30 
 
 UC-NRLF 
 
 B M DDb M2S 
 
The Study of the 
 
 British Commonwealth 
 
 jIn Inaugural Lecture 
 
 ^Delivered before the University of Oxford 
 on 19 November, 1921 
 
 BY 
 
 R. COUPLAND, M.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE 
 BEIT PROFESSOR OF COLONIAL HISTORY 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 1921 
 
The Study of the 
 
 British Commonwealth 
 
 jln Inaugural Lecture 
 
 Delivered before the University of Oxford 
 on 19 November, 1921 
 
 BY 
 
 R. COUPLAND, M.A. 
 
 FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COI.LKGE 
 BEIT PROFESSOR OF COLONIAL HISTORY 
 
 OXFORD 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1921 
 
I 
 
 ^0 
 
 V 
 
 Oxford University Press 
 
 London Edinburgh Glasgow Copenhagen 
 
 New Tork Toronto Melbourne Cape Town 
 Bombay Calcutta Madras Shanghai 
 Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University 
 
THE STUDY OF THE BRITISH 
 COMMONWEALTH 
 
 Those of you who have read Professor Basil Williams's 
 admirable biography will remember that Cecil Rhodes 
 once began an address to a great business meeting in 
 London by saying that ' he supposed the most unhappy 
 thing in the world was for a public man to make a speech '. 
 I venture to contest that claim. Public men, it is 
 notorious, enjoy nothing so much as making speeches ; 
 but has any Professor ever enjoyed delivering an In- 
 augural Lecture ? And can there be a more unhappy 
 thing in the world than the delivery of an Inaugural 
 Lecture before a University so critical as this and by 
 a Professor so conscious as your present victim of his 
 lack of almost all that is generally conceived to consti- 
 tute the professorial stock-in-trade— the profound know- 
 ledge which only many years of toil can give, the 
 authorship of several learned volumes, the venerable 
 bearing — and so dependent, therefore, on your generosity 
 when he asks that he be judged not by what he has done 
 but by what he means to do ? 
 
 And my diffidence is intensified when I reflect whose 
 mantle it is that I am told to wear. When, fifteen years 
 ago, Alfred Beit created this Chair with such far-sighted 
 generosity, and in such happy consonance with the 
 foundation of the Rhodes Scholarships by his life-long 
 friend, there may have been some who thought that 
 Colonial History was a 'fancy' subject, a side-track 
 
 8648 A 2 
 
 47&998 
 
4 THE STUJDY OF THE 
 
 from' the old, well-trodden highway of historical teaching, 
 attractive, indeed— if only because side-tracks are always, 
 alas ! attractive — but bordered by no such rich fields of 
 research as is the main road, nor equipped with such 
 famous store-houses of political experience, and leading 
 dangerously near those forbidden haunts where the 
 blare of trumpets and the blaze of flags reveal that the 
 partisans and propagandists are making merry. But 
 any such fears were quickly laid to rest by the first 
 appointment to the Chair. Professor Egerton, beyond 
 dispute, possesses a more thorough knowledge of 
 Colonial History than any living man ; and the wide 
 learning, the lucid exposition, the scholarly judgement 
 of his lectures and his writings soon proved — if proof 
 indeed were needed — that the American Revolution, for 
 example, was at least as fit and profitable a field for 
 scientific study as the Revolution of 1688, and that 
 pohtical lessons could be learned from the development 
 of self-government in the Dominions as well as in the 
 Mother-country. And may I here declare, on behalf of 
 many students known to me and not least of myself, the 
 debt of gratitude we owe Professor Egerton for the 
 instant sympathy and patient guidance he has given in 
 such full measure to all who shared his own deep 
 interest in the subject? It is a great gain not only to 
 his successor, who means to go on drawing, if he may, 
 on that never-failing store of knowledge and of friend- 
 ship, but for the study of History throughout the 
 Universit}'' that his resignation has not meant his de- 
 parture from Oxford. 
 
 The dread of this unhappy hour might well, indeed, 
 have been my reason for postponing it for a year from 
 the date of my appointment. But there have been other 
 reasons. It seemed to me that the holder of a recently 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH ' 5 
 
 founded chair might be expected to devote his first 
 Public Lecture not so much to the exposition of some 
 particular branch of his subject as to a brief discussion 
 of the part which it should take in the work of the 
 University : and to this end a little time was needed by 
 one who had had small experience of the scope and 
 method of the School of Modern History. A year 
 ago, moreover, the School of Philosophy, Politics, and 
 Economics, which is also concerned with the study of 
 Colonial History, was still in process of creation. Above 
 all, the Oxford of 1920 was not the Oxford 1 had known 
 in 1914. We have been forced to look at the world in 
 a new perspective, to take an interest in matters to 
 which we were once more or less indifferent, to re- 
 consider our scheme of values in education as in other 
 things. And if, on the whole, we come to the conclusion 
 that no radical change is needed in the great tradition 
 of Oxford studies, we are ready to admit that the condi- 
 tions of this post-War age demand, in some subjects at 
 any rate, a widening of the field of work or at least 
 a shifting of emphasis from one part of it to another. 
 
 Of the study of History this seems to me particularly 
 true. The development of the War presented to us, as 
 it were, a continuous examination paper on History. 
 And the results of it were devastating. Many of us, 
 I fear, were ' ploughed ' by the first question on Austria 
 and the Balkans ; and others went down before the 
 second — ' Describe exactly the origin and terms of the 
 Treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium.' But 
 the questions which betrayed most severely, perhaps, 
 the limitations of our knowledge came later in the paper. 
 When the people of the United States of America 
 entered the war, when the magnitude of the contribu- 
 
6 '' '' ' 'fUK STUt)'Y OF THE 
 
 tion they made to the cause of the Allies in the short 
 period allowed them revealed how vast was their 
 potential strength, when, above all, it became manifest 
 that the fortunes of the world in this new age depended 
 first and foremost on a real understanding between this 
 mighty Commonwealth and our own, we began to ask 
 ourselves what we knew of its history, of its great men 
 and great achievements, of its unique economic develop- 
 ment, of the forces which have shaped its poHtical 
 ideals. And what sort of marks, I wonder, did we get 
 for our answers? Happily an opportunity has been 
 quickly given us to lighten our darkness : and I can 
 speak for all Oxford in cordially welcoming the appoint- 
 ment of the first Harmsworth Professor of American 
 History. 
 
