Free The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 by William Manchester, Paul Reid Page A

peak.

    I t was the Tory journalist John Wilson of
Blackwood’s Magazine
who first observed, in 1817, that “the sun never sets upon the Union Jack.” At any given moment, wherever dawn was breaking, Britain’s colors were rippling up some flagpole. If one could have ascended high enough in one of those balloons which fascinated Jules Verne and were actually used in the Franco-Prussian War, the view of Britain’s colonial sphere would have been breathtaking. Victoria reigned over most of Africa, both ends of the Mediterranean, virtually all that mattered in the Middle East; the entire Indian subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Thailand, including Ceylon, which on a map appeared to be merely the dot below India’s exclamation mark but which was actually the size of Belgium; Malaya, Singapore, Australia, islands spread all over the Pacific and the Atlantic, and Canada. The Canadians, proud of their loyalty to the Queen, issued a stamp depicting a world map with the Empire’s lands colored red. It was a study in crimson splotches. Although the British Isles themselves were dwarfed by czarist Russia, and were smaller than Sweden, France, Spain, or Germany, their inhabitants ruled a quarter of the world’s landmass and more than a quarter of its population—thrice the size of the Roman Empire, far more than the Spanish Empire at full flush, or, for that matter, than the United States or the Soviet Union today.
    To its classically educated patricians, London was what Rome had once been:
caput mundi,
the head of the world. The popular aristocrat Lord Palmerston said that colonies were multiplying so rapidly that he had to “keep looking the damned places up on the map.” Disraeli said: “No Caesar or Charlemagne ever presided over a dominion so peculiar. Its flag floats on many waters, it has provinces in every zone, they are inhabited by persons of different races,… manners, customs.” All this had been acquired by imperial conquest, and young Winston Churchill, writing for the
Morning Post
from a colonial battlefield on September 12, 1898, took note of “the odd and bizarre potentates against whom the British arms continually are turned. They pass in a long procession. The Akhund of Swat, Cetewayo brandishing an assegai as naked as himself, Kruger singing a Psalm of Victory, Osman Digna, the Immortal and the Irrepressible, Theebaw with his umbrella, the Mahdi with his banner, Lobengula gazing fondly at the pages of
Truth,
Prompeh abasing himself in the dust, the Mad Mullah on his white ass and, latest of all, the Khalifa in his Coach of State. It is like a pantomime scene at Drury Lane.” 2
    All these suzerains lost, and all England rejoiced—loudly. The British were very vocal in their allegiance to their Empire. In public schools and public houses boys and men responded to “Three cheers for India!” and roared, to the music of “Pomp and Circumstance,” Edward Elgar’s patriotic hymn, composed in the last weeks of the old Queen’s reign:
    Land of hope and glory, mother of the free
,
    How shall we extol thee, who art born of thee?
    Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
    God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet;
    God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!
    On declamation days children recited, from Kipling:
    Dear-bought and clear, a thousand year
,
    Our fathers’ title runs
.
    Make we likewise their sacrifice
,
    Defrauding not our sons
.
    Music hall favorites were “The Death of Nelson,” by S. J. Arnold and John B. Raham; “Annie Laurie,” the great hit of the Crimean War; and, later, the rousing “Soldiers of the Queen.” Today their great-grandsons wince at the public displays of patriotism, but the Victorians responded quickly to calls of Duty, the Flag, the Race, the White Man’s Burden; the lot. Far from feeling manipulated—which they were; most Victorians gained nothing from the nation’s foreign conquests—they memorized lines from W. E. Henley, the balladeer of