Table of Contents

Tragedy and Hope

A History of the World in Our Time

By Carroll Quigley

PART FOUR







Part Four—The Buffer Fringe

     In the first half of the twentieth century the power structure of the world was entirely transformed. In 1900, European civilization, led by Britain and followed by other states at varying distances, was still spreading outward, disrupting the cultures of other societies unable to resist and frequently without any desire to resist. The European structure which pushed outward formed a hierarchy of power, wealth, and prestige with Britain at the top, followed by a secondary rank of other Great Powers, by a tertiary rank of the wealthy secondary Powers (like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden), and by a quaternary rank of the lesser or decadent Powers (like Portugal or Spain, whose world positions were sustained by British power).

     At the turn of the twentieth century the first cracklings of impending disaster were emitted from this power structure but were generally ignored: in 1896 the Italians were massacred by the Ethiopians at Adowa; in 1899-1902 the whole might of Britain was held in check by the small Boer republics in the South African War; and in 1904-1905 Russia was defeated by a resurgent Japan. These omens were generally not heeded, and European civilization continued on its course to Armageddon.

     By the second half of the twentieth century, the power structure of the world presented a quite different picture. In this new situation the world consisted of three great zones: (1) Orthodox civilization under the Soviet Empire, occupying the heartland of Eurasia; (2) surrounding this, a fringe of dying and shattered cultures: Islamic, Hindu, Malayan, Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, and others: and (3) outside this fringe, and chiefly responsible for shattering its cultures, Western Civilization. Moreover, Western Civilization had been profoundly modified. In 1900 it had consisted of a core area in Europe with peripheral areas in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and the fringes of Africa. By 1950 Western Civilization had its center of power in America, the fringes in Africa were being lost, and Europe had been so reduced in power, in wealth, and in prestige that it seemed to many that it must make a choice between becoming a satellite in an American-dominated Western Civilization or joining with the buffer fringe to try to create a Third Force able to hold a balance of power between America and the Soviet bloc. This impression was mistaken, and by the late 1950's Europe was in a position, once again, to play an independent role in world affairs.

     In previous chapters we have examined the background of Western Civilization and of the Russian Empire to the second decade of the twentieth century. In the present chapter we shall examine the situation in the buffer fringe until about the end of that same decade. At the beginning of the twentieth century the areas which were to become the buff r fringe consisted of (1) the Near East dominated by the Ottoman Empire, (2) the Middle East dominated by the British Empire in India, and (3) the Far East, consisting of two old civilizations, China and Japan. On the outskirts of these were the lesser colonial areas of Africa, Malaysia, and Indonesia. At this point we shall consider the three major areas of the buffer fringe with a brief glance at Africa.

Chapter 8: The Near East to 1914

     For the space of over a century, from shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 until 1922, the relationships of the Great Powers were exacerbated by what was known as the "Near East Question." This problem, which arose from the growing weakness of the Ottoman Empire, was concerned with the question of what would become of the lands and peoples left without government by the retreat of Turkish power. The problem was made more complex by the fact that Turkish power did not withdraw but rather decayed right were it was, so that in many areas it continued to exist in law when it had already ceased to function in fact because of the weakness and corruption of the sultan's government. The Turks themselves sought to maintain their position, not by remedying their weakness and corruption by reform, but by playing off one European state against another and hy using cruel and arbitrary actions against any of their subject peoples who dared to become restive under their rule.

     The Ottoman Empire reached its peak in the period 1526-1533 with the conquest of Hungary and the first siege of Vienna. A second siege, also unsuccessful, came in 1683. From this point Turkish power declined and Turkish sovereignty withdrew, but unfortunately the decline was much more rapid than the withdrawal, with the result that subject peoples were encouraged to revolt and foreign Powers were encouraged to intervene because of the weakness of Turkish power in areas which were still nominally under the sultan's sovereignty.

     At its height the Ottoman Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in both area and population. South of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco to the Persian Gulf; north of the Mediterranean it stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea, including the Balkans as far north as Poland and the whole northern shore of the Black Sea. This vast empire was divided into twenty-one governments and subdivided into seventy vilayets, each under a pasha. The whole structure was held together as a tribute-gathering military system by the fact that the rulers in all parts were Muslims. The supreme ruler in Constantinople was not only sultan (and thus head of the empire) but was also caliph (and thus defender of the Muslim creed). In most of the empire the mass of the people were Muslims like their rulers, but in much of the empire the masses of the peoples were non-Muslims, being Roman Christians, Orthodox Christians, Jews, or other creeds.

     Linguistic variations were even more notable than religious distinctions. Only the peoples of Anatolia generally spoke Turkish, while those of North Africa and the Near East spoke various Semitic and Hamitic dialects of which the most prevalent was Arabic. From Syria to the Caspian Sea across the base of Anatolia were several languages, of which the chief were Kurdish and Armenian. The shores of the Aegean Sea, especially the western, were generally Greek-speaking. The northern shore was a confused mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgarian speaking peoples. The eastern shore of the Adriatic was Greek-speaking up to the 40th parallel, then Albanian for almost three degrees of latitude, merging gradually into various South Slav languages like Croat, Slovens, and (in the interior) Serb. The Dalmatian shore and Istria had many Italian speakers. On the Black Sea shore Thrace itself was a mixture of Turkish, Greek, and Bulgar from the Bosporus to the 42nd parallel where there was a solid mass of Bulgarians. The central Balkans w as a confused area, especially in Macedonia where Turkish, Greek, Albanian, Serb, and Bulgar met and mingled. North of the Bulgarian-speaking groups, and generally separated from them by the Danube, were Romanians. North of the Croatians and Serbs, and generally separated from them by the Drava River, were the Hungarians. The district where the Hungarians and Romanians met, Transylvania, was confused, with great blocs of one language being separated from their fellows by blocs of the other, the confusion being compounded by the presence of considerable numbers of Germans and Gypsies.

     The religious and linguistic divisions of the Ottoman Empire were complicated by geographic, social, and cultural divisions, especially in the Balkans. This last-named area provided such contrasts as the relatively advanced commercial and mercantile activities of the Greeks; primitive pastoral groups like Albanian goat-herders; subsistence farmers scratching a living from small plots of Macedonia's rocky soils; peasant-size farms on the better soils of Serbia and Romania; great rich landed estates producing for a commercial market and worked by serf labor in Hungary and Romania. Such diversity made any hopes of political unity by consent or by federation almost impossible in the Balkans. Indeed, it was almost impossible to draw any political lines which would coincide with geographic and linguistic or religious lines, because linguistic and religious distinctions frequently indicated class distinctions. Thus the upper and lower classes or the commercial and the agricultural groups even in the same district often had different languages or different religions. Such a pattern of diversity could be held together most easily by a simple display of military force. This was what the Turks provided. Militarism and fiscalism were the two keynotes of Turkish rule, and were quite sufficient to hold the empire together as long as both remained effective and the empire was free from outside interference. But in the course of the eighteenth century Turkish administration became ineffective and outside interference became important.

     The sultan, who was a completely absolute ruler, became very quickly a completely arbitrary ruler. This characteristic extended to all his activities. He filled his harem with any women who pleased his fancy, without any formal ceremony. Such numerous and temporary liaisons produced numerous children, of whom many were neglected or even forgotten. Accordingly, the succession to the throne never became established and was never based on primogeniture. As a consequence, the sultan came to fear murder from almost any direction. To avoid this, he tended to surround himself with persons who could have no possible chance of succeeding him: women, children, Negroes, eunuchs, and Christians. All the sultans from 1451 onward were born of slave mothers and only one sultan after this date even bothered to contract a formal marriage. Such a way of life isolated the sultan from his subjects completely.

     This isolation applied to the process of government as well as to the ruler's personal life. Most of the sultans paid little heed to government, leaving this to their grand viziers and the local pashas. The former had no tenure, being appointed or removed in accordance with the whims of harem intrigue. The pashas tended to become increasingly independent, since they collected local taxes and raised local military forces. The fact that the sultan was also caliph (and thus religious successor to Muhammad), and the religious belief that the government was under divine guidance and should be obeyed, however unjust and tyrannical, made all religious thinking on political or social questions take the form of justification of the status quo, and made any kind of reform almost impossible. Reform could come only from the Sultan, but his ignorance and isolation from society made reform unlikely. In consequence the whole system became increasingly weak and corrupt. The administration was chaotic, inefficient, and arbitrary. Almost nothing could be done without gifts and bribes to officials, and it was not always possible to know what official or series of officials were the correct ones to reward.

     The chaos and weakness which we have described were in full blossom by the seventeenth century, and grew worse during the next two hundred years. As early as 1699 the sultan lost Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, and Slavonia to the Habsburgs, parts of the western Balkans to Venice, and districts in the north to Poland. In the course of the eighteenth century, Russia acquired areas north of the Black Sea, notably the Crimea.

     During the nineteenth century, the Near East question became increasingly acute. Russia emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as a Great Power, able to increase its pressure on Turkey. This pressure resulted from three motivations. Russian imperialism sought to win an outlet to open waters in the south by dominating the Black Sea and by winning access to the Aegean through the acquisition of the Straits and Constantinople. Later this effort was supplemented by economic and diplomatic pressure on Persia in order to reach the Persian Gulf. At the same time, Russia regarded itself as the protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and as early as 1774 had obtained the sultan's consent to this protective role. Moreover, as the most powerful Slav state, Russia had ambitions to be regarded as the protector of the Slavs in the sultan's domains.

     These Russian ambitions could never have been thwarted by the sultan alone, but he did not need to stand alone. He generally found support from Britain and increasingly from France. Britain was obsessed with the need to defend India, which was a manpower pool and military staging area vital to the defense of the whole empire. From 1840 to 1907, it faced the nightmare possibility that Russia might attempt to cross Afghanistan to northwest India, or cross Persia to the Persian Gulf, or penetrate through the Dardanelles and the Aegean onto the British "lifeline to India" by way of the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 increased the importance of this Mediterranean route to the east in British eyes. It was protected by British forces in Gibraltar, Malta (acquired 1800), Cyprus (1878), and Egypt (1882). In general, in spite of English humanitarian sympathy for the peoples subject to the tyranny of the Turk, and in spite of England's regard for the merits of good government, British imperial policy considered that its interests would be safer with a weak, if corrupt, Turkey in the Near East than they would be with any Great Power in that area or with the area broken up into small independent states which might fall under the influence of the Great Powers.

     The French concern with the Near East was parallel to, but weaker than, that of Britain. They had cultural and trade relations with the Levant going back, in some cases, to the Crusades. In addition the French had ancient claims, revived in 1854, to he considered the protectors of Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire and of the "holy places" in Jerusalem.

     Three other influences which became increasingly strong in the Near East were the growth of nationalism and the growing interests of Austria (after 1866) and of Germany (after 1889). The first stirrings of Balkan nationalism can be seen in the revolt of the Serbs in 1804-1812. By seizing Bessarabia from Turkey in 1812, Russia won the right for local self-government for the Serbs. Unfortunately, these latter began almost immediately to fight one another, the chief split being between a Russophile group led by Milan Obrenovich and a Serb nationalist group led by George Petroviๆ (better known as Karageorge). The Serb state, formally established in 1830, was bounded by the rivers Dvina, Save, Danube, and Timok. With local autonomy under Turkish suzerainty, it continued to pay tribute to the sultan and to support garrisons of Turkish troops. The vicious feud between Obrenovich and Karageorgevic continued after Serbia obtained complete independence in 1878. The Obrenovich dynasty ruled in 1817-1842 and 1858-1903, while the Karageorgevic group ruled in 1842-1858 and 1903-1945. The intrigues of these two against each other broadened into a constitutional conflict in which the Obrenovich group supported the somewhat less liberal constitution of 1869, while the Karageorgevic group supported the somewhat more liberal constitution of 1889. The former constitution was in effect in 1869 1889 and again in 1894-1903, while the latter was in effect in 1889-1894 and again in 1903-1921. In order to win popular support by an appeal to nationalist sentiments, both groups plotted against Turkey and later against Austria-Hungary.

     A second example of Balkan nationalism appeared in the Greek struggle for independence from the sultan (1821-1830). After Greeks and Muslims had massacred each other by the thousands, Greek independence was established with a constitutional monarchy under the guarantee of the three Great Powers. A Bavarian prince was placed on the throne and began to establish a centralized, bureaucratic, constitutional state which was quite unsuited for a country with such unconstitutional traditions, poor transportation and communications, a low level of literacy, and a high level of partisan localism. After thirty turbulent years (1832-1862), Otto of Bavaria was deposed and replaced by a Danish prince and a completely democratic unicameral government which functioned only slightly better. The Danish dynasty continues to rule, although supplanted by a republic in 1924-1935 and by military dictatorships on sundry occasions, notably that of Joannes Metaxas (1936-1941).

     The first beginnings of Balkan nationalism must not be overemphasized. While the inhabitants of the area have always been unfriendly to outsiders and resentful of burdensome governments, these sentiments deserve to be regarded as provincialism or localism rather than nationalism. Such feelings are prevalent among all primitive peoples and must not be regarded as nationalism unless they are so wide as to embrace loyalty to all peoples of the same language and culture and are organized in such fashion that this loyalty is directed toward the state as the core of nationalist strivings. Understood in this way, nationalism became a very potent factor in the disruption of the Ottoman Empire only after 1878.

     Closely related to the beginnings of Balkan nationalism were the beginnings of Pan-Slavism and the various "pan-movements" in reaction to this, such as Pan-Islamism. These rose to a significant level only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Simply defined, Pan-Slavism was a movement for cultural unity, and, perhaps in the long run, political unity among the Slavs. In practice it came to mean the right of Russia to assume the role of protector of the Slav peoples outside Russia itself. At times it was difficult for some peoples, especially Russia's enemies, to distinguish between Pan-Slavism and Russian imperialism. Equally simply defined, Pan-Islamism was a movement for unity or at least cooperation among all the Muslim peoples in order to resist the encroachments of the European Powers on Muslim territories. In concrete terms it sought to give the caliph a religious leadership, and perhaps in time a political leadership such as he had really never previously possessed. Both of these pan-movements are of no importance until the end of the nineteenth century, while Balkan nationalism was only slightly earlier than they in its rise to importance.

     These Balkan nationalists had romantic dreams about uniting peoples of the same language, and generally looked back, with a distorted historical perspective, to some period when their co-linguists had played a more important political role. The Greeks dreamed of a revived Byzantine state or even of a Periclean Athenian Empire. The Serbs dreamed of the days of Stephen Dushan, while the Bulgars went further back to the days of the Bulgarian Empire of Symeon in the early tenth century. However, we must remember that even as late as the beginning of the twentieth century such dreams were found only among the educated minority of Balkan peoples. In the nineteenth century, agitation in the Balkans was much more likely to be caused by Turkish misgovernment than by any stirrings of national feeling. Moreover, when national feeling did appear it was just as likely to appear as a feeling of animosity against neighbors who were different, rather than a feeling of unity with peoples who were the same in culture and religion. And at all times localism and class antagonisms (especially rural hostility against urban groups) remained at a high level.

     Russia made war on Turkey five times in the nineteenth century. On the last two occasions the Great Powers intervened to prevent Russia from imposing its will on the sultan. The first intervention led to the Crimean War (1854-1856) and the Congress of Paris (1856), while the second intervention, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, rewrote a peace treaty which the czar had just imposed on the sultan (Treaty of San Stefano, 1877) .

     In 1853 the czar, as protector of the Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire, occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia north of the Danube and east of the Carpathians. Under British pressure the sultan declared war on Russia, and was supported by Britain, France, and Sardinia in the ensuing "Crimean War." Under threat of joining the anti-Russian forces, Austria forced the czar to evacuate the principalities and occupied them herself, thus exposing an Austro-Russian rivalry in the Balkans which continued for two generations and ultimately precipitated the World War of 1914-1918.

     The Congress of Paris of 1856 sought to remove all possibility of any future Russian intervention in Turkish affairs. The integrity of Turkey was guaranteed, Russia gave up its claim as protector of the sultan's Christian subjects, the Black Sea was "neutralized" by prohibiting all naval vessels and naval arsenals on its waters and shores, an International Commission was set up to assure free navigation of the Danube, and in 1862, after several years of indecision, the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, along with Bessarabia, were allowed to form the state of Romania. The new state remained technically under Turkish suzerainty until 1878. It was the most progressive of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire, with advanced educational and judicial systems based on those of Napoleonic France, and a thorough-going agrarian reform. This last, which was executed in two stages (1863-1866 and 1918-1921), divided up the great estates of the Church and the nobility, and wiped away all vestiges of manorial dues or serfdom. Under a liberal, but not democratic, constitution, a German prince, Charles of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen (1866-1914), established a new dynasty which was ended only in 1948. During this whole period the cultural and educational systems of the country continued to be orientated toward France in sharp contrast to the inclinations of the ruling dynasty, which had German sympathies. The Romanian possession of Bessarabia and their general pride in their Latin heritage, as reflected in the name of the country, set up a barrier to good relations with Russia, although the majority of Romanians were members of the Orthodox Church.

     The political and military weakness of the Ottoman Empire in the face of Russian pressure and Balkan nationalisms made it obvious that it must westernize and it must reform, if it was going to survive. Broad verbal promises in this direction were made by the sultan in the period 1839-1877, and there were even certain efforts to execute these promises. The army was reorganized on a European basis with the assistance of Prussia. Local government was reorganized and centralized, and the fiscal system greatly improved, chiefly by curtailing the use of tax farmers; government officials were shifted from a fee-paid basis to a salaried basis; the slave market was abolished, although this meant a large reduction in the sultan's income; the religious monopoly in education was curtailed and a considerable impetus given to secular technical education. Finally, in 1856, in an edict forced on the sultan by the Great Powers, an effort was made to establish a secular state in Turkey by abolishing all inequalities based on creed in respect to personal freedom, law, property, taxation, and eligibility for office or military service.

     In practice, none of these paper reforms was very effective. It was not possible to change the customs of the Turkish people by paper enactments. Indeed, any attempt to do so aroused the anger of many Muslims to the point where their personal conduct toward non-Muslims became worse. At the same time, these promises led the non-Muslims to expect better treatment, so that relations between the various groups were exacerbated. Even if the sultan had had every intention of carrying out his stated reforms, he would have had extraordinary difficulties in doing so because of the structure of Turkish society and the complete lack of trained administrators or even of literate people. The Turkish state was a theocratic state, and Turkish society was a patriarchal or even a tribal society. Any movement toward secularization or toward social equality could easily result, not in reform, but in complete destruction of the society by dissolving the religious and authoritarian relationships which held both the state and society together. But the movement toward reform lacked the wholehearted support of the sultan; it aroused the opposition of the more conservative, and in some ways more loyal, groups of Muslims; it aroused the opposition of many liberal Turks because it was derived from Western pressure on Turkey; it aroused opposition from many Christian or non-Turkish groups who feared that a successful reform might weaken their chances of breaking up the Ottoman Empire completely; and the efforts at reform, being aimed at the theocratic character of the Turkish state, counteracted the sultan's efforts to make himself the leader of Pan-Islamism and to use his title of caliph to mobilize non-Ottoman Muslims in India, Russia, and the East to support him in his struggles with the European Great Powers.

     On the other hand, it was equally clear that Turkey could not meet any European state on a basis of military equality until it was westernized. At the same time, the cheap machinery-made industrial products of the Western Powers began to pour into Turkey and to destroy the ability of the handicraft artisans of Turkey to make a living. This could not be prevented by tariff protection because the sultan was bound by international agreements to keep his customs duties at a low level. At the same time, the appeal of Western ways of life began to be felt by some of the sultan's subjects who knew them. These began to agitate for industrialism or for railroad construction, for wider opportunities in education, especially technical education, for reforms in the Turkish language, and for new, less formal, kinds of Turkish literature, for honest and impersonal methods of administration in justice and public finance, and for all those things which, by making the Western Powers strong, made them a danger to Turkey.

     The sultan made feeble efforts to reform in the period 1838-1875, but by the latter date he was completely disillusioned with these efforts, and shifted over to a policy of ruthless censorship and repression; this repression led, at last, to the so-called "Young Turk" rebellion of 1908.

     The shift from feeble reform to merciless repression coincided with a renewal of the Russian attacks on Turkey. These attacks were incited by Turkish butchery of Bulgarian agitators in Macedonia and a successful Turkish war on Serbia. Appealing to the doctrine of Pan-Slavism, Russia came to the rescue of the Bulgars and Serbs, and quickly defeated the Turks, forcing them to accept the Treaty of San Stefano before any of the Western Powers could intervene (1877). Among other provisions, this treaty set up a large state of Bulgaria, including much of Macedonia, independent of Turkey and under Russian military occupation.

     This Treaty of San Stefano, especially the provision for a large Bulgarian state, which, it was feared, would be nothing more than a Russian tool, was completely unacceptable to England and Austria. Joining with France, Germany, and Italy, they forced Russia to come to a conference at Berlin where the treaty was completely rewritten (1878). The independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania was accepted, as were the Russian acquisitions of Kars and Batum, east of the Black Sea. Romania had to give Bessarabia to Russia, but received Dobruja from the sultan. Bulgaria itself, the crucial issue of the conference, was divided into three parts: (a) the strip between the Danube and the Balkan mountains was set up as an autonomous and tribute-paying state under Turkish suzerainty; (b) the portion of Bulgaria south of the mountains was restored to the sultan as the province of Eastern Rumelia to be ruled by a Christian governor approved by the Powers; and (c) Macedonia, still farther south, was restored to Turkey in return for promises of administrative reforms. Austria was given the right to occupy Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sanjak of Novi-Bazar (a strip between Serbia and Montenegro). The English, by a separate agreement with Turkey, received the island of Cyprus to hold as long as Russia held Batum and Kars. The other states received nothing, although Greece submitted claims to Crete, Thessaly, Epirus, and Macedonia, while France talked about her interest in Tunis, and Italy made no secret of her ambitions in Tripoli and Albania. Only Germany asked for nothing, and received the sultan's thanks and friendship for its moderation.

     The Treaty of Berlin of 1878 was a disaster from almost every point of view because it left every state, except Austria, with its appetite whetted and its hunger unsatisfied. The Pan-Slavs, the Romanians, the Bulgars, the South Slavs, the Greeks, and the Turks were all disgruntled with the settlement. The agreement turned the Balkans into an open powder keg from which the spark was kept away only with great difficulty and only for twenty years. It also opened up the prospect of the liquidation of the Turkish possessions in North Africa, thus inciting a rivalry between the Great Powers which was a constant danger to the peace in the period 1878-1912. The Romanian loss of Bessarabia, the Bulgarian loss of Eastern Rumelia, the South Slav loss of its hope of reaching the Adriatic or even of reaching Montenegro (because of the Austrian occupation of Bosnia and Novi-Bazar), the Greek failure to get Thessaly or Crete, and the complete discomfiture of the Turks created an atmosphere of general dissatisfaction. In the midst of this, the promise of reforms to Macedonia without any provision for enforcing this promise called forth hopes and agitations which could neither be satisfied nor quieted. Even Austria, which, on the face of it, had obtained more than she could really have expected, had obtained in Bosnia the instrument which was to lead eventually to the total destruction of the Habsburg Empire. This acquisition had been encouraged by Bismarck as a method of diverting Austrian ambitions southward to the Adriatic and out of Germany. But by placing Austria, in this way, in the position of being the chief obstacle in the path of the South Slav dreams of unity, Bismarck was also creating the occasion for the destruction of the Hohenzollern Empire. It is clear that European diplomatic history from 1878 to 1919 is little more than a commentary on the mistakes of the Congress of Berlin.

     To Russia the events of 1878 were a bitter disappointment. Even the small Bulgarian state which emerged from the settlement gave them little satisfaction. With a constitution dictated by Russia and under a prince, Alexander of Battenberg, who was a nephew of the czar, the Bulgarians showed an uncooperative spirit which profoundly distressed the Russians. As a result, when Eastern Rumelia revolted in 188; and demanded union with Bulgaria, the change was opposed by Russia and encouraged by Austria. Serbia, in its bitterness, went to war with Bulgaria but was defeated and forced to make peace by Austria. The union of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia was accepted, on face-saving terms, by the sultan. Russian objections were kept within limits by the power of Austria and England but were strong enough to force the abdication of Alexander of Battenberg. Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was elected to succeed Alexander, but was unacceptable to Russia and was recognized by none of the Powers until his reconciliation with Russia in 1896. The state was generally in turmoil during this period, plots and assassinations steadily following one another. A Macedonian revolutionary organization known as IMRO, working for independence for their area, adopted an increasingly terrorist policy, killing any Bulgarian or Romanian statesman who did not work wholeheartedly in cooperation with their efforts. Agitated Bulgarians formed insurgent bands which made raids into Macedonia, and insurrection became endemic in the province, bursting out in full force in 1902. By that date Serb and Greek bands had joined in the confusion. The Powers intervened at that point to inaugurate a program of reform in Macedonia under Austro-Russian supervision.

     The Congress of Berlin began the liquidation of the Turkish position in North Africa. France, which had been occupying Algeria since 1830, established a French protectorate over Tunis as well in 1881. This led to the British occupation of Egypt the following year. Not to be outdone, Italy put in a claim for Tripoli but could get no more than an exchange of notes, known as the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887, by which England, Italy, Austria, Spain, and Germany promised to maintain the status quo in the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean, and the Black seas, unless all parties agreed to changes. The only concrete advantage to Italy in this was a British promise of support in North Africa in return for Italian support of the British position in Egypt. This provided only tenuous satisfaction for the Italian ambitions in Tripoli, but it was reinforced in 1900 by a French-Italian agreement by which Italy gave France a free hand in Morocco in return for a free hand in Tripoli.

Berlin to Baghdad Railroad Scheme

     By 1900 an entirely new factor began to intrude into the Eastern Question. Under Bismarck (1862-1890) Germany had avoided all non-European adventures. Under William II (1888-1918) any kind of adventure, especially a remote and uncertain one, was welcomed. In the earlier period Germany had concerned itself with the Near East Question only as a member of the European "concert of Powers" and with a few incidental issues such as the use of German officers to train the Turkish Army. After 1889 the situation was different. Economically, the Germans began to invade Anatolia by establishing trading agencies and banking facilities; politically, Germany sought to strengthen Turkey's international position in every way. This effort was symbolized by the German Kaiser's two visits to the sultan in 1889 and 1898. On the latter occasion he solemnly promised his friendship to "the Sultan Abdul Hamid and the three hundred million Muhammadans who revere him as caliph." Most important, perhaps, was the projected "Berlin to Bagdad" railway scheme which completed its main trunk line from the Austro-Hungarian border to Nusaybin in northern Mesopotamia by September 1918. This project was of the greatest economic, strategic, and political importance not only to the Ottoman Empire and the Near East but to the whole of Europe. Economically, it tapped a region of great mineral and agricultural resources, including the world's greatest petroleum reserves. These were brought into contact with Constantinople and, beyond that, with central and northwestern Europe. Germany, which was industrialized late, had a great, unsatisfied demand for food and raw materials and a great capacity to manufacture industrial products which could be exported to pay for such food and raw materials. Efforts had been made and continued to be made by Germany to find a solution to this problem by opening trade relations with South America, the Far East, and North America. Banking facilities and a merchant marine were being established to encourage such trade relations. But the Germans, with their strong strategic sense, knew well that relations with the areas mentioned were at the mercy of the British fleet, which would, almost unquestionably, control the seas during wartime. The Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway solved these crucial problems. It put the German metallurgical industry in touch with the great metal resources of Anatolia; it put the German textile industry in touch with the supplies of wool, cotton, and hemp of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia; in fact, it brought to almost every branch of German industry the possibility of finding a solution for its critical market and raw-material problems. Best of all, these connections, being almost entirely overland, would be within reach of the German Army and beyond the reach of the British Navy.