 The War, in fact, has taught us, as nothing else could 
 have done, how the sundering spaces of the world have 
 shrunk before the swift advance of science. The lives 
 of all its peoples have been brought intimately close 
 together. A new idea is born, and in a moment it has 
 run the circuit of the earth. A fine ideal, a perilous 
 illusion, a resonant phrase may be uttered one day in 
 London, Paris, Washington, Moscow: and on the 
 morrow, oddly transmuted sometimes on the way, it is 
 caught up and acclaimed and does its work for good or 
 ill in India, Bokhara, Persia, Anatolia, Morocco, South 
 Africa — where you will. And, binding continent to 
 continent and nation to nation, runs the delicate, intricate 
 web of their economic and financial interdependence. 
 Human society, indeed, has become so close-knit, so 
 complex an organism, that we may be tempted some- 
 times to wonder whether its brain is big enough to 
 control its body. No one can doubt, at any rate, that 
 much hard thinking must be done if the intellectual 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 7 
 
 equipment of mankind is to keep abreast of its growing 
 moral and material needs. And this applies no less to 
 the political than to the economic organization of the 
 world. It has become not only foolish now but 
 dangerous to cling to the old, contemptible doctrine 
 that foresight and knowledge are not essential for the 
 handling of great political issues because, when it comes 
 to the point, we can always * muddle through '. There 
 will often enough be surprises in the world to test 
 those gifts of improvisation and adaptability on which we 
 pride ourselves. But politics is a science rather than 
 an art; and we cannot with impunity omit to look 
 afield and ahead, to detect the crucial problem, if we 
 can, before the crisis is upon us, and to prepare our- 
 selves betimes to solve it by scientific study. 
 
 History might well have taught this lesson before 
 1914. The greatest disaster in British annals was not 
 primarily due to moral or social or economic or personal 
 causes. We lost the thirteen American colonies pri- 
 marily because we never closely studied the old Colonial 
 System, never clearly analysed the political problem it 
 contained, never made a real constructive effort to solve 
 it. Per contra, the union of the thirteen American 
 States in one commonwealth — one of the greatest 
 achievements in history — could never have been effected 
 without the preliminary study so thoughtfully and 
 thoroughly pursued, and its results so admirably 
 expounded, by Alexander Hamilton and his collabora- 
 tors. The union of South Africa, again, which will one 
 day be recognized as an even more remarkable achieve- 
 ment, was carried into being, it is true, on a wave of 
 enthusiasm for a great idea ; but the momentum would 
 have been checked, the ardour chilled, the unique 
 opportunity frittered away, if the cardinal difficulties 
 
8 . THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 had not been thought out beforehand so that the con- 
 stitutional framework of union could be swiftly and 
 smoothly fashioned before the forces of disruption had 
 time to rouse themselves and wreck it. And, to take 
 a second failure for our fourth example, is it not reason- 
 ably certain that if the Irish problem had been treated 
 as a problem of historical and political science, and 
 studied in the hght of the experience of multi-national 
 federal states, it could have been solved, once for all, 
 forty years ago ? 
 
 But before a University audience it is hardly necessary 
 to state a case for the scientific study of politics. The 
 purpose of this lecture is to suggest the special oppor- 
 tunities for such study which are offered to us as 
 citizens of the British Commonwealth, and to plead that 
 these opportunities should not be neglected at Oxford, 
 especially with regard to the two paramount political 
 problems of our time. 
 
 The first of these problems is the problem of 
 nationality — the problem which arises from the fact that 
 a nation (whatever it is) is not, as current usage of the 
 term might seem to imply, the same thing as a state. 
 A whole course of lectures might well be devoted to 
 this fascinating theme. But I must content myself to-day 
 with emphasizing the vastly important part nationality 
 is playing in the modern world. Though it only came 
 to the forefront of European politics in the nineteenth 
 century, its reactions were felt all over Europe and 
 beyond before the century closed. The causes of the 
 War were rooted in it. And to-day nationality, in one 
 shape or another, is the most powerful and the most 
 troublesome element in the whole complex of world- 
 politics. The demon of an overweening and perverted 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 9 
 
 nationalism has not been wholly exorcized by the War, 
 although all Europe is suffering from its fruits and the 
 nation which most indulged it is paying the penalt}^ in 
 defeat and humiliation and poverty. Another nation 
 in recovering its body has apparently lost its head, 
 A group of nations are learning that the necessity of 
 disrupting an ill-organized multi-national state does not 
 in itself prove the validity of the shallow nineteenth- 
 century doctrine that ideally all states should be uni- 
 national. And, finally, this doctrine, under its new title 
 of national self-determination, declaring that every nation 
 has a positive right to be a state, has given a new 
 impetus to nationalist movements not in Europe only but 
 all over the world. It is manifest, indeed, that there can 
 be little peace or prosperity on earth until certain truths 
 concerning nationality are understood — that, for example, 
 nations, like men, should strive to cherish and enrich 
 their individuality not for themselves alone, but in order 
 to make their contribution to the common treasure of 
 humanity; that, in Mazzmi's noble phrase, 'a nation is 
 a living task, her life is not her own ' ; that somehow, in 
 the end, the ideal of national freedom must be harmonized 
 with the ideal of international unity. 
 
