CULTURE AS THE BOND OF EMPIRE. BY SIR FRANCIS YOUNGHUSBAND, [Read April 28th, 1920.] MAY I, at the start, briefly recall to your minds that the Empire, in addition to the sixty or seventy millions of British or European descent and of the Christian religion, contains about three hundred and fifty millions of Asiatics and Africans, of the Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist and other religions—men of every variety of type and of every grade of civilisation, from the lowest to the highest. And as it is among these non-British peoples that I have lived and worked during the greater part of my lifethough I have also travelled in South Africa and Canada-it is to these that I shall be more especially referring in the course of this address. A man who has been constantly working among these very different types of people, and often under conditions when a slip will cost him his life, or bring trouble to his country and ruin his career, is all the time instinctively feeling his way towards some common ground between him and them. I propose to give you the result of my experiences and of my reflections on them. My conclusion is this-and it will simplify matters VOL. I, N.S. 10 if I state it distinctly at once-that the common ground between us and them, as it must be between the Mother Country and her daughter Dominions, must be sentiment. Spirit is the only firm ground. The bond of union between the different parts of the Empire, in all their marvellous variety, must be a spiritual bond. And if a spiritual bond it must be of only the finest spirit. And the finest spirit is that of culture, a blend of society, art and thought, all three and all together springing from and shot through and through with religion. This is now my main thesis. We have accomplished an enormous amount of splendid work throughout the Empire in establishing and maintaining order; in dispensing justice; in developing the material resources of the countries. under our trusteeship by improving agriculture, conserving forests and opening up mines; in constructing roads, railways and telegraphs; and in fostering trade. We have trained the peoples in the art of self-government, and, in the case of India, have told the Indians frankly that we mean to work for the day when we shall be able to leave them to govern themselves as Australians govern Australia. All this on the political and material side we have done and done magnificently. But we have not, on anything like the same scale of endeavour, attempted to reach the souls of the people. And until we touch soul to soul to the very bottom we are not sufficiently united. At present men are not getting what their souls demand and need. And three-quarters of the unrest in India and Egyptas in England also-is unrest of soul. We have indeed made serious and increasing efforts to educate the peoples, and missionary bodies have made heroic efforts to convert them to one or other of the different forms of Christianity. But education only touches youth, and the formal education of the classroom is only one of the influences which mould youth. And missionaries are so absorbed in spreading their own particular religion that they have little time, inclination or training for touching the people on those other sides of culture which are also necessary, namely, society, art and thought. Moreover, they devote so much of their energies to the conversion of the lower classes that the leaders of society, of thought and of art are hardly touched. Yet it is these leaders that it is all important we should reach. But, at the outset, one appalling difficulty confronts us, and its immensity has haunted me for thirty years. Religion, which ought to be the central and most trusted strand of the bond that should bind us, seems only to be a stumbling-block and cause of offence. One solution of the difficulty is the obvious one of ignoring it altogether, placing no reliance on it and treating it as a matter of no importance. There are in every country so-called practical" men on the one hand and self-styled "intellectual" men on the other, who regard it as a survival of more primitive days and of more superstitious people, which we will do well to put behind us in the superior days of enlightened manhood to which we are now supposed to have attained. But I doubt if such men can have had any wide and deep experience of real life. They must surely have lived out of the great stream of life and out of touch with the warm realities of existence, in a tiny, driedup world of their own. They can hardly have known the joy of the great elemental passions which stir mankind, and which, however harmful they be when uncurbed, are the foundation of all the highest things in life. Human nature must have become frozen within them, and because they have ceased to be human they are unable to be divine. And I wish men were not I would that there were some other word to denote that sentiment and idea which lies at the root of every man's life. man's life. apt to apply the word "religion" exclusively to that form or expression of it which is most in evidence in the particular country in which they are born, and to conclude that those of their countrymen who do not subscribe to that particular form are therefore without religion. But regarding it in its broadest and truest sense we might just as well expect men to get on without love or without love of country as without religion. To the strictly practical or to the drily intellectual man love of country may appear utterly ridiculous. It must seem insanity rather than sense that a grown-up man of the world should deliberately and of his own choice, and merely from sentiment, leave his home and his friends and his riches and his comforts and all that has hitherto made life dear to him, and with actual joy in his heart face every conceivable horror and welcome death itself. Looked at drily and coldly it seems unaccountable that a sensible man should go through all this for only a sentiment. And yet something living and deep |