Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 703
Now British government has had to grapple with the contrast as between primitive and civilized conceptions of law, morality and duty. Where the divergence was too violent to be let alone, suppression was effected even at a cost. The ‘thug,’ the Indian form of murderer, whose sudden throttling of his victim (thuggee), an entire stranger, was intended as a protest against a sinful world, seemed to many pious natives a sort of implement of God, as many of the English once thought Bishop Bonner and Queen Mary. But the thug had to go. He was, in simple English metaphor, ‘a bit thick.’ Also suttee, the burning of widows, ultimately had to go. As long as the comfortable fiction could be maintained that the widows liked it, it managed to survive. But when it appeared that at least some of the widows shared the horror of the merrier widows of Europe, suttee could not be tolerated where British power could reach it. Such things as suttee, thuggee and infanticide are glaring cases, seen in a lurid light. But British rule has had to accept as best it could tribal marriage, polygamy, domestic slavery, and savage autocracy, tempering what it could not eradicate and waiting for the hand of time. The clock of human destiny cannot be put forward.
For the United States there has arisen in a lesser degree this same problem as to what the flag must cover or conceal. In the Philippines, when under American control, certain things were perforce let alone. On the other hand, when the United States went dry, the unhappy Porto Ricans, Spanish and thirsty, had to go dry also. But, in the Empire, if Great Britain went dry, the Nigerians, being in a Protectorate, could stay wet. The real answer to such a problem however is that Great Britain will not go dry.
This peculiar distinction as between Protectorates and Crown Colonies does not correspond to the differences in form of administration. Nor does it imply, as we might suppose from the general English sense of the words, that a Colony is a British settlement and a Protectorate a territory conquered or a native area. This is simply not so, Gibraltar, a military post, is a Colony. So is Basutoland, a native imperial preserve surrounded by the Union of South Africa. Papua, annexed in 1887, was ranked as a Colony to emphasize the British claim to it, though it was as black as a hat with natives and native custom and barbarity, while its inland tribes had largely not heard of their good luck in becoming British.
The order and class of overseas government depends on the relative extent of imperial and local control. In their lowest stage are the governments made up solely of British officials sent from Britain; above this, a government with some of the officials appointed on the spot. Then comes a government with a Council, as well as executive officials, the Council being selected from officials or nominated from the residents. Above this class are the governments which add to the Councils bodies called Assemblies, some of whose members are elected and some appointed. Above these come the Colonies, which have a popular Assembly all elected, but with a Legislative Council and an Executive Council, appointed. To these is often given the name, not official, of Representative Colonies. Their government is exactly of the type of those of Upper and Lower Canada before the rebellion of 1837. They need only a ‘responsible cabinet’ to give them complete colonial freedom. Just above them is a midway class, Southern Rhodesia and Ceylon, with a cabinet government which is limited by various reservations of power to the imperial government. Malta had been advanced to this class in 1921, but when the clouds gathered over the Mediterranean its constitution was suspended (1930), then restored with modifications (1932). But it broke under the weight of the vexed question of Italian in the schools. Letters patent, authorized by the statutes, put Malta back (1939) to the status of a Crown Colony in which the appointed members of the council can outvote the elected. Newfoundland, which had been a Dominion, at the request of its own government was put back in 1933 to the status of a Crown Colony under an appointed Commission.
The simplest form of colonial government — what the professoriate would call the lowest — is seen in the purely strategic posts such as Aden and Gibraltar. Yet even here the government is not military, not part of the War Office administration, but is civil government under the Colonial Office. Indeed the British system knows nothing of military government except in war, or in the martial law of emergency, or as a temporary administration, of conquered or ceded territory (Canada, 1759-63). The Aden Colony, so designated in 1937, has a Governor (also Commander-in-Chief) with appointed British officials. But Gibraltar, though only 2 square miles in extent, has a civil population of over 20,000 people. In this case the Governor (also Commander-in-Chief) adds three local appointees to the official members of his Executive Council (First Combatant Military Officer, Secretary, Attorney-General, Treasurer). A still further supplement is seen in the government of the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles off East Africa, a midway type between a tropical plantation and a point of strategy. The islands number ninety-two, the largest is only 55 square miles. They are a part of the wreckage of the colonial empire of the French monarchy. They lie among wide banks of submerged coral so that the total area is difficult to compute — probably only about 150 square miles. The islands were empty when the French came. The population has descended from mixed Creoles and immigrant blacks and Indians from Malabar, in all about 30,000. Their government reflects their peculiar status. The Governor has an Executive Council of Officials, with an added local member, and also a Legislative Council — the embryonic form of a true legislature — in which half of the six members are unofficial appointees.