 For the study of questions such as these there exists 
 no other political community comparable with the British 
 Commonwealth in the quantity or diversity of the 
 materials it contains. It is a great miscellany of nations, 
 big and Httle, old and young. In some the spirit of 
 nationality is satisfied and at peace. In others it is 
 restless, rebellious, disruptive. At this moment the 
 Commonwealth is alive with nationalist movements of 
 varying character and intensity— right at its centre in 
 Ireland, further afield in India and South Africa, and 
 throughout that Near-Eastern border-country, just within 
 A3 
 
10 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 or just without its orbit, in Egypt, Palestine, Mesopo- 
 tamia. On the happy issue of these movements how 
 much depends ! For the Commonwealth, in one of its 
 two most vital aspects, is nothing else than an attempt, 
 on a wider scale than anything that has preceded it, to 
 solve that insistent problem of nationality ; an endeavour 
 to keep a motley company of nations living contentedly 
 together both in freedom and in unity ; a unique 
 experiment in international relations. If it continues to 
 succeed, as on the whole it has so far succeeded, it may 
 do much to save mankind by its experience and 
 example. If it fails, if the bond of a common tradition 
 and a common purpose is snapped by the weight of 
 narrower interests or less generous ideals, if it splits 
 into a chaos of alien sovereignties, the hope of the world 
 will be dimmed. If the British League of Nations dies, 
 what other League can live ? 
 
 Because of its general importance, then, in the life of 
 the world to-day, and because of the particular part it 
 has played, and has yet to play, in the destiny of the 
 British Commonwealth, the study of nationality, and 
 especially of our own British dealings with it, should 
 form, I contend, an essential part in the work of every 
 British student of history and politics. And nowhere, 
 surely, could this study be more appropriately pursued 
 than here at Oxford, itself an academic miniature of the 
 Commonwealth, where the youth of all its nations meet 
 in the brotherhood of learning. A thorough under- 
 standing of nationality, I suggest, should be the hall- 
 mark of every twentieth-century Oxford historian. And 
 while he should not by any means neglect its history in 
 the world at large, he should make his special contribu- 
 tion to the general knowledge of the subject by studying 
 and expounding the experience of the British Common- 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH ii 
 
 wealth. He should be familiar, first of all, with the 
 history of nationality in the British Isles— the growth of 
 a national consciousness in the four nations they con- 
 tain, the inevitable development of the problem of 
 adjusting their mutual relations, the international con- 
 flict, its happy issue in Wales and Scotland, its tragic 
 issue in Ireland. He should be acquainted, secondly, 
 with the history of the same problem in Canada — where 
 the juxtaposition of a conquered Celtic Roman Catholic 
 population in the valley of the St. Lawrence and an 
 immigrant Anglo-Saxon Protestant population in its 
 hinterland created a situation so closely analogous at 
 the outset to that of Ireland, but so fortunately and so 
 instructively different in its development — and in South 
 Africa, where the national schism, opened so needlessly 
 by the Great Trek (one of the unwritten epics of 
 nationality, by the way), was only closed again when the 
 second and third generation had endured its heritage of 
 strife and waste and death. Thirdly, he should have 
 carefully studied the growth of what may be called 
 Dominion nationality — how the four groups of con- 
 tiguous colonies in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, 
 and South Africa, divided at first either by nationality 
 like England and Scotland, or by a jealous ' particularism' 
 like the thirteen American States, gradually yielded to 
 the forces, economic and political, which made for unity ; 
 how sooner, as in the case of New Zealand, or later, as 
 in that of South Africa, the barriers were broken down 
 and each group was welded together in a single con- 
 stitutional frame, more loosely or more tightly as the 
 case might be ; how this political unification stimulated 
 and quickened the process which, despite differences 
 and disputes, had been silently going on all the time — 
 the development of an inward unity, of which political 
 
12 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 unity was but the outward expression ; a sense of 
 common devotion to the land they had made their 
 home; a consciousness of the common customs and 
 common interests which they shared as dwellers in one 
 country, of something which made all who lived in 
 Canada Canadians, whether they were of French or 
 British blood, and all who lived in South Africa South 
 Africans, whether they spoke Dutch or English ; and, 
 finally, as time went on, the gathering of common 
 memories and the growth of a common purpose, culmi- 
 nating in the knowledge which all alike brought back 
 with them from the common ordeal of war that, to quote 
 from Kenan's famous definition of a nation, they had 
 done great things together and desired to do more 
 of them. 
 
 The historian who has mastered this material will be 
 able to throw some light on those difficult questions : 
 What is a nation ? and What is nationality ? He will be 
 able, too, to make the meaning of our Commonwealth of 
 Nations a little clearer to those of his fellow-citizens who 
 are puzzled by the emphasis which Overseas statesmen 
 have recently been laying on the * national status' of the 
 Dominions. He may even temper the not unnatural 
 bewilderment with which foreign observers contemplate 
 so queer a spectacle, for instance, as a brisk dispute 
 between Dominion and United Kingdom delegates in 
 the Assembly of the League of Nations. But that is 
 not all. Nationalism is a new thing in the Dominions. 
 It has yet to run its course. We cannot certainly fore- 
 tell, however strong our belief may be, what spirit will 
 inform it when it reaches its full power — the spirit of 
 Mazzini or another's. But this at least is certain. If 
 this great society of nations is to continue — its younger 
 partners, remember, growing in those wide spaces so 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 13 
 
 much faster than the Motherland, that even in our own 
 day their population may easily outstrip our own — 
 there is nothing we can do at Oxford to promote that 
 end more effectively than to foster a better knowledge 
 of the history of the Dominions in this country, and 
 thereby a better understanding of their character, their 
 circumstances, and their ideals. 
 
