Delphi complete works of.., p.404
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 404
Nor does it tell us any ultimate truth about the real nature of things to keep on making equations about them. Suppose I wish to take a holiday trip and am selecting a place to go. I ask, “How far is it? How long does it take to get there? What does it cost?” These things all come into it. If I like I can call them “dimensions.” It does no harm. If I like I can add other dimensions — how hot it is, how much gold it has, and what sort of women. I can say, if I wish, that the women are therefore found out to be the seventh dimension of locality. But I doubt if I can find anything sillier to say than the physicists’ talk of ten and twelve dimensions added to space.
Let it be realized, I say, that making equations and functions about a thing does not tell us anything about its real nature. Suppose that I sometimes wonder just what sort of man Chipman, my fellow club member, is. While I am wondering, another fellow member, a mathematician, comes in. “Wondering about Chipman, were you?” he says. “Well, I can tell you all about him as I have computed his dimensions. I have here the statistics of the number of times he comes (t), the number of steps he takes before he sits down (s), his orbit in moving round (o), aberrations as affected by other bodies (ab), velocity (v), specific gravity (sp), and his saturation (S).” He is therefore a function of these things, or shall we say quite simply:
F
∫
s.v.o.sp.S
—— ——
t.ab
Now this would be mathematically useful. With it I can calculate the likelihood of my friend’s being at the Club at any particular time, and whether available for billiards. In other words, I’ve got him in what is called a “frame” in space-time. But just as all this tells me nothing of ultimate reality, neither do the super-dimensions of the new physics.
People who know nothing about the subject, or just less than I do, will tell you that science and philosophy and theology have nowadays all come together. So they have, in a sense. But the statement, like those above, is just a “statistical” one. They have come together as three people may come together in a picture theater, or three people happen to take apartments in the same building, or, to apply the simile that really fits, as three people come together at a funeral. The funeral is that of Dead Certainty. The interment is over, and the three turn away together.
“Incomprehensible,” murmurs Theology reverently.
“What was that word?” asks Science.
“Incomprehensible; I often use it in my litanies.”
“Ah, yes,” murmurs Science, with almost equal reverence, “incomprehensible!”
“The comprehensibility of comprehension,” begins Philosophy, staring straight in front of him.
“Poor fellow,” says Theology, “he’s wandering again; better lead him home.”
“I haven’t the least idea where he lives,” says Science.
“Just below me,” says Theology. “We’re both above you.”
An Apology for the British Empire
IT IS RELATED of George III that a learned divine once presented to the King his new volume, An Apology for the Bible. “I did not know,” said the simple monarch, “that the Bible needed an apology.” It was explained to him that the word apology was used in its Greek meaning of a defence. It is in this sense that I want to offer an apology for the British Empire, a humble apology, as coming from a person without rank or honour, neither a statesman nor a general, but just a subject of the King, and glad to be one. Such qualifications as I have to voice the apology rest upon an English childhood, a lifetime mostly spent in Canada but with much knowledge at firsthand of the other Dominions, as well as of the United States.
There has been of late some queer talk and odd misunderstanding about the British Empire. Mr. Churchill has found it necessary to explain that we are not liquidating the Empire after the war. Others, on the contrary, have suggested that the parts of the Empire unable to look after themselves should be put under “international control.” This is a status, a straitjacket, entirely fitted for blood-crazy Germans and treacherous Japanese, but scarcely for the people living in peace in the open freedom of the Empire.
Nor do we want to be internationalized, any of us, in the Empire; I don’t, and the Canadians don’t, and Nigerian boys don’t, nor the Cingalese, nor the Bahamians, nor the shepherds that watch their flocks on the windswept Falkland Islands — none of us. How would you like international control for the United States? Or even for Chicago?
Such a notion can only come from a very feeble understanding of what the Empire is and does.