     For Turkey itself the railway was equally significant. Strategically it made it possible, for the first time, for Turkey to mobilize her full power in the Balkans, the Caucasus area, the Persian Gulf, or the Levant. It greatly increased the economic prosperity of the whole country; it could be run (as it was after 1911) on Mesopotamian petroleum; it provided markets and thus incentives for increased production of agricultural and mineral products; it greatly reduced political discontent, public disorder, and banditry in the areas through which it ran; it greatly increased the revenues of the Ottoman treasury in spite of the government's engagement to pay subsidies to the railroad for each mile of track built and for a guaranteed income per mile each year.

The Ottoman Empire Was Divided into Exclusive Spheres of

Influence by Money Powers

     The Great Powers showed mild approval of the Baghdad Railway until about 1900. Then, for more than ten years, Russia, Britain, and France showed violent disapproval, and did all they could to obstruct the project. After 1910 this disapproval was largely removed by a series of agreements by which the Ottoman Empire was divided into exclusive spheres of influence. During the period of disapproval the Great Powers concerned issued such a barrage of propaganda against the plan that it is necessary, even today, to warn against its influence. They described the Baghdad Railway as the entering wedge of German imperialist aggression seeking to weaken and destroy the Ottoman Empire and the stakes of the other Powers in the area. The evidence shows quite the contrary. Germany was the only Great Power which wanted the Ottoman Empire to be strong and intact. Britain wanted it to be weak and intact. France generally shared the British point of view, although the French, with a $500,000,000 investment in the area, wanted Turkey to be prosperous as well. Russia wanted it to be weak and partitioned, a view which was shared by the Italians and, to some extent, by the Austrians.

The Baghdad Railway

     The Germans were not only favorably inclined toward Turkey; their conduct seems to have been completely fair in regard to the administration of the Baghdad Railway itself. At a time when American and other railways were practicing wholesale discrimination between customers in regard to rates and freight handling, the Germans had the same rates and same treatment for all, including Germans and non-Germans. They worked to make the railroad efficient and profitable, although their income from it was guaranteed by the Turkish government. In consequence the Turkish payments to the railroad steadily declined, and the government was able to share in its profits to the extent of almost three million francs in 1914. Moreover, the Germans did not seek to monopolize control of the railroad, offering to share equally with France and England and eventually with other Powers. France accepted this offer in 1899, but Britain continued to refuse, and placed every obstacle in the path of the project. When the Ottoman government in 1911 sought to raise their customs duties from 1 l to 14 percent in order to finance the continued construction of the railway, Britain prevented this. In order to carry on the project, the Germans sold their railroad interests in the Balkans and gave up the Ottoman building subsidy of $275,000 a kilometer. In striking contrast to this attitude, the Russians forced the Turks to change the original route of the line from northern Anatolia to southern Anatolia by threatening to take immediate measures to collect all the arrears, amounting to over 57 million francs, due to the czar from Turkey under the Treaty of 1878. The Russians regarded the projected railway as a strategic threat to their Armenian frontier. Ultimately, in 1900, they forced the sultan to promise to grant no concessions to build railways in northern Anatolia or Armenia except with Russian approval. The French government, in spite of the French investments in Turkey of :.5 billion francs, refused to allow Baghdad Railway securities to be handled on the Paris Stock Exchange: To block the growth of German Catholic missionary activities in the Ottoman Empire, the French persuaded the Pope to issue an encyclical ordering all missionaries in that empire to communicate with the Vatican through the French consulates. The British opposition became intense only in April, 1903. Early in that month Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne made an agreement for joint German, French, and British control of the railroad. Within three weeks this agreement was repudiated by the government because of newspaper protests against it, although it would have reduced the Turks and Germans together to only fourteen out of thirty votes on the board of directors of the railway. When the Turkish government in 1910 tried to borrow abroad $30 million, secured by the customs receipts of the country, it was summarily rebuffed in Paris and London, but obtained the sum without hesitation in Berlin. In view of these facts, the growth of German prestige and the decline in favor of the Western Powers at the sultan's court is not surprising, and goes far to explain the Turkish intervention on the side of the Central Powers in the war of 1914-1918.

Secret Agreement Divides Turkey into Spheres of Foreign Influence

     The Baghdad Railway played no real role in the outbreak of the war of 1914 because the Germans in the period 1910-1914 were able to reduce the Great Powers' objections to the scheme. This was done through a series of agreements which divided Turkey into spheres of foreign influence. In November, 1910, a German-Russian agreement at Potsdam gave Russia a free hand in northern Persia, withdrew all Russian opposition to the Baghdad Railway, and pledged both parties to support equal trade opportunities for all (the "open-door" policy) in their respective areas of influence in the Near East. The French were given 2,000 miles of railway concessions in western and northern Anatolia and in Syria in 1910-1912 and signed a secret agreement with the Germans in February 1914, by which these regions were recognized as French "spheres of influence," while the route of the Baghdad Railway was recognized as a German sphere of influence; both Powers promised to work to increase the Ottoman tax receipts; the French withdrew their opposition to the railway; and the French gave the Germans the 70-million-franc investment which the French already had in the Baghdad Railway in return for an equal amount in the Turkish bond issue of 1911, which France had earlier rebuffed, plus a lucrative discount on a new Ottoman bond issue of 1914.

Various Monopolies Over Natural Resources Established

     The British drove a much harder bargain with the Germans. By an agreement of June 1914, Britain withdrew her opposition to the Baghdad Railway, allowed Turkey to raise her customs from 11 percent to 15 percent, and accepted a German sphere of interest along the railway route in return for promises (1) that the railway would not be extended to the Persian Gulf 'out would stop at Basra on the Tigris River, (2) that British capitalists would be given a monopoly on the navigation of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and exclusive control over irrigation projects based on these rivers, (3) that two British subjects would be given seats on the board of directors of the Baghdad Railway, (4) that Britain would have exclusive control over the commercial activities of Kuwait, the only good port on the upper Persian Gulf: (5) that a monopoly over the oil resources of the area from Mosul to Baghdad would be given to a new corporation in which British finances would have a half-interest, Royal Dutch Shell Company a quarter-interest, and the Germans a quarter-interest; and (6) that both Powers would support the "open-door" policy in commercial activities in Asiatic Turkey. Unfortunately, this agreement, as well as the earlier ones with other Powers, became worthless with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. However, it is still important to recognize that the Entente Powers forced upon the Germans a settlement dividing Turkey into "spheres of interest" in place of the projected German settlement based on international cooperation in the economic reconstruction of the area.

The Struggles of the Money Powers for Profit and Influence

     These struggles of the Great Powers for profit and influence in the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire could not fail to have profound effects in Turkish domestic affairs. Probably the great mass of the sultan's subjects were still untouched by these events, but an animated minority was deeply stirred. This minority received no encouragement from the despotic Abdul-Hamid II, sultan from 1876 to 1909. While eager for economic improvements, Abdul-Hamid II was opposed to the spread of the Western ideas of liberalism, constitutionalism, nationalism, or democracy, and did all he could to prevent their propagation by censorship, by restrictions on foreign travel or study abroad by Turks, and by an elaborate system of arbitrary police rule and governmental espionage. As a result, the minority of liberal, nationalistic, or progressive Turks had to organize abroad. This they did at Geneva in 1891 in a group which is generally known as the "Young Turks." Their chief difficulty was to reconcile the animosities which existed between the many linguistic groups among the sultan's subjects. This was done in a series of congresses held in Paris, notably in 190' and in 1907. At the latter meeting were representatives of the Turks, Armenians, Bulgars, Jews, Arabs, and Albanians. In the meantime, this secret organization had penetrated the sultan's army, which was seething with discontent. The plotters were so successful that they were able to revolt in July 1908, and force the sultan to reestablish the Constitution of 1876. At once divisions appeared among the rebel leaders, notably between those who wished a centralized state and those who accepted the subject nationalities' demands for decentralization. Moreover, the orthodox Muslims formed a league to resist secularization, and the army soon saw that its chief demands for better pay and improved living conditions were not going to be met. Abdul-Hamid took advantage of these divisions to organize a violent counterrevolution (April 1909). It was crushed, the sultan was deposed, and the Young Turks began to impose their ideas of a dictatorial Turkish national state with ruthless severity. A wave of resistance arose from the non-Turkish groups and the orthodox Muslims. No settlement of these disputes was achieved by the outbreak of the World War in 1914. Indeed, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 precipitated a series of international crises of which the outbreak of war in 1914 was the latest and most disastrous.

Chapter 9: The British Imperial Crisis:Africa, Ireland, and India to 1926

Introduction

     The old statement that England acquired its empire in a fit of absentmindedness is amusing but does not explain very much. It does, however, contain an element of truth: much of the empire was acquired by private individuals and commercial firms, and was taken over by the British government much later. The motives which impelled the government to annex areas which its citizens had been exploiting were varied, both in time and in place, and were frequently much different from what an outsider might believe.

     Britain acquired the world's greatest empire because it possessed certain advantages which other countries lacked. We mention three of these advantages: (1) that it was an island, (2) that it was in the Atlantic, and (3) that its social traditions at home produced the will and the talents for imperial acquisition.

English Channel Provides Security for Britain

     As an island off the coast of Europe, Britain had security as long as it had control of the narrow seas. It had such control from the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 until the creation of new weapons based on air power in the period after 1935. The rise of the German Air Force under Hitler, the invention of the long-range rocket projectiles (V-2 weapon) in 1944, and the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs in 1945-1955 destroyed England's security by reducing the defensive effectiveness of the English Channel. But in the period 1588-1942, in which Britain controlled the seas, the Channel gave England security and made its international position entirely different from that of any continental Power. Because Britain had security, it had freedom of action. That means it had a choice whether to intervene or to stay out of the various disputes which arose on the Continent of Europe or elsewhere in the world. Moreover, if it intervened, it could do so on a limited commitment, restricting its contribution of men, energy, money, and wealth to whatever amount it wished. If such a limited commitment were exhausted or lost, so long as the British fleet controlled the seas, Britain had security, and thus had freedom to choose if it would break off its intervention or increase its commitment. Moreover, England could make even a small commitment of its resources of decisive importance by using this commitment in support of the second strongest Power on the Continent against the strongest Power, thus hampering the strongest Power and making the second Power temporarily the strongest, as long as it acted in accord with Britain's wishes. In this way, by following balance-of-power tactics, Britain was able to play a decisive role on the Continent, keep the Continent divided and embroiled in its own disputes, and do this with a limited commitment of Britain's own resources, leaving a considerable surplus of energy, manpower, and wealth available for acquiring an empire overseas. In addition, Britain's unique advantage in having security through a limited commitment of resources by control of the sea was one of the contributing factors which allowed Britain to develop its unique social structure, its parliamentary system, its wide range of civil liberties, and its great economic advance.

European Wars

     The Powers on the Continent had none of these advantages. Since each could be invaded by its neighbors at any time, each had security, and thus freedom of action, only on rare and brief occasions. When the security of a continental Power was threatened by a neighbor, it had no freedom of action, but had to defend itself with all its resources. Clearly, it would be impossible for France to say to itself, "We shall oppose German hegemony on the Continent only to the extent of 50,000 men or of $10 million." Yet as late as 1939, Chamberlain informed France that England's commitment on the Continent for this purpose would be no more than two divisions.

European Powers Focus on the Continent

     Since the continental Powers had neither security nor freedom of action, their position on the Continent always was paramount over their ambitions for world empire, and these latter always had to be sacrificed for the sake of the former whenever a conflict arose. France was unable to hold on to its possessions in India or in North America in the eighteenth century because so much of its resources had to be used to bolster French security against Prussia or Austria. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803 because his primary concern had to be his position on the Continent. Bismarck tried to discourage Germany from embarking on any overseas adventures in the period after 1871 because he saw that Germany must be a continental power or be nothing. Again, France in 1882 had to yield Egypt to Britain, and in 1898 had to yield the Sudan in the same way, because it saw that it could not engage in any colonial dispute with Britain while the German Army stood across the Rhineland. This situation was so clear that all the lesser continental Powers with overseas colonial possessions, such as Portugal, Belgium, or the Netherlands, had to collaborate with Britain, or, at the very least, be carefully neutral. So long as the ocean highway from these countries to their overseas empires was controlled by the British fleet, they could not afford to embark on a policy hostile to Britain, regardless of their personal feelings on the subject. It is no accident that Britain's most constant international backing in the two centuries following the Methuen Treaty of 1703 came from Portugal and that Britain has felt free to negotiate with a third Power, like Germany, regarding the disposition of the Portuguese colonies, as she did in 1898 and tried to do in 1937-1939.

Britain's Control of the Sea

     Britain's position on the Atlantic, combined with her naval control of the sea, gave her a great advantage when the new lands to the west of that ocean became one of the chief sources of commercial and naval wealth in the period after 1588. Lumber, tar, and ships were supplied from the American colonies to Britain in the period before the advent of iron, steam-driven ships (after 1860), and these ships helped to establish Britain's mercantile supremacy. At the same time, Britain's insular position deprived her monarchy of any need for a large professional, mercenary army such as the kings on the Continent used as the chief bulwark of royal absolutism. As a result, the kings of England were unable to prevent the landed gentry from taking over the control of the government in the period 1642-1690, and the kings of England became constitutional monarchs. Britain's security behind her navy allowed this struggle to go to a decision without any important outside interference, and permitted a rivalry between monarch and aristocracy which would have been suicidal on the insecure grounds of continental Europe.

The Landed Oligarchy in Britain

     Britain's security combined with the political triumph of the landed oligarchy to create a social tradition entirely unlike that on the Continent. One result of these two factors was that England did not obtain a bureaucracy such as appeared on the Continent. This lack of a separate bureaucracy loyal to the monarch can be seen in the weakness of the professional army (already mentioned) and also in the lack of a bureaucratic judicial system. In England, the gentry and the younger sons of the landed oligarchy studied law in the Inns of Court and obtained a feeling for tradition and the sanctity of due process of law while still remaining a part of the landed class. In fact this class became the landed class in England just because they obtained control of the bar and the bench and were, thus, in a position to judge all disputes about real property in their own favor. Control of the courts and of the Parliament made it possible for this ruling group in England to override the rights of the peasants in land, to eject them from the land, to enclose the open fields of the medieval system, to deprive the cultivators of their manorial rights and thus to reduce them to the condition of landless rural laborers or of tenants. This advance of the enclosure movement in England made possible the Agricultural Revolution, greatly depopulated the rural areas of England (as described in The Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith), and provided a surplus population for the cities, the mercantile and naval marine, and for overseas colonization.

The Unique Status of the Landed Oligarchy in Britain

     The landed oligarchy which arose in England differed from the landed aristocracy of continental Europe in the three points already mentioned: (1) it got control of the government; (2) it was not opposed by a professional army, a bureaucracy, or a professional judicial system, but, on the contrary, it took over the control of these adjuncts of government itself, generally serving without pay, and making access to these positions difficult for outsiders by making such access expensive; and (3) it obtained complete control of the land as well as political, religious, and social control of the villages. In addition, the landed oligarchy of England was different from that on the Continent because it was not a nobility. This lack was reflected in three important factors. On the Continent a noble was excluded from marrying outside his class or from engaging in commercial enterprise; moreover, access to the nobility by persons of non-noble birth was very difficult, and could hardly be achieved in much less than three generations. In England, the landed oligarchy could engage in any kind of commerce or business and could marry anyone without question (provided she was rich); moreover, while access to the gentry in England was a slow process which might require generations of effort acquiring land-holdings in a single locality, access to the peerage by act of the government took only a moment, and could be achieved on the basis of either wealth or service. As a consequence of all these differences, the landed upper class in England was open to the influx of new talent, new money, and new blood, while the continental nobility was deprived of these valuable acquisitions.

England Developed an Aristocracy

     While the landed upper class of England was unable to become a nobility (that is, a caste based on exalted birth), it was able to become an aristocracy (that is, an upper class distinguished by traditions and behavior). The chief attributes of this aristocratic upper class in England were (1) that it should be trained in an expensive, exclusive, masculine, and relatively Spartan educational system centering about the great boys' schools like Eton, Harrow, or Winchester; (2) that it should imbibe from this educational system certain distinctive attitudes of leadership, courage, sportsmanship, team play, self-sacrifice, disdain for physical comforts, and devotion to duty; (3) that it should be prepared in later life to devote a great deal of time and energy to unpaid tasks of public significance, as justices of the peace, on county councils, in the county militia, or in other services. Since all the sons of the upper classes received the same training, while only the oldest, by primogeniture, was entitled to take over the income-yielding property of the family, all the younger sons had to go out into the world to seek their fortunes, and, as likely as not, would do their seeking overseas. At the same time, the uneventful life of the typical English village or county, completely controlled by the upperclass oligarchy, made it necessary for the more ambitious members of the lower classes to seek advancement outside the county and even outside England. From these two sources were recruited the men who acquired Britain's empire and the men who colonized it.

The British Empire

     The English have not always been unanimous in regarding the empire as a source of pride and benefit. In fact, the middle generation of the nineteenth century was filled with persons, such as Gladstone, who regarded the empire with profound suspicion. They felt that it was a source of great expense; they were convinced that it involved England in remote strategic problems which could easily lead to wars England had no need to fight; they could see no economic advantage in having an empire, since the existence of free trade (which this generation accepted) would allow commerce to flow no matter who held colonial areas; they were convinced that any colonial areas, no matter at what cost they might be acquired, would eventually separate from the mother country, voluntarily if they were given the rights of Englishmen, or by rebellion, as the American colonies had done, if they were deprived of such rights. In general, the "Little Englanders," as they were called, were averse to colonial expansion on the grounds of cost.

Colonies Could Be a Source of Riches

     Although upholders of the "Little England" point of view, men like Gladstone or Sir William Harcourt, continued in political prominence until 1895, this point of view was in steady retreat after 1870. In the Liberal Party the Little Englanders were opposed by imperialists like Lord Rosebery even before 1895; after that date, a younger group of imperialists, like Asquith, Grey, and Haldane took over the party. In the Conservative Party, where the anti-imperialist idea had never been strong, moderate imperialists like Lord Salisbury were followed by more active imperialists like Joseph Chamberlain, or Lords Curzon, Selborne, and Milner. There were many factors which led to the growth of imperialism after 1870, and many obvious manifestations of that growth. The Royal Colonial Institute was founded in 1868 to fight the "Little England" idea; Disraeli as prime minister (1874-1880) dramatized the profit and glamour of empire by such acts as the purchase of control of the Suez Canal and by granting Queen Victoria the title of Empress of India; after 1870 it became increasingly evident that, however expensive colonies might be to a government, they could be fantastically profitable to individuals and companies supported by such governments; moreover, with the spread of democracy and the growing influence of the press and the expanding need for campaign contributions, individuals who made fantastic profits in overseas adventures could obtain favorable support from their governments by contributing some part of their profits to politicians' expenses; the efforts of King Leopold II of Belgium, using Henry Stanley, to obtain the Congo area as his own preserve in 1876-1880, started a contagious fever of colony-grabbing in Africa which lasted for more than thirty years; the discovery of diamonds (in 1869) and of gold (in 1886) in South Africa, especially in the Boer Transvaal Republic, intensified this fever.

John Ruskin

     The new imperialism after 1870 was quite different in tone from that which the Little Englanders had opposed earlier. The chief changes were that it was justified on grounds of moral duty and of social reform and not, as earlier, on grounds of missionary activity and material advantage. The man most responsible for this change was John Ruskin.

     Until 1870 there was no professorship of fine arts at Oxford, but in that year, thanks to the Slade bequest, John Ruskin was named to such a chair. He hit Oxford like an earthquake, not so much because he talked about fine arts, but because he talked also about the empire and England's downtrodden masses, and above all because he talked about all three of these things as moral issues. Until the end of the nineteenth century the poverty-stricken masses in the cities of England lived in want, ignorance, and crime very much as they have been described by Charles Dickens. Ruskin spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged, ruling class. He told them that they were the possessors of a magnificent tradition of education, beauty, rule of law, freedom, decency, and self-discipline but that this tradition could not be saved, and did not deserve to be saved, unless it could be extended to the lower classes in England itself and to the non-English masses throughout the world. If this precious tradition were not extended to these two great majorities, the minority of upper-class Englishmen would ultimately be submerged by these majorities and the tradition lost. To prevent this, the tradition must be extended to the masses and to the empire.

Cecil Rhodes Sets Up a Monopoly Over the Gold and

Diamond Mines in South Africa

     Ruskin's message had a sensational impact. His inaugural lecture was copied out in longhand by one undergraduate, Cecil Rhodes, who kept it with him for thirty years. Rhodes (1853-1902) feverishly exploited the diamond and goldfields of South Africa, rose to be prime minister of the Cape Colony (1890-1896), contributed money to political parties, controlled parliamentary seats both in England and in South Africa, and sought to win a strip of British territory across Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Egypt and to join these two extremes together with a telegraph line and ultimately with a Cape-to-Cairo Railway. Rhodes inspired devoted support for his goals from others in South Africa and in England. With financial support from Lord Rothschild and Alfred Beit, he was able to monopolize the diamond mines of South Africa as De Beers Consolidated Mines and to build up a great gold mining enterprise as Consolidated Gold Fields. In the middle 1890's Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then about five million dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes that he was usually overdrawn on his account. These purposes centered on his desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control. For this purpose Rhodes left part of his great fortune to found the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world as Ruskin had wanted.

Cecil Rhodes Organized a Secret Society in 1891

     Among Ruskin's most devoted disciples at Oxford were a group of intimate friends including Arnold Toynbee, Alfred (later Lord) Milner, Arthur Glazebrook, George (later Sir George) Parkin, Philip Lyttelton Gell, and Henry (later Sir Henry) Birchenough. These were so moved by Ruskin that they devoted the rest of their lives to carrying out his ideas. A similar group of Cambridge men including Reginald Baliol Brett (Lord Esher), Sir John B. Seeley, Albert (Lord) Grey, and Edmund Garrett were also aroused by Ruskin's message and devoted their lives to extension of the British Empire and uplift of England's urban masses as two parts of one project which they called "extension of the English-speaking idea." They were remarkably successful in these aims because England's most sensational journalist William T. Stead (1849-1912), an ardent social reformer and imperialist, brought them into association with Rhodes. This association was formally established on February 5, 1891, when Rhodes and Stead organized a secret society of which Rhodes had been dreaming for sixteen years. In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a "Circle of Initiates"; while there was to be an outer circle known as the "Association of Helpers" (later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization). Brett was invited to join this organization the same day and Milner a couple of weeks later, on his return from Egypt. Both accepted with enthusiasm. Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March 1891. It continued to function as a formal group, although the outer circle was, apparently, not organized until 1909-1913.

Financial Backing of the Secret Society

      This group was able to get access to Rhodes's money after his death in 1902 and also to the funds of loyal Rhodes supporters like Alfred Beit (1853-1906) and Sir Abe Bailey (1864-1940). With this backing they sought to extend and execute the ideals that Rhodes had obtained from Ruskin and Stead. Milner was the chief Rhodes Trustee and Parkin was Organizing Secretary of the Rhodes Trust after 1902, while Gell and Birchenough, as well as others with similar ideas, became officials of the British South Africa Company. They were joined in their efforts by other Ruskinite friends of Stead's like Lord Grey, Lord Esher, and Flora Shaw (later Lady Lugard). In 1890, by a stratagem too elaborate to describe here, Miss Shaw became Head of the Colonial Department of The Times while still remaining on the payroll of Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, In this post she played a major role in the next ten years in carrying into execution the imperial schemes of Cecil Rhodes, to whom Stead had introduced her in 1889.

The Toynbee Hall Is Set Up

     In the meantime, in 1884, acting under Ruskin's inspiration, a group which included Arnold Toynbee, Milner, Gell, Grey, Seeley, and Michael Glazebrook founded the first "settlement house," an organization by which educated, upper-class people could live in the slums in order to assist, instruct, and guide the poor, with particular emphasis on social welfare and adult education. The new enterprise, set up in East London with P. L. Gell as chairman, was named Toynbee Hall after Arnold Toynbee who died, aged 31, in 1883. This was the original model for the thousands of settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago, now found throughout the world, and was one of the seeds from which the modern movement for adult education and university extension grew.

Roundtable Group Established

     As governor-general and high commissioner of South Africa in the period 1897-1905, Milner recruited a group of young men, chiefly from Oxford and from Toynbee Hall, to assist him in organizing his administration. Through his influence these men were able to win influential posts in government and international finance and became the dominant influence in British imperial and foreign affairs up to 1939. Under Milner in South Africa they were known as Milner's Kindergarten until 1910. In 1909-1913 they organized semi-secret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the chief British dependencies and the United States. These still function in eight countries. They kept in touch with each other by personal correspondence and frequent visits, and through an influential quarterly magazine, The Round Table, founded in 1910 and largely supported by Sir Abe Bailey's money.

The Royal Institute and Council on Foreign Relations Are Set Up

     In 1919 they founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) for which the chief financial supporters were Sir Abe Bailey and the Astor family (owners of The Times). Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-1927. After 1925 a somewhat similar structure of organizations, known as the Institute of Pacific Relations, was set up in twelve countries holding territory in the Pacific area, the units in each British dominion existing on an interlocking basis with the Round Table Group and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the same country. In Canada the nucleus of this group consisted of Milner's undergraduate friends at Oxford (such as Arthur Glazebrook and George Parkin), while in South Africa and India the nucleus was made up of former members of Milner's Kindergarten. These included (Sir) Patrick Duncan, B. K. Long, Richard Feetham, and (Sir) Dougal Malcolm in South Africa and (Sir) William Marris, James (Lord) Meston, and their friend Malcolm (Lord) Hailey in India. The groups in Australia and New Zealand had been recruited by Stead (through his magazine The Review of Reviews) as early as 1890-1893; by Parkin, at Milner instigation, in the period 1889-1910, and by Lionel Curtis, also at Milner's request, in 1910-1919. The power and influence of this Rhodes-Milner group in British imperial affairs and in foreign policy since 1889, although not widely recognized, can hardly be exaggerated. We might mention as an example that this group dominated The Times from 1890 to 191, and has controlled it completely since 1912 (except for the years 1919-1922). Because The Times has been owned by the Astor family since 1922, this Rhodes-Milner group was sometimes spoken of as the "Cliveden Set," named after the Astor country house where they sometimes assembled. Numerous other papers and journals have been under the control or influence of this group since 1889. They have also established and influenced numerous university and other chairs of imperial affairs and international relations. Some of these are the Beit chairs at Oxford, the Montague Burton chair at Oxford, the Rhodes chair at London, the Stevenson chair at Chatham House, the Wilson chair at Aberystwyth, and others, as well as such important sources of influence as Rhodes House at Oxford.