 There is one aspect of Dominion nationalism with 
 w^hich this Chair is especially concerned. The con- 
 sciousness of nationhood in the Dominions has greatly 
 stimulated the interest of all their peoples in their past. 
 But the histories of the Dominions, unhke their con- 
 stitutions, are unwritten ; and they cannot yet be written, 
 on a full scale and in keeping with modern standards of 
 historical scholarship, because the preliminary research 
 has not yet been done. The w^ork has been begun 
 indeed, and admirably begun, by the historians of the 
 Dominion Universities ; and from year to year they are 
 sending out a sweUing stream of students who mean to 
 devote themselves to building up the knowledge of their 
 national history in the same fine pioneer-spirit in which 
 their ancestors once cut their way through the trackless 
 forest and cleared the untouched ground for cultivation. 
 Now in this great undertaking Oxford is called to play 
 a part. The materials on which these pioneers must 
 w^ork are divided. They exist in part in the Dominions, 
 whose Governments are happily aware that the youth of 
 a nation is no excuse for neglecting the records of its 
 life. Every student of Canadian history owes an im- 
 measurable debt to Dr. Doughty for his masterly hand- 
 ling of the Dominion Archives and for the invaluable 
 publications of his Department : his example is being 
 zealously followed in South Africa by Mr. Botha, the 
 
14 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 Union Archivist; and similar work is being done in 
 Australia by the Library Committee of the Common- 
 wealth Parliament. But most of the other part of the 
 material is in England, mainly in the Record Office and 
 the British Museum. To England, therefore, the young 
 historians of the Dominions are now coming in increas- 
 ing numbers : and I know you will agree with me when 
 I say that nowhere can they find a warmer welcome 
 than at Oxford. I am trying myself to do something to 
 meet their special needs by building up alongside the 
 existing Beit Library of general Colonial History a 
 Research Library which will aim at containing ulti- 
 mately all the more important published sources, so 
 that Overseas research students can work at these in 
 term-time, with such guidance as the Beit Lecturer and 
 myself can give them, and devote their vacations to the 
 unpublished rndXeridils in London, where, if they are wise, 
 they will quickly find their way to the hospitable work- 
 rooms of the newly founded Institute of Historical 
 Research. 
 
 I trust, too, that some of these Overseas research 
 students will use the opportunity of residence at the 
 centre of the Commonwealth to study other fields within 
 its world-wide orbit than their own homelands. I regard 
 it as a welcome sign that one Canadian student wrote 
 a thesis this year for the degree of Bachelor of Letters 
 on the Constitutional Development of the British West 
 Indies, and that another is now working for our new 
 Research Doctorate on the history of British Malaya. 
 It is to be hoped, similarly, that students in this country 
 will collaborate with their kinsmen from overseas in 
 laying the foundations of Dominion history. 
 
 There is nothing revolutionary in the claim that the 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 15 
 
 problem of nationality in the Dominions should not 
 be overlooked by students of history and politics at 
 Oxford. It is merely an extension of a field already 
 occupied. But I would go further. I would plead that 
 no student of history and politics ought to leave this 
 University without some knowledge of the record and 
 the function of the British Commonwealth in Asia and 
 in other parts of Africa than the Dominion in the South, 
 For the second of the two transcendent political problems 
 of our time is the Colour Problem. Behind the ques- 
 tion of international relations looms the more difficult 
 and no less insistent question of interracial relations. 
 The world is one. Asia shared with Europe in the 
 War : and Europe cannot live apart from her in peace. 
 India, China, Japan are members, indeed, of the League 
 of Nations ; but are we not apt to regard the work of the 
 League as primarily an effort to establish harmony 
 between the white peoples of the world ? And what if, 
 while we labour at this task, the old familiar evils of 
 ignorance and prejudice, of ruthless greed and arrogant 
 ascendancy, are gathering strength beyond our limited 
 horizon till, some far-off day, we wake to find ourselves 
 confronted with another seemingly ' inevitable ' con- 
 flict, but this time a conflict of colour, more terribly 
 primitive in its impulses, more inexorable, more de- 
 structive than any of its predecessors, the authentic 
 Armageddon, stamping out in blood and ruin the last 
 hope of civilization ? I am not trying to make any one's 
 flesh creep— there is nothing, indeed, so hateful as 
 thoughtless scaremongering on this theme — but un- 
 thinkable as such a conflict may seem, it is idle to sup- 
 pose it could not happen. It might well happen if the 
 peoples of the West allowed themselves to be con- 
 vinced by dogmatic biologists that the ultimate relations 
 
i6 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 between the white and coloured races can only be a fight 
 to the death for the survival of the fittest, or by cynics 
 and materialists that a strong or civihzed people can 
 have no other genuine object in its dealings with a weak 
 or backward people than to exploit it solely for its selfish 
 gain. And it might well happen if the wisdom of Japan 
 were beguiled by militarist dreams which have lost (let 
 us hope) their charm in Europe and were per^^erted 
 by those evil counsellors who tell her, in language now 
 so bitterly familiar in the West, that ' to possess the 
 Empire of the Pacific is to be master of the world'. 
 And again it might well happen if Mr. Gandhi or his 
 disciples could persuade the untutored multitudes of 
 India that the East cannot profit by contact with the 
 West, and that all Britain has done for their motherland 
 has been Satan's doing. It is safe, I hope, to prophesy 
 that none of these hypotheses will be fulfilled ; but even 
 without them is it not conceivable that the world may 
 drift into a race-schism through mere indifference and 
 neglect ? Nature and circumstance have made the 
 races different in more than in colour — different in 
 religion, in philosophy, in experience and tradition and 
 ideals : and these differences cannot be harmonized 
 simply by wishing it so. They must be studied : they 
 must, as far as possible, be understood. 
 
