Free Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Page A

ranks, but they did not abandon the claim that their principal aim was the dispersion of Christian morality. The best of them saw the profit and power of Empire only as appendages to this high purpose. ‘In the Empire we have found,’ George Curzon once magnificently announced, ‘not merely the key to glory and wealth, but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.’ 1 Even Joseph Chamberlain, who saw the Empire primarily as a profitable estate, declared that British imperial rule could be justified only if it added to the happiness, prosperity, security and peace of the subject peoples—‘in carrying out this work of civilization we are fulfilling what I believe to be our national mission’. ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden!’ cried Kipling, when the Americans were debating whether or not to acquire the Philippines:
    Take up the White Man’s Burden—
        In patience to abide,
    To veil the threat of terror
        And check the show of pride;

        An hundred times made plain,
    To seek another ’s profit‚
        And work another’s gain.
    To much of the world this was fearful hypocrisy. Not to the British, even at their brashest heights of Jingo. They saw themselves sometimes as masters of the world, but sometimes as servants—public servants, like policemen or schoolmasters. When the young Thomas Russell went out to join the Egyptian police he thought of himself as standing towards the Egyptian people ‘as an old-fashioned headmaster of an approved school stood in relation to those whose criminal tendencies he must correct’. 1 Queen Victoria’s own definition of the imperial mission was ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilization’.
    The missionary urge in its most basic sense—the conversion of heathens to Christianity—had acquired several new possessions for the Empire. The missionaries were seldom consciously colonizers, but their old ideas of establishing independent native theocracies had withered in the face of Africa’s pagan awfulness, and now they were generally for the expansion of British rule as the best available medium for the reclamation of savages. And it was a true Christian zeal that still inspired the British in their campaigns against slavery—by no means ended yet, for the Royal Navy was still chasing slave-runners in the Red Sea, slave-columns were still travelling out of Africa to the coast, and often escaped slaves would stumble into the courtyard of the British Consulate at Muscat to throw their arms around the flagstaff and claim their freedom. That very year the Sultan of Zanzibar, whose country had been a British protectorate since 1890, was induced to abolish the legal status of slavery: In Livingstone’s day this island had been the chief clearing-house of African slaves, destined for the markets of the whole Muslim world, and its streets swarmed with captive humans, painted and paradedaround the town for the inspection of buyers, slumped hopelessly in stables, or packed by night below decks on the dhows, to run the gauntlet of the Royal Navy offshore. Now it was all ended, and the foundation stone of the Anglican Cathedral of Zanzibar was laid upon the site of the last slave-post in the market.
    Of course, the imperialists were thinking partly of their own salvation. Empire was a means of moral self-elevation, too. As capital punishment had a brutalizing effect on the hangman, and should therefore be abolished, so helping the heathen had an inspiring effect on the imperialists, and should therefore be encouraged. Disraeli claimed that he had developed the Empire ‘believing that the combination of achievement and responsibility elevates the character and condition of a people’. Dilke maintained that the British were chiefly interested in Africa ‘through their traditional desire to suppress the evils of the slave trade, and to pay conscience money in these days for the sins, in connection with slavery, of their predecessors’. To