Beasley E. Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (British and Foreign and Colonial Policy)
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did his education, which took him from Eton straight into the Scots Guards, propel him
into the higher intellectual circles (like many officers, he bypassed the universities).
The pattern of his life—flitting from place to place and subject to subject—was se
t
early. He began in the Guards, in which he served for only a year. Although he was not
the type to maintain an extensive correspondence, he left the Guards to become Private
Secretary to Lord John Russell (a position his father had held not long before); and yet
after so drastic a move Bury was back in the army a few months later, albeit once again
not for very long.
The only part of this second period of service that Bury seemed to enjoy were the
several months he spent rambling in the general direction of his post in India. More o
r
less on the way, he visited the Holy Land and the excavations in what is now Iraq, and he
stayed with Hormuzd Rassam in Kurdistan, Sir Henry Layard at Nineveh, and Sir Henry
Creswicke Rawlinson (who would himself be a founding officer of the Colonial Society)
at Baghdad. For many of the Colonial Society founders, the desert camps of the
archaeologists Rassam, Layard, and Rawlinson were the principal tourist attractions o
f
the Asian continent. Bury did not stay in camp long enough to excavate anything, but it is
not too much to suppose that Rawlinson, for one, shared with Bury his latest translations
and discoveries about his special subject, the sequence of Mesopotamian empires. Still,
Bury was soon aboard a pilgrim ship that took him part of the way to Mecca.
44
Eventually, he did get to his posting, that of aide-decamp to Lord Frederic Fitzclarence in
Bombay. After only a few months he was ill, out of the army again, and on his way
home. Soon enough, he would spend about three years in Canada; then he entered
Parliament.
Nor did Lord Bury pursue most of his civilian interests for very long. In his thirteen
years of discontinuous service in the House of Commons (thirteen years out of seventeen,
from 1857 to 1874)
45
he chiefly acted the part of enraged crusader against all proposals
for army reform. His military bent also led him to the Volunteers. Only after Cardwell’s
army reform of 1871, which reduced their role and which Bury of course resisted, did he
settle down and turn more of his attention towards non-military matters. But the
controversy was not forgotten. In 1878, when he was Under-Secretary of State for War (it
was to be his only government post in Great Britain), he continued to try to carve a niche
for the Volunteers despite Cardwell’s careful planning for a more professional army.
46
On the civilian side, he had begun tilting at that great Victorian wind-mill, a Deceased
Wife’s Sister’s Bill; he corresponded briefly with Gladstone on the subject.
47
Bury’s
interest in the Bill coincided with the Indian Mutiny and the subsequent winding-up o
f
the East India Company. One would think that the Indian Mutiny and its aftermath would
b
e a fitting subject for him if ever there was one, but he paid no attention to it. He showed
no interest in any of the fighting nor in any of the subsequent debates, despite his Indian
service. Deceased wives’ sisters loomed too large in his life just then (and he would come
back to the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill from time to time in later years, including once
during his period as president of the Colonial Society).
48
His only more or less Indian
activity at the watershed of 1857–58 was to introduce in Parliament a petition from the
merchants of Singapore, asking for that island to be transferred from the Indian
government to the Colonial Office.
49
Bury’s interest in the non-Indian parts of the empire ebbed and flowed as well. He
Tocqueville and Lord Bury 83
remained president of the Colonial Society for only two years after founding it; his
immediate successor, the Duke of Manchester, stayed in the post for seven.
One period deserves special attention for the way it revealed the development of his
ideas about the empire. In 1854, between his final period in the army and his first period
in Parliament, Bury took the post of Native Affairs Commissioner in Canada. The work
involved frequent travel to confer with the Indians; Bury was suited to frequent travel.
Indeed, a solemn council once gave Commissioner Bury the name ‘Chief White
Reindeer’ (very appropriate for someone of his migratory habits).
50
But Bury had good
reason for his travelling, namely to seek the counsel of as many Indians as possible. He
was gathering evidence for a key report on their behalf. There was a proposal to make the
Indian Department self-supporting—or simply to abolish it, merging the Indians and thei
r
lands into regular Canadian society. Bury was strongly against these moves. He thought
them fatally premature. The Indians, he wrote, were moving towards the level o
f
civilization at which they could look after themselves. They would soon make enough
money to keep possession of their lands in the face of white squatters and othe
r
challenges. All that still kept the Indians from doing this much, and moving with
considerable success into the Europeanized economy, was their weakness in the English
or French languages. That weakness would disappear in a generation if schooling were
handled correctly. Self-sufficiency, then, was the future that Bury saw for the Indians, but
it was a future that would be endangered if Indians themselves were to be taxed to pay fo
r
their white administrators cum guardians—and still more endangered if they were
stripped of those administrators too soon.
