Conclusion

Summary

What may be the future place of these islands in the government of the

world no human being can foretell. Nations, as history but too plainly

shows, have their periods of decay as well as their periods of growth. The

balance of power in the world is constantly shifting. Maxims and influences

very different from those which made England what she is are in the

ascendent, and the clouds upon the horizon are neither few nor slight.

–W. E. H. Lecky, Nov. 1893

Let us return to where we started: Lecky's 1893 talk at the Imperial Institute, which emphasised how two islands on the fringe of Europe had shaped the world. Towards the end of his address, ironically in a building supposedly symbolising ‘unity of empire’, Lecky hinted at the problems that lay ahead for the British Empire. Intensified imperial and commercial competition and the possibility of war with a European rival might prove too much for a Mother Country overburdened with imperial responsibilities and in need of ever more resources to keep rival powers from snapping at her heels. Despite its vast expanse, many contemporaries regarded the late-Victorian British Empire as ‘under siege’; underlying Britain's jingoistic self-assertion was a ‘feeling of vulnerability’. While Lecky did not mention it, closer to home, a nationalist revival was beginning to gather momentum around this time which would later pose a significant challenge to imperial unity. Less than ten years after his address, following the outbreak of the Boer War, the anti-imperial attitudes of Britain's junior ‘partner’ had hardened considerably.

Writing in Ireland and the Empire, as war raged in South Africa and Boer fever gripped nationalist Ireland, the Liberal Unionist politician T. W. Russell observed:

The dark spot is Ireland. Here the whole feeling of the mass of the people has been vehemently against England, and in favour of the Dutch Republics … There must be some reason for this attitude upon the part of a whole people. If it be possible to probe the wound, to discover the seat of the mischief, to raze the apparently rooted trouble from the Celtic brain, to make Ireland as loyal and contented as Scotland – to secure, in fine, a really United Empire – then no cost would be too great to ensure such a beneficent end.

Although Russell could not understand this Anglophobic anti-imperial sentiment, he believed it had to be addressed.