The British Empire covers one quarter of the globe (13,353,000 square miles) and includes about one quarter (525,000,000) of its inhabitants. It’s a pity it’s not bigger. It is made up of a group of six Associated Commonwealths and about fifty more or less dependent areas.
Constitutionally, the Empire is supposed to be held together by the Statute of Westminster, a British Imperial Statute of 1931. But that’s just a “suppose.” In reality, it is just held together by a vast gentlemen’s agreement, and in the case of Ireland it isn’t even gentlemenly.
The Statute of Westminster, indeed, is just a myth, a sort of idealization of unity or reality otherwise created. We keep it just as the Nigerian savages keep a wooden God with big glass eyes in the half-dark of a grass bungalow. People shake when they go in. So do our lawyers. But in plain logic the Statute won’t stand overhauling. It was passed by the British Parliament in 1931, after advice from an imperial Conference, and then sent on to the Dominions. So far it has never been accepted, not on its face value. Australia never ratified it; meant to and never has yet. There seemed something fishy about it, some trick in it. So in twelve years they haven’t touched it. South Africa ratified it; yes, indeed, they ratified it but with a local statute that ripped it to pieces. Canada didn’t formally ratify it, but accepted it, took it as read, till they found that if it went into force it would tie up Canada hand and foot with no supreme public authority left. We can only amend our Constitution by an Imperial statute; in other words, by calling the Westminster Statute off. Newfoundland, shivering and starving with the depression, accepted the Statute and then gave up Dominion Status (1935) and crawled back into its little old colonial cot where it had slept since 1583. Ireland, call it Eire if you know how, never even looked at the Statute of Westminster. They made a Constitutional Amendment Act of their own (1936). By this the British King is King of Ireland; but not King of Ireland in Ireland, only outside of it. To find the solution, turn to the back of the book. That’s the sole connection of Ireland with the Empire, except its language. Even as to that, they’re working hard to restore the old Gaelic. If they’re not careful, they’ll learn to speak it and then they’ll be sorry.
I forgot — one Dominion ratified the Statute, New Zealand. But any British person, knowing New Zealand, would take that for granted. Down there they ratify anything as soon as they see the British trademark. New Zealand is New Britain, about 150 per cent British. The size of the group of islands is 110,000 square miles, upside down in the Pacific instead of right side up in the Atlantic. The same people exactly, English and Scots, with enough Irish to make an Irish vote, a thing you have in any British country, like pepper in a soup. In a population of 1,600,000, we may leave out the 80,000 native Maoris — great fellows, all admit, a big asset in any trouble. A! Kia! Kia! Come on, boys! The climate is just the same as “at home,” with plenty of rough snow for the Scots down south, rain for the Irish and for the English, meadow land beside willows, and cricket and the bells of the Church of England....
So that’s the way the major parts of the Empire, the Associated Commonwealth, hang together, associated under the same King. In reality, not quite even that, for they have to accept him separately. As a matter of fact, King George VI didn’t begin to reign in England till he had been reigning for a day in South Africa, and in Ireland he didn’t reign for another day after that.
The Crown is the imperial link. Legally there is no other except, oddly enough, that Canada keeps up the appeal from its own law courts to the final decision of the British Privy Council in London. We get better justice. It must be better because it costs ten times as much, as our lawyers assure us on their return from pleading.
Associated also under the British Crown are all kinds of areas — islands, colonies, naval and military stations, protectorates, all around the globe. It’s hard to count them: some are half in the Empire and half out. But they number about sixty units of government. At first sight they seem to defy classification but when you look close they seem to represent a beautiful symmetry of structure according to how much, how little or how not at all, they govern themselves. Canada governs itself. So does Southern Rhodesia — almost. The Governor, the Ministerial Cabinet and everything look real, but, actually, certain ground is “reserved.” Nearly as much as is reserved, but not quite, by the Bahamas (West Indies, Class F, Partly White) — Parliament, but the Cabinet not exactly a Cabinet. The vote is granted to all who have a very small property qualification. Most haven’t.
