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,

viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what

India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought

we were up to there. Iam not writing without my book in these

matters. And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"-and

look at our sedition trials!-they told me nothing. Time after time

I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who,

when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a

week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee

nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as

our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve

the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic

inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and

sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without

plans, without intentions-a vast preventive. The sum total of our

policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would

enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for

themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men held

back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian

sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth

gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection

breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for

inaction develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the British

Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for

seditious emblems and inscriptions…

In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our

chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness

of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything

with India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in

the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about

"character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for

the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact,

if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great schools

and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit

of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be

different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to

justify it.

It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from

India. That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our

bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be

able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there. It is

our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools to

have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power

arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a

native state, we shall he willing to deal with it. We may or may

not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when

we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy,

and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such

as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror DE

FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home

will be invited to celebrate our recession-triumphantly. Iam no

believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; Iam less and

less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of

an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral

constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.