 We need not look far afield for the materials of study. 
 The British Commonwealth, it has been well said, is 
 a microcosm of the world. It cuts across the strata 
 of humanity. It includes a part of every continent and 
 a section of all the great families of mankind. As in 
 the question of nationality, therefore, so in the question 
 of colour, but on an even wider and more impressive 
 scale, it presents the essential problems in actual opera- 
 tion : and in this field, as in the other, its long experience 
 
/ 
 
 BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 17 
 
 has carried it some way, at any rate, towards their 
 solution. Roughly, perhaps, and tentatively as yet, 
 it bridges the gulf between Europe and Asia. Within 
 its bounds more than three hundred million Asiatics 
 are living side by side with Europeans. It may not 
 be the happiest of happy famihes. Discontents, justifi- 
 able or otherwise, may be at work beneath the surface 
 whose outcome cannot be foreseen. But the fact is 
 there. These Asiatics and Europeans are at this hour 
 living side by side, fellow-members of one political 
 society, owning allegiance to a single Crown. And 
 if this fact endures, if, as the years go by, the bridge 
 across the gulf consolidates, if the political association 
 becomes in time a genuine comradeship, yoking Europe 
 and Asia in free service for their common weal, surely 
 the longest and hardest stage will have been accom- 
 plished in the long, hard march towards the brotherhood 
 of man. Is it anything less, then, than the duty of 
 the rising generation to inform themselves by what 
 process of history and under what conditions this fact 
 has come about ? And ought not a British University 
 to help them to fulfil it ? 
 
 I am sure, at any rate, that my friend, the Reader in 
 Indian History — who will pardon, I know, this momen- 
 tary intrusion of mine into the field in which he labours 
 with such infectious zeal — will agree with me in wishing 
 that the history of British rule in India were more 
 generally and more fully studied here, and not only 
 or mainly the military and, in its outward form alone, 
 the constitutional history, but rather the development 
 of the ideas which have inspired the British Raj, and 
 especially the growth of a sense of responsibility towards 
 the Indian people, and its effect on public opinion in 
 Britain and on British administration in India. 
 
i8 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 The origin of this sense of responsibihty may be 
 found, I suppose, in that sudden renascence of idealism 
 with which the British people, on the morrow of the 
 most damaging and humiliating disaster in their histor}^ 
 awoke from the long lethargy of the eighteenth century. 
 Defeat may be a better moral tonic than victory ; and 
 in that interesting decade between the wars of the 
 American and French Revolutions men like Burke and 
 Wilberforce brought into politics the same new spirit 
 which Wesley and Whitefield had brought into religion. 
 Modern students of Warren Hastings's career may fairly 
 point to exaggeration and injustice in Burke's advocacy 
 of Indian grievances : but let it be remembered that he 
 was rousing his countrymen, by necessarily violent 
 means perhaps, to their first faint perception of the 
 moral issues at stake in the government of India. Re- 
 read his speeches of 1783 and 1785, and 3^ou will in- 
 crease — if that is possible at Oxford — your reverence 
 for that great political teacher. Note how clearly he 
 recognizes the magnitude of our task in India, the 
 immensity of its population, and the difficulty and 
 delicacy of the situation that arises from the intrusion 
 of Europe into that ancient civilization with its ' venerable 
 priesthood ', its ' nobility of great antiquity and renown ', 
 its merchants and bankers, its manufacturers and me- 
 chanics, and its ' millions of diligent tillers of the earth ', 
 the whole body ' infinitely diversified by manners, by 
 religion, by hereditary employment, through all their 
 possible combinations '. Note, too, how wisely he 
 emphasizes the danger of entrusting to the same men 
 the functions of government and the interests of trade : 
 and how clearly he affirms the cardinal principle that the 
 powers and privileges granted to his countrymen in 
 India ought all to be exercised for the ultimate benefit 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 19 
 
 of the Indian people and are ' all in the strictest sense 
 a trust' — the first public enunciation, I take it, of the 
 modern doctrine of trusteeship. And note, finall}', his 
 stern reproof of the ignorance and apathy of Parliament. 
 ' Let us do what we please to put India from our thoughts, 
 we can do nothing to separate it from our public interest 
 and our national reputation '. 
 
 It would be no less educative, surely, than interesting 
 to watch the influence of this idea of trusteeship, once 
 Burke had forced it on the British conscience, on the 
 subsequent development of pubhc opinion and official 
 conduct — on Parliament's attempts to reform the ad- 
 ministration of the East India Company, on the expansion 
 of British rule, on the interpretation and the handling of 
 the crisis of 1857 and the question of transferring 
 political control entirely to the Crown, on the policy of 
 a Cobden on the one hand, and a Disraeli on the other, 
 and on the methods and the purpose of the greatest 
 bureaucracy, to judge it not merely by the multitude of 
 human beings in its charge, that the world has ever 
 known. 
 
 Should our student of the Commonwealth stop there, 
 for fear of coming too close abreast of contemporary 
 politics and treading controversial ground ? Or should 
 he press on to the inauguration of the new regime in 
 India ? I think he will answer that question for himself. 
 I think, if he studies the steady permeation of British 
 rule in India, from Burke's day onwards, by the ideal 
 Burke proclaimed, he will be caught up by the glamour 
 of the story and will not rest, until, be it in work-time or 
 in leisure, he has read its latest chapter and watched, 
 with the anxious interest only his previous study could 
 give him, the initiation of the policy of extending to the 
 people of India the forms of political freedom or, as 
 
20 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 I would rather put it, of political responsibility, which 
 the people of Britain have fashioned, not without dust 
 and heat, from the lessons of a long experience. He 
 may judge it either way. He may think it an untimely 
 abandonment of our trust or the inception of its last, its 
 hardest, its crowning stage. But anyhow he will be able 
 to contribute some measure of knowledge and thought — 
 academic, it may be, and uninformed by personal experi- 
 ence of India, but better, surely, than blank ignorance and 
 indifference — to the formation of the public opinion of 
 his time on what may prove to be the most decisive issue 
 of this century for the good or ill of mankind as a whole. 
 