But where the area of the dependency is of considerable extent with an almost entirely native population, the administration by appointed officials is supplemented by ‘indirect government,’ so-called, the rule of native chiefs over their own people with British control in the background. The Aden Colony has beside it the Aden Protectorate, 112,000 square miles of the Arabian peninsula. Here native Sultans rule, under the authority of the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Aden Colony.
Compare Basutoland, a native enclave of about 11,000 — square miles, surrounded by the Union of South Africa. Such British government as reaches it is exercised by a Resident Commissioner with a few appointed officials. Its half million, or more, of natives live under their own chiefs and custom, with a grand gathering once a year of the Basutoland National Council. It has no authority, being what is called in America a pow-wow.
The next grade of colonies is that in which an elected assembly appears — elected either in part or as a total, either by a particular group, or by votes at large. Here is, for example, Hong Kong, the famous Chinese island (11 miles by about 3) at the mouth of the Canton River. To it is now attached a slice of the mainland. It is a great emporium of Eastern trade and is, or was, a point of commanding strategy. With it goes the history of the past (since 1841) and round it turns the immediate future. The form of its government reflects what was its commercial, not its military, aspect. The Governor’s Executive Council of official members has an added appointee, and the Legislative Council adds to the usual officials certain civil functionaries as the Director of Public Works, the Harbour Master and the Director of Medical Services, with also the Commissioner of Police. Most notable is the addition of three Chinese (appointed by the Crown), three other councillors nominated from among the residents and two selected locally — one by the Chamber of Commerce and one by the Justices of the Peace of Hong Kong. We see here the beginning of the principle of elected representatives which from this stage up is gradually infiltrated into British Colonial government, till it presently absorbs all other elements. These ascending stages are represented by the African colonies which contain a certain number of white people as permanent settlers and which are looked on as ‘white man’s territory,’ and especially by the West India Islands. These last are, indeed, overwhelmingly coloured in population, but the whites fall heir to a certain prestige of history, and of the coloured people large numbers are persons of education and culture. In Africa, Northern Rhodesia has only about 10,000 whites, among nearly 1,500,000 blacks. But it has both an Executive and a Legislative Council and in the latter has seven members elected by the Europeans, just enough, it may be noted, to be comfortably outvoted by the ex-officio (5) and the nominated (4) members. British government seldom sins by going too fast and too far. Compare the French colony of Senegal in West Africa, which has about the same native population, and where voting and elections are the order of the day. The whole Colonial Council of “members is elected by native ‘citizens’ (in St. Louis) or by their chiefs outside. A deputy is elected to the Chamber at Paris. The schools give the same instruction as the French primary schools, from the same books, the principal of equality thus allowing the Senegalese children to learn about ‘our ancestors the Gauls.’ British and French colonial governments are differently based. The French aim at nominal equality, the British at nominal autocracy, but both confer the priceless right to be let alone as much as possible.
One may compare with Northern Rhodesia the partial use of the principle of election as appears in the governments of Ceylon, Kenya, etc., all of which are summarized in a table at the end of this volume. Most interesting are the West Indian colonies, where representative government reaches its highest point before expanding into responsible government. In Jamaica the Legislative Council has 5 ex-officio, 10 nominated and 14 elected members. The franchise, which extends to women, takes no account of colour. With Barbados the name ‘Legislative Council’ disappears in favour of a House of Assembly, all elected annually. The suffrage is restricted, there being only about 6,500 voters among nearly 200,000 people. But the restriction is not that of colour. In the Bahamas the entire Assembly is elected and is on a wider suffrage. In these two colonies, as also in Bermuda, the members of the Executive Council become in practice something very much like a responsible cabinet. Members of the Assembly can be made members of the Executive Council, though not exclusively, and it is found as a matter of practice to be easier and simpler to govern with the consenting vote of the house, than to try to govern without it. In other words, they are as far forwards, or as backwards, as England was in the days of Queen Anne.
The top stage in this continuous advance is seen in the government which is enjoyed by Southern Rhodesia and which was enjoyed, but not appreciated, by Malta. In this geographical section of Rhodesia (area 150,000 square miles; whites 55,000, natives 1,300,000) the government, as first established in 1923, is responsible government, much as it was in the chief colonies when instituted under Queen Victoria. The Legislative Assembly of thirty members is elected on a franchise covering all British subjects, but native councils are established for native reserves. There is no upper house unless the Assembly wishes to create one, and the Governor’s Council, by understanding, must and do hold office on a cabinet tenure. Only the fact that the Imperial Government still reserves definite powers in regard to bills reserved for the Crown, native affairs, etc., stands between Southern Rhodesia and dominion status.