Roundtable Groups Seek to Extend the British Empire

     From 1884 to about 1915 the members of this group worked valiantly to extend the British Empire and to organize it in a federal system. They were constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867, and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire as seemed feasible, then confederate the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single organization. They also hoped to bring the United States into this organization to whatever degree was possible. Stead was able to get Rhodes to accept, in principle, a solution which might have made Washington the capital of the whole organization or allow parts of the empire to become states of the American Union. The varied character of the British imperial possessions, the backwardness of many of the native peoples involved, the independence of many of the white colonists overseas, and the growing international tension which culminated in the First World War made it impossible to carry out the plan for Imperial Federation, although the five colonies in Australia were joined into the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and the four colonies in South Africa were joined into the Union of South Africa in 1910.

Egypt and the Sudan to 1922

     Disraeli's purchase, with Rothschild money, of 176,602 shares of Suez Canal stock for ฃ3,680,000 from the Khedive of Egypt in 1875 was motivated by concern for the British communications with India, just as the British acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope in 1814 had resulted from the same concern. But in imperial matters one step leads to another, and every acquisition obtained to protect an earlier acquisition requires a new advance at a later date to protect it. This was clearly true in Africa where such motivations gradually extended British control southward from Egypt and northward from the Cape until these were joined in central Africa with the conquest of German Tanganyika in 1916.

     The extravagances of the Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), which had compelled the sale of his Suez Canal shares, led ultimately to the creation of an Anglo-French condominium to manage the Egyptian foreign debt and to the deposition of the khedive by his suzerain, the Sultan of Turkey. The condominium led to disputes and finally to open fighting between Egyptian nationalists and Anglo-French forces. When the French refused to join the British in a joint bombardment of Alexandria in 1882, the condominium was broken, and Britain reorganized the country in such a fashion that, while all public positions were held by Egyptians, a British army was in occupation, British "advisers" controlled all the chief governmental posts, and a British "resident," Sir Evelyn Baring (known as Lord Cromer after 1892), controlled all finances and really ruled the country until 1907.

     Inspired by fanatical Muslim religious agitators (dervishes), the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmed led a Sudanese revolt against Egyptian control in 1883, massacred a British force under General Charles ("Chinese") Gordon at Khartoum, and maintained an independent Sudan for fifteen years. In 1898 a British force under (Lord) Kitchener, seeking to protect the Nile water supply of Egypt, fought its way southward against fanatical Sudanese tribesmen and won a decisive victory at Omdurman. An Anglo-Egyptian convention established a condominium known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the area between Egypt and the Congo River. This area, which had lived in disorder for centuries, was gradually pacified, brought under the rule of law, irrigated by extensive hydraulic works, and brought under cultivation, producing, chiefly, long staple cotton.

East Central Africa to 19 10

     South and east of the Sudan the struggle for a British Africa was largely in the hands of H. H. (Sir Harry) Johnston (1858-1927) and Frederick (later Lord) Lugard (1858-1945). These two, chiefly using private funds but frequently holding official positions, fought all over tropical Africa, ostensibly seeking to pacify it and to wipe out the Arab slave trade, but always possessing a burning desire to extend British rule. Frequently, these ambitions led to rivalries with supporters of French and German ambitions in the same regions. In 1884 Johnston obtained many concessions from native chiefs in the Kenya area, turning these over to the British East Africa Company in 1887. When this company went bankrupt in '895, most of its rights were taken over by the British government. In the meantime, Johnston had moved south, into a chaos of Arab slavers' intrigues and native unrest in Nyasaland (1888). Here his exploits were largely financed by Rhodes (1889-1893) in order to prevent the Portuguese Mozambique Company from pushing westward toward the Portuguese West African colony of Angola to block the Cape-to-Cairo route. Lord Salisbury made Nyasaland a British Protectorate after a deal with Rhodes in which the South African promised to pay ฃ1,000 a year toward the cost of the new territory. About the same time Rhodes gave the Liberal Party a substantial financial contribution in return for a promise that they would not abandon Egypt. He had already (1888) given ฃ10,000 to the Irish Home Rule Party on condition that it seek Home Rule for Ireland while keeping Irish members in the British Parliament as a step toward Imperial Federation.

     Rhodes's plans received a terrible blow in 1890-1891 when Lord Salisbury sought to end the African disputes with Germany and Portugal by delimiting their territorial claims in South and East Africa. The Portuguese agreement of 1891 was never ratified, but the Anglo-German agreement of 1890 blocked Rhodes's route to Egypt by extending German East Africa (Tanganyika) west to the Belgium Congo. By the same agreement Germany abandoned Nyasaland, Uganda, and Zanzibar to Britain in return for the island of Heligoland in the Baltic Sea and an advantageous boundary in German Southwest Africa.

     As soon as the German agreement was published, Lugard was sent by the British East Africa Company to overcome the resistance of native chiefs and slavers in Uganda (1890-1894). The bankruptcy of this company in 1895 seemed likely to lead to the abandonment of Uganda because of the Little Englander sentiment in the Liberal Party (which was in office in 1892-1895). Rhodes offered to take the area over himself and run it for ฃ25,000 a year, but was refused. As a result of complex and secret negotiations in which Lord Rosebery was the chief figure, Britain kept Uganda, Rhodes was made a privy councilor, Rosebery replaced his father-in-law, Lord Rothschild, in Rhodes's secret group and was made a Trustee under Rhodes's next (and last) will. Rosebery tried to obtain a route for Rhodes's railway to the north across the Belgian Congo; Rosebery was informed of Rhodes's plans to finance an uprising of the English within the Transvaal (Boer) Republic and to send Dr. Jameson on a raid into that country "to restore order"; and, finally, Rhodes found the money to finance Kitchener's railway from Egypt to Uganda, using the South African gauge and engines given by Rhodes.

     The economic strength which allowed Rhodes to do these things rested in his diamond and gold mines, the latter in the Transvaal, and thus not in British territory. North of Cape Colony, across the Orange River, was a Boer republic, the Orange Free State. Beyond this, and separated by the Vaal River, was another Boer republic, the Transvaal. Beyond this, across the Limpopo River and continuing northward to the Zambezi River, was the savage native kingdom of the Matabeles. With great personal daring, unscrupulous opportunism, and extravagant expenditure of money, Rhodes obtained an opening to the north, passing west of the Boer republics, by getting British control in Griqualand West (1880), Bechuanaland, and the Bechuanaland Protectorate (1885). In 1888 Rhodes obtained a vague but extensive mining concession from the Matabeles' chief, Lobengula, and gave it to the British South Africa Company organized for the purpose (1889). Rhodes obtained a charter so worded that the company had very extensive powers in an area without any northern limits beyond Bechuanaland Protectorate. Four years later the Matabeles were attacked and destroyed by Dr. Jameson, and their lands taken by the company. The company, however, was not a commercial success, and paid no dividends for thirty-five years (1889-1924) and only 12.5 shillings in forty-six years. This compares with 793.5 percent dividends paid by Rhodes's Consolidated Gold Fields in the five years 1889-1894 and the 125 percent dividend it paid in 1896. Most of the South Africa Company's money was used on public improvements like roads and schools, and no rich mines were found in its territory (known as Rhodesia) compared to those farther south in the Transvaal.

     In spite of the terms of the Rhodes wills, Rhodes himself was not a racist. Nor was he a political democrat. He worked as easily and as closely with Jews, black natives, or Boers as he did with English. But he had a passionate belief in the value of a liberal education, and was attached to a restricted suffrage and even to a non-secret ballot. In South Africa he was a staunch friend of the Dutch and of the blacks, found his chief political support among the Boers, until at least 1895, and wanted restrictions on natives put on an educational rather than on a color basis. These ideas have generally been held by his group since and have played an important role in British imperial history. His greatest weakness rested on the fact that his passionate attachment to his goals made him overly tolerant in regard to methods. He did not hesitate to use either bribery or force to attain his ends if he judged they would be effective. This weakness led to his greatest errors, the Jameson Raid of 1895 and the Boer War of 1899-1902, errors which were disastrous for the future of the empire he loved.

South Africa, 1895-1933

     By 1895 the Transvaal Republic presented an acute problem. All political control was in the hands of a rural, backward, Bible-reading, racist minority of Boers, while all economic wealth was in the hands of a violent, aggressive majority of foreigners (Uitlanders), most of whom lived in the new city of Johannesburg. The Uitlanders, who were twice as numerous as the Boers and owned two-thirds of the land and nine-tenths of the wealth of the country, were prevented from participating in political life or from becoming citizens (except after fourteen years' residence) and were irritated by a series of minor pinpricks and extortions such as tax differentials, a dynamite monopoly, and transportation restrictions) and by rumors that the Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, was intriguing to obtain some kind of German intervention and protection. At this point in 1895, Rhodes made his plans to overthrow Kruger's government by an uprising in Johannesburg, financed by himself and Beit, and led by his brother Frank Rhodes, Abe Bailey, and other supporters, followed by an invasion of the Transvaal by a force led by Jameson from Bechuanaland and Rhodesia. Flora Shaw used The Times to prepare public opinion in England, while Albert Grey and others negotiated with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain for the official support that was necessary. Unfortunately, when the revolt fizzled out in Johannesburg, Jameson raided anyway in an effort to revive it, and was easily captured by the Boers. The public officials involved denounced the plot, loudly proclaimed their surprise at the event, and were able to whitewash most of the participants in the subsequent parliamentary inquiry. A telegram from the German Kaiser to President Kruger of the Transvaal, congratulating him on his success "in preserving the independence of his country without the need to call for aid from his friends," was built up by The Times into an example of brazen German interference in British affairs, and almost eclipsed Jameson's aggression.

     Rhodes was stopped only temporarily, but he had lost the support of many of the Boers. For almost two years he and his friends stayed quiet, waiting for the storm to blow over. Then they began to act again. Propaganda, most of it true, about the plight of Uitlanders in the Transvaal Republic flooded England and South Africa from Flora Shaw, W. T. Stead, Edmund Garrett, and others; Milner was made high commissioner of South Africa (1897); Brett worked his way into the confidence of the monarchy to become its chief political adviser during a period of more than twenty-five years (he wrote almost daily letters of advice to King Edward during his reign, 1901-1910). By a process whose details are still obscure, a brilliant, young graduate of Cambridge, Jan Smuts, who had been a vigorous supporter of Rhodes and acted as his agent in Kimberley as late as 1895 and who was one of the most important members of the Rhodes-Milner group in the period 1908-1950, went to the Transvaal and, by violent anti-British agitation, became state secretary of that country (although a British subject) and chief political adviser to President Kruger; Milner made provocative troop movements on the Boer frontiers in spite of the vigorous protests of his commanding general in South Africa, who had to be removed; and, finally, war was precipitated when Smuts drew up an ultimatum insisting that the British troop movements cease and when this was rejected by Milner.

     The Boer War (1899-1902) was one of the most important events in British imperial history. The ability of 40,000 Boer farmers to hold off ten times as many British for three years, inflicting a series of defeats on them over that period, destroyed faith in British power. Although the Boer republics were defeated and annexed in 1902, Britain's confidence was so shaken that it made a treaty with Japan in the same year providing that if either signer became engaged in war with two enemies in the Far East the other signer would come to the rescue. This treaty, which allowed Japan to attack Russia in 1904, lasted for twenty years, being extended to the Middle East in 1912. At the same time Germany's obvious sympathy with the Boers, combined with the German naval construction program of 1900, alienated the British people from the Germans and contributed greatly toward the Anglo-French entente of 1904.

     Milner took over the two defeated Boer republics and administered them as occupied territory until 1905, using a civil service of young men recruited for the purpose. This group, known as "Milner's Kindergarten," reorganized the government and administration of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and played a major role in South African life generally. When Milner left public life in 1905 to devote himself to international finance and the Rhodes enterprises, Lord Selborne, his successor as high commissioner, took over the Kindergarten and continued to use it. In 1906 a new Liberal government in London granted self-government to the two Boer states. The Kindergarten spent the next four years in a successful effort to create a South African Federation. The task was not an easy one, even with such powerful backing as Selborne, Smuts (who was now the dominant political figure in the Transvaal, although Botha held the position of prime minister), and Jameson (who was the prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1904-1908). The subject was broached through a prearranged public interchange of letters between Jameson and Selborne. Then Selborne published a memorandum, written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and Lionel Curtis, calling for a union of the four colonies. Kerr founded a periodical (The State, financed by Sir Abe Bailey) which advocated federation in every issue; Curtis and others scurried about organizing "Closer Union" societies; Robert H. (Lord) Brand and (Sir) Patrick Duncan laid the groundwork for the new constitution. At the Durban constitutional convention (where Duncan and B. K. Long were legal advisers) the Transvaal delegation was controlled by Smuts and the Kindergarten. This delegation, which was heavily financed, tightly organized, and knew exactly what it wanted, dominated the convention, wrote the constitution for the Union of South Africa, and succeeded in having it ratified (1910). Local animosities were compromised in a series of ingenious arrangements, including one by which the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the new government were placed in three different cities. The Rhodes-Milner group recognized that Boer nationalism and color intolerance were threats to the future stability and loyalty of South Africa, but they had faith in the political influence of Smuts and Botha, of Rhodes's allies, and of the four members of the Kindergarten who stayed in South Africa to hold off these problems until time could moderate the irreconcilable Boers. In this they were mistaken, because, as men like Jameson (1917), Botha (1919), Duncan (1943), Long (1943), and Smuts (1950) died off, they were not replaced by men of equal loyalty and ability, with the result that the Boer extremists under D. F. Malan came to power in 1948.

     The first Cabinet of the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 by the South African Party, which was largely Boer, with Louis Botha as prime minister. The real master of the government was Smuts, who held three out of nine portfolios, all important ones, and completely dominated Botha. Their policy of reconciliation with the English and of loyal support for the British connection was violently opposed by the Boer Nationalists within the party led by J. B. M. Hertzog. Hertzog was eager to get independence from Britain and to reserve political control in a South African republic to Boers only. He obtained growing support by agitating on the language and educational issues, insisting that all government officials must speak Afrikaans and that it be a compulsory language in schools, with English a voluntary, second language.

     The opposition party, known as Unionist, was largely English and was led by Jameson supported by Duncan, Richard Feetham, Hugh Wyndham, and Long. Financed by Milner's allies and the Rhodes Trust, its leaders considered that their chief task was "to support the prime minister against the extremists of his own party." Long, as the best speaker, was ordered to attack Hertzog constantly. When Hertzog struck back with too violent language in 1912, he was dropped from the Cabinet and soon seceded from the South African Party, joining with the irreconcilable Boer republicans like Christiaan De Wet to form the Nationalist Party. The new party adopted an extremist anti-English and anti-native platform.

     Jameson's party, under his successor, Sir Thomas Smartt (a paid agent of the Rhodes organization), had dissident elements because of the growth of white labor unions which insisted on anti-native legislation. By 1914 these formed a separate Labour Party under F. H. P. Creswell, and were able to win from Smuts a law excluding natives from most semiskilled or skilled work or any high-paving positions (1911). The natives were compelled to work for wages, however low, by the need to obtain cash for taxes and by the inadequacy of the native reserves to support them from their own agricultural activities. By the Land Act of 1913 about 7 percent of the land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the other 93 percent for purchase by whites. At that time the native population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.

     As a result of such discriminations, the wages of natives were about one-tenth those of whites. This discrepancy in remuneration permitted white workers to earn salaries comparable to those earned in North America, although national income was low and productivity per capita was very low (about $125 per year).

     The Botha-Smuts government of 1910-1924 did little to cope with the almost insoluble problems which faced South Africa. As it became weaker, and the Hertzog Nationalists grew stronger, it had to rely with increasing frequency on the support of the Unionist party. In 1920 a coalition was formed, and three members of the Unionist party, including Duncan, took seats in Smuts's Cabinet. In the next election in 1924 Cresswell's Labourites and Hertzog's Nationalists formed an agreement which dropped the republican-imperial issue and emphasized the importance of economic and native questions. This alliance defeated Smuts's party and formed a Cabinet which held office for nine years. It was replaced in March 1933 by a Smuts-Hertzog coalition formed to deal with the economic crisis arising from the world depression of 1929-1935.

     The defeat of the Smuts group in 1924 resulted from four factors, besides his own imperious personality. These were (1 ) his violence toward labor unions and strikers; (2) his strong support for the imperial connection, especially during the war of 1914-1918; (3) his refusal to show any enthusiasm for an anti-native program, and (4) the economic hardships of the postwar depression and the droughts of 1919-1923. A miners' strike in 1913 was followed by a general strike in 1914; in both, Smuts used martial law and machine-gun bullets against the strikers and in the latter case illegally deported nine union leaders to England. This problem had hardly subsided before the government entered the war against Germany and actively participated in the conquest of German Africa as w ell as in the fighting in France. Opposition from Boer extremists to this evidence of the English connection was so violent that it resulted in open revolt against the government and mutiny by various military contingents which sought to join the small German forces in Southwest Africa. The rebels were crushed, and thousands of their supporters lost their political rights for ten years.

     Botha and, even more, Smuts played major roles in the Imperial War Cabinet in London and at the Peace Conference of 1919. The former died as soon as he returned home, leaving Smuts, as prime minister, to face the acute postwar problems. The economic collapse of 1920-1923 was especially heavy in South Africa as the ostrich-feather and diamond markets were wiped out, the gold and export markets were badly injured, and years of drought were prevalent. Efforts to reduce costs in the mines by increased use of native labor led to strikes and eventually to a revolution on the Rand (1922). Over 200 rebels were killed. As a result, the popularity of Smuts in his own country reached a low ebb just at the time when he was being praised almost daily in England as one of the world's greatest men.

     These political shifts in South Africa's domestic affairs did little to relieve any of the acute economic and social problems which faced that country. On the contrary these grew worse year by year. In 1921 the Union had only 1.5 million whites, 4.7 million natives, 545 thousand mulattoes ("coloured"), and 166 thousand Indians. By 1936 the whites had increased by only half a million, while the number of natives had gone up almost two million. These natives lived on inadequate and eroded reserves or in horrible urban slums, and were drastically restricted in movements, residence, or economic opportunities, and had almost no political or even civil rights. By 1950 most of the native workers of Johannesburg lived in a distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily "detribalized," abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs (including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the whites. Indeed, they were generally excluded from this because of the obstacles placed in their path to education or property ownership. The result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and reproduction.

     Almost half of the whites and many of the blacks were farmers, but agricultural practices w ere so deplorable that water shortages and erosion grew with frightening rapidity, and rivers which had flowed steadily in 1880 largely disappeared by 1950. As lands became too dry to farm, they were turned to grazing, especially under the spur of high wool prices during the two great wars, but the soil continued to drift away as dust.

     Because of low standards of living for the blacks, there was little domestic market either for farm products or for industrial goods. As a result, most products of both black and white labor were exported, the receipts being used to pay for goods which were locally unavailable or for luxuries for whites. But most of the export trade was precarious. The gold mines and diamond mines had to dig so deeply (below 7,000-foot levels) that costs arose sharply, while the demand for both products fluctuated widely, since neither was a necessity of life. Nonetheless, each year over half of the Union's annual production of all goods was exported, with about one-third of the total represented by gold.

     The basic problem was lack of labor, not so much the lack of hands but the low level of productivity of those hands. This in turn resulted from lack of capitalization and from the color bar which refused to allow native labor to become skilled. Moreover, the cheapness of unskilled labor, especially on the farms, meant that most work was left to blacks, and many whites fell into lazy habits. Unskilled whites, unwilling and unable to compete as labor with the blacks, became indolent "poor whites." Milner's Kindergarten had, at the end of the Boer War, the sum of ฃ3 million provided by the peace treaty to be used to restore Boer families from concentration camps to their farms. They were shocked to discover that one-tenth of the Boers were "poor whites," had no land and wanted none. The Kindergarten decided that this sad condition resulted from the competition of cheap black labor, a conclusion which was incorporated into the report of a commission established by Selborne to study the problem.

     This famous Report of the Transvaal Indigency Commission, published in 1908, was written by Philip Kerr (Lothian) and republished by the Union government twenty years later. About the same time, the group became convinced that black labor not only demoralized white labor and prevented it from acquiring the physical skills necessary for self-reliance and high personal morale but that blacks were capable of learning such skills as well as whites were. As Curtis expressed it in 1952: "I came to see how the colour bar reacted on Whites and Blacks. Exempt from drudgery by custom and law, Whites acquire no skill in crafts, because the school of skill is drudgery. The Blacks, by doing drudgery, acquire skill. All skilled work in mines such as rock-drilling was done by miners imported from Cornwall who worked subject to the colour bar. The heavy drills were fixed and driven under their direction by Natives. These Cornish miners earned ฃ1 a day, the Natives about 2s. The Cornish miners struck for higher pay, but the Blacks, who in doing the drudgery had learned how to work the drills, kept the mines running at a lower cost."

     Accordingly, the Milner-Round Table group worked out a scheme to reserve the tropical portions of Africa north of the Zambezi River for natives under such attractive conditions that the blacks south of that river would be enticed to migrate northward. As Curtis envisioned this plan, an international state or administrative body "would take over the British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese dependencies in tropical Africa.... Its policy would be to found north of the Zambezi a Negro Dominion in which Blacks could own land, enter professions, and stand on a footing of equality with Whites. The inevitable consequence would be that Black laborers south of the Zambezi would rapidly emigrate from South Africa and leave South African Whites to do their own drudgery which would be the salvation of the Whites." Although this project has not been achieved, it provides the key to Britain's native and central-African policies from 1917 onward. For example, in 19371939 Britain made many vain efforts to negotiate a settlement of Germany's colonial claims under which Germany would renounce forever its claims on Tanganyika and be allowed to participate as a member of an international administration of all tropical Africa (including the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola as well as British and French territory) as a single unit in which native rights would be paramount.

     The British tradition of fair conduct toward natives and nonwhites generally was found most frequently among the best educated of the English upper class and among those lower-class groups, such as missionaries, where religious influences were strongest. This tradition was greatly strengthened by the actions of the Rhodes-Milner group, especially after 1920. Rhodes aroused considerable ill-feeling among the whites of South Africa when he announced that his program included "equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi," and went on to indicate that "civilized men" included ambitious, literate Negroes. When Milner took over the Boer states in 1901, he tried to follow the same policy. The peace treaty of 1902 promised that the native franchise would not be forced on the defeated Boers, but Milner tried to organize the governments of municipalities, beginning with Johannesburg, so that natives could vote. This was blocked by the Kindergarten (led by Curtis who was in charge of municipal reorganization in 1901-1906) because they considered reconciliation with the Boers as a preliminary to a South African Union to be more urgent. Similarly, Smuts as the chief political figure in South Africa after 1910 had to play down native rights in order to win Boer and English labor support for the rest of his program.

     The Rhodes-Milner group, however, was in a better position to carry out its plans in the non-self-governing portions of Africa outside the Union. In South Africa the three native protectorates of Swaziland, Bechuanaland, and Basutoland were retained by the imperial authorities as areas where native rights were paramount and where tribal forms of living could be maintained at least partially. However, certain tribal customs, such as those which required a youth to prove his manhood by undergoing inhuman suffering or engaging in warfare or cattle stealing before he could marry or become a full-fledged member of the tribe, had to be curtailed. They were replaced in the twentieth century by the custom of taking work in the mines of South Africa as contract laborers for a period of years. Such labor was as onerous and killing as tribal warfare had been earlier because deaths from disease and accident were very high. But, by undergoing this test for about five years, the survivors obtained sufficient savings to allow them to return to their tribes and buy sufficient cattle and wives to support them as full members of the tribe for the rest of their days. Unfortunately, this procedure did not result in good agricultural practices but rather in overgrazing, growing drought and erosion, and great population pressure in the native reserves. It also left the mines without any assured labor supply so that it became necessary to recruit contract labor farther and farther north. Efforts by the Union government to set northern limits beyond which labor recruiting was forbidden led to controversy with employers, frequent changes in regulations, and widespread evasions. As a consequence of an agreement made by Milner with Portuguese authorities, about a quarter of the natives working in South African mines came from Portuguese East Africa even as late as 1936.

Making the Commonwealth, 1910-1926

     As soon as South Africa was united in 1910, the Kindergarten returned to London to try to federate the whole empire by the same methods. They were in a hurry to achieve this before the war with Germany which they believed to be approaching. With Abe Bailey money they founded The Round Table under Kerr's (Lothian's) editorship, met in formal conclaves presided over by Milner to decide the fate of the empire, and recruited new members to their group, chiefly from New College, of which Milner was a fellow. The new recruits included a historian, F. S. Oliver, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern, (Sir) Reginald Coupland, Lord Lovat, and Waldorf (Lord) Astor. Curtis and others were sent around the world to organize Round Table groups in the chief British dependencies.

     For several years (1910 1916) the Round Table groups worked desperately trying to find an acceptable formula for federating the empire. Three books and many articles emerged from these discussions, but gradually it became clear that federation was not acceptable to the English-speaking dependencies. Gradually, it was decided to dissolve all formal bonds between these dependencies, except, perhaps, allegiance to the Crow-n, and depend on the common outlook of Englishmen to keep the empire together. This involved changing the name "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations," as in the title of Curtis's book of 1916, giving the chief dependencies, including India and Ireland, their complete independence (but gradually- and by free gift rather than under duress), working to bring the United States more closely into this same orientation, and seeking to solidify the intangible links of sentiment by propaganda among financial, educational, and political leaders in each country.

     Efforts to bring the dependencies into a closer relationship with the mother country were by no means new in 1910, nor were they supported only by the Rhodes-Milner group. Nevertheless, the actions of this group were all-pervasive. The poor military performance of British forces during the Boer War led to the creation of a commission to investigate the South African War, with Lord Esher (Brett) as chairman (1903). Among other items, this commission recommended creation of a permanent Committee of Imperial Defence. Esher became (unofficial) chairman of this committee, holding the position for the rest of his life (1905-1930). He was able to establish an Imperial General Staff in 1907 and to get a complete reorganization of the military forces of New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa so that they could be incorporated into the imperial forces in an emergency (1909- 1912). On the committee itself he created an able secretariat which cooperated loyally with the Rhodes-Milner group thereafter. These men included (Sir) Maurice (later Lord) Hankey and (Sir) Ernest Swinton (who invented the tank in 1915). When, in 1916-1917, Milner and Esher persuaded the Cabinet to create a secretariat for the first time, the task was largely given to this secretariat from the Committee on Imperial Defence. Thus Hankey was secretary to the committee for thirty years (1908-1938), to the Cabinet for twenty-two years (1916-1938), clerk to the Privy Council for fifteen years (1923-1938), secretary-general of the five imperial conferences held between 1921 and 1937, secretary to the British delegation to almost every important international conference held between the Versailles Conference of 1919 and the Lausanne Conference of 1932, and one of the leading advisers to the Conservative governments after 1939.