And so you pass on down through the grades and degrees till you come to the great protectorate of the tropics, the places where white men cannot live.
Take Nigeria as an example. It is a vast tropical river country sunk in the hollow side of West Africa; a huge place, with low coasts all surf and foam, swamps, jungles, fever and the sleeping sickness, then dense equatorial forests, then wide plains of grass, on into the heart of Africa to die in the desert. Nigeria covers half a million square miles — more than the whole Atlantic seaboard of the United States. There is a native population of 25,000,000 people. The climate never varies; each day is awful. White people cannot live there; those who survive go home. This was the famous Bight of Bengal where “for one that comes out there were ten who went in.”
And how many white people do you suppose “hold down” this vast protectorate of 25,000,000 people? About two or three hundred. There are, in all, 5,000 whites, but a large proportion of these are missionaries, nurses and teachers, holding down a job, not a country, along with the clerks and traders of the steamship companies and the Staff of Government House. The whole Nigerian national defence (pre-war) consisted of three guns (3½ inches each), four battalions of infantry, one mortar and a signal school class. But even at that the whole army is black anyway, except the officers. That’s how Nigeria is “held down” by imperialism. In other words, the people of Nigeria could rise up and kill all the whites in one day. But why should they? So could the people of Omaha, Nebraska, rise up and kill all the commercial travellers. But I doubt if they would care to.
How was this vast, undisturbed rule brought about? It was like this. The British are terribly lazy about fighting. They like to get it over and done with and then get up a game of cricket. In the tropics, cricket is played on coconut matting. Well, Nigeria grows one-half the world’s coconuts. So there you are! What with playing cricket and learning how to mix gin fizz and to tie on one-piece, two-leg cotton pants, the place was civilized in no time. Not quite, of course. The British took away all the brutalities of savagery — the hideous human sacrifices of Ashanti — and left only its pleasant aspects such as polygamy. Cannibalism went right out as soon as the American canned food came in.
The Government? Yes, there’s a real Government House at Lagos, with all the forms that go with it, but mostly the Nigerians, those inland, govern themselves under their own chiefs, Emirs and such. All the revenue raised in taxes wouldn’t keep Chicago going for six months. As to religion, it’s entirely free, but Mohammedanism beats Christianity to a standstill. Yet the few Christian converts are full of zeal, expecting the Day of Judgement any time, and all set for it with music.
Some natives, it must be admitted, want a change. They have had enough education to look around and compare themselves with other countries. They want to be like Canada: you can hardly blame them. So they talk in a vague way of a great Gold Coast Nation under the British flag — by taking in all the other odd lots between the Congo and Senegal. It may come some day, or something like it, but meantime this is not a political scheme, just a forlorn African fancy, like the Golden Gates and the Year of Jubilee! Longfellow’s dreaming slave came from the Gold Coast.
Now, can any sane person think of setting up a European International Committee to look after Nigeria? And if “International” means British, we’ve got it already. If it means American and British, that’s all right if they promise not to introduce baseball — after all, we saw them first.
Nigeria is just one of ever so many such areas, great and small. It is the biggest of them, next to India, but the pattern is the same all the globe around.
India is, of course, the Empire’s problem. By all means give it self-government. But how do you do it? You can’t start self-government with a civil war. In the United States, there was a century between the Stamp Act and the Civil War. But imagine the situation if the North and the South had been all ready to start the Civil War as soon as Independence was granted. That’s India. There is no such thing as the Indian nation. There are in India over two hundred nations, as distinguished by distinct languages. The great mass of the Moslem races cannot tolerate the Hindu races, nor the Hindus the Moslems. The Hindus think the Moslems rough and uncultivated, people of physical force and not of the spirit. The Moslems think the Hindus a set of flabby intellectuals, not men at all. It’s the difference between football players and divinity students. We have it in all the colleges. The football teams would liquidate the divinity students, only they’re not allowed to. That’s India. While the British stay, liquidation can’t start.