 The Colour Problem is most urgent and. most critical 
 in Asia. It is most difficult and morally most dangerous 
 in Africa ; and for present purposes I mean by Africa 
 that great Equatorial belt between the Sahara and 
 the Zambesi— that vast primeval country, the birth- 
 place, seemingl}^ of our race, yet to the great majority 
 of men a dark, unknown, mysterious land ; a land of 
 fabulous wealth from the days when Europe whispered 
 of Ophir and Monomatapa to the days when Europe 
 finds itself dependent on its palm-oil and its rubber and 
 the countless other products of its teeming soil ; a land 
 which has always tempted the explorer since, four 
 centuries before our era, Hanno set sail from Carthage, 
 and, passing the Pillars of Hercules and Cape Verde, 
 came at last to the Gulf of Guinea and there beheld 
 those hairy, savage men and women whom his inter- 
 preters told him were ' gorillas ' ; the chosen land of 
 glorious incredible romance, the home of the blame- 
 less Ethiopians who feasted with the gods, of those 
 battles in the dawn between the pygmies and the 
 cranes, of Presbyter John, of King Solomon's Mines; 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 21 
 
 a land of tropical extremes where Nature nourishes and 
 kills so easily, where white men rise so high and fall so 
 low, where the vileness in Heart of Darkness and the 
 nobility in Multitude and Solitude can both be true to 
 life; the homeland, first and last, of that swarming, 
 fecund negro race, the most backward among the great 
 races of mankind, ignorant, superstitious, brutal, if you 
 will, but, like children, simple, happy, docile, and not 
 without their special gifts of mind and body. . . Now 
 it happens that a wider area of this land and a greater 
 number of its peoples are included in the British 
 Commonwealth than in any other political community. 
 It falls to us, therefore, its European members, by what 
 we do or leave undone, to take the predominant, indeed 
 the decisive, part in settHng, one way or another, the 
 African question. For there is an African question. 
 The world (I repeat the truism) is one. None of its 
 peoples can live in isolation. And somehow or other, 
 at the risk of disaster to all the world, no less ruinous 
 because it might be primarily a moral disaster, the life 
 of Africa, like that of Asia, must be harmonized with the 
 life of the other continents. Here too, moreover, the 
 course taken in the early years of this new age will 
 probably determine the issue for centuries to come. Is 
 it importunate to ask, then, that the rising generation 
 should find among their busy hours a space in which to 
 study what we have done in Africa and so to fit them- 
 selves to decide— for it will rest with them— what we 
 shall do in Africa ? 
 
 That some such study should be pursued, and pre- 
 ferably in the sober, impartial atmosphere of a University, 
 seems to me imperative if only to counteract the in- 
 creasing vogue of certain dangerous half-truths. TViere 
 is a type of doctrinaire, who, when confronted with that 
 
22 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 question, What have we done in Africa ? is ready with 
 a short reply. ' Nothing but harm ', he will tell you ; and 
 if asked to enlarge on this assertion he narrates the 
 story of British intercourse with Africa in two grim 
 chapters. Chapter I is called ' The Slave-Trade '. It 
 is a ghastly picture of seventeenth- and eighteenth-cen- 
 tury brutality — the ruthless man-hunt on the Guinea 
 coast— the horrors of the ' Middle Passage'— the sale of 
 the human cargo in ' parcels ' at the West Indian or 
 North American ports, ' choice men ' fetching £2.0 and 
 upwards a head, the sick or feeble or ' much abused ' 
 lumped with little children and superfluous women and 
 sold off cheap as ' refuse ' — and at home in comfortable 
 England British merchants battening on the trade and 
 complacently protesting that for this negroid order of 
 creation, so little higher than the animals, enslavement 
 by a civilized race is positively a moral and a physical 
 gain. And Chapter II is scarcely less appalling. Its 
 title is ' Economic Imperialism ' ; and it displays the 
 greed of Europe, with Britain to the fore, operating 
 as injuriously in the nineteenth as in the eighteenth 
 century on the welfare of Africa. Now and again its 
 cruelty is naked and unashamed : and if as a rule it is 
 outwardly less brutal and wears the disguise of a peaceful 
 and mutually advantageous trade, its effects on the body 
 and soul of the negro are no less destructive than the 
 Slave traffic itself. Lawless adventurers are soon nose 
 down along the path to wealth which the now forbidden 
 slave-traders had trodden. Instead of the chain and 
 the whip, the white man brings the black man now, in 
 exchange for his little store of rubber or ivory or gold, 
 a gun and powder with which to kill his fellows and 
 poisonous * Trade Spirits ' with which to madden and 
 to rot himself. And, presently, as the century draws 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 23 
 
 on, the Governments of Europe are seen feverishly 
 competing to include as much as they can of this rich 
 field within their own exclusive control, till at last all 
 Central Africa is ' partitioned ' among them, the largest 
 share falling, as in the Slave Trade, to ourselves. And 
 the moral of the tale is this — Economic exploitation has 
 been, and is now, the only purpose in our dealings with 
 Central Africa. 
 
 It is a terrible story, and, as far as it goes ^ it is true. 
 But I would like our hypothetical student not to take it 
 as he finds it in propagandist literature, but to build 
 it up for himself from the materials available. And of 
 these there are plenty, even though the arcana imperii 
 of recent years are locked up in the Colonial Office — 
 the earlier official documents in the Record Office, 
 Parliamentary Papers and Debates, Reports of Public 
 Commissions and Private Committees, records of mis- 
 sionary societies, autobiographies, letters, newspapers, 
 and so forth. From these let him peruse that half-true 
 story, not skimming too lightly over any of the black 
 spots on its pages. But let him also put together the 
 other half of the truth. Let him study in Africa as in 
 India the growth of the doctrine of trusteeship. 
 
