IMMORALITY AND EMPIRE.

IN the current number of the Fortnightly Review Mr. William Watson publishes a poem, entitled "The Unknown God," which is marked with the thoughtfulness the power of language, and the harmony of sound which mark all his poetic work. With the intention of the poem

we are, and believe most of his readers will be, entirely out of sympathy. It is a plea for pure pantheism, and in our opinion, a rather ineffective plea. It begins with an attack —after the manner of Gibbon — on the God of the Hebrews, on a God made in the image of man, and then proclaims the unknown God who is "too near, too far, for me to know." As was to be expected, the pantheism which can be read into one of the new Login—it is by no means

certain that it is really there, as we try to show elsewhere —finds a place in the poem :— " The Clod I know of, I shall ne'er

Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there, Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know."

To the mystic who can delight in the thought of "Christian annihilation" or of ingression into the divine shadow, this

thought of an unknown God may possibly be made to seem satisfying and sufficient. For the ordinary man there is seldom any choice between a God who can be thought of as a loving, helping Father, and no God at all. "Streams of tendency" and the like will mean too little or too much for those who are "militant below." If doing God's will, fearing God and keeping his Commandments, loving God and doing his service, are to have any force in the world—and if they are to have no force the earth will be nothing but a hell—.

they must be dependent, not on an unknown, impersonal God, but upon a God whom men may know and love. A mystic may love the unknown and the unknowable. Ordinary minds revolt from the notion as preposterous. A God that cannot be loved is a God that will be hated by the fierce and forgotten by the gentle. We do not deny that many men holding the pantheistic view have been and are good men, and sometimes better men than many who hold the truer view, but we are sure that, except for specially mystical and subtle minds—minds that can discern something of a right line in obliquity—the pantheistic idea takes the whole heart out of religion.

It is not our intention, however, to re discuss the well-worn pantheistic controversy. What we want to deal with on the present occasion is a side-issue of the problem raised by one of the last verses in Mr. Watson's poem. Here is the verse :—

"Best by remembering God, say some

We keep our h3gh imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hith oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down!"

Mr. Watson, in fact, challenges the notion, regretfully, of course, that "what makes a nation great and keeps it so," and what adds to "our high Imperial lot," is the fear of God and the holding his will in remembrance. He believes that history teaches that we have done our

greatest deeds, not when we remembered to do our duty- i.e., to do the will of God—but when we forgot. It is a note of pessimism very common jnst now. A hundred times over we have heard it in connection with South Africa. We are told that if the work of acquiring mighty possessions is to

be achieved, it must be achieved by questionable means. 'You cannot obey the laws of morality if you are to add vast provinces to the Empire. For such work a certain amount of unscrupulousness, of bad faith, of lying, and evil- doing is absolutely necessary. The nation must tolerate a good deal of blackguardism and wickedness, and so to a certain extent become a party to it if it is to have a high Imperial lot.

Empires can no more be built up without breaking the laws of morality than an omelette can be made without breaking eggs.'

So runs a very widespread belief, —a belief which makes those

who entertain it, but who do not want to see the Devil win, regard the Empire as an unclean thing which ought to be avoided at all costs, and renders the cynically minded and those naturally inclined to follow Machiavelli's teachings ten times more Atheists and Epicures than they were before.'

There is no need either for this reaction into "Little Englandiem" on the ground of morality, or for this

sublimation of pessimism. There is not only no essential connection between misdoing and Empire, between forgetting our duty and the rearing of a, great Imperial State, but a positive disseverance. We venture to assert that "our high

