Free Pax Britannica by Jan Morris

people wanting to fulfil themselves abroad ‘reason and justification for foreign extensions where they can legitimately be made’.
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    What incentives they were! The smell of the veldt, the illicit delight of a sabre-slash in the sunshine, a drum-beat out of the forested hills, the first sod turned on your own homestead, with a million acres to come; the wheezing breath of your dear old bearer, as he lit the juniper fire in the morning, and brought the teapot steaming to your bed; the never-sated excitement of tigers, the pride of red tunic and swagger stick in the bazaars, the thump of the band behind you as you clattered, the Colonel’s lady, in your spanking tonga through the cantonment, or the dull gleam of a nugget in the clay, Twelve Below Discovery on Bonanza Creek: gracious acceptance of curtsies, on the lawn for the Queen’s Birthday—sparkle of brass polished thin, as your carriage braked precariously down the tree-shaded road from the Peak—sudden tap of Morse in the silence of the Outback—first place for the Royal Mail on the convoy through Suez—unexpected promotion to be officer in charge of the Ex-Amir of Kabul— ‘the Ship cannot dock at Addah owing to the surf, but  Mr Micah our Agent will be on the beach to welcome you from the Surf boat, and I remain, Dear Sir, Y our Faithful Servant , p.p. F. and A. Swanzy’ . The cloud of dust and jingle of accoutrement, as the dispatch rider swept in with an ultimatum for the paramount chief; the gleaming plates of the entrepreneurs on the waterfront at Singapore; flowers and brown arms in the Pacific evening; flash, and fire, and black men all around you, and great ships steaming, and curry on the train at Sher Shah junction, and the Admiral’s pinnace chugging across Esquimalt Bay, and the surreptitious glance at the Gazette, over the breakfast table before morning inspection, on the day they announced the Birthday Honours. All these fortified the pugnacity of Empire: and filtered back along the trade routes, distilled in the heady patriotism of home, they laced the policies of State.
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    Many years before Dr Livingstone had laid another trail of glory. When he first penetrated the interior of Central Africa he set a standard for his compatriots. He was the best of men. He was very brave. He was contributing to human knowledge. He was opening the way for trade and probably dominion. Above all he was serving God, and revealing the Christian truth to people miserably denied it. 1 Christian philanthropy was seldom altogether absent from the imperial enterprises of the Victorians. The one universally admired achievement of Empire was the abolition of the West African slave trade. The ideal imperial general was Gordon, England’s pattern of a Christian hero. Even Rhodes was a clergyman’s son, one was relieved to remember, and scrutinizing every imperial policy, sometimes censorious, sometimes eagerly in support, stood the watchdogs of humanitarianism—the Anti-Slavery Society, the Aborigines Protection Society, and many another staunch old institution. Ruskin once spoke of the colonies as ‘motionless navies’, but hecorrected his metaphor—‘or rather, in the true and mightiest sense, motionless churches, ruled by pilots of the Galilean lake of all the world’. In that last heyday of Christian power the British had no doubts about the superiority of their civilization and its faith. They believed it to be their duty, however arduous or expensive, to distribute it among the heathen and the ignorant. Time and again the spokesmen of imperialism appealed to Providence, as the ultimate source of British power: they had been chosen for this task, and were in a kind of ecstasy.
    Bigness, Seeley had preached, was not necessarily greatness. ‘If by remaining in the second rank of magnitude we can hold the first rank morally and intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude.’ By the nineties the British generally believed they could occupy both