 The starting-point will be the same : for, at the same 
 time as Burke was declaring the new purpose of British 
 rule in India, William Wilberforce, that rare example of 
 the saint in politics, was bringing the question of the 
 abolition of the Slave Trade, which had been agitated 
 for some time past in humanitarian circles and especially 
 in the Society of Friends, to the forefront of the political 
 stage, forcing it by his eloquence, his industry, his 
 almost irresistible sincerity, on the uneasy conscience of 
 the House of Commons, and rallying to its support not 
 only the warm heart of Fox but also the cool head of 
 
24 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 his intimate friend, the young Prime Minister himself. 
 It was a little more than seven years since Burke had 
 spoken in Parliament of Britain's ' trust ' in India when 
 Pitt asserted the same claim for Africa in a speech which 
 such expert critics as Fox and Grey and Windham 
 declared to be ' one of the most extraordinary displays of 
 eloquence they had ever heard'. You remember the 
 historic scene ? The debate had been long drawn out 
 and the night was far gone when Pitt began his closing 
 speech. As he reached his peroration the first rays of 
 an April dawn shone through the windows of the House. 
 It gave the orator a noble metaphor with which to point 
 his ending. If they listened to the voice of reason and 
 duty, he told the Commons, if, by a prompt and total 
 abolition of the Slave Trade, they made atonement for 
 their long and cruel injustice towards Africa, if they 
 allowed her the opportunity and the hope of attaining to 
 the same blessings which they themselves, under Provi- 
 dence, enjoyed, then they might live to see the dawn of 
 civilization breaking over Africa, one day to illumine and 
 invigorate that immense continent from end to end. 
 
 Nos . . . primus equis On'ens aj]lavit anhelis ; 
 illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper. 
 
 The sun was to rise many times over Westminster 
 before this call was answered. The French Revolution 
 and the European War thrust the question of Abolition 
 into the background of men's minds, and of Pitt's among 
 them. But from May i, 1807, as far as British subjects 
 throughout the world were concerned, the Slave Trade 
 was ' utterly abolished, prohibited, and declared to be 
 unlawful' by Act of Parliament. Twenty-six years 
 later, as you know. Slavery itself was suppressed in 
 every part of the British Commonwealth. 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 25 
 
 Our student will discover, then, that the first chapter 
 of the British record in Africa closes, and the second 
 chapter opens, with a moral revolution. British public 
 opinion has acknowledged that it lies not in man's 
 prerogative to pronounce the curse of Canaan. The 
 doctrine that the black race was created to be the ' living 
 implements ' of labour for the white is dead. The doc- 
 trine that the white race has a duty towards the black 
 has been born. And a tradition has been created 
 of which not only a handful of humanitarians but the 
 rank and file of the British people are proud. Just 
 as the cutlers of Sheffield had declared for Abolition in 
 1789, although, as they admitted, it might injure their 
 industry, so the cotton spinners of Lancashire in the 
 'sixties cheerfully endured the interruption of the cotton 
 supply and the unemployment and hardship it involved, 
 because it served the cause of freedom for the slaves 
 of North America. But Africa is far from England. 
 Deeds can be done in the dark there, unseen by English- 
 men at home. And our student will find, as I have 
 said, that half-true story to be half the truth. He will 
 find the fortune-hunter busily at work in the slave- 
 hunter's shoes. But he will find, too, the principles, for 
 which Englishmen at home were willing to sacrifice 
 so much, being upheld by two groups, especially, of 
 their countrymen in Africa, partly through an instinctive 
 sense of justice and humanity, partly, and in growing 
 measure as time goes on, through a deliberate acceptance 
 of the doctrine of trusteeship. 
 
 These two groups are the missionaries and the 
 officials. The fortune-hunters might often be first in 
 the field, but close on their heels and sometimes in 
 advance of them went the preachers of the Gospel, 
 
26 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 no less enterprising, no less persevering, facing as coolly 
 the dangers of disease and violent death, though it was 
 only the souls of the negroes they were after and not 
 their gold and ivory. There were missionaries, it may 
 be, who through ignorance or bigotry or tactlessness or 
 worse did more harm than good : but on the whole, 
 whether in Darkest Africa or among the defenceless 
 islanders of the Pacific, their work was of immeasurable 
 value not only for the welfare of the people they served 
 but also for the good name of the Commonwealth. 
 It would be an unhistorical account of British deahngs 
 with the Pacific which made no mention of Patesson 
 and Selwyn. It would be a travesty of our record 
 in Africa which did not set in the forefront the name 
 of David Livingstone. Nor were missionaries fighting 
 a lonely battle for the natives. They were sure of warm 
 support at the Colonial Office, especially during James 
 Stephen's long career as its permanent chief. Their 
 influence, indeed, on Government policy in the second 
 quarter of the nineteenth century was actually too power- 
 ful because it was too one-sided. It was not in the best 
 interests of South Africa, black as well as white, that 
 Glenelg, for instance, should have been persuaded that 
 no white man could do right and no black man wrong. 
 And a similar charge might be brought against the 
 influence of the missionaries in alienating Government 
 opinion from the early schemes of colonization in Aus- 
 tralia and New Zealand. But it was better to err on 
 the side of the angels, to emphasize even to unwise 
 extremes the duty of trusteeship, than to abandon the 
 tradition altogether and drift back into the criminal 
 indifference of earlier days. And if ministers in Eng- 
 land were generally true to the tradition, so were their 
 officials m Africa. 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 27 
 
 For officials in the end were needed, in Central Africa 
 as well as in the South. During the greater part of the 
 nineteenth century the British Government abstained 
 as far as possible from adding fresh territories to an 
 Empire which already seemed too vast. But in the 
 'eighties the policy of annexation or, more strictly, of 
 the institution of protectorates was suddenly and vigor- 
 ousl}'' taken up. Into the causes of this our student 
 should look closely. He will find once more that there 
 is a measure of truth in the assertion that the motive 
 was selfish : that not Britain only, but all the leading 
 States of Europe, had realized the bearing on their 
 economic future of the fact that Tropical Africa was 
 capable of producing an almost immeasurable quantity 
 of certain raw materials which modern civilization could 
 scarcely do without ; and that in the ensuing ' scramble ' 
 there was more haste and rivalry than might be expected 
 of a wholly disinterested pursuit. But, as he digs 
 a little deeper, he will come upon other facts. He will 
 learn, first, that annexation to the British Commonwealth 
 was not seldom asked for, spontaneously and genuinely, 
 by the rulers of the peoples concerned. He will read, for 
 example, the historic reply of the shrewd Basuto chief to 
 Governor Wodehouse when he was told that his request 
 for annexation had been granted. ' I have become old : 
 therefore 1 am glad that my people should have been 
 allowed to rest and to lie under the large folds of the 
 flag of England before I am no more.' He will learn, 
 secondly, that a policy of annexation was almost always 
 supported, nay, sometimes passionately demanded, by 
 the missionaries. And why ? Because only by annexa- 
 tion, only by the assumption of direct responsibility for 
 the maintenance of law and order by a humane European 
 