Imperial lot" has never really been successfully prosecuted when we "forgot," but only when we "remembered,"—when, that is, the nation and its rulers were careful to put before them a high ideal of duty and of morality. That this is so can be shown both indirectly and directly. No one will assert that the Puritans, whatever else may have been their faults, were men who "forgot." According to their lights, and to the light of their age, they put before themselves the ideal of duty. They, at any rate, had no materialistic aims, and pursued no cynical, Machiavellian, anti-moral, or non-moral policy. Yet our Empire has its roots in the Puritan spirit. Dryden wrote of Cromwell, "He did not keep us prisoners to our isle," and it was undoubtedly during the Commonwealth that we first began to realise "our high Imperial lot." When we "forgot," and forgot so abjectly in the sodden, squalid license of the Restoration, Fortune, instead of smiling on us, frowned and turned away her head. It was in that period of forgetting that the flag receded from Dunkirk and Tangier, and that the Dutch fleet was in the Thames. It is curious, too, to note in this context how many of our most successful Empire-builders have had in them a touch of the Puritan spirit. Except that the public never recognises the names of Indian soldiers and states- men, one might mention several whose characters and ideals were strongly like those of the soldier-saints of the Common- wealth. If we trace our history onward from the time of the Restoration, we shall see how very unsuccessful in the carry- ing out of "our high Imperial lot" were the men who had been nurtured in the ideals that took possession of the nation after the overthrow of Puritanism. The first twenty-five years of the reign of George III. was one of the most materialised and forgetful periods in our history, an epoch when men's minds were bent upon the earth. It was during that period that we lost America. The great successes of the latter years of the reign were achieved when men had at any rate begun to think of something beyond their material needs and in- terests. By 1800 the Wesleyan movement had insensibly leavened the nation. Its effect was almost as great on those who did not know they had been affected as on those who did. Wilberforce, again, had touched the heart of the nation on the issue of the slave trade, while Adam Smith's teachings had shown men that even in what was apparently the most material side of life, freedom and justice would triumph over blind selfishness and oppression. In a word, the nation had become alive again to a sense of duty, and this enabled her to stand the awful strain of the great war. But perhaps it will be said that this fine theorising breaks down when we come to the case of India. On the contrary, we hold that nowhere more clearly than in India does the rule hold good that we have only prospered greatly when we have not for- gotten the ideals of duty and righteousness. Clive's career in India has been to some extent misrepresented. His second Administration was governed by the true spirit of reform. Let us, however, accept the popular verdict in regard both to Clive and Warren Hastings. The results of their action certainly do not prove that fortune oftenest smiled when we forgot. After Warren Hastings left India, the tenure on which we held our Asian Empire was of the most precarious kind. Clive and Hastings had, it is true, made a beginning, but it was not till Lord Cornwallis went to India carrying with him a high ideal of duty that our Indian Empire really began to advance. He and, in a lesser though important degree, Lord Wellesley settled the foundations of our Indian Empire deep on the rock-bed of duty, and from that time our advance was in- finitely more rapid, more assured, more satisfactory, than it had ever been before. We do not, of course, say that Lord Cornwallis or Lord Wellesley, or their successors, or, again, their instruments, always obeyed lofty ideals. They often did very much the reverse. What we do say is that on the whole the Indian Empire was governed after Lord Corn- wallis's time on sound and just, and not on non-moral or anti. moral, lines, and that from that time dates its real prosperity. Let any one who doubts the fact that our success in India is due to keeping a high and honourable ideal before us read the Life of Mountstuart Elphinstone. In peace and war he was one of the most successful statesmen and administrators India has ever known. Nothing he attempted failed, and by his action he added far more to the Empire than the men whose faults and blunders we are asked to excuse because you must do shady things if you are to bring in new pro- vinces.' Yet Elphinatone kept always before him the highest standard of duty. The "bit of a blackguard" theory breaks down as conclusively in a hundred other instances. We are not, of course, so foolish as to think that only the saints have succeeded, but we do say that, taking our history as a whole, fortune has not oftenest come, or "our high Imperial lot" been safest, when we forgot to do our duty as a nation.

We fully admit that there are great difficulties in interro- gating history as we have attempted to interrogate it. If we try to look at the matter too much in detail we may easily be puzzled with instances where bad faith has seemed to triumph, and where a maintenance of a high standard of national duty has apparently been attended with failure. It is useless to attempt to decide such a question by too minute an inquiry. We hold, however, that a broad and general survey of our history cannot fail to support the view that we have taken,—namely, that our Empire rests upon a moral, and not a non-moral, base, and that it is not accurate to say that fortune has of tenest favoured us when we forgot. We believe that in the long run we have won because we remembered our duty to God and to our fellows, and that only by remembering shall we keep the gift of Empire. If we hold it for selfish ends we are doomed. If we hold it as a trust we may and shall retain it till the trust is accomplished. After all, what we have been saying is little more than an expansion of Mr. Kidd's deduction from history. History, he tells us, shows that nations and races only succeed when they have put before themselves some non-rational, some non-materialistic ideal. The ideal of duty is, in the scientific sense, the least rational of ideals, for no man can define how he knows and why he follows the "stern daughter of the voice of God." When, then, we say that the nation, if it is to survive, must not forget to do the will of God, we are only stating a truth taught by history. Doubtless, strive as we may, we shall in the future, as in the past, fail to reach our ideal, for nations are as fallible as men. That, however, matters little. Honesty in intent, not success, is what is essential. What is wanted to keep the nation sound is to preserve it from the belief that God is an "unknown God," far and indifferent, who reeks not of human concerns and human good and evil, and that it matters little whether we do or do not do our duty. That is a belief which, except in a few mystically minded men, kills all sense of duty, is in the end "what ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat." To get ordinary men to make, in Cromwell's phrase, a conscience of what they do, you must allow them some- thing more life-giving than "the unknown God."