     Until 1907 the overseas portions of the Empire (except India) communicated with the imperial government through the secretary of state for colonies. To supplement this relationship, conferences of the prime ministers of the self-governing colonies were held in London to discuss common problems in 1887, 1897, 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, and 1918. In 1907 it was decided to hold such conferences every four years, to call the self-governing colonies "Dominions," and to by-pass the Colonial Secretary by establishing a new Dominion Department. Ruskin's influence, among others, could be seen in the emphasis of the Imperial Conference of 1911 that the Empire rested on a triple foundation of (1) rule of law, (2) local autonomy, and (3) trusteeship of the interests and fortunes of those fellow subjects who had not yet attained self -government.

     The Conference of 1915 could not be held because of the war, but as soon as Milner became one of the four members of the War Cabinet in 1915 his influence began to be felt everywhere. We have mentioned that he established a Cabinet secretariat in 1916-1917 consisting of two proteges of Esher (Hankey and Swinton) and two of his own (his secretaries, Leopold Amery and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech). At the same time he gave the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, a secretariat from the Round Table, consisting of Kerr (Lothian), Grigg (Lord Altrincham), W. G. S. Adams (Fellow of All Souls College), and Astor. He created an Imperial War Cabinet by adding Dominion Prime Ministers (particularly Smuts) to the United Kingdom War Cabinet. He also called the Imperial Conferences of 1917 and 1918 and invited the dominions to establish Resident Ministers in London. A' the war drew to a close in 1918, Milner took the office of Colonia] Secretary, with Amery as his assistant, negotiated an agreement providing independence for Egypt, set up a new self-government constitution in Malta, sent Curtis to India (where he drew up the chief provisions of the Government of India Act of 1919), appointed Curtis to the post of Adviser on Irish Affairs (where he played an important role in granting dominion status to southern Ireland in 1921), gave Canada permission to establish separate diplomatic relations with the United States (the firs minister being the son-in-law of Milner's closest collaborator on the Rhodes Trust), and called the Imperial Conference of 1921.

     During this decade 1919-1929 the Rhodes-Milner group gave the chief impetus toward transforming the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations and launching India on the road to responsible self-government. The creation of the Round Table groups by Milner's Kindergarten in 1909-1913 opened a new day in both these fields, although the whole group was so secretive that, even today, many close students of the subject are not aware of its significance. These men had formed their intellectual growth at Oxford on Pericle's funeral oration as described in a book by a member of the group, (Sir) Alfred Zimmern's The Greek Commonwealth (1911), on Edmund Burke's On Conciliation with America, on Sir J. B. Seeley's Growth of British Policy, on A. V. Dicey's The Law and Custom of the Constitution, and on The New Testament's "Sermon on the Mount." The last was especially influential on Lionel Curtis. He had a fanatical conviction that with the proper spirit and the proper organization (local self-government and federalism), the Kingdom of God could be established on earth. He was sure that if people were trusted just a bit beyond what they deserve they would respond by proving worthy of such trust. As he wrote in The Problem of a Commonwealth (1916), "if political power is granted to groups before they are fit they will tend to rise to the need." This was the spirit which Milner's group tried to use toward the Boers in 1902-1910, toward India in 1910 1947, and, unfortunately, toward Hitler in 1933-1939. This point of view was reflected in Curtis's three volumes on world history, published as Civitas Dei in 1938. In the case of Hitler, at least, these high ideals led to disaster; this seems also to be the case in South Africa; whether this group succeeded in transforming the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations or merely succeeded in destroying the British Empire is not yet clear, but one seems as likely as the other.

     That these ideas were not solely those of Curtis but were held by the group as a whole will be clear to all who study it. When Lord Lothian died in Washington in 1940, Curtis published a volume of his speeches and included the obituary which Grigg had written for The Round Table. Of Lothian this said, "He held that men should strive to build the Kingdom of Heaven here upon this earth, and that the leadership in that task must fall first and foremost upon the English-speaking peoples." Other attitudes of this influential group can be gathered from some quotations from four books published by Curtis in 1916-1920: "The rule of law as contrasted with the rule of an individual is the distinguishing mark of the Commonwealth. In despotisms government rests on the authority of the ruler or of the invisible and uncontrollable power behind him. In a commonwealth rulers derive their authority from the law, and the law from a public opinion which is competent to change it . . . The idea that the principle of the Commonwealth implies universal suffrage betrays an ignorance of its real nature. That principle simply means that government rests on the duty of the citizens to each other, and is to be vested in those who are capable of setting public interests before their own.... The task of preparing for freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those who can. It is the spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except as a means to it.... The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled in the management of their national affairs.... The whole effect of the war [of 1914-1918] has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden head.... Companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smouldering resentment against the presumption that Europeans are destined to dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into flames. . . . Personally I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome, especially to ourselves.... The world is in the throes which precede creation or death. Our whole race has outgrown the merely national state and, as surely as day follows night or night the day, will pass either to a Commonwealth of Nations or else to an empire of slaves. And the issue of these agonies rests with us."

     In this spirit the Rhodes-Milner group tried to draw plans for a federation of the British Empire in 1909-1916. Gradually this project was replaced or postponed in favor of the commonwealth project of free cooperation. Milner seems to have accepted the lesser aim after a meeting, sponsored by the Empire Parliamentary Association, on July 28, 1916, at which he outlined the project for federation with many references to the writings of Curtis, but found that not one Dominion member present would accept it. At the Imperial Conference of 1917, under his guidance, it was resolved that "any re-adjustment of constitutional relations . . . should be based on a full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth and of India as an important portion of the same, should recognize the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for continuous consultation in all important matters of common Imperial concern." Another resolution called for full representation for India in future Imperial Conferences. This was done in 1918. At this second wartime Imperial Conference it was resolved that Prime Ministers of Dominions could communicate directly with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and that each dominion (and India) could establish Resident Ministers in London who would have seats on the Imperial War Cabinet. Milner was the chief motivating force in these developments. He hoped that the Imperial War Cabinet would continue to meet annually after the war but this did not occur.

     During these years 1917-1918, a declaration was drawn up establishing complete independence for the dominions except for allegiance to the crown. This was not issued until 1926. Instead, on July 9, 1919 Milner issued an official statement which said, "The United Kingdom and the Dominions are partner nations; not yet indeed of equal power, but for good and all of equal status.... The only possibility of a continuance of the British Empire is on a basis of absolute out-and-out equal partnership between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. I say that without any kind of reservation whatsoever." This point of view was restated in the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1926 and was enacted into law as the Statute of Westminster in 1931. B. K. Long of the South African Round Table group (who was Colonial Editor of The Times in 1913-1921 and Editor of Rhodes's paper, The Cape Times, in South Africa in 1922-1935) tells us that the provisions of the declaration of 1926 were agreed on in 1917 during the Imperial Conference convoked by Milner. They were formulated by John W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press for 43 years and the most influential journalist in Canada for much of that period. Dafoe persuaded the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert Borden, to accept his ideas and then brought in Long and Dawson (Editor of The Times). Dawson negotiated the agreement with Milner, Smuts, and others. Although Australia and New Zealand were far from satisfied, the influence of Canada and of South Africa carried the agreement. Nine years later it was issued under Balfour's name at a conference convoked by Amery.

East Africa, 1910-1931

     In the dependent empire, especially in tropical Africa north of the Zambezi River, the Rhodes-Milner group was unable to achieve most of its desires, but was able to win wide publicity for them, especially for its views on native questions. It dominated the Colonial Office in London, at least for the decade 1919-1929. There Milner was secretary of state in 1919-1921 and Amery in 1924-1929, while the post of parliamentary under-secretary was held by three members of the group for most of the decade. Publicity for their views on civilizing the natives and training them for eventual self-government received wide dissemination, not only by official sources but also by the academic, scholarly, and journalistic organizations they dominated. As examples of this we might mention the writings of Coupland, Hailey, Curtis, Grigg, Amery, and Lothian, all Round Tablers. In 1938 Lord Hailey edited a gigantic volume of 1,837 pages called An Africa Survey. This work was first suggested by Smuts at Rhodes House, Oxford, in 1929, had a foreword by Lothian, and an editorial board of Lothian, Hailey, Coupland, Curtis, and others. It remains the greatest single book on modern Africa. These people, and others, through The Times, The Round Table, The Observer, Chatham House, and other conduits, became the chief source of ideas on colonial problems in the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, they were unable to achieve their program.

     In the course of the 1920's the Round Table program for East Africa was paralyzed by a debate on the priority which should be given to the three aspects of group’s project for a Negro Dominion north of the Zambezi. The three parts were (1) native rights, (2) “Closer Union,” and (3) international trusteeship. Generally, the group gave priority to Closer Union (federation of Kenya with Uganda and Tanganyika), but the ambiguity of their ideas on native rights made it possible for Dr. Joseph H. Oldham, spokesman for the organized Nonconformist missionary groups, to organize a successful opposition movement to federation of East Africa. In this effort Oldham found a powerful ally in Lord Lugard, and considerable support from other informed persons, including Margery Perham.

     The Round Tablers, who had no firsthand knowledge of native life or even of tropical Africa, were devoted supporters of the English way of life, and could see no greater benefit conferred on natives than to help them to move in that direction. This, however, would inevitably destroy the tribal organization of life, as well as the native systems of land tenure, which were generally based on tribal holding of land. The white settlers were eager to see these things disappear, since they generally wished to bring the native labor force and African lands into the commercial market. Oldham and Lugard opposed this, since they felt it would lead to white ownership of large tracts of land on which detribalized and demoralized natives would subsist as wage slaves. Moreover, to Lugard, economy in colonial administration required that natives be governed under his system of "indirect rule" through tribal chiefs. Closer Union became a controversial target in this dispute because it involved a gradual increase in local self-government which would lead to a greater degree of white settler rule.

     The opposition to Closer Union in East Africa was successful in holding up this project in spite of the Round Table domination of the Colonial Office, chiefly because of Prime Minister Baldwin's refusal to move quickly. This delayed change until the Labour government took over in 1929; in this the pro-native, nonconformist (especially Quaker) influence was stronger.

     The trusteeship issue came into this controversy because Britain was bound, as a mandate Power, to maintain native rights in Tanganyika to the satisfaction of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations. This placed a major obstacle in the path of Round Table efforts to join Tanganyika with Kenya and Uganda into a Negro Dominion which would be under quite a different kind of trusteeship of the African colonial Powers. Father south, in the Rhodesias and Nyasaland, the Round Table obsession with federation did not meet this obstacle, and that area was eventually federated, over native protests, in 1953, but this creation, the Central African Federation, broke up again in 1964. Strangely enough, the League of Nations Mandate System which became such an obstacle to the Round Table plans was largely a creation of the Round Table itself.

     The Milner Group used the defeat of Germany in 1918 as an opportunity to impose an international obligation on certain Powers to treat the natives fairly in the regions taken from Germany. This opportunity was of great significance because just at that time the earlier impetus in this direction arising from missionaries was beginning to weaken as a consequence of the general weakening of religious feeling in European culture.

     The chief problem in East Africa arose from the position of the white settlers of Kenya. Although this colony rests directly on the equator, its interior highlands, 4,000 to 10,000 feet up, were well adapted to white settlement and to European agricultural methods. The situation was dangerous by 1920, and grew steadily worse as the years passed, until by 1950 Kenya had the most critical native problem in Africa. It differed from South Africa in that it lacked self-government, rich mines, or a divided white population, but it had many common problems, such as overcrowded native reserves, soil erosion, and discontented and detribalized blacks working for low wages on lands owned by whites. It had about two million blacks and only 3,000 whites in 1910. Forty years later it had about 4 million blacks, 100,000 Indians, 24,000 Arabs, and only 30,000 whites (of which 40 percent were government employees). But what the whites lacked in numbers they made up in determination. The healthful highlands were reserved for white ownership as early as 1908, although they were not delimited and guaranteed until 1939. They were organized as very large, mostly undeveloped, farms of which there were only 2,000 covering 10,000 square miles in 1940. Many of these farms were of more than 30,000 acres and had been obtained from the government, either by purchase or on very long (999-year) leases for only nominal costs (rents about two cents per year per acre). The native reserves amounted to about 50,000 square miles of generally poorer land, or five times as much land for the blacks, although they had at least 150 times as many people. The Indians, chiefly in commerce and crafts, were so industrious that they gradually came to own most of the commercial areas both in the towns and in the native reserves.

     The two great subjects of controversy in Kenya were concerned with the supply of labor and the problem of self-government, although less agitated problems, like agricultural technology, sanitation, and education were of vital significance. The whites tried to increase the pressure on natives to work on white farms rather than to seek to make a living on their own lands within the reserves, by forcing them to pay taxes in cash, by curtailing the size or quality of the reserves, by restricting improvements in native agricultural techniques, and by personal and political pressure and compulsion. The effort to use political compulsion reached a peak in 1919 and was stopped by Milner, although his group, like Rhodes in South Africa, was eager to make natives more industrious and more ambitious by any kinds of social, educational, or economic pressures. The settlers encouraged natives to live off the reserves in various ways: for example, hy permitting them to settle as squatters on white estates in return for at least 180 clays of work a year at the usual low wage rates. To help both back and white farmers, not only in Kenya but throughout the world, Milner created, as a research organization, an Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture at Trinidad in 1919.

     As a consequence of various pressures which we have mentioned, notably the need to pay taxes which averaged, perhaps, one month's wages a year and, in the aggregate, took from the natives a larger sum than that realized from the sale of native products, the percentage of adult males working off the reservations increased from about 35 percent in 1925 to over 80 percent in 1940. This had very deleterious effects on tribal life, family life, native morality, and family discipline, although it seems to have had beneficial effects on native health and general education.

     The real crux of controversy before the Mau Mau uprising of 1948-1955 was the problem of self-government. Pointing to South Africa, the settlers in Kenya demanded self-rule which would allow them to enforce restrictions on nonwhites. A local colonial government was organized under the Colonial Office in 1906; as was usual in such cases it consisted of an appointive governor assisted by an appointed Executive Council and advised by a legislative Council. The latter had, also as usual, a majority of officials and a minority of "unofficial" outsiders. Only in 1922 did the unofficial portion become elective, and only in 1949 did it become a majority of the whole body. The efforts to establish an elective element in the Legislative Council in 1919-1923 resulted in violent controversy. The draft drawn by the council itself provided for only European members elected by a European electorate. Milner added two Indian members elected by a separate Indian electorate. In the resulting controversy the settlers sought to obtain their original plan, while London sought a single electoral roll restricted in size by educational and property qualifications but without mention of race. To resist this, the settlers organized a Vigilance Committee and planned to seize the colony, abduct the governor, and form a republic federated in some way with South Africa. From this controversy came eventually a compromise, the famous Kenya White Paper of 1923, and the appointment of Sir Edward Grigg as governor for the period of 1925-1931. The compromise gave Kenya a Legislative Council containing representatives of the imperial government, the white settlers, the Indians, the Arabs, and a white missionary to represent the blacks. Except for the settlers and Indians, most of these were nominated rather than elected, but by 1949, as the membership was enlarged, election was extended, and only the official and Negro members (4 out of 41) were nominated.

     The Kenya White Paper of 1923 arose from a specific problem in a single colony, but remained the formal statement of imperial policy in tropical Africa. It said: "Primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty's Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if and when those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail.... In the administration of Kenya His Majesty's Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races."

     As a result of these troubles in Kenya and the continued encroachment of white settlers on native reserves, Amery sent one of the most important members of Milner's group to the colony as governor and commander in chief. This was Sir Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), who had been a member of Milner's Kindergarten, an editor of The Round Table and of The Times (1903-1905, 1908-1913), a secretary to Lloyd George and to the Rhodes Trustees (1923-1925), and a prolific writer on British imperial, colonial, and foreign affairs. In Kenya he tried to protect native reserves while still forcing natives to develop habits of industry by steady work, to shift white attention from political to technical problems such as agriculture, and to work toward a consolidation of tropical Africa into a single territorial unit. He forced through the Colonial Legislature in 1930 the Native Land Trust Ordinance which guaranteed native reserves. But these reserves remained inadequate and were increasingly damaged by bad agricultural practices. Only in 1925 did any sustained effort to improve such practices by natives begin. About the same time efforts were made to extend the use of native courts, native advisory councils, and to train natives for an administrative service. All of these met slow, varied, and (on the whole) indifferent success, chiefly because of natives' reluctance to cooperate and the natives' growing suspicion of white men's motives even when these whites were most eager to help. The chief cause of this growing suspicion (which in some cases reached a psychotic level) would seem to be the native's insatiable hunger for religion and his conviction that the whites were hypocrites who taught a religion that they did not obey, were traitors to Christ's teachings, and were using these to control the natives and to betray their interests, under cover of religious ideas which the whites themselves did not observe in practice.

India to 1926

     In the decade 1910-1920, the two greatest problems to be faced in creating a Commonwealth of Nations were India and Ireland. There can be no doubt that India provided a puzzle infinitely more complex, as it was more remote and less clearly envisioned, than Ireland. When the British East India Company became the dominant power in India about the middle of the eighteenth century, the Mogul Empire was in the last stages of disintegration. Provincial rulers had only nominal titles, sufficient to bring them immense treasure in taxes and rents, but they generally lacked either the will or the strength to maintain order. The more vigorous tried to expand their domains at the expense of the more feeble, oppressing the peace-loving peasantry in the process, while all legal power was challenged by roaming upstart bands and plundering tribes. Of these willful tribes, the most important were the Marathas. These systematically devastated much of south-central India in the last half of the eighteenth century, forcing each village to buy temporary immunity from destruction, but steadily reducing the capacity of the countryside to meet their demands because of the trail of death and economic disorganization they left in their wake. By 1900 only one-fifth of the land in some areas was cultivated.

     Although the East India Company was a commercial firm, primarily interested in profits, and thus reluctant to assume a political role in this chaotic countryside, it had to intervene again and again to restore order, replacing one nominal ruler by another and even taking over the government of those areas where it was more immediately concerned. In addition the cupidity of many of its employees led them to intervene as political powers in order to divert to their own pockets some of the fabulous wealth which they saw flowing by. For these two reasons the areas under company rule, although not contiguous, expanded steadily until by 1858 they covered three-fifths of the country. Outside the British areas were over five hundred princely domains, some no larger than a single village but others as extensive as some states of Europe. At this point, in 1857-1858, a sudden, violent insurrection of native forces, known as the Great Mutiny, resulted in the end of the Mogul Empire and of the East India Company, the British government taking over their political activities. From this flowed a number of important consequences. Annexation of native principalities ceased, leaving 562 outside British India, but under British protection and subject to British intervention to ensure good government; within British India itself, good government became increasingly dominant and commercial profit decreasingly so for the whole period 1858-1947; British political prestige rose to new heights from 1858 to 1890 and then began to dwindle, f ailing precipitously in 1919-1922.

     The task of good government in India was not an easy one. In this great subcontinent with a population amounting to almost one-fifth of the human race were to be found an almost unbelievable diversity of cultures, religions, languages, and attitudes. Even in 1950 modern locomotives linked together great cities with advanced industrial production by passing through jungles inhabited by tigers, elephants, and primitive pagan tribes. The population, which increased from 284 million in 1901 to 389 million in 1941 and reached 530 million in 1961, spoke more than a dozen major languages divided into hundreds of dialects, and were members of dozens of antithetical religious beliefs. There were, in 1941, 255 million Hindus, 92 million Muslims, 6.3 million Christians, 5.7 million Sikhs, 1.5 million Jains, and almost 26 million pagan animists of various kinds. In addition, the Hindus and even some of the non-Hindus were divided into four major hereditary castes subdivided into thousands of sub-castes, plus a lowest group of outcastes ("untouchables"), amounting to at least 30 million persons in 1900 and twice this number in 1950. These thousands of groups were endogamous, practiced hereditary economic activities, frequently had distinctive marks or garb, and were usually forbidden to marry, eat or drink with, or even to associate with, persons of different caste. Untouchables were generally forbidden to come in contact, even indirectly, with members of other groups and were, accordingly, forbidden to enter many temples or public buildings, to draw water from the public wells, even to allow their shadows to fall on any person of a different group, and were subject to other restrictions, all designed to avoid a personal pollution which could be removed only by religious rituals of varying degrees of elaborateness. Most sub-castes were occupational groups covering all kinds of activities, so that there were hereditary groups of carrion collectors, thieves, high-way robbers, or murderers (thugs), as well a farmers, fishermen, storekeepers, drug mixers, or copper smelters. For most peoples of India, cast was the most important fact of life, submerging their individuality into a group from which they could never escape, and regulating all their activities from birth to death. As a result, India, even as late as 1900, was a society in which status was dominant, each individual having a place in a group which, in turn, had a place in society. This place, known to all and accepted by all, operated by established procedures in its relationships with other groups so that there was in spite of diversity, a minimum of intergroup friction and a certain peaceful tolerance so long as intergroup etiquette was known and accepted.

     The diversity of social groups and beliefs was naturally reflected in an extraordinarily wide range of social behavior from the most degraded and bestial activities based on crude superstitions to even more astounding levels of exalted spiritual self-sacrifice and cooperation. Although the British refrained from interfering with religious practices, in the course of the nineteenth century they abolished or greatly reduced the practice of thuggism (in which a secret caste strangled strangers in honor of the goddess Kali), suttee (in which the widow of a deceased Hindu was expected to destroy herself on his funeral pyre), infanticide, temple prostitution, and child marriages. At the other extreme, most Hindus abstained from all violence; many had such a respect for life that they would eat no meat, not even eggs, while a few carried this belief so far that they would not molest a cobra about to strike, a mosquito about to sting, or even walk about at night, less they unknowingly step on an ant or worm. Hindus, who considered cows so sacred that the worse crime would be to cause the death of one (even by accident), who allowed millions of these beasts to have free run of the country to the great detriment of cleanliness or standards of living, who would not wear shoes of leather, and would rather die than taste beef, ate pork and associated daily with Muslims who ate beef but considered pigs to be polluting. In general, most Indians lived in abject poverty and want; only about one in a hundred could read in 1858, while considerably less could understand the English language. The overwhelming majority at that time were peasants, pressed down by onerous taxes and rents, isolated in small villages unconnected by roads, and decimated at irregular intervals by famine or disease.

     British rule in the period 1858-1947 tied India together by railroads, roads, and telegraph lines. It brought the country into contact with the Western world, and especially with world markets, by establishing a uniform system of money, steamboat connections with Europe by the Suez Canal, cable connections throughout the world, and the use of English as the language of government and administration. Best of all, Britain established the rule of law, equality before the law, and a tradition of judicial fairness to replace the older practice of inequality and arbitrary, violence. A certain degree of efficiency, and a certain ambitious, if discontented, energy directed toward change replaced the older abject resignation to inevitable fate.

     The modern postal, telegraphic, and railroad systems all began in 1854. The first grew to such dimensions that by the outbreak of war in 1939 it handled over a billion pieces of mail and forty million rupees in money orders each year. The railroad grew from zoo miles in 1855 to 9,000 in 1880, to 25,000 in 1901, and to 43,000 in 1939. This, the third largest railroad system in the world, carried 600 million passengers and go million tons of freight a year. About the same time, the dirt tracks of 1858 had been partly replaced by over 300,000 miles of highways, of which only about a quarter could be rated as first class. From 1925 onward, these highways were used increasingly by passenger buses, crowded and ramshackle in many cases, but steadily breaking down the isolation of the villages.

     Improved communications and public order served to merge the isolated village markets, smoothing out the earlier alternations of scarcity and glut with their accompanying phenomena of waste and of starvation in the midst of plenty. All this led to a great extension of cultivation into more remote areas and the growing of a greater variety of crops. Sparsely settled areas of forests and hills, especially in Assam and the Northwest Provinces, were occupied, without the devastation of deforestation (as in China or in non-Indian Nepal) because of a highly developed forestry conservation service. Migration, permanent and seasonal, became regular features of Indian life, the earnings of the migrants being sent back to their families in the villages they had left. A magnificent system of canals, chiefly for irrigation, was constructed, populating desolate wastes, especially in the northwestern parts of the country, and encouraging whole tribes which had previously been pastoral freebooters to settle down as cultivators. By 1939 almost 60 million acres of land were irrigated. For this and other reasons, the sown area of India increased from 195 to 228 million acres in about forty years (1900-1939). Increases in yields were much less satisfactory because of reluctance to change, lack of knowledge or capital, and organizational problems.

     The tax on land traditionally had been the major part of public revenue in India, and remained near so percent as late as 1900. Under the Moguls these land revenues had been collected by tax farmers. In many areas, notably Bengal, the British tended to regard these land revenues as rents rather than taxes, and thus regarded the revenue collectors as the owners of the land. Once this was established, these new landlords used their powers to raise rents, to evict cultivators who had been on the same land for years or even generations, and to create an unstable rural proletariat of tenants and laborers unable or unwilling to improve their methods. Numerous legislative enactments sought, without great success, to improve these conditions. Such efforts were counterbalanced by the growth of population, the great rise in the value of land, the inability of industry or commerce to drain surplus population from the land as fast as it increased, the tendency of the government to favor industry or commerce over agriculture by tariffs, taxation, and public expenditures, the growing frequency of famines (from droughts), of malaria (from irrigation projects), and of plague (from trade with the Far East) which wiped out in one year gains made in several years, the growing burden of peasant debt at onerous terms and at high interest rates, and the growing inability to supplement incomes from cultivation by incomes from household crafts because of the growing competition from cheap industrial goods. Although slavery was abolished in 1843, many of the poor were reduced to peonage by contracting debts at unfair terms and binding themselves and their heirs to work for their creditors until the debt was paid. Such a debt could never be paid, in many cases, because the rate at which it was reduced was left to the creditor and could rarely be questioned by the illiterate debtor.

     All of these misfortunes culminated in the period 1895-1901. There had been a long period of declining prices in 1873-1896, which increased the burden on debtors and stagnated economic activities. In 1897 the monsoon rains failed, with a loss of 18 million tons of food crops and of one million lives from famine. This disaster was repeated in 1899-1900. Bubonic plague was introduced to Bombay from China in 1895 and killed about two million persons in the next six years.

     From this low point in 1901, economic conditions improved fairly steadily, except for a brief period in 1919-1922 and the long burden of the world depression in 1929-1934. The rise in prices in 1900 1914 benefitted India more than others, as the prices of her exports rose more rapidly. The war of 1914-1918 gave India a great economic opportunity, especially by increasing the demand for her textiles. Tariffs were raised steadily after 1916, providing protection for industry, especially in metals, textiles, cement, and paper. The customs became the largest single source of revenue, alleviating to some extent the pressure of taxation on cultivators. However, the agrarian problem remained acute, for most of the factors listed above remained in force. In 1931 it was estimated that, in the United Provinces, 30 percent of the cultivators could not make a diving from their holdings even in good years, while 52 percent could make a living in good years but not in bad ones.

     There was great economic advance in mining, industry, commerce, and finance in the period after 1900. Coal output went up from 6 to 21 million tons in 1900-1924, and petroleum output (chiefly from Burma) \vent up from 37 to 294 million gallons. Production in the protected industries also improved in the same period until, by 1932, India could produce three-quarters of her cotton cloth, three-quarters of her steel, and most of her cement, matches, and sugar. In one product, jute, India became the chief source for the world's supply, and this became the leading export after 1925.

