POWER AND IDEOLOGY
249
finally wrecked it) is the best proof. Professor Snyder of course has
DO
notion that there was such a thing as liberal imperialism. For
him
all imperialists are either reactionaries or Communists. He is in for
a surprise.
For obvious reasons, pre-1914 England
was
the country where
the imperialist movement attained its fullest intellectual expression.
England had the world's greatest empire, and it also had the world's
most successful oligarchy. German imperialism was reactionary and
racist. French imperialism was bourgeois and positivist. British im–
perialism was neither. Its exponents--whether they belonged to the
Conservative or the Liberal Party-already possessed the ruling-class
ethos which is the precondition of a fully developed imperial mystique.
They represented a country governed on liberal lines by an oligarchy
drawn in part from the thirty thousand landowners who possessed
ninety percent of Britain's soil. Most Americans have never seen a
liberal oligarchy in action, and cannot imagine what it is like. They
associate landowners with reaction. The smaller gentry were indeed
Tories, but many of the great landed families were Whigs, and they
dominated the Liberal Party down to the 1880's. What is more, they
transmitted the ruling-class ethos to the wealthy patricians and solid
professional men-Asquith, Haldane, Grey, and the rest-who succeeded
them. The genuinely democratic, pacifist, anti-imperialist wing of the
Liberal Party was never in control: its lower-middle-class, noncon–
formist, teetotaling, provincial earnestness made it appear slightly
ridiculous in the eyes of the ruling elite. These pacifist Liberals were
the "Radicals" (in British parlance), and
J.
A. Hobson was their
prophet. His well-known work entitled
Imperialism
appeared in 1902,
and all the socialists of the period, including Lenin, cribbed from it.
But he never converted his own party, and Radicalism as a movement
was a total failure. The only real leader it ever produced, Lloyd
George, ran out on his followers in 1914 and-with the Liberal Im–
perialist Winston Churchill-became one of the two great wartime
Prime Ministers Britain has had in this century.
1914-18 was a turning-point. It was the triumph of the imperialist
movement, but also its Nemesis. As the war dragged on, the democratic
and pacifist tide gained in strength, and by 1919 imperialism was on
the defensive all over the Western world, and more particularly in
Britain, where official Liberalism had split and thousands of pacifist
Radicals streamed into the Labor Party. For the real heyday of the
movement one must go back to the pre-war era, when popular feeling
and imperialism marched hand in hand. Its first great electoral
