Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The landed oligarchy which arose in England differed from the landed aristocracy of continental Europe in the three points already mentioned: (i) 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 landholdings 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.

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 upper-class 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 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.

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.

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.

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 (185 3-1902) 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.