     A notable feature of the growth of manufacturing in India after 1900 lies in the fact that Hindu capital largely replaced British capital, chiefly for political reasons. In spite of India's poverty, there was a considerable volume of saving, arising chiefly from the inequitable distribution of income to the landlord class and to the moneylenders (if these two groups can be separated in this way). Naturally, these groups preferred to invest their incomes back in the activities whence they had been derived, but, after 1919, nationalist agitation and especially Gandhi's influence inclined many Hindus to make contributions to their country's strength by investing in industry.

     The growth of industry should not be exaggerated, and its influences were considerably less than one might believe at first glance. There was little growth of an urban proletariat or of a permanent class of factory workers, although this did exist. Increases in output came largely from power production rather than from increases in the labor force. This labor force continued to be rural in its psychological and social orientation, being generally temporary migrants from the villages, living under urban industrial conditions only for a few years, with every intention of returning to the village eventually, and generally sending savings back to their families and visiting them for weeks or even months each year (generally at the harvest season). This class of industrial laborers did not adopt either an urban or a proletarian point of view, were almost wholly illiterate, formed labor organizations only reluctantly (because of refusal to pay dues), and rarely acquired industrial skills. After 1915 labor unions did appear, but membership remained small, and they were organized and controlled by non-laboring persons, frequently middle-class intellectuals. Moreover, industry remained a widely scattered activity found in a few cities but absent from the rest. Although India had 35 cities of over 100,000 population in 19:1, most of these remained commercial and administrative centers and not manufacturing centers. That the chief emphasis remained on rural activities can be seen from the fact that these 35 centers of population had a total of 8.2 million inhabitants compared to 310.7 million outside their limits in 1921. In fact, only 30 million persons lived in the 1,623 centers of over 5,000 persons each, while 289 million lived in centers smaller than 5,000 persons.

     One of the chief ways in which the impact of Western culture reached India was by education. The charge has frequently been made that the British neglected education in India or that they made an error in emphasizing education in English for the upper classes rather than education in the vernacular languages for the masses of the people. History does not sustain the justice of these charges. In England itself the government assumed little responsibility for education until 1902, and in general had a more advanced policy in this field in India than in England until well into the present century. Until 1835 the English did try to encourage native traditions of education, but their vernacular schools failed from lack of patronage; the Indians themselves objected to being excluded, as they regarded it, from English education. Accordingly, from 1835 the British offered English-language education on the higher levels in the hope that Western science, technology, and political attitudes could be introduced without disrupting religious or social life and that these innovations would "infiltrate" downward into the population. Because of the expense, government-sponsored education had to be restricted to the higher levels, although encouragement for vernacular schools on the lower levels began (without much financial obligation) in 1854. The "infiltration downward" theory was quite mistaken because those who acquired knowledge of English used it as a passport to advancement in government service or professional life and became renegades from, rather than missionaries to, the lower classes of Indian society. In a sense the use of English on the university level of education did not lead to its spread in Indian society but removed those who acquired it from that society, leaving them in a kind of barren ground which was neither Indian nor Western but hovered uncomfortably between the two. The fact that knowledge of English and possession of a university degree could free one from the physical drudgery of Indian life by opening the door to public service or the professions created a veritable passion to obtain these keys (but only in a minority).

     The British had little choice but to use English as the language of government and higher education. In India the languages used in these two fields had been foreign ones for centuries. The language of government and of the courts was Persian until 1837. Advanced and middle-level education had always been foreign, in Sanskrit for the Hindus and in Arabic for the Muslims. Sanskrit, a "dead" language, was that of Hindu religious literature, while Arabic was the language of the Koran, the only writing the ordinary Muslim would wish to read. In fact, the allegiance of the Muslims to the Koran and to Arabic was so intense that they refused to participate in the new English-language educational system and, in consequence, had been excluded from government, the professions, and much of the economic life of the country by 1900.

     No vernacular language could have been used to teach the really valuable contributions of the West, such as science, technology, economics, agricultural science, or political science, because the necessary vocabulary was lacking in the vernaculars. When the university of the native state of Hyderabad tried to translate Western works into Urdu for teaching purposes after 1920, it was necessary to create about 40,000 new words. Moreover, the large number of vernacular languages would have made the choice of any one of them for the purpose of higher education invidious. And, finally, the natives themselves had no desire to learn to read their vernacular languages, at least during the nineteenth century; they wanted to learn English because it provided access to knowledge, to government positions, and to social advancement as no vernacular could. But it must be remembered that it was the exceptional Indian, not the average one, who wanted to learn to read at all. The average native was content to remain illiterate, at least until deep into the twentieth century. Only then did the desire to read spread under the stimulus of growing nationalism, political awareness, and growing concern with political and religious tensions. These fostered the desire to read, in order to read newspapers, but this had adverse effects: each political or religious group had its own press and presented its own biased version of world events so that, by 1940, these different groups had entirely different ideas of reality.

     Moreover, the new enthusiasm for the vernacular languages, the influence of extreme Hindu nationalists like B. G. Tilak (1859-1920) or anti-Westerners like M. K. Gandhi (1869-1948), led to a wholesale rejection of all that was best in British or in European culture. At the same time, those who sought power, advancement, or knowledge continued to learn English as the key to these ambitions. Unfortunately, these semi-westernized Indians neglected much of the practical side of the European way of life and tended to be intellectualist and doctrinaire and to despise practical learning and physical labor. They lived, as we have said, in a middle world which was neither Indian nor Western, spoiled for the Indian way of life, but often unable to find a position in Indian society which would allow them to live their own version of a Western way of life. At the university they studied literature, law, and political science, all subjects which emphasized verbal accomplishments. Since India did not provide sufficient jobs for such accomplishments, there was a great deal of ''academic unemployment," with resulting discontent and growing radicalism. The career of Gandhi was a result of the efforts of one man to avoid this problem by fusing certain elements of Western teaching with a purified Hinduism to create a nationalist Indian way of life on a basically moral foundation.

     It is obvious that one of the chief effects of British educational policy has been to increase the social tensions within India and to give them a political orientation. This change is usually called the "rise of Indian nationalism," but it is considerably more complex than this simple name might imply. It began to rise about 1890, possibly under the influence of the misfortunes at the end of the century, grew steadily until it reached the crisis stage after 1917, and finally emerged in the long-drawn crisis of 1930-1947.

     India's outlook was fundamentally religious, just as the British outlook was fundamentally political. The average Indian derived from his religious outlook a profound conviction that the material world and physical comfort were irrelevant and unimportant in contrast with such spiritual matters as the proper preparation for the life to come after the body's death. From his English education the average Indian student derived the conviction that liberty and self-government were the highest goods of life and must be sought by such resistance to authority as had been shown in the Magna Carta, the opposition to Charles I, the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689, the writings of John Locke and of John Stuart Mill, and the general resistance to public authority found in nineteenth century liberalism and laissez-faire. These two points of view tended to merge in the minds of Indian intellectuals into a point of view in which it seemed that English political ideals should be sought by Indian methods of religious fervor, self-sacrifice, and contempt for material welfare or physical comforts. As a result, political and social tensions were acerbated between British and Indians, between Westernizers and Nationalists, between Hindus and Muslims, between Brahmins and lower castes, and between caste members and outcastes.

     In the early part of the nineteenth century there had been a revival of interest in Indian languages and literatures. This revival soon revealed that many Hindu ideas and practices had no real support in the earliest evidence. Since these later innovations included some of the most objectionable features of Hindu life, such as suttee, child marriage, female inferiority, image worship, and extreme polytheism, a movement began that sought to free Hinduism from these extraneous elements and to restore it to its earlier "purity" by emphasizing ethics, monotheism, and an abstract idea of deity. This tendency was reinforced by the influence of Christianity and of Islam, so that the revived Hinduism w as really a synthesis of these three religions. As a consequence of these influences, the old, and basic, Hindu idea of Karma was played down. This idea maintained that each individual soul reappeared again and again, throughout eternity, in a different physical form and in a different social status, each difference being a reward or punishment for the soul's conduct at its previous appearance. There was no real hope for escape from this cycle, except by a gradual improvement through a long series of successive appearances to the ultimate goal of complete obliteration of personality (Nirvana) by ultimate mergence in the soul of the universe (Brahma). This release (moksha) from the endless cycle of existence could be achieved only by the suppression of all desire, of all individuality, and of all will to live.

     The belief in Karma was the key to Hindu ideology and to Hindu society, explaining not only the emphasis on fate and resignation to fate, the idea that man was a part of nature and brother to the beasts, the submergence of individuality and the lack of personal ambition, but also specific social institutions such as caste or even suttee. How could castes be ended if these are God-given gradations for the rewards or punishments earned in an earlier existence? How could suttee be ended if a wife is a wife through all eternity, and must pass from one life to another when her husband does?

     The influence of Christianity and of Islam, of Western ideas and of British education, in changing Hindu society was largely a consequence of their ability to reduce the average Hindu's faith in Karma. One of the earliest figures in this growing synthesis of Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam was Ram Mohan Roy (1772-1833), founder of the Brahma Samaj Society in 1828. Another was Keshab Chandra Sen (1841-1884), who hoped to unite Asia and Europe into a common culture on the basis of a synthesis of the common elements of these three religions. There were many reformers of this type. Their most notable feature was that they were universalist rather than nationalist and were Westernizers in their basic inclinations. About 1870 a change began to appear, perhaps from the influence of Rama Krishna (1834-1886) and his disciple Swami Vivekananda (1862-1902), founder of Vedanta. This new tendency emphasized India's spiritual power as a higher value than the material power of the West. It advocated simplicity, asceticism, self-sacrifice, cooperation, and India's mission to spread these virtues to the world. One of the disciples of this movement was Gopal Krishna Gokhale ( 1866-1915), founder of the Servants of India Society (1905). This was a small band of devoted persons who took vows of poverty and obedience, to regard all Indians as brothers irrespective of caste or creed, and to engage in no personal quarrels. The members scattered among the most diverse groups of India to teach, to weld India into a single spiritual unit, and to seek social reform.

     In time these movements became increasingly nationalistic and anti-Western, tending to defend orthodox Hinduism rather than to purify it and to oppose Westerners rather than to copy them. This tendency culminated in Bal Gangathar Tilak (1859-1920), a Marathi journalist of Poona, who started his career in mathematics and law but slowly developed a passionate love for Hinduism, even in its most degrading details, and insisted that it must be defended against outsiders, even with violence. He was not opposed to reforms which appeared as spontaneous developments of Indian sentiment, but he was violently opposed to any attempt to legislate reform from above or to bring in foreign influences from European or Christian sources. He first became a political figure in 1891 when he vigorously opposed a government bill which would have curtailed child marriage by fixing the age of consent for girls at twelve years. By 1897 he was using his paper to incite to murder and riots against government officials.

     A British official w ho foresaw this movement toward violent nationalism as early as 1878 sought to divert it into more legal and more constructive channels by establishing the Indian National Congress in 1885. The official in question, Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), had the secret support of the viceroy, Lord Dufferin. They hoped to assemble each year an unofficial congress of Indian leaders to discuss Indian political matters in the hope that this experience would provide training in the working of representative institutions and parliamentary government. For twenty years the Congress agitated for extension of Indian participation in the administration, and for the extension of representation and eventually of parliamentary government within the British system. It is notable that this movement renounced violent methods, did not seek separation from Britain, and aspired to form a government based on the British pattern.

     Support for the movement grew very slowly at first, even among Hindus, and there was open opposition, led by Sir Saiyid Ahmad Khan, among the Muslims. As the movement gathered momentum, after 1890, many British officials began to oppose it. At the same time, under pressure from Tilak, the Congress itself advanced its demands and began to use economic pressure to obtain these. As a result, after 1900, fewer Muslims joined the Congress: there were 156 Muslims out of 702 delegates in 1890, but only 17 out of 756 in 1905. All these forces came to a head in 1904-1907 when the Congress, for the first time, demanded self-government within the empire for India and approved the use of economic pressures (boycott) against Britain.

     The Japanese victory over Russia in 1905, which was regarded as an Asiatic triumph over Europe, the Russian revolt of 1905, the growing power of Tilak over Gokhale in the Indian National Congress, and public agitation over Lord Curzon's efforts to push through an administrative division of the huge-province of Bengal (population 78 million) brought matters to a head. There was open agitation by Hindu extremists to spill English blood to satisfy the goddess of destruction, Kali. In the Indian National Congress of 1907, the followers of Tilak stormed the platform and disrupted the meeting. Much impressed with the revolutionary violence in Russia against the czar and in Ireland against the English, this group advocated the use of terrorism rather than of petitions in India. The viceroy, Lord Hardinge, was wounded by a bomb in 1912. For many Nears, racial intolerance against Indians by English residents in India had been growing, and was increasingly manifested in studied insults and even physical assaults. In 1906 a Muslim League was formed in opposition to tile Hindu extremists and in support of the British position, but in 1913 it also demanded self-government. Tilak's group boycotted the Indian National Congress for nine years (1907-1916), and Tilak himself was in prison for sedition for six years (1908-1914).

     The constitutional development of India did not stand still during this tumult. In 1861 appointive councils with advisory powers had been created, both at the center to assist the viceroy and in the provinces. These had nonofficial as well as official members, and the provincial ones had certain legislative powers, but all these activities were under strict executive control and veto. In 1892 these powers were widened to allow discussion of administrative questions, and various non-governmental groups (called "communities") were allowed to suggest individuals for the unofficial seats in the councils.

     A third act, of 1909, passed by the Liberal government with John (Lord) Morley as secretary of state and Lord Minto as viceroy, enlarged the councils, making a nonofficial majority in the provincial councils, allowed the councils to vote on all issues, and gave the right to elect the nonofficial members to various communal groups, including Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, on a fixed ratio. This last provision was a disaster. By establishing separate electoral lists for various religious groups, it encouraged religious extremism in all groups, made it likely that the more extremist candidates would be successful, and made religious differences the basic and irreconcilable fact of political life. By giving religious minorities more seats than their actual proportions of the electorate entitled them to (a principle known as "weightage"), it made it politically advantageous to he a minority. By emphasizing minority rights (in which they did believe) over majority rule (in which they did not believe) the British made religion a permanently disruptive force in political life, and encouraged the resulting acerbated extremism to work out its rivalries outside the constitutional framework and the scope of legal action in riots rather than at the polls or in political assemblies. Moreover, as soon as the British had given the Muslims this special constitutional position in 1909 they lost the support of the Muslim community in 1911-1919. This loss of Muslim support was the result of several factors. Curzon's division of Bengal, which the Muslims had supported (since it gave them East Bengal as a separate area with a Muslim majority) was countermanded in 1911 without any notice to the Muslims. British foreign policy after 1911 was increasingly anti-Turkish, and thus opposed to the caliph (the religious leader of the Muslims). As a result the Muslim League called for self-government for India for the first time in 1913, and four years later formed an alliance with the Indian National Congress which continued until 1924.

     In 1909, while Philip Kerr (Lothian), Lionel Curtis, and (Sir) William Marris were in Canada laying the foundations for the Round Table organization there, Marris persuaded Curtis that "self-government, . . . however far distant was the only intelligible goal of British policy in India...the existence of political unrest in India, so far from being a reason for pessimism, was the surest sign that the British, with all their manifest failings, had not shirked their primary duty of extending western education to India and so preparing Indians to govern themselves." Four years later the Round Table group in London decided to investigate how this could be done. It formed a study group of eight members, under Curtis, adding to the group three officials from the India Office. This group decided, in 1915, to issue a public declaration favoring "the progressive realization of responsible government in India." A declaration to this effect was drawn up by Lord Milner and was issued on August 20, 1917, by Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu. It said that "the policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire."

     This declaration was revolutionary because, for the first time, it specifically enunciated British hopes for India's future and because it used, for the first time, the words "responsible government." The British had spoken vaguely for over a century about "self-government" for India; they had spoken increasingly about "representative government"; but they had consistently avoided the expression "responsible government." This latter term meant parliamentary government, which most English conservatives regarded as quite unsuited for Indian conditions, since it required, they believed, an educated electorate and a homogeneous social system, both of which were lacking in India. The conservatives had talked for years about ultimate self-government for India on some indigenous Indian model, but had done nothing to find such a model. Then, without any clear conception of where they were going, they had introduced "representative government," in which the executive consulted with public opinion through representatives of the people (either appointed, as in 1871, or elected, as in 1909), but with the executive still autocratic and in no way responsible to these representatives. The use of the expression "responsible government" in the declaration of 1917 went back to the Round Table group and ultimately to the Marris-Curtis conversation in the Canadian Rockies in 1909.

     In the meantime, the Round Table study-group had worked for three years (1913-1916) on methods for carrying out this promise. Through the influence of Curtis and F. S. Oliver the federal constitution of the United States contributed a good deal to the drafts which were made, especially to provisions for dividing governmental activities into central and provincial portions, with gradual Indianization of the latter and 166 ultimately of the former. This approach to the problem was named "dyarchy" by Curtis. The Round Table draft was sent to the Governor of New South Wales, Lord Chelmsford, a Fellow of All Souls College, who believed that it came from an official committee of the India Office. After he accepted it in principle he was made Viceroy of India in 1916. Curtis went to India immediately to consult with local authorities there (including Meston, Marris, Hailey, and the retired Times Foreign Editor, Sir Valentine Chirol) as well as with Indians. From these conferences emerged a report, written by Marris, which was issued as the Montagu-Chelmsford Report in 1917. The provisions of this report were drawn up as a bill, passed by Parliament (after substantial revision by a Joint Committee under Lord Selborne) and became the Government of India Act of 1919.

     The Act of 1919 was the most important law in Indian constitutional history before 1935. It divided governmental activities into "central" and "provincial." The former included defense, foreign affairs, railways and communications, commerce, civil and criminal law and procedures and others; the latter included public order and police, irrigation, forests, education, public health, public works, and other activities. Furthermore, the provincial activities were divided into "transferred" departments and "reserved" departments, the former being entrusted to native ministers who were responsible to provincial assemblies. The central government remained in the hands of the governor-general and viceroy, who was responsible to Britain and not to the Indian Legislature. His Cabinet (Executive Council) usually had three Indian members after 1921. The legislature was bicameral, consisting of a Council of State and a Legislative Assembly. In both, some members were appointed officials, but the majority were elected on a very restricted suffrage. There were, on the electoral lists, no more than 900,000 voters for the lower chamber and only 16,000 for the upper chamber. The provincial unicameral legislatures had a wider, but still limited, franchise, with about a million on the list of voters in Bengal, half as many in Bombay. Moreover, certain seats, on the principle of "weightage," were reserved to Muslims elected by a separate Muslim electoral list. Both legislatures had the power to enact laws, subject to rather extensive powers of veto and of decree in the hands of the governor-general and the appointed provincial governors. Only the "transferred" departments of the provincial governments were responsible to elective assemblies, the "reserved" activities on the provincial level and all activities in the central administration being responsible to the appointed governors and governor-general and ultimately to Britain.

     It was hoped that the Act of 1919 would provide opportunities in parliamentary procedures, responsible government, and administration to Indians so that self-government could be extended by successive steps later, but these hopes were destroyed in the disasters of 1919-1922. The violence of British reactionaries collided with the nonviolent refusal to cooperate of Mahatma Gandhi, crushing out the hopes of the Round Table reformers between them.

     Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948), known as "Mahatma," or "Great Soul," was the son and grandson of prime ministers of a minute princely state in western India. Of the Vaisya caste (third of the four), he grew up in a very religious and ascetic atmosphere of Hinduism. Married at thirteen and a father at fifteen, Gandhi was sent to England to study law by his older brother when he was seventeen. Such a voyage was forbidden by the rules of his caste, and he was expelled from it for going. Before he left he gave a vow to his family not to touch wine, women, or meat. After three years in England he passed the bar at Inner Temple. Most of his time in Europe was passed in dilettante fads, experimenting with vegetarian diets and self-administered medicines or in religious or ethical discussions with English faddists and Indiophiles. He was much troubled by religious scruples and feelings of guilt. Back in India in 1891, he was a failure as a lawyer because of his inarticulate lack of assurance and his real lack of interest in the law. In 1893 a Muslim firm sent him to Natal, South Africa, on a case. There Gandhi found his vocation.

     The population of Natal in 1896 consisted of 50,000 Europeans, mostly English, 400,000 African natives, and 51,000 Indians, chiefly outcastes. The last group had been imported from India, chiefly as indentured workers on three or five-year contracts, to work the humid low land plantations where the Negroes refused to work. Most of the Indians stayed, after their contracts were fulfilled, and were so industrious and intelligent that they began to rise very rapidly in an economic sense, especially in the retail trades. The whites, who were often indolent, resented such competition from dark-skinned persons and were generally indignant at Indian economic success. As Lionel Curtis told Gandhi in the Transvaal in 1903, "It is not the vices of Indians that Europeans in this country fear but their virtues."

     When Gandhi first arrived in Natal in 1893, he found that that country, like most of South Africa, was rent with color hatred and group animosities. All political rights were in the hands of whites, while the nonwhites were subjected to various kinds of social and economic discriminations and segregations. When Gandhi first appeared in court. the judge ordered him to remove his turban (worn with European clothes); Gandhi refused, and left. Later, traveling on business in a first-class railway carriage to the Transvaal, he was ejected from the train at the insistence of a white passenger. He spent a bitterly cold night on the railway platform rather than move to a second- or third-class compartment when he had been sold a first-class ticket. For the rest of his life he traveled only third class. In the Transvaal he was unable to get a room in a hotel because of his color. These episodes gave him his new vocation: to establish that Indians were citizens of the British Empire and therefore entitled to equality under its laws. He was determined to use only peaceful methods of passive mass non-cooperation to achieve his goal. His chief weapon would be love and submissiveness, even to those who treated him most brutally. His refusal to fear death or to avoid pain and his efforts to return love to those who tried to inflict injuries upon him made a powerful weapon, especially if it were practiced on a mass basis.

     Gandhi's methods were really derived from his own Hindu tradition, but certain elements in this tradition had been reinforced by reading Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoi, and the Sermon on the Mount. When he was brutally beaten by whites in Natal in 1897, he refused to prosecute, saying that it was not their fault that they had been taught evil ideas.

     These methods gave the Indians of South Africa a temporary respite from the burden of intolerance under Gandhi's leadership in the period 1893-1914. When the Transvaal proposed an ordinance compelling all Indians to register, be fingerprinted, and carry identity cards at all times, Gandhi organized a mass, peaceful refusal to register. Hundreds went to jail. Smuts worked out a compromise with Gandhi: if the Indians would register "voluntarily" the Transvaal would repeal the ordinance. After Gandhi had persuaded his compatriots to register, Smuts failed to carry out his part of the agreement, and the Indians solemnly burned their registration cards at a mass meeting. Then, to test the Transvaal ban on Indian immigration, Gandhi organized mass marches of Indians into the Transvaal from Natal. Others went from the Transvaal to Natal and returned, being arrested for crossing the frontier. At one time 2,500 of the 13,000 Indians in the Transvaal were in jail and 6,000 were in exile.

     The struggle was intensified after the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 because the Transvaal restrictions on Indians, which forbade them to own land, to live outside segregated districts, or to vote, were not repealed, and a Supreme Court decision of 1913 declared all non-Christian marriages to be legally invalid. This last decision deprived most nonwhite wives and children of all legal protection of their family rights. Mass civil disobedience by Indians increased, including a march by 6,000 from Natal to the Transvaal. Finally, after much controversy, Gandhi and Smuts worked out an elaborate compromise agreement in 1914. This revoked some of the discriminations against Indians in South Africa, recognized Indian marriages, annulled a discriminatory ฃ3 annual tax on Indians, and stopped all importation of indentured labor from India in 1920. Peace was restored in this civil controversy just in time to permit a united front in the external war with Germany. But in South Africa by 1914 Gandhi had worked out the techniques he would use against the British in India after 1919.

     Until 1919 Gandhi Noms very loyal to the British connection. Both in South Africa and in India he had found that the English from England were much more tolerant and understanding than most of the English-speaking whites of middle-class origin in the overseas areas. In the Boer War he was the active leader of an 1,100-man Indian ambulance corps which worked with inspiring courage even under fire on the field of battle. During World War I, he worked constantly on recruiting campaigns for the British forces. On one of these in 1915 he said, "I discovered that the British Empire had certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of these ideals is that every subject of the British Empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience." By 1918 this apostle of nonviolence was saying: "We are regarded as a cowardly people. If we want to become free from that reproach, we should learn to use arms.... Partnership in the Empire is our definite goal. We should suffer to the utmost of our ability and even lay down our lives to defend the Empire. If the Empire perishes, with it perishes our cherished aspiration."

     During this period Gandhi's asceticism and his opposition to all kinds of discrimination were winning him an outstanding moral position among the Indian people. He was opposed to all violence and bloodshed, to alcohol, meat, and tobacco, even to the eating of milk and eggs, and to sex (even in marriage). More than this, he was opposed to Western industrialism, to Western science and medicine, and to the use of Western rather than Indian languages. He demanded that his followers make fixed quotas of homespun cotton each day, wore a minimum of homespun clothing himself, spun on a small wheel throughout all his daily activities, and took the small hand spinning wheel as the symbol of his movement— all this in order to signify the honorable nature of handwork, the need for Indian economic self-sufficiency, and his opposition to Western industrialism. He worked for equality for the untouchables, calling them "God's children" (Harijans), associating with them whenever he could, taking them into his own home, even adopting one as his own daughter. He worked to relieve economic oppression, organizing strikes against low wages or miserable working conditions, supporting the strikers with money he had gathered from India's richest Hindu industrialists. He attacked Western medicine and sanitation, supported all kinds of native medical nostrums and even quackery, yet went to a Western-trained surgeon for an operation when he had appendicitis himself. Similarly he preached against the use of milk, but drank goat's milk for his health much of his life. These inconsistencies he attributed to his own weak sinfulness. Similarly, he permitted hand-spun cotton to be sewn on Singer sewing machines, and conceded that Western-type factories were necessary to provide such machines.

     During this period he discovered that his personal fasts from food, which he had long practiced, could be used as moral weapons against those who opposed him while they strengthened his moral hold over those who supported him. "I fasted," he said, "to reform those who loved me. You cannot fast against a tyrant." Gandhi never seemed to recognize that his fasting and nonviolent civil disobedience were effective against the British in India and in South Africa only to the degree that the British had the qualities of humanity, decency, generosity, and fair play which he most admired, but that by attacking the British through these virtues he was weakening Britain and the class which possessed these virtues and making it more likely that they would be replaced by nations and by leaders who did not have these virtues. Certainly Hitler and the Germans who exterminated six million Jews in cold blood during World War II would not have shared the reluctance of Smuts to imprison a few thousand Indians or Lord Halifax's reluctance to see Gandhi starve himself to death. This was the fatal weakness of Gandhi's aims and his methods, but these aims and methods were so dear to Indian hearts and so selflessly pursued by Gandhi that he rapidly became the spiritual leader of the Indian National Congress after Gokhale's death in 1915. In this position Gandhi by his spiritual power succeeded in something which no earlier Indian leader had achieved and few had hoped for: he spread political awareness and nationalist feeling from the educated class down into the great uneducated mass of the Indian people.

