Goldwin Smith

“ The Indian Empire is the regular theme of Anglophobists. They never mention it without giving utterance to burning words about the oppression of the Hindoo. For my part, not being a Jingo, but enjoying the worst possible reputation in that quarter, I will freely confess that, notwithstanding all the grandeur and all the romance of the Indian Empire, which no British heart can help feeling, I believe England would have been better without India. ”

“ If England has fought for aggrandizement, as beyond doubt she has, she has also fought for better things—for human liberty against Philip II., for the freedom and independence of the nations against the Bourbon despotism and the tyranny of Napoleon. The notion that she has now a settled policy of aggrandizement, and is always carrying it forward by a union of far-reaching fraud with force, though it constantly appears in the American press, is plainly baseless. ”

“ Again, Great Britain, thanks largely, no doubt, to her happy insular position, has been the foster-mother of free institutions, both political and judicial. The constitution of every free nation in the world at the present day is clearly traceable to hers as its source, and most of them are direct imitations. I do not say that parliamentary monarchy, or parliamentary government at all, that of which the seat is Washington any more than that of which the seat is Westminster, is likely to be final ”

“ There are practical reasons for allaying Anglophobia, if it can be done. We are always told that a war between the kindred nations is inconceivable. We may hope that it is very unlikely; but there has not only been a good deal of hatred, there has been a good deal of fighting, between kinsmen since Cain and Abel. A leading American journal said the other day that the American people could not help rejoicing in any reverse that might befall England. It may well be so, considering what the journals, which are the only teachers of the masses, every morning and evening tell them ”

“ To have, after framing a treaty with the President, to wait in the anteroom of the Senate, and then to be publicly dismissed with contumely, can never be agreeable to a government accustomed to the diplomatic etiquette and amenities of the old world. ”

“ No government, if it has any sense of dignity or of duty, will allow a constitutional question to be settled by mobs—even Boston mobs—or by insulting its officers, wrecking their houses, and flinging the goods of merchants trading under its flag into the sea. ”

“ Surely the Draft Riots, the Molly-Maguire outrages, Tammany, and the Clan-na-Gael must sometimes suggest to American Anglophobists that Irish character is, at all events, a factor in this unhappy problem. That character is just the same in Australia that it is in Ireland and in the United States. The overbreeding of a very amiable, but not very energetic or thrifty, race, on a soil which will not support them, is what no government can prevent; nor can any government, whether in French Canada or in Ireland, annul the effects of ecclesiastical domination on industrial progress. ”

“ Is there any limit to the affronts which American legislatures and Presidents may offer to Great Britain when they are in urgent need of the Irish vote? Is there no limit to the quiet sufferance of those affronts by a proud and powerful nation? However, apart from the danger of war, on which it is odious to dwell. Anglophobia does mischief in more ways than one. It drives British emigration from American shores to Australia at a time when the self-governing element in this country is in danger of being swamped by alien elements, and stands in need of reënforcement. ”

“ Americans know what party is when out of power, and how it can not only assail the government, but traduce the country. To suppose that the people of Great Britain will allow the other island to be made the seat of a hostile power is preposterous, and those who abet disunion are only preparing for Ireland the miseries of reconquest. But I am straying beyond my subject and into the most hateful of discussions.
I have said that there is no pervading antipathy to America in British literature or in the British press. ”

“ There seems to be no doubt that British enterprise and the security afforded to property have vastly developed wealth. Agriculture has been encouraged by the government; railroads have been built; and by the increased facilities of transport local famines, which Anglophobists preposterously ascribe to the British government, have been abated. Evil and criminal customs, such as suttee, have been put down, and a good deal has been done for education. Haughty, cold, and exclusive, unhappily, the conquerors are: the social relation between them and the government is the weak point. ”

“ All tyrannies are bad, but of the two would you not prefer a tyranny which forces you to pay a small tea-tax to a tyranny which forces you to do wrong? Surely this subjection of American politics, of the American press, and sometimes even of American taste, to the Irish vote, will some day cut a strange figure ha history.
The other kind of factitious Anglophobia is that which is got up by the Protectionists. Protectionists and their organs always appeal to the patriotism of the people against the admission of British goods. ”

“ But I suspect something is due to the sensitiveness of Americans who, when they visit England, fancy that English society is prejudiced against them and secretly contemptuous. More than once I have seen bitter allusions to the supposed arrogance of Englishmen in telling an American, by way of compliment, that they should not know him from one of themselves. ”

“ On that point one can only say that it is one of the strangest phenomena in ethnology if, in a single century, the two branches of the same race have become radically different in character from each other, and the strangest fact in history if, when a race was suddenly cut in two, all the good went to one side and all the evil to the other. ”

“ I do not believe there is a laboring population in all Europe—although the condition of the Irish laborer leaves much to desire—which in the course of the last twenty years has made a progress equal to that of the laboring population in Ireland. Let me look at the farming class, which, as you know, may be said almost to constitute the body of the nation, understood as the term is understood in Ireland—let me look at the indication of their surplus wealth. Forty years ago the deposits in the Irish banks, which are the indication of the amount of their free savings, were about five millions. ”