A backward glance over this vast panorama of British rule over colonies and protectorates extending round the tropical world shows a vast and varied picture of island and mainland, ports and river mouths, open coast and tangled interior, equatorial forest or waving savannah and park-like uplands. Through it all runs peace and decency, free speech and fair play. The tumult of Europe, the carnage of the Orient, comes but as an echo to the peaceful uplands of Africa. It is an irony of history that what was to Europe the land of savagery and mystery, hideous with barbarous rites and human sacrifice, its very air laden with putrid fever and sudden death, now breathes the soft air of peace, while Europe struggles against the annihilation of civilization. British government has done this. Nor does it rest on force. The five thousand white people of Nigeria are as nothing against its twenty million natives. The armed forces of the Empire, apart from the naval protection of seaports, are too insignificant to hold it against the unnumbered millions of its inhabitants without the goodwill that everywhere joins British rule and native life. It is well to lay stress on this aspect of the British Empire. It is necessary to get rid of the taint of that anti-imperialism which was for so long the reverse side of British expansion and overlordship, and which followed like a dark cloud each ‘forward’ movement and bred disunion within the Empire itself. It is getting to be little more than a memory now. The basic idea of British rule now has come to be co-operation not conquest. But all of us of the outgoing generation can remember how bitter were the feelings of many people, fifty years ago, at what appeared to them the unwarranted aggression of British rule, its intrusion where it had no ‘right,’ its seeming associations with capitalism and the exploitation of unoffending partners. It was as if the slave-trade had only died to raise upon its own soil a newer slavery. The slave who dreamed beside the ungathered rice of Carolina of his own African uplands, was replaced by the slaves fettered in Africa itself. To such a vision even the most blood-besotten of the Dervishes seemed a people struggling to be free, the Mashonas and Matabeles the noble savages, better men than their conquerors. Such sentiments were especially prevalent among those who lived in the Dominions, the then self-governing colonies. They had no commercial interest in the new expansion of Europe, in the partition of Africa or in the proposed opening of China, as Europe’s oyster. Their own struggle towards free government lent a bias to their views.
Theory coloured fact. In the days when it seemed that the manifest destiny of the Empire was peaceful dissolution, an undoubted factor of the situation was this supposed contrast between British rapacity and rugged colonial honesty. All that is gone, far away now. The ast clouds of it are drifting away on the blast of war It is only useful to recall it so that we may better understand the good fortune of our history. Bygone danger enhances present security. No one doubts now the significance of membership in the British Commonwealth.
This indicated frame of mind is above all necessary for the understanding of Britain in India. Here is a record not yet finished. Here is history in the climax of its making If we have no faith here, then force is vain.
The government of India occupies in the British system an entirely unique position. The vast population of the great peninsula, its teeming population and the prestige of its long history place it out of other comparison among the possessions under the Crown. India was old when even the British Isles were young, crowded when North America was a wilderness, profound in its learning and philosophy centuries ago. It ‘heard the legions thunder past and turned to thought again.’ From India Western civilization received much of its mathematics and its speculative thought. Yet in spite of such overpowering eminence in certain aspects, India occupies, in respect to its government, a constitutional position below that of the British Dominions. It is still in the last resort under the sovereign control of the United Kingdom. It is true that there is an understanding that India is to have the full and equal status of a Dominion — some day. The only question is, when is the day to come?
The pomp and majesty of government can easily be extended to India. The reality not so well. Since 18 77 India has been an Empire and the British Sovereign its Emperor. Delhi, the city of the Moguls, is again its capital. The great Durbar held at Delhi in 1911 by George V, represented the first visit to India of a reigning British Sovereign. It antedated any similar honour to the Dominions by twenty-eight years. Indian princes carry resounding titles and glitter with stars. Yet for people of a certain temper of mind there is less freedom in all this than in membership of the Parish Council of Portsea — if there is one — or, shall we say, of the Town Council of Orillia, Ontario. That is as far as many people are able to see into the problem of government for India. Why not give them freedom? This simple conception of an easy and mechanical frictionless freedom, effected by a count of heads and a ballot box, came to us from the middle nineteenth century when it shed its light as a sort of hope of the world. Where it can be and has been realized it is as good a general hope, in the secular sense, as the world has yet obtained.