     This mass and Gandhi expected and demanded a greater degree of self-government after the end of World War I. The Act of 1919 provided that, and probably provided as much of it as the political experience of Indians entitled them to. Moreover, the Act anticipated expansion of the areas of self-government as Indian political experience increased. But the Act was largely a failure, because Gandhi had aroused political ambitions in great masses of Indians who lacked experience in political activities, and these demands gave rise to intense opposition to Indian self-government in British circles which did not share the ideals of the Round Table group. Finally, the actions of this British opposition drove Gandhi from "nonresistance" through complete "non-cooperation," to "civil disobedience," thus destroying the whole purpose of the Act of 1919.

     Many British conservatives both at home and in India opposed the Act of 1919. Lord Ampthill, who had long experience in India and had valiantly supported Gandhi in South Africa, attacked the Act and Lionel Curtis for making it. In the House of Lords he said: "The incredible fact is that, but for the chance visit to India of a globe-trotting doctrinaire with a positive mania for constitution-mongering [Curtis], nobody in the world would ever have thought of so peculiar a notion as Dyarchy. And yet the Joint [Selborne] Committee tells us in an airy manner that no better plan can be conceived." In India men like the governor of the Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, were even more emphatically opposed to Indian self-government or Indian nationalist agitation. Many Conservatives who were determined to maintain the empire intact could not see how this could be done without India as the major jewel in it, as in the nineteenth century. India not only provided a large share of the manpower in the peacetime imperial army, hut this army was largely stationed in India and paid for out of the revenues of the Government of India. Moreover, this self-paying manpower pool was beyond the scrutiny of the British reformer as well as the British taxpayers. The older Tories, with their strong army connections, and others, like Winston Churchill, with an appreciation of military matters, did not see how England could face the military demands of the twentieth century without Indian military manpower, at least in colonial areas.

     Instead of getting more freedom at the end of the war in 1918, the Indians got less. The conservative group pushed through the Rowlatt Act in March 1919. This continued most of the wartime restrictions on civil liberties in India, to be used to control nationalist agitations. Gandhi called for civil disobedience and a series of scattered local general strikes (hartels) in protest. These actions led to violence, especially to Indian attacks on the British. Gandhi bewailed this violence, and inflicted a seventy-two-hour fast on himself as penance.

     In Amritsar an Englishwoman was attacked in the street (April 10, 1919). The Congress Party leaders in the city were deported, and Brigadier R. E. H. Dyer was sent to restore order. On arrival he prohibited all processions and meetings; then, without waiting for the order to be publicized, went with fifty men to disperse with gunfire a meeting already in progress (April 13, 1919). He fired 1,650 bullets into a dense crowd packed in a square with inadequate exits, inflicting 1,516 casualties, of which 379 met death. Leaving the wounded untended on the ground, General Dyer returned to his office and issued an order that all Indians passing through the street where the Englishwoman had been assaulted a week before must do so by crawling on hands and knees. There is no doubt that General Dyer was looking for trouble. In his own words: "I had made up my mind I would do all men to death.... It was no longer a question of merely dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point of view not only on those who were present, but more especially throughout the Punjab."

     The situation might still have been saved from Dyer's barbarity but the Hunter Committee, which investigated the atrocity, refused to condemn Dyer except for "a grave error of judgment" and "an honest but mistaken conception of duty." A majority of the House of Lords approved his action by refusing to censure him, and, when the government forced him to resign from the army, his admirers in England presented him with a sword and a purse of 120,000.

     At this point Gandhi committed a grave error of judgment. In order to solidify the alliance of Hindu and Muslim which had been in existence since 1917, he supported the Khilafat movement of Indian Muslims to obtain a lenient peace treaty for the Turkish sultan (and caliph) following World War I. Gandhi suggested that the Khilafat adopt "non-cooperation" against Britain to enforce its demands. This would have involved a boycott of British goods, schools, law courts, offices, honors, and of all goods subject to British taxes (such as alcohol). This was an error of judgment because the sultan was soon overthrown by his own people organized in a Turkish Nationalist movement and seeking a secularized Turkish state, in spite of all Britain was already doing (both in public and in private) to support him. Thus, the Khilafat movement was seeking to force Britain to do something it already wanted to do and was not able to do. Moreover, by bringing up "non-cooperation" as a weapon against the British, Gandhi had opened a number of doors he had no desire to open, with very bad consequences for India.

     At the Indian National Congress of December, 1919, Tilak and Gandhi were the leading figures. Both were willing to accept the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Tilak because he believed this would be the best way to prove that they were not adequate. But on August I, 1920, Gandhi proclaimed "non-cooperation" in behalf of the Khilafat movement. On the same day Tilak died, leaving Gandhi as undisputed leader of the Congress. At the 1920 meeting he won unanimous approval for "non-cooperation," and then moved a resolution for swaraj (self-rule) either within or outside the British Empire. The Muslims in Congress, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, refused to accept an independent India outside the British Empire because this would subject the Muslims to a Hindu majority without Britain's protecting restraint. As a result, from that point, many Muslims left the Congress.

     Non-cooperation was a great public success. But it did not get self-rule for India, and made the country less fitted for self-rule by making it impossible for Indians to get experience in government under the Act of 1919. Thousands of Indians gave up medals and honors, gave up the practice of law in British courts, left the British schools, and burned British goods. Gandhi held great mass meetings at which thousands of persons stripped themselves of their foreign clothing to throw it on raging bonfires. This did not, however, give them training in government. It merely roused nationalist violence. On February 1, 1922, Gandhi informed the viceroy that he was about to begin mass civil disobedience, in one district at a time, beginning in Bardoli near Bombay. Civil disobedience, including refusal to pay taxes or obey the laws, was a step beyond non-cooperation, since it involved illegal acts rather than legal ones. On February 5, 1922, a Hindu mob attacked twenty-two police constables and killed them by burning the police station down over their heads. In horror Gandhi canceled the campaign against Britain. He was at once arrested and condemned to six years in prison for sedition.

     Very great damage had been done by the events of 1919-1922. Britain and India were alienated to the point where they no longer trusted one another. The Congress Party itself had been split, the moderates forming a new group called the Indian Liberal Federation. The Muslims had also left the Congress Party to a large extent and gone to strengthen the Muslim League. From this point onward, Muslim-Hindu riots were annual occurrences in India. And finally the boycott had crippled the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, almost two-thirds of the eligible voters refusing to vote in the Councils elections of November, 1920.

Ireland to 1939

     While the Indian crisis was at its height in 1919-1922, an even more violent crisis was raging in Ireland. Throughout the nineteenth century Ireland had been agitated by grievances of long standing. The three major problems were agrarian, religious, and political. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century had transferred much Irish land, as plunder of war, to absentee English landlords. In consequence high rents, insecure tenure, lack of improvements, and legalized economic exploitation, supported by English judges and English soldiers, gave rise to violent agrarian unrest and rural atrocities against English lives and properties.

     Beginning with Gladstone's Land Act of 1870, the agrarian problems were slowly alleviated and, by 1914, were well in hand. The religious problem arose from the fact that Ireland was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, and resented being ruled by persons of a different religion. Moreover, until the Irish (Episcopal) Church was dis-established in 1869, Irish Catholics had to support a structure of Anglican clergy and bishops, most of whom had few or no parishioners in Ireland and resided in England, supported by incomes from Ireland. Finally, the Act of Union of 1801 had made Ireland a part of the United Kingdom, with representatives in the Parliament at Westminster.

     By 1871 those representatives who were opposed to union with England formed the Irish Home Rule Party. It sought to obtain separation by obstructing the functions of Parliament and disrupting its proceedings. At times this group exercised considerable influence in Parliament by holding a balance of power between Liberals and Conservatives. The Gladstone Liberals were willing to give Ireland Home Rule, with no representatives at Westminster; the Conservatives (with the support of a majority of Englishmen) were opposed to Home Rule; the Rhodes-Milner group wanted self-government for the Irish in their home affairs with Irish representatives retained at Westminster for foreign and imperial matters. The Liberal government of 1906- 1916 tried to enact a Home Rule bill with continued Irish representation in the House of Commons, but was repeatedly blocked by the opposition of the House of Lords; the bill did not become law until September, 1914.

     The chief opposition arose from the fact that Protestant Ulster (Northern Ireland) would be submerged in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland. The Ulster opposition, led by Sir Edward (later Lord) Carson, organized a private army, armed it with guns smuggled from Germany, and prepared to seize control of Belfast at a signal from London. Carson was on his way to the telegraph station to send this signal in 1914 when he received a message from the prime minister that war was about to break out with Germany. Accordingly, the Ulster revolt was canceled and the Home Rule Act was suspended until six months after the peace with Germany. As a consequence the revolt with German arms in Ireland was made by the Irish Nationalists in 1916, instead of by their Ulster opponents in 1914. This so-called Easter Revolt of 1916 was crushed and its leaders executed, but discontent continued to simmer in Ireland, with violence only slightly below the surface.

     In the parliamentary election of 1918, Ireland elected 6 Nationalists (who wanted Home Rule for all Ireland), 73 Sinn Fein (who wanted an Irish Republic free from England), and 23 Unionists (who wanted to remain part of Britain). Instead of going to Westminster, the Sinn Fein organized their own Parliament in Dublin. Efforts to arrest its members led to open civil war. This was a struggle of assassination, treachery, and reprisal, fought out in back alleys and on moonlit fields. Sixty thousand British troops could not maintain order. Thousands of lives were lost, with brutal inhumanity on both sides, and property damage rose to ฃ50 million in value.

     Lionel Curtis, who helped edit The Round Table in 1919-1921, advocated in the March 1920 issue that Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland be separated and each given Home Rule as autonomous parts of Great Britain. This was enacted into law eight months later as the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, but was rejected by the Irish Republicans led by Eamon de Valera. The civil war continued. The Round Table group worked valiantly to stop the extremists on both sides, but with only moderate success. Amery's brother-in-law, Hamar (Lord) Greenwood, was appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the last incumbent of that post, while Curtis was appointed adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office (which was headed by Milner and Amery). The Times and The Round Table condemned British repression in Ireland, the latter saying, "If the British Commonwealth can only be preserved by such means, it would become a negation of the principle for which it has stood." But British violence could not be curtailed until Irish violence could be curtailed. One of the chief leaders of the Irish Republicans was Erskine Childers, an old schoolboy friend of Curtis who had been with him in South Africa, but nothing could be done through him, since he had become fanatically anti-British. Accordingly, Smuts was called in. He wrote a conciliatory speech for King George to deliver at the opening of the Ulster Parliament, and made a secret visit to the rebel hiding place in Ireland to try to persuade the Irish Republican leaders to be reasonable. He contrasted the insecurity of the Transvaal Republic before 1895 with its happy condition under dominion status since 1910, saying: "Make no mistake about it, you have more privilege, more power, more peace, more security in such a sisterhood of equal nations than in a small, nervous republic having all the time to rely on the good will and perhaps the assistance of foreigners. What sort of independence do you call that?"

     Smuts arranged an armistice and a conference to negotiate a settlement. From this conference, at which Curtis was secretary, came the Articles of Agreement of December, 1921, which gave Southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland continuing under the Act of 1920. The boundary line between the two countries was drawn by a committee of three of which the British member (and chairman) was Richard Feetham of Milner's Kindergarten and the Round Table group, later Supreme Court judge in South Africa.

     De Valera's Irish Republicans refused to accept the settlement, and went into insurrection, this time against the moderate Irish leaders, Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Collins was assassinated, and Griffith died, exhausted by the strain, but the Irish people themselves were now tired of turmoil. De Valera's forces were driven underground and were defeated in the election of 1922. When De Valera's party' the Fianna Fail, did win an election in 1932 and he became President of Ireland, he abolished the oath of loyalty to the king and the office of governor-general, ended annual payments on seized English lands and appeals to the Privy Council, engaged in a bitter tariff war with Britain, and continued to demand the annexation of Ulster. One of the last links with Britain was ended in 1938, when the British naval bases in Eire were turned over to the Irish, to the great benefit of German submarines in 1939-1945

Chapter 10: The Far East to World War I

The Collapse of China to 1920

     The destruction of traditional Chinese culture under the impact of Western Civilization was considerably later than the similar destruction of Indian culture by Europeans. This delay arose from the fact that European pressure on India was applied fairly steadily from the early sixteenth century, while in the Far East, in Japan even more completely than in China, this pressure was relaxed from the early seventeenth century for almost two hundred years, to 1794 in the case of China and to 1854 in the case of Japan. As a result, we can see the process by which European culture was able to destroy the traditional native cultures of Asia more clearly in China than almost anywhere else.

     The traditional culture of China, as elsewhere in Asia, consisted of a military and bureaucratic hierarchy superimposed on a great mass of hardworking peasantry. It is customary, in studying this subject, to divide this hierarchy into three levels. Politically, these three levels consisted of the imperial authority at the top, an enormous hierarchy of imperial and provincial officials in the middle, and the myriad of semi-patriarchal, semi-democratic local villages at the bottom. Socially, this hierarchy was similarly divided into the ruling class, the gentry, and the peasants. And, economically, there was a parallel division, the uppermost group deriving its incomes as tribute and taxes from its possession of military and political power, while the middle group derived its incomes from economic sources, as interest on loans, rents from lands, and the profits of commercial enterprise, as well as from the salaries, graft, and other emoluments arising from his middle group's control of the bureaucracy. At the bottom the peasantry, which was the only really productive group in the society, derived its incomes from the sweat of its collective brows, and had to survive on what was left to it after a substantial fraction of its product had gone to the two higher groups in the form of rents, taxes, interest, customary bribes (called "squeeze"), and excessive profits on such purchased "necessities" of life as salt, iron, or opium.

     Although the peasants were clearly an exploited group in the traditional society of China, this exploitation was impersonal and traditional and this more easily borne shall if it had been personal or arbitrary. In the course of time, a workable system of customary relationships had come into existence among the three levels of society. Each group knew its established relationships with the others, and used those relationships to avoid any sudden or excessive pressures which might disrupt the established patterns of the society. The political and military force of the imperial regime rarely impinged directly on the peasantry, since the bureaucracy intervened between them as a protecting buffer. This buffer followed a pattern of deliberate amorphous inefficiency so that the military and political force from above had been diffused, dispersed, and blunted by the time it reached down to the peasant villages. The bureaucracy followed this pattern because it recognized that the peasantry was the source of its incomes, and it had no desire to create such discontent as would jeopardize the productive process or the payments of rents, taxes, and interest on which it lived. Furthermore, the inefficiency of the system was both customary and deliberate, since it allowed a large portion of the wealth which was being drained from the peasantry to be diverted and diffused among the middle class of gentry before the remnants of it reached the imperial group at the top.

     This imperial group, in its turn, had to accept this system of inefficiency and diversion of incomes and its own basic remoteness from the peasantry because of the great size of China, the ineffectiveness of its systems of transportation and communications, and the impossibility of keeping records of population, or of incomes and taxes except through the indirect mediation of the bureaucracy. The semi-autonomous position of the bureaucracy depended, to a considerable extent, on the fact that the Chinese system of writing was so cumbersome, so inefficient, and so difficult to learn that the central government could not possibly have kept any records or have administered tax collection, public order, or justice except through a bureaucracy of trained experts. This bureaucracy was recruited from the gentry because the complex systems of writing, of law, and of administrative traditions could be mastered only by a group possessing leisure based on unearned incomes. To be sure, in time, the training for this bureaucracy and for the examinations admitting to it became quite unrealistic, consisting largely of memorizing of ancient literary texts for examination purposes rather than for any cultural or administrative ends. This was not so bad as it sounds, for many of the memorized texts contained a good deal of ancient wisdom with an ethical or practical slant, and the possession of this store of knowledge engendered in its possessors a respect for moderation and for tradition which was just what the system required. No one regretted that the system of education and of examinations leading to the bureaucracy did not engender a thirst for efficiency, because efficiency was not a quality which anyone desired. The bureaucracy itself did not desire efficiency because this would have reduced its ability to divert the funds flowing upward from the peasantry.

     The peasantry surely did not want any increase in efficiency, which would have led to an increase in pressure on it and would have made it less easy to blunt or to avoid the impact of imperial power. The imperial power itself had little desire for any increased efficiency in its bureaucracy, since this might have led to increased independence on the part of the bureaucracy. So long as the imperial superstructure of Chinese society obtained its share of the wealth flowing upward from the peasantry, it was satisfied. The share of this wealth which the imperial group obtained was very large, in absolute figures, although proportionately it was only a small part of the total amount which left the peasant class, the larger part being diverted by the gentry and bureaucracy on its upward flow.

     The exploitative nature of this three-class social system was alleviated, as we have seen, by inefficiency, by traditional moderation and accepted ethical ideas, by a sense of social interdependence, and by the power of traditional law and custom which protected the ordinary peasant from arbitrary treatment or the direct impact of force. Most important of all, perhaps, the system was alleviated by the existence of careers open to talent. China never became organized into hereditary groups or castes, being in this respect like England and quite unlike India. The way was open to the top in Chinese society, not for any individual peasant in his own lifetime, but to any individual peasant family over a period of several generations. Thus an individual's position in society depended, not on the efforts of his own youth, but on the efforts of his father and grandfather.

     If a Chinese peasant was diligent, shrewd, and lucky, he could expect to accumulate some small surplus beyond the subsistence of his own family and the drain to the upper classes. This surplus could be invested in activities such as iron-making, opium selling, lumber or fuel selling, pig-trading and such. The profits from these activities could then be invested in small bits of land to be rented out to less fortunate peasants or in loans to other peasants. If times remained good, the owner of the surpluses began to receive rents and interest from his neighbors; if times became bad he still had his land or could take over his debtor's land as forfeited collateral on his loan. In good times or bad, the growth of population in China kept the demand for land high, and peasants were able to rise in the social scale from peasantry to gentry by slowly expanding their legal claims over land. Once in the gentry, one's children or grandchildren could be educated to pass the bureaucratic examinations and be admitted to the group of mandarins. A family which had a member or two in this group gained access to the whole system of "squeeze" and of bureaucratic diversion of income flows, so that the family as a whole could continue to rise in the social and economic structure. Eventually some member of the family might move into the imperial center from the provincial level on which this rise began, and might even gain access to the imperial ruling group itself.

     In these higher levels of the social structure many families were able to maintain a position for generations, but in general there was a steady, if slow, "circulation of the elite," most families remaining in a high social position for only a couple of generations, after about three generations of climb, to be followed by a couple of generations of decline. Thus, the old American saying that it took only three generations "from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves" would, in the old China, have to be extended to allow about six or seven generations from the rice paddy's drudgery back to the rice paddy again. But the hope of such a rise contributed much to increase individual diligence and family solidarity and to reduce peasant discontent. Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did peasants in China come to regard their positions as so hopeless that violence became preferable to diligence or conformity. This change arose from the fact, as we shall see, that the impact of Western culture on China did, in fact, make the peasant’s position economically hopeless.

     In traditional Chinese society the bureaucrats recruited through examinations from the gentry class were called mandarins. They became, for all practical purposes, the dominant element in Chinese society. Since their social and economic position did not rest on political or military power but on traditions, the legal structure, social stability, accepted ethical teachings, and the rights of property, this middle-level group gave Chinese society a powerful traditionalist orientation. Respect for old traditions, for the accepted modes of thought and action, for the ancestors in society and religion, and for the father in the family became the salient characteristics of Chinese society. That this society was a complex network of vested interests, was unprogressive, and was shot through with corruption was no more objectionable to the average Chinese, on any level, than the fact that it was also shot through with inefficiency.

     These things became objectionable only when Chinese society came directly in contact with European culture during the nineteenth century. As these two societies collided, inefficiency, unprogressiveness, corruption, and the whole nexus of vested interests and traditions which constituted Chinese society was unable to survive in contact with the efficiency, the progressiveness, and the instruments of penetration and domination of Europeans. A system could not hope to survive which could not provide itself with firearms in large quantities or with mass armies of loyal soldiers to use such weapons, a system which could not increase its taxes or its output of wealth or which could not keep track of its own population or its own incomes by effective records or which had no effective methods of communication and transportation over an area of 3.5 million square miles.

     The society of the West which began to impinge on China about 1800 was powerful, efficient, and progressive. It had no respect for the corruption, the traditions, the property rights, the family solidarity, or the ethical moderation of traditional Chinese society. As the weapons of the West, along with its efficient methods of sanitation, of writing, of transportation and communications, of individual self-interest, and of corrosive intellectual rationalism came into contact with Chinese society, they began to dissolve it. On the one hand, Chinese society w as too weak to defend itself against the West. When it tried to do so, as in the Opium Wars and other struggles of 1841-1861, or in the Boxer uprising of 1900, such Chinese resistance to European penetration was crushed by the armaments of the Western Powers, and all kinds of concessions to these Powers were imposed on China.

     Until 1841 Canton was the only port allowed for foreign imports, and opium was illegal. As a consequence of Chinese destruction of illegal Indian opium and the commercial exactions of Cantonese authorities, Britain imposed on China the treaties of Nanking (1842) and of Tientsin (1858). These forced China to cede Hong Kong to Britain and to open sixteen ports to foreign trade, to impose a uniform import tariff of no more than 5 percent, to pay an indemnity of about $100 million, to permit foreign legations in Peking, to allow a British official to act as head of the Chinese customs service, and to legalize the import of opium. Other agreements were imposed by which China lost various fringe areas such as Burma (to Britain), Indochina (to France), Formosa and the Pescadores (to Japan), and Macao (to Portugal), while other areas were taken on leases of various durations, from twenty-five to ninety-nine years. In this way Germany took Kiaochow, Russia took southern Liaotung (including Port Arthur), France took Kwangcho-wan, and Britain took Kowloon and Weihaiwei. In this same period various Powers imposed on China a system of extraterritorial courts under which foreigners, in judicial cases, could not be tried in Chinese courts or under Chinese law.

     The political impact of Western civilization on China, great as it was, was overshadowed by the economic impact. We have already indicated that China was a largely agrarian country. Years of cultivation and the slow growth of population had given rise to a relentless pressure on the soil and to a destructive exploitation of its vegetative resources. .Most of the country was deforested, resulting in shortage of fuel, rapid runoff of precipitation, constant danger of floods, and large-scale erosion of the soil. Cultivation had been extended to remote valleys and up the slopes of hills by population pressures, with a great increase in the same destructive consequences, in spite of the fact that many slopes were rebuilt in terraces. The fact that the southern portion of the country depended on rice cultivation created many problems, since this crop, of relatively low nutritive value, required great expenditure of labor (transplanting and weeding) under conditions which were destructive of good health. Long periods of wading in rice paddies exposed most peasants to various kinds of joint diseases, and to water-borne infections such as malaria or parasitical flukes.

     The pressure on the soil was intensified by the fact that 60 percent of China was over 6,000 feet above sea level, too high for cultivation, while more than half the land had inadequate rainfall (below twenty inches a year). Moreover, the rainfall was provided by the erratic monsoon winds which frequently brought floods and occasionally failed completely, causing wholesale famine. In the United States 140 million people were supported by the labor of 6.5 million farmers on 365 million acres of cultivated land in 1945; China, about the same time, had almost 500 million persons supported by the labor of 65 million farmers on only 217 million acres of cultivated land. In China the average farm was only a little over four acres (compared to 157 in the United States) but was divided into five or six separate fields and had, on the average, 6.2 persons living on it (compared to 4.2 persons on the immensely larger American farm). As a result, in China there was only about half an acre of land for each person living on the land, compared to the American figure of 15.7 acres per person.

     As a consequence of this pressure on the land, the average Chinese peasant had, even in earlier times, no margin above the subsistence level, especially when we recall that a certain part of his income flowed upward to the upper classes. Since, on his agricultural account alone, the average Chinese peasant was below the subsistence level, he had to use various ingenious devices to get up to that level. All purchases of goods produced off the farm were kept at an absolute minimum. Every wisp of grass, fallen leaf, or crop residue was collected to serve as fuel. All human waste products, including those of the cities, were carefully collected and restored to the soil as fertilizer. For this reason, farmlands around cities, because of the greater supply of such wastes, were more productive than more remote farms which were dependent on local supplies of such human wastes. Collection and sale of such wastes became an important link in the agricultural economics of China. Since the human digestive system extracts only part of the nutritive elements in food, the remaining elements were frequently extracted by feeding such wastes to swine, thus passing them through the pig's digestive system before these wastes returned to the soil to provide nourishment for new crops and, thus, for new food. Every peasant farm had at least one pig which was purchased young, lived in the farm latrine until it was full grown, and then was sold into the city to provide a cash margin for such necessary purchases as salt, sugar, oils, or iron products. In a somewhat similar way the rice paddy was able to contribute to the farmer's supply of proteins by acting as a fishpond and an aquarium for minute freshwater shrimp.

     In China, as in Europe, the aims of agricultural efficiency were quite different from the aims of agricultural efficiency in new countries, such as the United States, Canada, Argentina, or Australia. In these newer countries there was a shortage of labor and a surplus of land, while in Europe and Asia there was a shortage of land and a surplus of labor. Accordingly, the aim of agricultural efficiency in newer lands was high output of crops per unit of labor. It was for this reason that American agriculture put such emphasis on labor-saving agricultural machinery and soil-exhausting agricultural practices, while Asiatic agriculture put immense amounts of hand labor on small amounts of land in order to save the soil and to win the maximum crop from the limited amount of land. In America the farmer could afford to spend large sums for farm machinery because the labor such machinery replaced would have been expensive anyway and because the cost of that machinery was spread over such a large acreage that its cost per acre was relatively moderate. In Asia there was no capital for such expenditures on machinery because there was no margin of surplus above subsistence in the hands of the peasantry and because the average farm was so small that the cost of machinery per acre (either to buy or even to operate) would have been prohibitive. The only surplus in Asia was of labor, and every effort was made, by putting more and more labor on the land, to make the limited amount of land more productive. One result of this investment of labor in land in China can be seen in the fact that about half of the Chinese farm acreage was irrigated while about a quarter of it was terraced. Another result of this excess concentration of labor on land was that such labor was underemployed and semi-idle for about three-quarters of the year, being fully busy only in the planting and harvest seasons. From this semi-idleness of the Asiatic rural population came the most important effort to supplement peasant incomes through rural handicrafts. Before we turn to this crucial point, we should glance at the relative success of China's efforts to achieve high-unit yields in agriculture.

     In the United States, about 1940, each acre of wheat required 1.2 man-days of work each year; in China an acre of wheat took 26 man-days of labor. The rewards of such expenditures of labor were quite different. In China the output of grain for each man-year of labor was 3,080 pounds; in the United States the output was 44,000 pounds per man-year of labor. This low productivity of agricultural labor in China would have been perfectly acceptable if China had, instead, achieved high output per acre. Unfortunately, even in this alternative aim China was only moderately successful, more successful than the United States, it is true, but far less successful than European countries which aimed at the same type of agricultural efficiency (high yields per acre) as China did. This can be seen from the following figures:

Output Per Acre

In Rice                         In Wheat

     United States          47 bushes          United States          14 bushels

     China               67 bushes          China               16 bushels

     Italy               93 bushels          England          32 bushels

     These figures indicate the relative failure of Chinese (and other Asiatic) agriculture even in terms of its own aims. This relative failure was not caused by lack of effort, but by such factors as (I) farms too small for efficient operation; (2) excessive population pressure which forced farming onto less productive soil and which drew more nutritive elements out of the soil than could be replaced, even by wholesale use of human wastes as fertilizer; ( 3) lack of such scientific agricultural techniques as seed selection or crop rotation; and (4) the erratic character of a monsoon climate on a deforested and semi-eroded land.

