The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (144 page)

All this was threatening to the defenders of a rich national legacy, and it was a new experience for them. Their fathers had snorted and had ignored the Ruskins and Paters and Wildes because British supremacy, in those days, had been unquestioned. No more; since the Armistice, England had steadily lost ground to competitors abroad in virtually every field of endeavor. Yet Englishmen could not rid themselves of the old complacency. Cunarders, they told one another, were the world’s finest ocean liners, and R.M.S.
Queen Mary,
now about to be launched, would set a standard none could surpass.
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They were right, but steamships, like locomotives, in the construction of which the Victorians had also excelled, were not the transport of the future. Britannia had ruled the waves and the railway tracks, but was far from indomitable on highways and in the air—especially the air. Imperial Airways, Morris wrote, “enjoyed semi-official privileges,” yet its management was inefficient and its schedules ridiculous; a person flying from London to Cape Town had to change planes six times.
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Seasoned British travelers preferred KLM. But Britain’s greatest aerial fiasco was the maiden voyage of the R 101, the costliest airship ever built in England, a few months after Churchill’s return from the United States. Great hopes were reposed in the R 101. A pet project of Ramsay MacDonald’s, it was expected to demonstrate Britain’s enduring dominance in technology and provide mail and passenger service between Canada, South Africa, Australia, and India. This superzeppelin, powered by diesel engines, took off from Cardington in Bedfordshire on October 4, 1930, bound for Karachi, 3,652 miles away. It had traveled 300 miles when it struck a low hill on the outskirts of Beauvais, northwest of Paris, and collapsed in flames. The Empire’s prime ministers, assembled in London to draft the Statute of Westminster, observed a minute of silent prayer. It should have been longer. They were mourning the passing of something far more momentous than a dirigible.

B
ut the Dominion leaders had much to celebrate, too. In 1926 England and its white possessions had become “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Now came the Statute of Westminster, which was just beginning its two-year progress through the parliamentary process. It was a historic measure, international in its implications, perhaps the vastest piece of legislation ever to pass through this or any other legislative body. Arthur Balfour called it “the most novel and greatest experiment in Empire-building the world has ever seen.”
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Jan Christiaan Smuts, its author, knew better. The statute was in fact a blue-print for the dismantling of the Empire. Under its terms, the Mother Country relinquished all authority over the white Dominions; laws passed by the House of Commons were inapplicable in them, and the House could not overrule acts of Dominion parliaments, which, indeed, were granted veto power over the succession to the British throne.

The Statute of Westminster was not only flexible; it was equivocal. Its language might be interpreted any way you liked.
Civis Britannicus Sum
could be translated to mean everything or nothing. A New Zealand lawyer could cite a precedent in Britain’s elaborate imperial judicial system; the New Zealand judge could defer to the precedent or laugh it out of court. Ireland could and did quote the statute as justifying its complete secession from the Commonwealth, converting itself into “a sovereign, independent and democratic State.”
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While the imperial conference was deliberating over the phrasing of the statute, and the R 101 was disappearing in a bellying sheet of flame, taking forty-eight British lives with it, Mohandas Gandhi was observing his sixty-first birthday in a Poona jail. Since the statute in this early draft excluded possessions inhabited by men with pigmented skin, Gandhi and his cause, it would seem, gained nothing from it. But the language of Lord Irwin’s presentation defined the Commonwealth as color-blind—if it hadn’t, the pressure of twentieth-century history would have made the discrimination indefensible anyhow. Even as Victor McLaglen, Ronald Colman, and C. Aubrey Smith held audiences enthralled, the Empire they were celebrating was fading with the credits.

In every age there are certain articles of faith which society accepts unquestioningly, with or without evidence; often, indeed, in the face of inconvenient facts. The faith may be religious, moral, or political. During the last quarter of the twentieth century it has become political. Creeds, like streams, gather strength as they narrow, thriving on bigotry—at present, liberal bigotry. In our time the institution of European colonialism is condemned as an abomination. No defense of it is admissible. The transformation of former colonies into emerging nations is regarded as inherently benign, one of the few great achievements in a troubled century. Africa, we are told, is free. Certainly it is free of foreign administration, but the question of whether the people of Libya, Uganda, Angola, or Katanga enjoy political freedom—not to mention the four freedoms, from fear and want and of religion and speech, proclaimed by Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941—is so provocative that raising it is bad taste. Yet despite the hopes raised by Gandhi and his gifted successor, Jawaharlal Nehru, the results of their statecraft are rather different from those they anticipated. The old Indian Empire is now split into five nations. In all of them the beneficence which was expected to replace the departed Raj is, if present, extremely well camouflaged. This is not an argument against the rise of national pride in what we have come to call the Third World. To disapprove of what Macmillan called “the winds of change” would be like passing judgment on the decline of Rome, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or the Industrial Revolution. History can never be put in the dock. But before examining it, one should clear the mind of cant.