28 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 Government, could the native be protected from the 
 private European fortune-hunter. And thirdly he will 
 learn how obstinately reluctant British Governments 
 were to yield to these appeals; how early and easily, 
 had they wished, they could have planted ' the flag of 
 England ' across Africa from sea to sea ; but how at last, 
 when other Powers, with Germany in the van, began to 
 peg out their claims, they could no longer stand aloof. 
 
 And so the student will come again to the threshold 
 of our own age : and on the African as on the Asiatic 
 question he will find new ideas awakened by the War, 
 or rather, old ideas reanimated, crystallized, expanded. 
 He will hear men saying that we stand in Africa as we 
 stood in India generations back ; that a similar task, 
 though more difficult perhaps and more protracted, 
 awaits us there ; that the time is coming when all British 
 Central Africa will be consolidated like the Indian 
 Empire in one great political system, with an African 
 Civil Service ranking in position and prestige and 
 opportunity with the Indian Civil Service and attracting 
 to its ranks that British genius for administrative tutelage 
 which India, as we hope, will cease progressively to 
 need. And may I express a wish, in passing, that 
 Oxford, which takes a notable part in the preliminary 
 training of cadets for the Indian, Egyptian, and Sudanese 
 Civil Services, might also be associated, in some degree, 
 with the Colonial Civil Service ? But more important 
 than the formulation of these schemes of political or- 
 ganization is the acceptance by the Great Powers of the 
 world of a new principle by which the government of 
 backward peoples is henceforth to be controlled— the 
 principle of the Mandate. A new principle, did I say ? 
 A principle, surely, as old as the days of Burke and 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 29 
 
 Wilberforce. For the principle of the Mandate is 
 simply the doctrine of trusteeship— the doctrine that 
 implies (i) that a native territory must not be regarded 
 as the private estate of its European rulers ; that the 
 economic development of it is undertaken for the benefit 
 of the world at large ; and therefore that the subjects of 
 other States shall be as free to share in its development 
 and trade as the subjects of the ruling State— i.e. the 
 principle of the Open Door: (2) that the natives, on 
 their part, must not be regarded as so much labour- 
 power for their rulers' plantations, nor as so much 
 ' cannon-fodder ' for their armies, nor as so many clients 
 for their liquor-trade ; but in spirit, if not yet in political 
 capacities and duties, their fellow-citizens, as free as they 
 themselves to traffic in their property or labour: and 
 (3) that not only should their moral and material interests 
 be upheld against all other interests that conflict with 
 them, but positive efforts should be made to raise them 
 by wise education and in other ways to a higher and 
 wider life. And since on all these heads, with one or 
 two exceptions, with hesitations and backslidings here 
 and there, British ministers and British officials have 
 observed the doctrine, Britain can claim to have been 
 a Mandatory State for many years past. 
 
 But if the doctrine of trusteeship is no new thing in 
 the British Commonwealth, its solemn affirmation in the 
 Treaty of Versailles and its detailed exposition in the 
 Covenant of the League of Nations and the texts of 
 the Mandates is a new and a great thing — on paper. 
 How much it will mean in practice depends primarily 
 on us. We first upheld the doctrine, we must lead the 
 way in its application, more consciously and resolutely 
 now, at this great turning-point in history, than ever 
 
30 THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 before. That is why, I repeat, it seems to me essential 
 that the rising generation should not entirely neglect to 
 study its development and so to grasp its importance 
 and its difficulty. It is difficult, so difficult indeed, that 
 Mr. Worldlywiseman may be tempted to warn us that 
 it is really not a practical proposition among imperfect 
 men in this workaday world, and that nothing will 
 prevent the strong from pushing the weak against the 
 wall. Well, we have our answer to that. It was no 
 unpractical dreamer, inexperienced in realities, who 
 said that * the essential points of a sound Imperial poHcy 
 admit of being embodied in this one statement, that . . . 
 our relations with the various races who are subjects of 
 the King of England should be founded on the granite 
 rock of the Christian code.' Those words were written 
 by Lord Cromer. 
 
 I have gone far afield and brought some strange 
 figures on to our academic stage — habitants from the 
 St. Lawrence, Boers from the veld, practitioners of 
 dyarchy from India, negroes from the Tropics. And if 
 I ask that Oxford should make itself more familiar with 
 these and others like them and with the problems they 
 represent, it is because they are fellow-members with 
 us in one Commonwealth and because, if for lack of 
 scientific preparation we fail to solve those problems, 
 this Commonwealth will fail to fulfil the great purpose 
 for which it exists. A policy of excluding its outer 
 peoples from our field of education would seem to me 
 to be analogous to the policy, often advocated but 
 never, happily, with success, of withdrawing our political 
 activities within the limits of these islands, of bidding 
 our kinsmen overseas to break away and live alone, of 
 
BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 31 
 
 abandoning Asia and Africa to their fate. And I would 
 dismiss the thought of such a policy in the spirit in 
 which Burke dismissed the thought of leaving India: 
 ' There we are : there we are placed by the Sovereign 
 Disposer; and we must do the best we can in our 
 situation. The situation of man is the preceptor of 
 his duty.' 
 
PRINTED IN ENGLAND 
 AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS