Greater Britain and the United States

BISHOP BUTLER, in the course of an argument, entertained the theory that a whole nation might suffer from an attack of insanity. Mr. Seeley, in his lectures on the Expansion of England,¹ seems to assume that the English nation is the victim of mental myopy. Here is a nation, he says in effect, which is a world-state, and has been since 1600, yet stupidly insists on regarding itself as a European kingdom, with large, indeed overgrown, colonial and dependent possessions. Its historians and statesmen persist in confining their attention to the interior development and the politics of a little island ; its people are still insular in their consciousness ; yet all the while a Greater Britain is forming. which must be measured, not by the limited states of the European system, but by the two great powers which cast their shadows on the future, Russia and the United States. It is Mr. Seeley’s business, in these lectures, to interpret English history since the time of Elizabeth by the growth of this Greater Britain.

There is something almost grotesque in this conception of a people attaining an imperial state, yet so near-sighted as to need the artificial aid of two courses of lectures to enable them to see distinctly beyond their nose. M. Jourdain becomes commonplace, in comparison. None the less, the reader of these lectures, especially if he be an American, does not find it difficult to accept Mr. Seeley’s judgment of his countrymen. When Disraeli, acting out one of his own spangling romances, invested Queen Victoria with the title of Empress of India, the conventional Englishman was made thoroughly uncomfortable. He felt that the prime minister was making a guy of the Queen, and yet he was unable to deny that England did have an unquestionable sovereignty in India. The Jingo crowd were delighted, but apparently still less able to give an historic justification. It was the open secret of Disraeli’s mysterious nature that he had the penetration of a Semitic mind with the vulgar liking for a hair-oil gentility, which made him capable of an imperial instinct while he appeared to be a showman.

It comes easier, we suspect, to an American, who has grown up in the consciousness of his citizenship, to give immediate assent to the main propositions laid down by Mr. Seeley in his fascinating volume. We are accustomed, in the United States, to think continentally, when we undertake historical studies ; and by our remoteness from the party politics of England and the influence of social traditions, we are able to follow more freely a generalization of history which is indifferent to the triumphs of party and the succession of a royal family.

At any rate, Mr. Seeley’s reading of English history is so reasonable, and so intelligent in its apprehension of the relation of the United States to modern civilization, that we find it by far the best working hypothesis of the development of England which has been presented to students. It is so simple, so comprehensive, and so suggestive that we accept it at once, and are scarcely prepared to offer any objection, except the obvious one that if Mr. Seeley is right, then historians for the most part have been on the wrong track ; and more startling still, the English people have wanted the consciousness which it is hard to dissociate from a long historic development. It may be suggested, however, on this last point, that there is a good deal more of practical recognition of Greater Britain than shows itself in parliamentary discussion, or even in journalism. Certainly one of the most striking phenomena apparent to the stranger in London is the evidence which meets him on every hand that the city is the metropolis of Greater Britain. A walk of an hour about the Mansion House district brings to the eye the geographical names of all quarters of the globe.

The first course of eight lectures concerns itself with the history of England as it regards the colonies and the United States, and is in effect a new reading of that history in the eighteenth century. Mr. Seeley complains that the unity of the period has heretofore been missed, because students have pursued an artificial method in grouping the facts. “ We have an unfortunate habit,” he says, “ of distributing historical affairs under reigns. We do this mechanically, as it were, even in periods where we recognize — nay, where we exaggerate — the insignificance of the monarch. The first Georges were, in my opinion, by no means so insignificant as is often supposed ; but even the most influential sovereign has seldom a right to give his name to an age. Much misconception, for example, has arisen out of the expression Age of Louis XIV. The first step, then, in arranging and dividing any period of English history is to get rid of such useless headings as Reign of Queen Anne, Reign of George I., Reign of George II. In place of these we must study to put divisions founded upon some real stage of progress in the national life. We must look onward, not from king to king, but from great event to great event. And in order to do this we must estimate events, measure their greatness ; a thing which cannot be done without considering them and analyzing them closely. When, with respect to any event, we have satisfied ourselves that it deserves to rank among the leading events of the national history, the next step is to trace the causes by which it was produced. In this way each event takes the character of a development, and each development of this kind furnishes a chapter to the national history, — a chapter which will get its name from the event.”

We may say, in passing, that an American student is likely to accept this rational statement more easily than an English student, because the shortness of administrative terms and the wider distribution of authority have led him to study his history rather by natural periods ; and though the formal division by Presidents is still retained in many textbooks, the better judgment refuses to acknowledge it except as a convenience to the memory. With this principle in mind, Mr. Seeley, taking the period from 1688 to 1815, finds that the great events are foreign wars, and he aims to discover the unity of purpose pervading them. Upon the surface there is only a confused succession of wars, having no apparent connection. " But look a little closer,” he proceeds, “ and after all you will discover some uniformities. For example, out of these seven wars of England five are wars with France from the beginning, and both the other two, though the belligerent at the outset was in the first Spain, and in the second our own colonies, yet became in a short time and ended as wars with France. Now here is one of those general facts which we are in search of. The full magnitude of it is not usually perceived, because the whole middle part of the eighteenth century has passed too much into oblivion. . . . The truth is, these wars group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years’ War.... I said that the expansion of England in the New World and Asia is the formula which sums up for England the history of the eighteenth century. I point out now that the great triple war of the middle of that century is neither more nor less than the great decisive duel between England and France for the possession of the New World. It was perhaps scarcely perceived at the time, as it has been seldom remarked since ; but the explanation of that second Hundred Years’ War between England and France, which fills the eighteenth century, is this, — that they were rival candidates for the possession of the New World; and the triple war, which fills the middle of the century, is as it were the decisive campaign in that great world-struggle.”

All this has a familiar sound to our ears ; for no one, in reading the history of the United States, has failed to recognize the critical passage of the struggle of England and France for possession, and the momentous result of the fall of Quebec. It is in the relation of minor European complications to this struggle that Mr. Seeley shows his historical insight, and in his clear discrimination of the relative importance of the colonial and the church question. Thus, he illuminates at once the perplexity of the war of the Spanish succession, when he says, “ We must not be misled by the name. Much has been said of the wicked waste of blood and treasure of which we were guilty, when we interfered in a Spanish question with which we had no concern, or terrified ourselves with a phantom of French ascendency which had no reality. How much better, it has been said, to devote ourselves to the civilizing pursuit of trade ! But read in Ranke how the war broke out. You will find that it was precisely trade that led us into it. The Spanish succession touched us because France threatened, by establishing her influence in Spain, to enter into the Spanish monopoly of the New World, and to shut us irrevocably out of it. Accordingly, the great practical results of this war to England were colonial, namely, the conquest of Acadie and the Asiento contract, which for the first time made England on the great scale a slave-trading power.”

This, then, is the thesis, worked out with a most suggestive use of historical material, and full of instruction to American as well as English students. Mr. Seeley is led, necessarily, to inquire into the whole meaning of colonies and empire, and to distinguish between these systems as applicable to England and systems having the same title but far different historical interpretation. He maintains that Englishmen, when asking, What is the good of colonies ? have constantly been misled by a false conception of what English colonies really are. “ That question,” he remarks, “ implies that we think of a colony, not as part of our state, but as a possession belonging to it. For we should think it absurd to raise such a question about a recognized part of the body politic. Who ever thought of inquiring whether Cornwall or Kent rendered any sufficient return for the money which we lay out upon them, — whether those counties were worth keeping? The tie that holds together the parts of a nationstate is of another kind ; it is not composed of considerations of profit and loss, but is analogous to the family bond. The same tie would hold a nation to its colonies, if colonies were regarded as simply an extension of the nation. If Greater Britain, in the full sense of the phrase, really existed, Canada and Australia would be to us as Kent and Cornwall.” When he says of the term colonial possessions, “ At the bottom of it certainly was the idea that the colony was an estate, which was to be worked for the benefit of the mother-country,” he almost succeeds in putting into a phrase the explanation of the secession of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain.

The most noticeable omission in Mr. Seeley’s argument is in a failure to take account of the factor of local government. He sees that in the increased facility of intercourse mere distance of space is not fatal to unity of government; but he does not seem to consider that, while Canada and Australia are much nearer to London than the colonies here were in 1775, the principle of autonomy which lay imbedded in English liberty, and acted as a powerful solvent in separating the thirteen colonies from Great Britain, is constantly gaining in force in the colonies of Great Britain to-day, and shaping the destiny of those colonies. He points to the United States as having successfully solved the great problem of expansion on a vast scale, when she throws out States into her new territory without shaking her political system, and he appears to intimate that the future of Great Britain lies in federation. Unless we misread his pages, he regards the United States as offering an illustration of such federation ; but the unity of the nation lies deeper than any state lines or adjustment of state interests. There is an indefeasible property in territorial boundaries, which cannot be overlooked. Were the time ever to come when Alaska should be a flourishing state, there would be a steadily growing demand to rectify the boundaries of the Pacific coast, and the old war cry of “ Fiftyfour forty, or fight! ” would have a new significance. A federation of separated countries may be possible in a Greater Britain, but the union of the United States is not a historical parallel. Such a federation might precede, but it could not prevent, the perfect autonomy of Australia or Canada.

“ If the colonies are not, in the old phrase,” says Mr. Seeley, “ possessions of England, then they must be a part of England ; and we must adopt this view in earnest. We must cease altogether to say that England is an island off the northwestern coast of Europe ; that it has an area of one hundred and twenty thousand square miles and a population of thirty odd millions. We must cease to think that emigrants, when they go to colonies, leave England or are lost to England. We must cease to think that the history of England is the history of the Parliament that sits at Westminster, and that affairs which are not discussed there cannot belong to English history. When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole empire together and call it all England, we shall see that here too is a United States; here too is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion, and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space. We shall see that, though it is held together by strong moral ties, it has little that can be called a constitution, no system that seems capable of resisting any severe shock. But if we are disposed to doubt whether any system can be devised capable of holding together communities so distant from each other, then is the time to recollect the history of the United States of America. For they have such a system. They have solved this problem. They have shown that in the present age of the world political unions may exist on a vaster scale than was possible in former times. No doubt our problem has difficulties of its own, — immense difficulties. But the greatest of these difficulties is one which we make ourselves. It is the false preconception which we bring to the question, that the problem is insoluble, that no such thing ever was done or ever will be done ; it is our misinterpretation of the American Revolution. From that Revolution we infer that all distant colonies, sooner or later, secede from the mother-country. We ought to infer only that they secede when they are held under the old colonial system.”

It is entirely possible to follow Mr. Seeley in his most interesting interpretation of modern English history by the great fact of the expansion of England without accepting his apparent conclusion. He complains that Englishmen have misunderstood their own history, and, in the passage last quoted, he sees the remedy in a new and juster view. “ We must cease to think,” he says; and again, “ When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate.” But does a nation thus rectify its misunderstanding? No doubt England to-day has its representatives, like Mr. Seeley, who have reached this broader consciousness ; and their views may find concrete expression in legislation, which in turn will react upon national thought. Nevertheless, a more philosophical judgment, as we think, takes this persistent misunderstanding as radical and fundamental, itself an index to national limitations. If for two hundred years England has thus been expanding, and needs to be told of it at last by a Cambridge professor, the doubt remains if there are not conditions of nationality, overlooked in the survey, which defeat the prediction of a vast English union. Certain it is that the United States as a nation has attained the consciousness of an organism through means which directly antagonize the assumptions of Mr. Seeley. The war for independence marked the beginning of this consciousness, but it was not until the close of the second war with England that this country really cut loose from Europe. It was not until it had swung out of the great current of European life that it bore on its way with anything like a distinct purpose. Independence and union have been closely bound with continental integrity, and the highest expression of national life in free political institutions, self-control, art, and religion is the slow product of this self-poised condition. The recent action of Australia is a slight intimation of the same truth. The land held by a people is a far more potent factor in nationality than Mr. Seeley seems to suspect.

Yet there may be a prophetic view of national life which takes too much heed to the relation of the people to the land. The very alluring survey by Mr. Zincke,² to which we have once before referred, reminds one a little of the speculations which Franklin used with so much skill when encouraging his countrymen in the establishment of a separate government. Mr. Zincke forecasts the English-speaking population of the globe in successive quarter centuries, upon the basis of the increase during the past hundred years, and finds that, with a total of ninety-three millions in 1880, there will be a thousand millions in 1980. The progression of the United States population alone will be at the rate of doubling itself every twenty-five years ; so that, with fifty millions to-day, there will be eight hundred millions a century hence.

With these vast figures, and with the North American continent, Australia, South Africa, and an etcetera for a field upon which to marshal them, he sketches a civilization which is most flattering to one’s English pride, and more than that to our American sense ; for he rests this mighty civil virtue which is to be upon the American idea that every man shall own his farm. Mr. Seeley shows how England has ceased to be an agricultural country, and has become a commercial one. Mr. Zincke turns his back on England, apparently, and finds in the agricultural basis of Western civilization the promise of a stupendous future. There is, in his speculations, as in those of many political philosophers to-day, a certain dream of a Paradise Regained rather than of a new Jerusalem. It is impossible to read his glowing pamphlet without a kindling at one’s heart; yet when it is laid aside, and one sits down to reason the matter out from the facts of present civilization, the outlook is not so simple and majestic. There are certain stubborn elements of society in our American life which refuse to yield to the seductions of Mr. Zincke’s prophecy. There are, too, the facts of great cities, of factories, of corporations, of the gravitation of wealth and land itself into the hands of a few, even in America, which come in to disturb the equation. For all that, it is an interesting sign of the times that the redemption of the world’s surface should play so important a part in speculation; that land and its tenure should he the oue subject to which men recur in their political thought. Mr. Seeley’s great federation and Mr. Zincke’s colossal Englishry may be dreams, but they are not idle ones, for they both throw light on the tendencies of history, and have a large value for American students. They have an excellent use also in enlarging the very conceptions of historical study, and we cannot withhold the concluding passage of Mr. Seeley’s book as bearing upon this point.

“ I am often told by those who, like myself, study the question how history should be taught, Oh, you must, before all things, make it interesting ! I agree with them in a certain sense, but I give a different sense to the word interesting, — a sense which after all is the original and proper one. By interesting they mean romantic, poetical, surprising ; I do not try to make history interesting in this sense, because I have found that it cannot be done without adulterating history and mixing it with falsehood. But the word interesting does not properly mean romantic. That is interesting in the proper sense which affects our interests, which closely concerns us and is deeply important to us. I have tried to show you that the history of modern England from the beginning of the eighteenth century is interesting in this sense, because it is pregnant with great results, which will affect the lives of ourselves and our children and the future greatness of our country. Make history interesting, indeed ! I cannot make history more interesting than it is, except by falsifying it. And therefore, when I meet a person who does not find history interesting, it does not occur to me to alter history ; I try to alter him”