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GEORGE LICHTHEIN
triumphs occurred in the 1880's, and then for a while indeed
it
was
the Conservatives who profited most from it. They were traditionally
the party of military rule, in India and elsewhere, and the "service
classes" who read Kipling had their own vision of society. By
then
these strata of the middle class most closely connected with the military
services and the colonial administration had assimilated the traditional
ruling-class outlook and employed it as a justification for lording it
over subject populations. Emotionally and intellectually, their creed
envisioned an "ordered" hierarchical society, infused with feudal senti–
ments of mutual respect and obligation, though at the same time
the
new ruling elite would be self-made, not hereditary. It would govern
the "lesser breeds" for their own benefit, and uphold the "law" taught
in the great public schools. This is the ethos of Kipling, and by now
everyone knows what to think of it. But what of Joseph Conrad?
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it
away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look
into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea
at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and
an unselfish belief in the idea-something you can set up, and
bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to. . .
(HeMt of Darkness)
Hardly an anti-imperialist utterance. Conrad in fact voiced
the
stoical sentiment in which middle-class liberalism adapted itself to
the reality of Empire. It was there, and one had to make the best of it.
The "idea" was what counted. There were others whose applause
was
more full-blooded. Lord Rosebery, a Liberal aristocrat and in 1894
Gladstone's successor as Prime Minister, had no doubt at all that
the
Empire was a great thing:
How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the
work of men's hands; cemented with men's honest blood and
with a world of tears, welded by the best brains of the centuries
past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all
human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and
splendid purpose. Human and yet not wholly human, for the
most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the
Divine. (Cited by G. Bennett,
The Concept of Empire
pp.
326-7.)
,
Rosebery, unlike Balfour, was no philosopher, and one hardly
knows where he acquired these sentiments, but he could have obtained