In 1885 a clique of upper-class Indians established, as an annual custom, a three-day Christmas-week picnic. They called it the Indian National Congress. Except in 1906, when its members approved a mild resolution favoring some form of Indian self-government in domestic affairs, the congress had no political overtones until 1920. Nevertheless, the damage to imperial authority had been done long before that. It is obvious now that the ultimate failure of the Raj was social, not political. Lord Willingdon told Boothby he once invited a distinguished Indian prince, a friend of his, to lunch at Bombay’s Yacht Club. When they were ordering drinks, a porter came over and told Willingdon: “I am sorry, your Excellency, but the secretary has asked me to tell you that niggers are not allowed in this club.” Boothby himself agreed with Clemenceau’s observation that Englishmen and Indians in the Raj “do not mingle at all.” Had the picnickers of 1885 included English families, the congress might have remained a frolic. Like Gandhi, who conceived of England as “a land of philosophers and poets, the very centre of civilization,” the original congressmen were fervent anglophiles.
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But this, from the British point of view, was less a blessing than it seemed. The most sophisticated of them spent several years in the Mother Country—Gandhi was admitted to the Inner Temple, one of London’s four law colleges (“inns of court”)—or sent their sons there: Jawaharlal Nehru, like Churchill, attended Harrow. Inspired by the liberal idealism of their English teachers, they returned home with a new sense of purpose, which grew, after the Armistice, when they followed the events in Ireland with intense interest. Under Gandhi’s guidance the congress became a mass movement, with Indian freedom as its objective. Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal’s father, became co-founder of the Swarajya party.
Hind Swaraj
is a subtle Hindi phrase; under Motilal it was translated as “Indian home rule,” or the achievement of dominion status; later, when his son rose to power, it came to mean independence—a socialist republic.

In either case, the task confronting the congress was almost beyond imagining. Ireland was difficult, but in India the problems of nationhood were increased a thousandfold. The Raj wasn’t even entirely British; France ruled five small colonies there and Portugal three. The subcontinent’s vast population, which increased by some thirty-four million each decade, was divided into four dominant ethnic strains: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Australoid, and Negroid. They spoke 225 main languages; each of the most popular 12 was the native tongue for at least ten million Indians. The illiteracy rate in the Indian Empire was 88 percent; the average diet, between six and seven hundred calories a day. Idols, and there were thousands of them, were worshiped by Hindus, Moslems, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians, and the possibilities for religious conflict were limitless. Moslems regarded swine as unclean. To Hindus, cows, monkeys, and the waters of the Ganges were sacred. Assam head-hunters knelt before the skulls of their victims and chewed their fathers’ bones, regarding the marrow as an aphrodisiac. To offer a Sikh a cigarette, or to light up near one of his shrines, could be suicidal. Hindus and Moslems were forever stalking one another with daggers, swords, spears, and torches. The followers of these warring faiths did not live apart; they mingled daily. Segregating them, even roughly, would require the relocation of between fourteen and sixteen million people. Moreover, native rulers and their subjects often prayed at different altars. The nawab of Junadagh was a Moslem; 81 percent of his people were Hindus. The maharaja of Kashmir was a Hindu; of his four million Kashmiris, 80 percent were Moslems. “India is an abstraction,” Churchill said. “India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”
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Two out of every three Indians were Hindus. Because of their beliefs, seven hundred million cattle roamed unharmed in a country which always teetered on the brink of starvation and sometimes plunged into famine. Hinduism is an exquisite maze of twistings and circlings and doublings-back, of poetry and philosophy and taboos, of hauntingly lovely corridors and frightening tunnels into the darker places in the human mind, and many pilgrims from the West, having studied it, have emerged the better for the journey. One of them, Frank Lloyd Wright, once told a group of fellow architects that Hindu thought takes a longer route on its way to reach a conclusion and “gathers more richness along the way.” In an illustration which would almost certainly have baffled Churchill, Wright drew a diagram:
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To those who have not mastered it, the reasoning in the Bhagavad-Gita or the more complex Upanishads can be immensely frustrating. A single idea sets off a series of cerebral reactions so complex that one may become quickly, and hopelessly, entangled—as in the Dharma Chakra, or Wheel of Asoka, now displayed on the Indian flag. The wheel dates from 228
B.C.,
and its hub, rim, and spokes blend concepts of light, truth, simplicity, compassion, renunciation, humility, faith, strength, fellowship, and interdependence, all entwined in an image which links, reinforces, and merges them. You do not have to understand it to feel its conceptual power, but the learned Hindu will pity you for your ignorance. He will also feel superior to you in other ways. High Brahmins, for example, seem to their Western friends to bathe incessantly. They are probably the cleanest people in the world. To them, Englishmen and Americans are coarse and crude, with unspeakable personal habits.