CHAPTER XIII - The British Commonwealth of Nations

Summary

Never had the British Empire been more unpopular in the world than it was when the nineteenth century passed over into the twentieth; never indeed had the idea of empire been more questionable in the eyes even of a number of the subjects of that empire; but never did the majority of Britons feel more justified in taking pride in the dominance which it exerted over so large a part of the earth's surface—its ‘dominion over palm and pine’. The extraordinary, the frightful happenings in South Africa, where for a few months the British army was so ubiquitously beaten by elusive bands of bearded farmers, gave delight to those Europeans who now saw perfidious Albion in decline and fall. But Albion, though puzzled and perturbed, did not think of decline and fall; it sighed over its generals, sent put others, accepted help from the colonies (‘the lion's cubs’, in the language of the time, ‘rallying to the dam’); and with tedious inevitability wore the farmers down. On 31 May 1902 the Boer leaders accepted the Peace of Vereeniging and British sovereignty. The readers of Kipling were reassured; the Union Jack, fluttering above the veld, marked the triumph of civilisation and efficiency; the way stood open for the pacifying efforts of Lord Milner's ‘kindergarten’, the young men from Oxford whose minds were suffused with the light of a liberal empire; and colonial Prime Ministers, like New Zealand's Richard John Seddon, released the ample folds of their homespun eloquence, congratulating and advising, upon a Mother Country that was both gratified and embarrassed.