An American lawyer would say, “Federate India.” You can’t. It won’t. Inside the Moslems, the Sikhs refuse any rule but British. No Pakistan for them. All through Hindu India are the cast-out people, the “untouchables,” the 60,000,000 people that the rest won’t eat with, from whose hands they will not even take water. Are they to be slaves? You can’t take freedom to men who treat 60,000,000 others as dogs.
There is no union in India but the British Raj and the English language and the imported British transport and industrialism. India is a misfit. It was old when England began, full when England was empty, and fallen asleep over dead books when England learned to read with Shakespeare and think with Newton.
Except to Great Britain, India has no meaning for the Empire, no cohesion nor even any commercial interest. To us in Canada, it is utterly alien. We would never dream of letting in Indians, touchables or untouchables. We forbid their immigration, not by law but by a lawyer’s trick. In Australia, they forbid it flat out. South Africa let them in till they began to swamp Natal, then shut the door. In all good will, there can be no co-operation between India and the Dominions, except by and through and because of Britain. Cut that out and it’s all gone.
What can be done about India? International Control by a committee? They have two hundred and twenty-two nations already. Anyway they’d only send Mr. Gandhi in a loincloth to lie down and die on the committee’s doorstep — it’s called Swa-raj, or Swa-slush, or something. There’s no answer. We always pick Gandhi up and feed him.
There is nothing to be done but wait. If and when the people in India agree, all of them, or most of them, on what they want, and cut out that hideous untouchable stuff, then, I am sure, they can have Dominion Government tomorrow.
So India must, for the present, stay as it is. You can’t have a free united state till you have first a free united people. At present the Indians in India won’t let one another be that.
India must stay and the Empire must stay. You can’t mark it out with rule and compass as we mark out on a flat ground of empty prairie an Oklahoma or an Alberta before it is there. Such places can begin with a ready-made constitution put up over them like a circus tent, but you can’t do that with older places. The Empire is a long product of history. It began as a mixed result of national defence and plundering the Spanish Main. It was hard to tell a patriot from a pirate. Some were both. Then it shifted into adventure and commerce and refugee settlement. Puritans sang in the wilderness, till they were too busy with business and stopped singing. Empire wars with France and Spain came and went, accepted like rounds in a prize fight. Then came the Independence of America. We are just getting over it after one hundred and sixty years. That started Australia and New Zealand.
The first Great War of 1793-1815 brought in more colonies than they could use. They gave back some, like Argentina. Then followed the wonderful era of free trade, with all men brothers, which was too good to be true — there weren’t enough brothers. Then the scramble to partition Africa and Asia and everything left over. That’s when many people first learned the word “imperialism” and learned to hate it. But that is half a century ago, as long ago and as far away as Rudyard Kipling’s Mandalay.
That’s not the Empire today. We know better now. The Empire today means co-operation of hundreds of millions of people, not on equal terms, but on decent terms. What would have been a hundred discordant states, each a powerless prey for rapacity to destroy, has turned into the united buttresses that held alone for a while the falling walls of a broken world.
We prefer to keep all this going under a set of mediaeval forms and observances, offices and dignities, that sound as the very converse of popular liberty and equality. We pretend that the King is an absolute sovereign and to make him look like it we surround him with Beef-eaters, Lords of the Buckhounds, Norroy Kings at Arms, a Poursuivant Unicorn, a Red Dragon and an Officer of the Black Rod. Those are all actual offices, but in reality these people are as harmless as a pack of cards, ranking somewhere below a full house. And with that we have Dukes and Earls who pay feudal homages, giving the King dead birds once a year, other offices all gone except the salary, and salaries all gone except the offices, and an official list of precedence — it is a fact — that distinguishes seventy-one classes of British subjects before it even lets in Gentlemen. The point of it all is that it works. People like a bit of humbug. If a reader of this article heard that the King had appointed him Keeper of the Swans, he’d be all over town with it in a minute.
