The Historical Experience

Abstract

‘Here I sit and govern it with my pen: I write and it is done: and by a clerk of the council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword.’1 Such may be thought the British ideal of imperial government — trouble-free; economical, with a clerk of the council sufficing as the agent of imperial authority; and pacific. But while King James I of England and VI of Scotland could boast in these words of having achieved it in his northern kingdom, no nineteenth-century British statesman, plagued by the ‘small wars of empire’ and their expense, could even aspire to so happy a state. By then the Empire was too large, too variously composed and too expensive to allow of the direct, economical exercise of authority or of a reasonable prospect of general peace. On the contrary by Victorian times its administration had come to be popularly, and not unreasonably, associated with troubles, expense and wars. That association meant that the argument of Empire was rarely stilled. But by 1870 one outcome of the argument at least was clear. It was, as Lord John Russell contended in the sentences reprinted on the title page of this book, that there could be no going back. ‘Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.’*