     Because of the relatively low productivity of Chinese (and all Asiatic) agriculture, the whole population was close to the margin of subsistence and, at irregular intervals, was forced below that margin into widespread famine. In China the situation was alleviated to some extent by three forces. In the first place, the irregular famines which we have mentioned, and somewhat more frequent onslaughts of plague disease, kept the population within manageable bounds. These two irregular occurrences reduced the population by millions, in both China and India, when they occurred. Even in ordinary years the death rate was high, about 30 per thousand in China compared to 25 in India, 12.3 in England, or 8.7 in Australia. Infant mortality (in the first year of life) was about 159 per thousand in China compared to 240 in India, about 70 in western Europe, and about 32 in New Zealand. At birth an infant could be expected to live less than 27 years in India, less than 35 years in China, about 60 years in England or the United States, and about 66 years in New Zealand (all figures are about 1930). In spite of this "expectation of death" in China, the population was maintained at a high level by a birth rate of about 38 per thousand of the population compared to 34 in India, 18 in the United States or Australia, and 15 in England. The skyrocketing effect which the use of modern sanitary or medical practices might have upon China's population figures can be gathered from the fact that about three-quarters of Chinese deaths are from causes which are preventable (usually easily preventable) in the West. For example, a quarter of all deaths are from diseases spread by human wastes; about 10 percent come from childhood diseases like smallpox, measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough; about 15 percent arise from tuberculosis; and about 7 percent are in childbirth..

     The birthrate was kept up, in traditional Chinese society as a consequence of a group of ideas which are usually known as "ancestor worship." Every Chinese family had, as its most powerful motivation, the conviction that the family line must be continued in order to have descendants to keep up the family shrines, to maintain the ancestral graves, and to support the living members of the family after their productive years had ended. The expense of such shrines, graves, and old persons was a considerable burden on the average Chinese family and a cumulative burden as well, since the diligence of earlier generations frequently left a family with shrines and graves so elaborate that upkeep alone was a heavy expense to later generations. At the same time the urge to have sons kept the birth rate up and led to such undesirable social practices, in traditional Chinese society, as infanticide, abandonment, or sale of female offspring. Another consequence of these ideas was that more well-to-do families in China tended to have more children than poor families. This was the exact opposite of the situation in Western civilization, where a rise in the economic scale resulted in the acquisition of a middle-class outlook which included restriction of the family's offspring.

     The pressure of China's population on the level of subsistence was relieved to some extent by wholesale Chinese emigration in the period after 1800. This outward movement was toward the less settled areas of Manchuria, Mongolia, and southwestern China, overseas to America and Europe, and, above all, to the tropical areas of southeastern Asia (especially to Malaya and Indonesia). In these areas, the diligence, frugality, and shrewdness of the Chinese provided them with a good living and in some cases with considerable wealth. They generally acted as a commercial middle class pushing inward between the native Malaysian or Indonesian peasants and the upper group of ruling whites. This movement, which began centuries ago, steadily accelerated after 1900 and gave rise to unfavorable reactions from the non-Chinese residents of these areas. The Malay, Siamese, and Indonesians, for example, came to regard the Chinese as economically oppressive and exploitative, while the white rulers of these areas, especially in Australia and New Zealand, regarded them with suspicion for political and racial reasons. Among the causes of this political suspicion were that emigrant Chinese remained loyal to their families at home and to the homeland itself, that they were generally excluded from citizenship in areas to which they emigrated, and that they continued to be regarded as citizens by successive Chinese governments. The loyalty of emigrant Chinese to their families at home became an important source of economic strength to these families and to China itself, because emigrant Chinese sent very large savings back to their families.

     We have already mentioned the important role played by peasant handicrafts in traditional Chinese society. It would, perhaps, not be any real exaggeration to say that peasant handicrafts were the factor which permitted the traditional form of society to continue, not only in China but in all of Asia. This society was based on an inefficient agricultural system in which the political, military, legal, and economic claims of the upper classes drained from the peasantry such a large proportion of their agricultural produce that the peasant was kept pressed down to the subsistence level (and, in much of China, below this level). Only by this process could Asia support its large urban populations and its large numbers of rulers, soldiers, bureaucrats, traders, priests, and scholars (none of whom produced the food, clothing, or shelter they were consuming). In all Asiatic countries the peasants on the land were underemployed in agricultural activities, because of the seasonal nature of their work. In the course of time there had grown up a solution to this social-agrarian problem: in their spare time the peasantry occupied themselves with handicrafts and other nonagricultural activities and then sold the products of their labor to the cities for money to be used to buy necessities. In real terms this meant that the agricultural products which were flowing from the peasantry to the upper classes (and generally from rural areas to the cities) were replaced in part by handicrafts, leaving a somewhat larger share of the peasants' agricultural products in the hands of peasants. It was this arrangement which made it possible for the Chinese peasantry to raise their incomes up to the subsistence level.

     The importance of this relationship should be obvious. If it were destroyed, the peasant would be faced with a cruel alternative: either he could perish by falling below the subsistence level or he could turn to violence in order to reduce the claims which the upper classes had on his agricultural products. In the long run every peasant group was driven toward the second of these alternatives. As a result, all Asia by 1940 was in the grip of a profound political and social upheaval because, a generation earlier the demand for the products of peasants' handicrafts had been reduced.

     The destruction of this delicately balanced system occurred when cheap, machine-made products of Western manufacture began to flow into Asiatic countries. Native products such as textiles, metal goods, paper, wood carvings, pottery, hats, baskets, and such found it increasingly difficult to compete with Western manufactures in the markets of their own cities. As a result, the peasantry found it increasingly difficult to shift the legal and economic claims which the upper, urban, classes held against them from agricultural products to handicraft products. And, as a consequence of this, the percentage of their agricultural products which was being taken from the peasantry by the claims of other classes began to rise..

     This destruction of the local market for native handicrafts could have been prevented if high customs duties had been imposed on European industrial goods. But one point on which the European Powers were agreed was that they would not allow "backward" countries to exclude their products with tariffs. In India, Indonesia, and some of the lesser states of southeastern Asia this was prevented by the European Powers taking over the government of the areas; in China, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, and some Malay states the European Powers took over no more than the financial system or the customs service. As a result, countries like China, Japan, and Turkey had to sign treaties maintaining their tariffs at 5 or 8 percent and allowing Europeans to control these services. Sir Robert Hart was head of the Chinese customs from 1863 to 1906, just as Sir Evelyn Baring (Lord Cromer) was head of the Egyptian financial system from 1879 to 1907, and Sir Edgar Vincent (Lord D'Abernon) was the chief figure in the Turkish financial system from 1882 to 1897.

     As a consequence of the factors we have described, the position of the Chinese peasant was desperate by 1900, and became steadily worse. A moderate estimate (published in 1940) showed that lo percent of the farm population owned 53 percent of the cultivated land, while the other go percent had only 47 percent of the land. The majority of Chinese farmers had to rent at least some land, for which they paid, as rent, from one-third to one-half of the crop. Since their incomes were not adequate, more than half of all Chinese farmers had to borrow each year. On borrowed grain the interest rate was 85 percent a year; on money loans the interest rate was variable, being over 20 percent a year on nine-tenths of all loans made and over so percent a year on one-eighth of the loans made. Under such conditions of landownership, rental rates, and interest charges, the future was hopeless for the majority of Chinese farmers long before 1940. Yet the social revolution in China did not come until after 1940.

     The slow growth of the social revolution in China was the result of many influences. Chinese population pressure was relieved to some extent in the last half of the nineteenth century by the famines of 1877-1879 (which killed about 12 million people), by the political disturbances of the Tai-Ping and other rebellions in 1848-1875 (which depopulated large areas), and by the continued high death rate. The continued influence of traditional ideas, especially Confucianism and respect for ancestral ways, held the lid on this boiling pot until this influence was destroyed in the period after 1900. Hope that some solution might be found by the republican regime after the collapse of the imperial regime in 1911 had a similar effect. And, lastly, the distribution of European weapons in Chinese society was such as to hinder rather than to assist revolution until well into the twentieth century. Then this distribution turned in a direction quite different from that in Western civilization. These last three points are sufficiently important to warrant a closer examination.

     We have already mentioned that effective weapons which are difficult to use or expensive to obtain encourage the development of authoritarian regimes in any society. In the late medieval period, in Asia, cavalry provided such a weapon. Since the most effective cavalry was that of the pastoral Ural-Altaic-speaking peoples of central Asia, these peoples were able to conquer the peasant peoples of Russia, of Anatolia, of India, and of China. In the course of time, the alien regimes of three of these areas (not in Russia) were able to strengthen their authority by the acquisition of effective, and expensive, artillery. In Russia, the princes of Moscow, having been the agents of the Mongols, replaced them by becoming their imitators, and made the same transition to a mercenary army, based on cavalry and artillery, as the backbone of the ruling despotism. In Western civilization similar despotisms, but based on infantry and artillery, were controlled by figures like Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, or Gustavus Adolphus. In Western Civilization, however, the Agricultural Revolution after 1725 raised standards of living, while the Industrial Revolution after 1800 so lowered the cost of firearms that the ordinary citizen of western Europe and of North America could acquire the most effective weapon existing (the musket). As a result of this, and other factors, democracy came to these areas, along with mass armies of citizen-soldiers. In central and southern Europe where the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions came late or not at all, the victory of democracy was also late and incomplete.

     In Asia generally, the revolution in weapons (meaning muskets and later rifles) came before the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, most firearms were not locally made, but were imported and, being imported, came into the possession of the upper class of rulers, bureaucrats, and landlords and not into the hands of peasants or city masses. As a result, these ruling groups were generally able to maintain their position against their own masses even when they could not defend themselves against European Powers. As a consequence of this, any hope of partial reform or of a successful revolution early enough to be a moderate revolution became quite unlikely. In Russia and in Turkey it required defeat in a foreign war with European states to destroy the corrupt imperial regimes (1917-1921). Earlier, the czar had been able to crush the revolt of 1905, because the army remained loyal to the regime, while the sultan, in 1908, had to yield to a reform movement because it was supported by the army. In India, Malaya, and Indonesia the disarmed native peoples offered no threat of revolt to the ruling European Powers before 1940. In Japan the army, as we shall see, remained loyal to the regime and was able to dominate events so that no revolution was conceivable before 1940. But in China the trend of events was much more complex.

     In China the people could not get weapons because of their low standards of living and the high cost of imported arms. As a result, power remained in the hands of the army, except for small groups who were financed by emigrant Chinese with relatively high incomes overseas. By 1911 the prestige of the imperial regime had fallen so low that it obtained support from almost no one, and the army refused to sustain it. As a result, the revolutionaries, supported by overseas money, were able to overthrow the imperial regime in an almost bloodless revolution, but were not able to control the army after they had technically come to power. The army, leaving the politicians to squabble over forms of government or areas of jurisdiction, became independent political powers loyal to their own chiefs ("warlords"), and supported themselves and maintained their supply of imported arms by exploiting the peasantry of the provinces. The result was a period of "warlordism" from 1920 to 1941.

     In this period the Republican government was in nominal control of the whole country but was actually in control only of the seacoast and river valleys, chiefly in the south, while various warlords, operating as bandits, were in control of the interior and most of the north. In order to restore its control to the whole country, the Republican regime needed money and imported arms. Accordingly, it tried two expedients in sequence. The first expedient, in the period 1920-1927, sought to restore its power in China by obtaining financial and military support from foreign countries (Western countries, Japan, or Soviet Russia). This expedient failed, either because these foreign Powers were unwilling to assist or (in the case of Japan and Soviet Russia) were willing to help only on terms which would have ended China's independent political status. As a consequence, after 1927, the Republican regime underwent a profound change, shifting from a democratic to an authoritarian organization, changing its name from Republican to Nationalist, and seeking the money and arms to restore its control over the country by making an alliance with the landlord, commercial, and banking classes of the eastern Chinese cities. These propertied classes could provide the Republican regime with the money to obtain foreign arms in order to fight the warlords of the west and north, but these groups would not support any Republican effort to deal with the social and economic problems facing the great mass of the Chinese peoples.

     While the Republican armies and the warlords were struggling with each other over the prostrate backs of the Chinese masses, the Japanese attacked China in 1931 and 1937. In order to resist the Japanese it became necessary, after 1940, to arm the Chinese masses. This arming of the masses of Chinese in order to defeat Japan in 1941-1945 made it impossible to continue the Republican regime after 1945 so long as it continued to be allied with the upper economic and social groups of China, since the masses regarded these groups as exploiters. At the same time, changes to more expensive and more complex weapons made it impossible either for warlordism to revive or for the Chinese masses to use their weapons to establish a democratic regime. The new weapons, like airplanes and tanks, could not be supported by peasants on a provincial basis nor could they be operated by peasants. The former fact ended warlordism, while the latter fact ended any possibility of democracy. In view of the low productivity of Chinese agriculture and the difficulty of accumulating sufficient capital either to buy or to manufacture such expensive weapons, these weapons (in either way) could be acquired only by a government in control of most of China and could be used only by a professional army loyal to that government. Under such conditions it was to be expected that such a government would be authoritarian and would continue to exploit the peasantry (in order to accumulate capital either to buy such weapons abroad or to industrialize enough to make them at home, or both).

     From this point of view the history of China in the twentieth century presents five phases, as follows:

     1. The collapse of the imperial regime, to 1911

     2. The failure of the Republic, 1911-1920

     3. The struggle with warlordism, 1920-1941

          a. Efforts to obtain support abroad, 1920-1927

          b. Efforts to obtain support form the propertied groups, 1927-1941

     4. The struggle with Japan, 1931-1945

     5. The authoritarian triumph, 1945—

     The collapse of the imperial regime has already been discussed as a political and economic development. It was also an ideological development. The authoritarian and traditionalist ideology of the old China, in which social conservatism, Confucianist philosophy, and ancestor worship were intimately blended together, was well fitted to resist the intrusion of new ideas and new patterns of action. The failure of the imperial regime to resist the military, economic, and political penetration of Western Civilization gave a fatal blow to this ideology. New ideas of Western origin were introduced, at first by Christian missionaries and later by Chinese students who had studied abroad. By 1900 there were thousands of such students. They had acquired Western ideas which were completely incompatible with the older Chinese system. In general, such Western ideas were not traditionalist or authoritarian, and were, thus, destructive to the Chinese patriarchal family, to ancestor worship, or to the imperial autocracy. The students brought back from abroad Western ideas of science, of democracy, of parliamentarianism, of empiricism, of self-reliance, of liberalism, of individualism, and of pragmatism. Their possession of such ideas made it impossible for them to fit into their own country. As a result, they attempted to change it, developing a revolutionary fervor which merged with the anti-dynastic secret societies which had existed in China since the Manchus took over the country in 1644.

     Japan's victory over China in 1894-1895 in a war arising from a dispute over Korea, and especially the Japanese victory over Russia in the war of 1904-1905, gave a great impetus to the revolutionary spirit in China because these events seemed to show that an Oriental country could adopt Western techniques successfully. The failure of the Boxer movement in 1900 to expel Westerners without using such Western techniques also increased the revolutionary fervor in China. As a consequence of such events, the supporters of the imperial regime began to lose faith in their own system and in their own ideology. They began to install piecemeal, hesitant, and ineffective reforms which disrupted the imperial system without in any way strengthening it. Marriage between Manchu and Chinese was sanctioned for the first time (1902); Manchuria was opened to settlement by Chinese (1907); the system of imperial examinations based on the old literary scholarship for admission to the civil service and the mandarinate were abolished and a Ministry of Education, copied from Japan, was established (1905); a drafted constitution was published providing for provincial assemblies and a future national parliament (1908); the law was codified (1910).

     These concessions did not strengthen the imperial regime, but merely intensified the revolutionary feeling. The death of the emperor and of Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, who had been the real ruler of the country (1908), brought to the throne a two-year-old child, P'u-I. The reactionary elements made use of the regency to obstruct reform, dismissing the conservative reform minister Yan Shih-k’ai (1859-1916). Discovery of the headquarters of the revolutionists at Hankow in 1911 precipitated the revolution. While Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) hurried back to China from abroad, whence he had directed the revolutionary movement for many years, the tottering imperial regime recalled Yuan Shih-K'ai to take command of the anti-revolutionary armies. Instead he cooperated with the revolutionists, forced the abdication of the Manchu dynasty, and plotted to have himself elected as president of the Chinese Republic. Sun Yat-sen who had already been elected provisional president by the National Assembly at Nanking, accepted this situation, retiring from office, and calling on all Chinese to support President Yuan.

     The contrast between Dr. Sun and General Yan, the first and second presidents of the Chinese Republic, was as sharp as could be. Dr. Sun was a believer in Western ideas, especially in science, democracy, parliamentary government, and socialism, and had lived for most of his life as an exile overseas. He was self-sacrificing, idealistic, and somewhat impractical. General Yuan, on the other hand, was purely Chinese, a product of the imperial bureaucracy, who had no knowledge of Western ideas and no faith in either democracy or parliamentary government. He was vigorous, corrupt, realistic, and ambitious. The real basis of his power rested in the new westernized army which he had built up as governor-general of Chihli in 1901-1907. In this force there were five divisions, well trained and completely loyal to Yan. The officers of these units had been picked and trained by Yuan, and played principal roles in Chinese politics after 1916.

     As president, Yan opposed almost everything for which Dr. Sun had dreamed. He expanded the army, bribed politicians, and eliminated those who could not be bribed. The chief support of his policies came from a ฃ25 million loan from Britain, France, Russia, and Japan in 1913. This made him independent of the assembly and of Dr. Sun's political party, the Kuomintang, which dominated the assembly. In 1913 one element of Sun's followers revolted against Yuan but were crushed. Yuan dissolved the Kuomintang, arrested its members, dismissed the Parliament, and revised the constitution to give himself dictatorial powers as president for life, with the right to name his own successor. He was arranging to have himself proclaimed emperor when he died m 1916.

     As soon as Yan died, the military leaders stationed in various parts of the country began to consolidate their power on a local basis. One of them even restored the Manchu dynasty, but it was removed again within two weeks. By the end of 1916 China was under the nominal rule of two governments, one at Peking under Feng Kuo-chang (one of Yuan's militarists) and a secession government at Canton under Dr. Sun. Both of these functioned under a series of fluctuating paper constitutions, but the real power of both was based on the loyalty of local armies. Because in both cases the armies of more remote areas were semi-independent, government in those areas was a matter of negotiation rather than of commands from the capital. Even Dr. Sun saw this situation sufficiently clearly to organize the Cantonese government as a military system with himself as generalissimo (1917). Dr. Sun was so unfitted for this military post that on two occasions he had to flee from his own generals to security in the French concession at Shanghai (1918-1922). Under such conditions Dr. Sun was unable to achieve any of his pet schemes, such as the vigorous political education of the Chinese people, a widespread network of Chinese railways built with foreign capital, or the industrialization of China on a socialist basis. Instead, by 1920, warlordism was supreme, and the Westernized Chinese found opportunity to exercise their new knowledge only in education and in the diplomatic service. Within China itself, command of a well-drilled army in control of a compact group of local provinces was far more valuable than any Westernized knowledge acquired as a student abroad.

The Resurgence of Japan to 1918

     The history of Japan in the twentieth century is quite distinct from that of the other Asiatic peoples. Among the latter the impact of the West led to the disruption of the social and economic structure, the abandonment of the traditional ideologies, and the revelation of the weakness of native political and military systems. In Japan these events either did not occur or occurred in a quite different fashion. Until 1945 Japan's political and military systems were strengthened by Western influences; the older Japanese ideology was retained, relatively intact, even by those who were most energetic copiers of Western ways; and the changes in the older social and economic structure were kept within manageable limits and were directed in a progressive direction. The real reason for these differences probably rests in the ideological factor—that the Japanese, even the vigorous Westernizers, retained the old Japanese point of view and, as a consequence, were allied with the older Japanese political, economic, and social structure rather than opposed to it (as, for example, Westernizers were in India, in China, or in Turkey). The ability of the Japanese to westernize without going into opposition to the basic core of the older system gave a degree of discipline and a sense of unquestioning direction to their lives which allowed Japan to achieve a phenomenal amount of westernization without weakening the older structure or without disrupting it. In a sense until about 1950, Japan took from Western culture only superficial and material details in an imitative way and amalgamated these newly acquired items around the older ideological, political, military, and social structure to make it more powerful and effective. The essential item which the Japanese retained from their traditional society and did not adopt from Western civilization was the ideology. In time, as we shall see, this was very dangerous to both of the societies concerned, to Japan and to the West.

     Originally Japan came into contact with Western civilization in the sixteenth century, about as early as any other Asiatic peoples, but, within a hundred years, Japan was able to eject the West, to exterminate most of its Christian converts, and to slam its doors against the entrance of any Western influences. A very limited amount of trade was permitted on a restricted basis, but only with the Dutch and only through the single port of Nagasaki.

Japan Is Dominated by the Tokugawa Family

     Japan, thus isolated from the world, was dominated by the military dictatorship (or shogunate) of the Tokugawa family. The imperial family had been retired to a largely religious seclusion whence it reigned but did not rule. Beneath the shogun the country was organized in a hereditary hierarchy, headed by local feudal lords. Beneath these lords there were, in descending ranks, armed retainers (samurai), peasants, artisans, and merchants. The whole system was, in theory at least, rigid and unchanging, being based on the double justification of blood and of religion. This was in obvious and sharp contrast with the social organization of China, which was based, in theory, on virtue and on educational training. In Japan virtue and ability were considered to be hereditary rather than acquired characteristics, and, accordingly, each social class had innate differences which had to be maintained by restrictions on intermarriage. The emperor was of the highest level, being descended from the supreme sun goddess, while the lesser lords were descended from lesser gods of varying degrees of remoteness from the sun goddess. Such a point of view discouraged all revolution or social change and all "circulation of the elites," with the result that China's multiplicity of dynasties and rise and fall of families was matched in Japan by a single dynasty whose origins ran back into the remote past, while the dominant individuals of Japanese public life in the twentieth century were members of the same families and clans which were dominating Japanese life centuries ago.

All Non-Japanese Are Basically Inferior Beings

     From this basic idea flowed a number of beliefs which continued to be accepted by most Japanese almost to the present. Most fundamental was the belief that all Japanese were members of a single breed consisting of many different branches or clans of superior or inferior status, depending on their degree of relationship to the imperial family. The individual was of no real significance, while the families and the breed were of major significance, for individuals lived but briefly and possessed little beyond what they received from their ancestors to pass on to their descendants. In this fashion it was accepted by all Japanese that society was more important than any individual and could demand any sacrifice from him, that men were by nature unequal and should be prepared to serve loyally in the particular status into which each had been born, that society is nothing but a great patriarchal system, that in this system authority is based on the personal superiority of man over man and not on any rule of law, that, accordingly, all law is little more than some temporary order from some superior being, and that all non-Japanese, lacking divine ancestry, are basically inferior beings, existing only one cut above the level of animals and, accordingly, having no basis on which to claim any consideration, loyalty, or consistency of treatment at the hands of Japanese.

Japanese World View Is Anti-thetical to Christian World View

     This Japanese ideology was as anti-thetical to the outlook of the Christian West as any which the West encountered in its contacts with other civilizations. It was also an ideology which was peculiarly fitted to resist the intrusion of Western ideas. As a result, Japan was able to accept and to incorporate into its way of life all kinds of Western techniques and material culture without disorganizing its own outlook or its own basic social structure.

     The Tokugawa Shogunate was already long past its prime when, in 1853, the "black ships" of Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. That these vessels could move against the wind, and carried guns more powerful than any the Japanese had ever imagined, was a great shock to the natives of Nippon. The feudal lords who had been growing restive under Tokugawa rule used this event as an excuse to end that rule. These lords, especially the representatives of four western clans, demanded that the emergency be met by abolishing the shogunate and restoring all authority to the hands of the emperor. For more than a decade the decision whether to open Japan to the West or to try to continue the policy of exclusion hung in the balance. In 1863-1866 a series of naval demonstrations and bombardments of Japanese ports by Western Powers forced the opening of Japan and imposed on the country a tariff agreement which restricted import duties to 5 percent until 1899. A new and vigorous emperor came to the throne and accepted the resignation of the last shogun (1867). Japan at once embarked on a policy of rapid Westernization.

Shift in Power from the Shogun to Four Western Japanese Clans

     The period in Japanese history from the so-called Meiji Restoration of 1867 to the granting of a constitution in 1889 is of the most vital importance. In theory what had occurred had been a restoration of Japan's rule from the hands of the shogun back into the hands of the emperor. In fact what occurred was a shift in power from the shogun to the leaders of four western Japanese clans who proceeded to rule Japan in the emperor's name and from the emperor's shadow. These four clans of Satsuma, Choshu, Hizen, and Tosa won the support of certain nobles of the imperial court (such as Saionji and Konoe) and of the richer mercantile families (such as Mitsui) and were able to overthrow the shogun, crush his supporters (in the Battle of Uemo in 1868), and win control of the government and of the emperor himself. The emperor did not assume control of the government, but remained in a semi-religious seclusion, too exalted to concern himself with the functioning of the governmental system except in critical emergencies. In such emergencies the emperor generally did no more than issue a statement or order ("imperial rescript") which had been drawn up by the leaders of the Restoration.

The Meiji Oligarchy

     These leaders, organized in a shadowy group known as the Meiji oligarchy, had obtained complete domination of Japan by 1889. To cover this fact with camouflage, they unleashed a vigorous propaganda of revived Shintoism and of abject submission to the emperor which culminated in the extreme emperor worship of 1941-1945. To provide an administrative basis for their rule, the oligarchy created an extensive governmental bureaucracy recruited from their supporters and inferior members. To provide an economic basis for their rule, this oligarchy used their political influence to pay themselves extensive pensions and governmental grants (presumably as compensation for the ending of their feudal incomes) and to engage in corrupt business relationships with their allies in the commercial classes (like Mitsui or Mitsubishi). To provide a military basis for their rule, the oligarchy created a new imperial army and navy and penetrated the upper ranks of these so that they were able to dominate these forces as they dominated the civil bureaucracy. To provide a social basis for their rule, the oligarchy created an entirely new peerage of five ranks of nobility recruited from their own members and supporters.

The Japanese Oligarchy Draw Up a Constitution That Would Conceal Their

Political Domination of the Country

     Having thus assured their dominant position in the administrative, economic, military, and social life of Japan, the oligarchy in 1889 drew up a constitution which would assure, and yet conceal, their political domination of the country. This constitution did not pretend to be a product of the Japanese people or of the Japanese nation; popular sovereignty and democracy had no place in it. Instead this constitution pretended to be an emission from the emperor, setting up a system in which all government would be in his name, and all officials would be personally responsible to him. It provided for a bicameral Diet as a legislature. The House of Peers consisted of the new nobility which had been created in 1884, while the House of Representatives was to be elected "according to the law." All legislation had to pass each house by majority vote and be signed by a minister of state.