51
What, then, according to this line of thinking, were the key characteristics of a people’s
modernity, the key guarantors of their independence within the capitalist world? It
seemed to Bury in this 1855 report that the indispensable keys were neither British
governance nor British blood—
b
oth of these, which would be the focus of much imperial
pride in the 1880s and after, he took care to reject.
52
He saw two other keys: the
possession of the imperial language and of one’s local property. Even the Indians could
aspire to these possessions.
53
This idea of having a voice and a family farm would have
endeared Bury to John Locke, but it would have endeared him as well to Tocqueville
—
who advocated the widest participation in local government, a participation guaranteed
by a multiplicity of small inheritable freeholds.
54
To this image of Indians turning into freeholding citizens (since they had given up the
nasty Indian custom of holding property in common), Bury added one more item that
would loom ever larger in his thoughts, an image of Canada as the apex of the wide
r
history of European behaviour towards the aboriginals of the world. He contrasted British
treatment of the Canadian Indians with the Indian policy of two other powers in the New
World. For centuries, the Spanish policy was enslavement; the Americans, for their part,
‘deport whole tribes to more distant hunting-grounds, by peaceable means if possible,
b
ut, if necessary, by force, as soon and as often as the increasing tide of white emigration
appears to demand wider bounds’.
55
It was against this historical tableau that Bury set out
his argument: Canada’s Indian policy was too important and too good to be subjected to
budgetary salami-slicing—the Indian Department must be preserved.
Lord Bury believed that the white Canadian settlers and their governments, like the
Americans, would open all the Indian lands to settlement if possible. They should not be
Empire as the triumph of theory 84
allowed to do so; the imperial government had to retain control over native policy and
native lands. The Canadians would not have liked this, but Bury’s report was not
immediately made public and he remained popular in Canada. He was the heir to an
earldom, and the parents of eligible daughters were only too glad to have him around. He
married Sophia MacNab, daughter of the Canadian Prime Minister. He also dabbled
without notable success in two Canadian railway schemes (as noted in Chapter 4).
56
Soon
b
ack in England, he would revisit Canada only once. Yet Canada was to be central to his
imperial thinking for the rest of his life.
Bury as writer and thinker
Lord Bury paid attention to so many things that he seems the very model of the modern
major-general—except that his highest rank was lieutenant-colonel of the Volunteers. His
overall career, and especially his continual defence of the army from threats to make it
more efficient and more military rather than social in purpose, might indeed have come to
W.S. Gilbert’s attention before The Pirates of Penzance premièred in 1873. But whethe
r
or not it did, Bury was as fine a model of intellectual dilettantism as could be imagined
b
y Gilbert or anyone else. He was no finance capitalist, no imperial careerist, no Little
Englander, no man-on-the-spot—none of the characters traditionally used to explain
Victorian imperial expansion or the growth of the imperialistic sentiment behind it. He
simply reacted to some of what he saw in his career and in the news. One could try to fit
him into one category or another, but the best of these competing categories for him is
that of intellectual dilettante, reacting to the information flowing through the Victorian
world.
Thus it should be noted that Bury’s writings ranged from several articles on electricity
to an article on modern philosophy to an 1887 handbook on bicycling (he was one of two
coauthors of this handbook); it went through five editions before his death in 1895. His
1865 pamphlet on agriculture, ‘The Rinderpest Treated with Homeopathy in South
Holland’, did not commend itself so well to a wide readership, even during the rinderpest
epidemic of that year.
57
The big book on empire, The Exodus of the Western Nations, was also published in
1865. It did rather better, garnering substantial reviews in The Times and elsewhere. It
was Bury’s main publication on the subject, although he wrote four short articles on
Canadian affairs in Fraser’s Magazine in 1857 and 1858, at the time of a second and
shorter stay in the country. (After our period, he would go on to write a pamphlet on an
1873 border dispute with America, as well as an article on the empire in general in 1885.)
The first of the 1857/58 Canadian articles anticipated much of the historical sweep that
would take up hundreds of pages in The Exodus of the Western Nations. Democratic
history, which Bury began by summarizing, was unfolding itself before anyone who
wanted to go to Canada and look at it:
Why, then, does not everyone with money and leisure, instead of making
mechanically the usual Continental tour next summer, like a blind horse in a
mill, determine to put his faith in Nature instead of ‘Murray’, see wonders in
Tocqueville and Lord Bury 85
progress rather than castles in decay; and to vary the entertainment by a trip to
the New World, with a view to a passing glimpse at England’s Yankee cousins,
and a little more extended acquaintance with her Canadian sons?