“ Industrial and pacific communities are of all communities the most easily touched by military glory, as the line of American Presidents and candidates for the Presidency shows; and, unluckily for England, it happens that she is the only foreign nation of any consequence with whom the American Republic has had a war. ”

“ British Canadians love a mother-country which has never wilfully given them cause for complaint, and they take hostility to her as hostility to them.
It is only with genuine Anglophobia that we deal. There are two spurious varieties, about which nothing can or need be said. One is the Anglophobia put on to win the Irish vote. The governments of Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, France, of all the European countries, in short, in which there are disunionist, rebellious, or ultra-revolutionary forces at work, have in their turn to resort to measures of repression ”

“ The spirit of science, in fact, is making itself felt in the historical field, and passion is descending from its usurped throne. But a generation at least will probably pass before the popular version will conform itself to the scientific version, and before Americans who read no annals but their own will cease, historically at least, to identify patriotism with hostility to Great Britain. I am not saying that in any of the cases that have been mentioned there was not wrong on the part of the British people, or a section of it ”

“ When I am struggling for my life with a desperado, if you come along the sidewalk in such a way as to cover him from my shot and I push you rudely aside, perhaps I am wrong,—you have a right to use the public sidewalk; but I am not an execrable villain. Americans surely must sometimes feel that, if the common tyrant had succeeded in crushing the liberties of Europe with their help, it would not have been altogether a bright episode in Republican history. ”

“ It must be left to Americans to say whether there has been anything overstrained in the civility towards Great Britain of American legislatures and politicians, or even of American Presidents, when elections were likely to turn on the Irish vote. The American Constitution itself, by submitting treaties to discussion in the Senate after negotiation with the President, gives an opening for breaches of diplomatic courtesy which, when Great Britain is concerned, are seldom allowed to go unimproved. ”

“ It appears ridiculous to suppose that any sane American can now hate the English people or wish them evil on account of anything done by the British monarchy and aristocracy in the last century. You might just as well visit the sins of the Bourbons on the French Republic. And yet the unrevised version of these events enshrined in histories, and especially in the school histories,* does still exercise a malignant influence ”

“ Great Britain has in her empire three hundred millions of people, with a standing army of 200,000 British and 130,000 Sepoys; so that she is really by far the least military of all the old-world powers. ”

“ Whether protectionism is the parent of prosperity we do not inquire here. It is certainly not the parent of international amity. It will always be the policy of Protectionists to obtain the support of patriotism by keeping up ill-will against the country whose competition they fear. ”

“ I think we remember that an American politician of mark once explained his vote to the British ambassador, and I have myself heard a politician say that he knew it was wrong to interfere with the domestic affairs of another country, but that when a man had thousands of Irishmen in his constituency he could not help himself. ”

“ Once more I must say it seems preposterous to go back so far, as though any man of sense would allow himself now to be influenced by things which happened eighty years ago. But the wound still bleeds in the popular histories, which form the sentiments of the people. ”

“ The advantages of Australian democracy, its comparative freedom from the dominion of Tom Paine, Elijah Pogram, Tammany, and people-worship, its comparative moderation and mildness, may certainly be ascribed in part to its not having been born of revolution. ”

“ Amongst the scenes that are now unhappily being enacted in Ireland by certain persons we may lose sight of the great and unquestionable progress of that country. It has achieved material progress in a degree most remarkable for a country with little variety of pursuit. ”

“ Under the peace which British rule has imposed, where before raged constant and murderous war, the population has increased immensely, and the pressure of its numbers on the means of subsistence—not British extortion—is the main cause of the ryot’s poverty. ”

“ But that the British government was not tyrannical, or for those times a bad government, that the colonists enjoyed under it the substantial benefits of freedom, is proved by the testimony of the Revolutionary leaders themselves, all of whom, including Samuel Adams and Washington, found it necessary, in order to carry the people with them, to protest that they did not mean separation. ”

“ But this, instead of embodying itself in heroic corsairs, such as Drake, Raleigh, and Cavendish, or their later counterparts in land enterprise who won the Indian Empire, now takes the forms of Gordon, Rajah Brooke, and Livingstone, who have their American comrade in Stanley. The cession of the Ionian Islands by England to Greece is, I believe, an almost unique instance of a perfectly voluntary cession. Over the colonies England has resigned all real power: they are substantially so many independent nations. The only empire, properly so called, which she now has is India. ”

“ There is no trampling on Indian nationality, for in that vast medley of races and religions, in which conquest has been superposed upon conquest, no such thing as nationality exists. The Hindoo press is free, and abuses the government without stint. Some time ago there appeared in this Review a fierce arraignment of the rulers of India by a Hindoo writer. ”

“ Unluckily, the more amiable and sociable temper seldom goes with the power of command. After all, there is no exclusiveness of race like the exclusiveness of Hindoo caste, as any one will see who will read what the Sacred Books say about the relations between the Brahmin and the Sudra. ”

“ Dominion has certainly not added to her strength, for it has destroyed her insular security, making her a continental power on the largest scale in a continent far remote from the centre of her force, with the most aggressive of military monarchies for her neighbors. ”

“ It is very doubtful whether dominion has added to her wealth, for she draws no tribute, and against the salaries and pensions have to be set the armaments and wars. The Crimean War was really a war for India ”