     These ministers, established as a Council of State in 1885, were responsible to the emperor and not to the Diet. Their tasks were carried out through the bureaucracy which was already established. All money appropriations, like other laws, had to obtain the assent of the Diet, but, if the budget was not accepted by this body, the budget of the preceding year was repeated automatically for the following year. The emperor had extensive powers to issue ordinances which had the force of law and required a minister's signature, as did other laws.

Japanese Constitution Based upon the Constitution of Imperial Germany

     This constitution of 1889 was based on the constitution of Imperial Germany and was forced on Japan by the Meiji oligarchy in order to circumvent and anticipate any future agitation for a more liberal constitution based on British, American, or French models. Basically, the form and functioning of the constitution was of little significance, for the country continued to be run by the Meiji oligarchy through their domination of the army and navy, the bureaucracy, economic and social life, and the opinion-forming agencies such as education and religion. In political life this oligarchy was able to control the emperor, the Privy Council, the House of Peers, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy.

The Oligarchy's Chief Aim Was to Westernize Japan

     This left only one possible organ of government, the Diet, through which the oligarchy might be challenged. Moreover, the Diet had only one means (its right to pass the annual budget) by which it could strike back at the oligarchy. This right was of little significance so long as the oligarchy did not want to increase the budget, since the budget of the previous year would be repeated if the Diet rejected the budget of the following year. However, the oligarchy could not be satisfied with a repetition of an earlier budget, for the oligarchy's chief aim, after they had ensured their own wealth and power, was to westernize Japan rapidly enough to be able to defend it against the pressure of the Great Powers of the West.

Controlling the Elections to the Diet

     All these things required a constantly growing budget, and thus gave the Diet a more important role than it would otherwise have had. This role, however, was more of a nuisance than a serious restriction on the power of the Meiji oligarchy because the power of the Diet could be overcome in various ways. Originally, the oligarchy planned to give the Imperial Household such a large endowment of property that its income would be sufficient to support the army and navy outside the national budget. This plan was abandoned as impractical, although the Imperial Household and all its rules were put outside the scope of the constitution. Accordingly, an alternative plan was adopted: to control the elections to the Diet so that its membership would be docile to the wishes of the Meiji oligarchy. As we shall see, controlling the elections to the Diet was possible, but ensuring its docility was quite a different matter.

The Meiji Oligarchy Controls the Police and the Government

     The elections to the Diet could be controlled in three ways: by a restricted suffrage, by campaign contributions, and by bureaucratic manipulation of the elections and the returns. The suffrage was restricted for many years on a property basis, so that, in 1900, only one person in a hundred had the right to vote. The close alliance between the Meiji oligarchy and the richest members of the expanding economic system made it perfectly easy to control the flow of campaign contributions. And if these two methods failed, the Meiji oligarchy controlled both the police and the prefectural bureaucracy which supervised the elections and counted the returns. In case of need, they did not hesitate to use these instruments, censoring opposition papers, prohibiting opposition meetings, using violence, if necessary, to prevent opposition voting, and reporting, through the prefects, as elected candidates who had clearly failed to obtain the largest vote.

The Meiji Oligarchy Controls the Emperor

     These methods were used from the beginning. In the first Diet of 1889, gangsters employed by the oligarchy prevented opposition members from entering the Diet chamber, and at least twenty-eight other members were bribed to shift their votes. In the elections of 189: violence was used, mostly in districts opposed to the government, so that 25 persons were killed and 388 were injured. The government still lost that election but continued to control the Cabinet. It even dismissed eleven prefectural governors who had been stealing votes, as much for their failure to steal enough as for their action in stealing any. When the resulting Diet refused to appropriate for an enlarged navy, it was sent home for eighteen days, and then reassembled to receive an imperial rescript which gave 1.8 million yen over a six-year period from the Imperial Household for the project and went on to order all public officials to contribute one-tenth of their salaries each year for the duration of the naval building program which the Diet had refused to finance. In this fashion, the Diet's control of increased appropriations was circumvented by the Meiji oligarchy's control of the emperor.

     In view of the dominant position of the Meiji oligarchy in Japanese life from 1867 until after 1992, it would be a mistake to interpret such occurrences as unruly Diets, the growth of political parties, or even the establishment of adult manhood suffrage (in 1925) as such events would be interpreted in European history. In the West we are accustomed to narrations about heroic struggles for civil rights and individual liberties, or about the efforts of commercial and industrial capitalists to capture at least a share of political and social power from the hands of the landed aristocracy, the feudal nobility, or the Church. We are acquainted with movements by the masses for political democracy, and with agitations by peasants and workers for economic advantages. All these movements, which fill the pages of European history books, are either absent or have an entirely different significance in Japanese history.

Shintoism Was Promoted by the Meiji Oligarchy to Control the People

     In Japan history presents a basic solidarity of outlook and of purpose, punctuated with brief conflicting outbursts which seem to be contradictory and inexplicable. The explanation of this is to be found in the fact that there was, indeed, a solidarity of outlook but that this solidarity was considerably less solid than it appeared, for, beneath it, Japanese society was filled with fissures and discontents. The solidarity of outlook rested on the ideology which we have mentioned. This ideology, sometimes called Shintoism, was propagated by the upper classes, especially by the Meiji oligarchy but was more sincerely embraced by the lower classes, especially by the rural masses, than it was by the oligarchy which propagated it. This ideology accepted an authoritarian, hierarchical, patriarchal society, based on families, clans, and nation, culminating in respect and subordination to the emperor. In this system there was no place for individualism, self-interest, human liberties, or civil rights.

Shintoism Allowed the Meiji Oligarchy to Pursue Policies of Self-Aggrandizement

     In general, this system was accepted by the mass of the Japanese peoples. As a consequence, these masses allowed the oligarchy to pursue policies of selfish self-aggrandizement, of ruthless exploitation, and of revolutionary economic and social change with little resistance. The peasants were oppressed by universal military service, by high taxes and high interest rates, by low farm prices and high industrial prices, and by the destruction of the market for peasant handicrafts. They revolted briefly and locally in 1884-1885, but were crushed and never revolted again, although they continued to be exploited. All earlier legislation seeking to protect peasant proprietors or to prevent monopolization of the land was revoked in the 1870's.

     In the 1880's there was a drastic reduction in the number of landowners, through heavy taxes, high interest rates, and low prices for farm products. At the same time the growth of urban industry began to destroy the market for peasant handicrafts and the rural "putting-out system" of manufacture. In seven years, 1883-1890, about 360,000 peasant proprietors were dispossessed of 5 million yen worth of land because of total tax arrears of only 114,178 yen (or arrears of only one-third yen, that is, 17 American cents, per person). In the same period, owners were dispossessed of about one hundred times as much land by foreclosure of mortgages. This process continued at varying rates, until, by 1940, three-quarters of Japanese peasants were tenants or part-tenants paying rents of at least half of their annual crop.

Pressures on Japanese Peasants

     In spite of their acceptance of authority and Shinto ideology, the pressures on Japanese peasants would have reached the explosive point if safety valves had not been provided for them. Among these pressures we must take notice of that arising from population increase, a problem arising, as in most Asiatic countries, from the introduction of Western medicine and sanitation. Before the opening of Japan, its population had remained fairly stable at 28-30 million for several centuries. This stability arose from a high death rate supplemented by frequent famines and the practice of infanticide and abortion. By 1870 the population began to grow, rising from 30 million to 56 million in 1920, to 73 million in 1940, and reaching 87 million in 1955.

Meiji Oligarchy Controls Shipping, Railroads, Industry and Services

     The safety valve in the Japanese peasant world resided in the fact that opportunities were opened, with increasing rapidity, in nonagricultural activities in the period 1870-1920. These nonagricultural activities were made available from the fact that the exploiting oligarchy used its own growing income to create such activities by investment in shipping, railroads, industry, and services. These activities made it possible to drain the growing peasant population from the rural areas into the cities. A law of 1873 which established primogeniture in the inheritance of peasant property made it evident that the rural population which migrated to the cities would be second and third sons rather than heads of families. This had numerous social and psychological results, of which the chief was that the new urban population consisted of men detached from the discipline of the patriarchal family and thus less under the influence of the general authoritarian Japanese psychology and more under the influence of demoralizing urban forces. As a consequence, this group, after 1920, became a challenge to the stability of Japanese society.

Exploitation of Japanese Society

     In the cities the working masses of Japanese society continued to be exploited, but now by low wages rather than by high rents, taxes, or interest rates. These urban masses, like the rural masses whence they had been drawn, submitted to such exploitation without resistance for a much longer period than Europeans would have done because they continued to accept the authoritarian, submissive Shintoist ideology. They were excluded from participation in political life until the establishment of adult manhood suffrage in 1925. It was not until after this date that any noticeable weakening of the authoritarian Japanese ideology began to appear among the urban masses.

     Resistance of the urban masses to exploitation through economic or social organizations was weakened by the restrictions on workers' organizations of all kinds. The general restrictions on the press, on assemblies, on freedom of speech, and on the establishment of "secret" societies were enforced quite strictly against all groups and doubly so against laboring groups. There were minor socialistic and laborers' agitations in the twenty years 1890-1910. These were brought to a violent end in 1910 by the execution of twelve persons for anarchistic agitations. The labor movement did not raise its head again until the economic crisis of 1919-1922.

The Low-Wage Policy of Japanese Originated in the Self-Interest of the Elite

     The low-wage policy of the Japanese industrial system originated in the self-interest of the early capitalists, but came to be justified with the argument that the only commodity Japan had to offer the world, and the only one on which it would construct a status as a Great Power, was its large supply of cheap labor. Japan's mineral resources, including coal, iron, or petroleum, were poor in both quality and quantity; of textile raw materials it had only silk, and lacked both cotton and wool. It had no natural resources of importance for which there was world demand such as were to be found in the tin of Malaya, the rubber of Indonesia, or the cocoa of West Africa; it had neither the land nor the fodder to produce either dairy or animal products as Argentina, Denmark, New Zealand, or Australia. The only important resources it had which could be used to provide export goods to exchange for imported coal, iron, or oil were silk, forest products, and products of the sea. All these required a considerable expenditure of labor, and these products could be sold abroad only if prices were kept low by keeping wage rates down.

     Since these products did not command sufficient foreign exchange to allow Japan to pay for the imports of coal, iron, and oil which a Great Power must have, Japan had to find some method by which it could export its labor and obtain pay for it. This led to the growth of manufacturing industries based on imported raw materials and the development of such service activities as fishing and ocean shipping. At an early date Japan began to develop an industrial system in which raw materials such as coal, wrought iron, raw cotton, or wool were imported, fabricated into more expensive and complex forms, and exported again for a higher price in the form of machinery or finished textiles. Other products which were exported included such forest products as tea, carved woods, or raw silk, or such products of Japanese labor as finished silks, canned fish, or shipping services.

The Meiji Oligarchy Is Controlled by a Small Group of Men

     The political and economic decisions which led to these developments and which exploited the rural and urban masses of Japan were made by the Meiji oligarchy and their supporters. The decision-making powers in this oligarchy were concentrated in a surprisingly small group of men, in all, no more than a dozen in number, and made up, chiefly, of the leaders of the four western clans which had led the movement against the shogun in 1867. These leaders came in time to form a formal, if extralegal, group known as the Genro (or Council of Elder Statesmen). Of this group Robert Reischauer wrote in 1938: "It is these men who have been the real power behind the Throne. It became customary for their opinion to be asked and, more important still, to be followed in all matters of great significance to the welfare of the state. No Premier was ever appointed except from the recommendation of these men who became known as Genro. Until 1922 no important domestic legislation, no important foreign treaty escaped their perusal and sanction before it was signed by the Emperor. These men, in their time, were the actual rulers of Japan."

The Eight Members of the Genro Control Japan

     The importance of this group can be seen from the fact that the Genro had only eight members, yet the office of prime minister was held by a Genro from 1885 to 1916, and the important post of president of the Privy Council was held by a Genro from its creation in 1889 to 1922 (except for the years 1890-1892 when Count Oki of the Hizen clan held it for Okuma). If we list the eight Genro with three of their close associates, we shall be setting down the chief personnel of Japanese history in the period covered by this chapter. To such a list we might add certain other significant facts, such as the social origins of these men, the dates of their deaths, and their dominant connections with the two branches of the defense forces and with the two greatest Japanese

industrial monopolies. The significance of these connections will appear in a moment.

The Meij Oligarchy

               Name               Date

Social               (Genro               of                         Linked

Origin               Marked*)          Death          Dominated          With

               *Ito               1909

Choshu          *Yamagata          1922           Army               Mitsui

               *Inoue               1915

               *Katsura          1913

                *Oyama          1916

                *Matsukata          1924

Satsuma           Kuroda                    Navy

                Yamamoto

                                        Progressive

Hizen               Okuma               1922          Party from 1882

                                        Liberal Party

Tosa                Itagaki               1920          from 1881          Mitsubishi

Noble                Saionji               1940          Last of the

Court                                        Genro"               Sumitomo

                                        (1924-1940)

The Unofficial Rules of Japan

     Japanese history from 1890 to 1940 is largely a commentary on this table. We have said that the Meiji Restoration of 1868 resulted from an alliance of four western clans and some court nobles against the shogunate and that this alliance was financed by commercial groups led by Mitsui. The leaders of this movement who were still alive after 1890 came to form the Genro, the real but unofficial rulers of Japan. As the years passed and the Genro became older and died, their power became weaker, and there arose two claimants to succeed them: the militarists and the political parties. In this struggle the social groups behind the political parties were so diverse and so corrupt that their success was never in the realm of practical politics. In spite of this fact, the struggle between the militarists and the political parties looked fairly even until 1935, not because of any strength or natural ability in the ranks of the latter but simply because Saionji, the "Last of the Genro" and the only non-clan member in that select group, did all he could to delay or to avoid the almost inevitable triumph of the militarists.

     All the factors in this struggle and the political events of Japanese history arising from the interplay of these factors go back to their roots in the Genro as it existed before 1900. The political parties and Mitsubishi were built up as Hizen-Tosa weapons to combat the Choshu-Satsuma domination of the power nexus organized on the civilian-military bureaucracy allied with Mitsui; the army-navy rivalry (which appeared in 1912 and became acute after 1931) had its roots in an old competition between Choshu and Satsuma within the Genro; while the civilian-militarist struggle went back to the personal rivalry between Ito and Yamagata before 1900. Yet, in spite of these fissures and rivalries, the oligarchy as a whole generally presented a united front against outside groups (such as peasants, workers, intellectuals, or Christians) in Japan itself or against non-Japanese.

Ito—the Most Powerful Man in Japan

     From 1882 to 1898 Ito was the dominant figure in the Meiji oligarchy, and the most powerful figure in Japan. As minister of the Imperial Household, he was charged with the task of drawing up the constitution of 1889; as president of the Privy Council, he guided the deliberations of the assembly which ratified this constitution; and as first prime minister of the new Japan, he established the foundations on which it would operate. In the process he entrenched the Sat-Cho oligarchy so firmly in power that the supporters of Tosa and Hizen began to agitate against the government, seeking to obtain what they regarded as their proper share of the plums of office.

Political Parties Arise in Japan

     In order to build up opposition to the government, they organized the first real political parties, the Liberal Party of Itagaki (1881) and the Progressive Party of Okuma (1882). These parties adopted liberal and popular ideologies from bourgeois Europe, but, generally, these were not sincerely held or clearly understood. The real aim of these two groups was to make themselves so much of a nuisance to the prevailing oligarchy that they could obtain, as a price for relaxing their attacks, a share of the patronage of public office and of government contracts. Accordingly, the leaders of these parties, again and again, sold out their party followers in return for these concessions, generally dissolving their parties, to re-create them at some later date when their discontent with the prevailing oligarchy had risen once again. As a result, the opposition parties vanished and reappeared, and their leaders moved into and out of public office in accordance with the whims of satisfied or discontented personal ambitions.

The Great Monopolies of Japan

     Just as Mitsui became the greatest industrial monopoly of Japan on the basis of its political connections with the prevalent Sat-Cho oligarchy, so Mitsubishi became Japan's second greatest monopoly on the basis of its political connections with the opposition groups of Tosa-Hizen. Indeed, Mitsubishi began its career as the commercial firm of the Tosa clan, and Y. Iwasaki, who had managed it in the latter role, continued to manage it when it blossomed into Mitsubishi. Both of these firms, and a handful of other monopolistic organizations which grew up later, were completely dependent for their profits and growth on political connections.

The Rise of the Zaibatsu

     The task of building Japan into a modern industrial power in a single lifetime required enormous capital and stable markets. In a poor country like Japan, coming late into the industrial era, both of these requirements could be obtained from the government, and in no other way. As a result business enterprise became organized in a few very large monopolistic structures, and these (in spite of their size) never acted as independent powers, even in economic matters, but cooperated in a docile fashion with those who controlled government expenditures and government contracts. Thus they cooperated with the Meiji oligarchy before 1922, with the political party leaders in 1922-1932, and with the militarists after 1932. Taken together, these monopolistic industrial and financial organizations were known as zaibatsu. There were eight important organizations of this kind in the period after World War I, but three were so powerful that they dominated the other five, as well as the whole economic system. These three were Mitsui, Mitsubishi, and Sumitomo (controlled by Saionji's relatives). These competed with one another in a halfhearted fashion, but such competition was political rather than economic, and always remained within the rules of a system which they all accepted.

The Elite Oligarchy Maintains Control of Japan

     In the period 1885-1901, during which Ito was premier four times, Matsukata twice, and Yamagata twice, it became evident that the oligarchy could not be controlled by the Diet or by the Tosa-Hizen political parties but could always rule Japan through its control of the emperor, the armed forces, and the civil bureaucracy. This victory was hardly established before a rivalry appeared between Ito, supported by the civil bureaucracy, and Yamagata, supported by the armed services. By 1900 Yamagata won a decisive victory over Ito and formed his second Cabinet (1898-1900), from which the Ito group was, for the first time, completely excluded. During this administration Yamagata extended the franchise from half a million to a million voters in order to obtain city support for imposing taxes on rural lands to pay for military expansion. Far more important than this, he established a law that the ministries of the army and the navy must be headed by Cabinet posts held by active generals and admirals of the highest rank. This law made civilian rule of Japan impossible thereafter because no prime minister or member of the Cabinet could fill the two defense posts unless they made concessions to the armed services.

Internal Feuds for Power

     In retaliation for this defeat, Ito made an alliance with the Liberal Party of Itagaki (1900) and took office as prime minister for the third time (1900-1901). But he had little freedom of action, since the minister of war, in accordance with the new law, was Yamagata's man, Katsura, and the minister of the navy was Admiral Yamamoto.

     In 1903 Yamagata obtained an imperial rescript forcing Ito to retire from active political life to the shelter of the Privy Council. Ito did so, leaving the Liberal Party and the leadership of the civilian forces to his prot้g้, Saionji. Yamagata had already retired behind the scenes, but still dominated political life through his prot้g้, Katsura.

     The period 1901-1913 saw an alternation of Katsura and Saionji governments, in which the former clearly controlled the government, while the latter, through the Liberal Party, won large and meaningless victories at the polls. Both in 1908 and in 1912 Saionji's party won easy victories in general elections held while he was in office, and in both cases Katsura forced him out of office in spite of his majority in the Diet.

     At this point Katsura's ruthless use of the emperor and the militarists to increase the size and power of the army brought a new factor into Japanese political life by leading to a split with the navy. In 1912, when Saionji and Katsura had each headed two governments since 1901, the former refused to increase the army by two divisions (for service in Korea). Katsura at once threw the Saionji government out of office by having the minister of war resign. When Saionji could find no eligible general willing to serve, Katsura formed his third Cabinet (1912-1913) and created the new divisions.

     The navy, alienated by the army's high-handed political tactics, tried to keep Katsura out of office in 1912 by refusing to provide an admiral to serve as minister of the navy. They were defeated when Katsura produced an imperial rescript from the new Emperor Taisho (1912-1926) ordering them to provide an admiral. The navy retaliated the following year by forming an alliance with the Liberals and other anti-Katsura forces, on the grounds that his frequent use of imperial intervention in behalf of the lowest partisan politics was an insult to the exalted sanctity of the imperial position. For the first and only time, in 1913, an imperial rescript was refused acceptance, by the Liberal Party; Katsura had to resign, and a new Cabinet, under Admiral Yamamoto, was formed (1913-1914). This alliance of the navy, the Satsuma clan, and the Liberal Party so enraged the Choshu clan that the military and civilian wings of that group came together on an anti-Satsuma basis.

Japanese Officials Receive Bribes from Foreign Munitions Firms

     In 1914 it was revealed that several high admirals had accepted bribes from foreign munitions firms such as German Siemens and British Vickers. Choshu used this as a club to force Yamamoto to resign, but since they could not form a government themselves they called Okuma out of retirement to form a temporary government completely dependent on them. The old man was given a majority in the Diet by turning the existing Liberal Party majority out of office and, in a completely corrupt election, providing a majority for a new Constitutional Believers' Party, which Katsura had created in 1913. Okuma was completely dependent on the Choshu oligarchy (which meant on Yamagata, as Ito died in 1909 and Inoue in 1915). He gave them two new army divisions and a strong anti-Chinese policy, but was replaced by General Terauchi, a Choshu militarist and favorite of Yamagata, in 1916. To provide this new government with less obviously corrupt party support, a deal was made with the Liberal Party. In return for seats in the Diet, places in the bureaucracy, and Mitsui money, this old Tosa party sold out to Choshu militarism, and was provided, by the prefectural governors, with a satisfying majority in the general election of 1916.

Control of Japan under Domination of One Man

     Under the Terauchi government, Choshu militarism and Yamagata's personal power reached their culmination. By that time every high officer in the army owed his position to Yamagata's patronage. His old civilian rivals, like Ito or Inoue, were dead. Of the four remaining Genro, only Yamagata, aged eighty-one in 1918, still had his hands on the tiller; Matsukata, aged eighty-four, was a weakling; Okuma, aged eighty-one, was an outsider; and Saionji, aged seventy, was a semi-outsider. The emperor, as a result of the protests of 1913, no longer intervened in political life. The political parties were demoralized and subservient, prepared to sacrifice any principle for a few jobs. The economic organizations, led by the great zaibatsu, were completely dependent on government subsidies and government contracts. In a word, the controls of the Meiji oligarchy had come almost completely into the hands of one man.

The Incredible Degree of Concentration of Power in Japan

     It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree of concentration of power in Japan in the period covered by this chapter. In thirty-three years of Cabinet government, there had been eighteen Cabinets but only nine different premiers. Of these nine premiers, only two (Saionji and Okuma) were not of Choshu or Satsuma, while five were military men.

     The growing militarization of Japanese life in the period ending in 1918 had ominous implications for the future. Not only did militarists control growing sectors of Japanese life; they had also succeeded in merging loyalty to the emperor and subservience to militarism into a single loyalty which no Japanese could reject without, at the same time, rejecting his country, his family, and his whole tradition. Even more ominous was the growing evidence that Japanese militarism was insanely aggressive, and prone to find the solution for internal problems in foreign wars.

Japan Becomes Aggressive

     On three occasions in thirty years, against China in 1894-1895, against Russia in 1904-1905, and against China and Germany in 1914-1918, Japan had entered upon warlike action for purely aggressive purposes. As a consequence of the first action, Japan acquired Formosa and the Pescadores and forced China to recognize the independence of Korea (1895). The subsequent Japanese penetration of Korea led to a rivalry with Russia, whose Trans-Siberian Railway was encouraging her to compensate for her rebuffs in the Balkans by increasing her pressure in the Far East.

     In order to isolate the approaching conflict with Russia, Japan signed a treaty with Britain (1902). By this treaty each signer could expect support from the other if it became engaged in war with more than one enemy in the Far East. With Russia thus isolated in the area, Japan attacked the czar's forces in 1904. These forces were destroyed on land by Japanese armies under the Satsuma Genro Oyama, while the Russian fleet of thirty-two vessels, coming from Europe, was destroyed by the Satsuma Admiral Togo in Tsushima Straits. By the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) Russia renounced her influence in Korea, yielded southern Sakhalin and the lease on Liaotung to Japan, and agreed to a joint renunciation of Manchuria (which was to be evacuated by both Powers and restored to China). Korea, which had been made a Japanese protectorate in 1904, was annexed in 1910.

Outbreak of War in 1914

     The outbreak of war in 1914 provided a great opportunity for Japanese expansion. While all the Great Powers were busy elsewhere, the Far East was left to Japan. Declaring war on Germany on August 23, 1914, Nipponese troops seized the German holdings on the Shantung Peninsula and the German Pacific islands north of the equator (Marshall Islands, Marianas, and Carolines). This was followed, almost immediately (January 1915), by presentation of "Twenty-one Demands" on China. These demands at once revealed Japan's aggressive ambitions on the continent of Asia, and led to a decisive change in world opinion about Japan, especially in the United States. As preparation for such demands Japan had been able to build up a very pro-Japanese feeling in most of the Great Powers. Formal agreements or notes had been made with these, recognizing, in one way or another, Japan's special concern with East Asia. In respect to Russia a series of agreements had established spheres of influence. These gave northern Manchuria and western Inner Mongolia as spheres to Russia, and southern Manchuria with eastern Inner Mongolia as spheres for Japan.

Japanese Agree upon an Open-Door Policy in China

     A number of diplomatic notes between the United States and Japan had arranged a tacit American acceptance of the Japanese position in Manchuria in return for a Japanese acceptance of the "Open-Door" or free-trade policy in China. The Twenty-one Demands broke this agreement with the United States since they sought to create for Japan a special economic position in China. In combination with the injury inflicted on Japanese pride by the rigid American restrictions on Japanese immigration into the United States, this marked a turning point in Japanese-American feeling from the generally favorable tone which it had possessed before 1915 to the growing unfavorable tone it assumed after 1915.

     Unfavorable world opinion forced Japan to withdraw the most extreme of her Twenty-one Demands (those which were concerned with the use of Japanese advisers in various Chinese administrative functions), but many of the others were accepted by China under pressure of a Japanese ultimatum. The chief of these permitted Japan to arrange with Germany regarding the disposition of the German concessions in China without interference from China itself. Other demands, which were accepted, gave Japan numerous commercial, mining, and industrial concessions, mostly in eastern Inner Mongolia and southern Manchuria.

Japan Was the Preeminent Power in East Asia

     In spite of her growing alienation of world opinion in the years of the First World War, the war brought Japan to a peak of prosperity and power it had not previously attained. The demand for Japanese good s by the belligerent countries resulted in a great industrial boom. The increase in the Japanese fleet and in Japanese territories in the northern Pacific, as well as the withdrawal of her European rivals from the area, gave Japan a naval supremacy there which was formally accepted by the other naval Powers in the Washington Agreements of 1922. And the Japanese advances in northern China made her the preeminent Power in East Asian economic and political life. All in all, the successors of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 could look with profound satisfaction on Japan's progress by 1918.

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