Free Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Page B

some idealists this was a back-handed way of attaining perpetual glory—there were evangelists who considered the Indian Mutiny a divine punishment for the failure to make the Bible compulsory reading in Indian schools. To others the scouring or purifying effect of the imperial mission was more straightforward, and might be summed up in the motto of the Rand Pioneers’ Association: ‘They Did Their Level Best’.
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    The evangelical mood was now past its prime, and agnostics were asking if it was really proper to chivvy natives out of their own certainties of fetish and taboo into Christianity’s dim sanctuary. A less debatable moral impulse was the urge to spread good government throughout the world. The British were convinced, not without reason, that they had developed a unique mastery of the art of Government—towering supreme among scenes of peace and plenty. ‘We happen to be the best people in the world,’ Rhodes once roundly declared, ‘with the highest ideals of decency and justice and liberty and peace, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity.’ Chamberlain, too, once publicly expressedhis belief that the British was the greatest governing race the world had ever seen. These gifts, the imperialists felt, they had a mission to employ. They knew best, and if other peoples resented the imposition of British standards, they would learn later in life that it had all been for their own good. Monypenny thought that in the end the Empire, properly unified, might become ‘the central or regulating State’ of the entire world.
    To men of this persuasion the Pax Britannica was like a great surgical clamp, an elaborate device of joints and fittings which, adjusted properly on its straps and trolleys, kept any dislocated limb stoutly on the mend. It had cured many of the evils of India, where peace really had been universal since the end of the Mutiny forty years before, and where the ferocious old antagonisms between race and race, creed and creed, rajah and mogul, were now only colourful sagas in the folk-memory. It had apparently healed the breaches between the British and the French in Canada, where the new Confederation was a delicate equilibrium between the two. It had brought order to the quarrelsome sultans of the Malay Peninsula, ended the piracy of the Persian Gulf, reduced the cannibals of Australia to shirts and wage-rates, and for eight hundred years kept the unruly Irish under control. This was the British speciality: like doctors under the spell of some incantatory oath, the imperialists felt mystically impelled to find new patients.
    It was odd that the longer the British stayed in a country the more likely it seemed that order would collapse the moment they left. In the early years of the century the most eminent administrators of the East India Company, then the sovereign power in British India, had openly declared that in a century or so they would be able to hand over an orderly, peaceful, modern nation to the Indians. By the end of the century most people assumed, not least the public and the policy-makers at home, that an India without the British would fall apart in communal violence, and relapse into the chaos from which the Empire was supposed to have rescued it. It was the same in Egypt. When the British occupied that country in 1882, leaders of both political parties said they would withdraw again when a stable local Government had been established, to protect the interests of foreign investors, and ensure the security of the Suez Canal.They meant it: but as the years passed, as the British dug themselves deeper and deeper into the Egyptian sands, as the Thomas Russells of the day matured from aloof supervision to fascinated involvement, so it seemed ever more reprehensible to leave a job half done, until by 1897 the British presence in Egypt seemed permanent, and the more imaginative of the British administrators already saw themselves in the historic line of the