58
B
ury’s other articles from 1857 and 1858 went into greater detail about Canadia
n
g
eography and history, and the second speculated on sending Englan
d
’s poor to tha
t
c
ountry.
59
The third and most important of these articles began with a very Tocquevillean analysi
s
o
f the mechanics of caucuses and the power of public opinion in the United States, and o
f
h
ow Canada was rather different. Later in the article, Bury borrowed some other idea
s
f
rom Tocqueville:
The same reasons which operate against the formation of an American regular
army, would also prevent the formation of a regular army in Canada; but the
latter has the advantage of a large infusion of the old-country love of order and
obedience to constituted authority.
60
F
or all the analytical flights, in none of these articles was there a hint from Bury that h
e
w
as preparing a larger work. Bury must have begun his magnum opus in earnest som
e
t
ime after 1858, since at that point his attentions were more fully engaged by th
e
D
eceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill and his anti-army reform campaign, for which he becam
e
q
uite famous in the newspapers. Perhaps he was inspired by his success in a Roya
l
G
eographical Society debate on Canada in February 1859, in which he brought the roo
m
t
o life with his attack on the Hudson’s Bay Company for standing in the way of the kin
d
o
f transcontinental roa
d
- and railway-
b
uilding that could help to unite the Nort
h
A
merican empire.
61
Whenever he wrote it, with The Exodus of the Western Nations Bur
y
s
urpassed himself. The book presents a rounded and fully realized picture of why h
e
w
ished to see the British Empire bound more firmly together, and thus why he woul
d
f
ound the Colonial Society. It shows how certain mi
d
-Victorian generalists—if no
t
g
enerals—were led to the subject of empire.
How did Lord Bury start down this road intellectually? When did details about th
e
i
mperial world begin to build up in his mind? We have seen the outward details of hi
s
c
areer in India and Canada, but there were also other ways in which the empire had com
e
t
o his attention. His father, the Earl of Albemarle, had also written on imperial affairs
.
T
he way that in The Exodus of the Western Nations Lord Bury added Tocquevillean an
d
i
mperialistic elements to the older kind of travel writing practised by his father is striking.
If anything the father had a deeper interest in empire than the son did, but it was a
n
i
nterest that belonged to an older intellectual species than the son’s. Albemarle’s interes
t
i
n things imperial was particularist. His interests had grown out of his own militar
y
s
ervice. Not for him generalization and abstraction; he was made of grainier stuff
.
A
lbemarle was from an in-between generation; he did not indulge in the theory-making o
f
t
he older generation, the generation of the late Enlightenment, nor did he find any need t
o
t
ake the multiplying, ramifying facts of his own lifetime and
p
ut them into (new
)
m
eaningful categories, as his son and other mi
d
-Victorians would.
The plain facts of his life were interesting enough to him; he did not need to embroide
r
t
hem with philosophy. Albemarle entered the army just in time to walk home with it fro
m
Empire as the triumph of theory 86
Waterloo; he then had short postings to the Ionian Islands and Mauritius. He went on to
India for two years as aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, the Marquess of Hastings,
and left India when the Marquess resigned.
62
He wrote an account of his journey home
—
a journey that he undertook overland; here was the precedent for Bury’s partially
overland journey to a post in India thirty years later. The title of his father’s book gives a
hint of the particularist flavour: Personal Narrative of a Journey from India to England,
by Bussorah, Baghdad, the Ruins of Babylon, Curdistan, The Court of Persia, The
Western Shore of the Caspian Sea, Astrakhan, Nishney Novogorod, Moscow, and S
t
P
etersberg in the year 1824, by Captain the Hon. George Keppel.
63
It was dedicated to
his own father, then Earl, from Dublin Castle, where the young captain was serving as
aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant.
There was no general idea of empire at all in the book, much less in the title, a detailed
and largely non-British list of places. George Keppel, as he then was, does not seem to
have connected his Indian and Irish experiences with his short service in the Ionian
Islands and in Mauritius. But Bury grew up with a father who was simply full of stories
like this:
The principle person of the Prince’s establishment, was a Persian Syuud, a man
of some information, and not deficient in humour. As I could speak Persian with
tolerable fluency, I used frequently to amuse myself by asking his opinion
respecting the improvement of our nation in different branches of science.
Amongst other subjects, I tried to explain to him the properties of a steam-boat
lately established in Calcutta, which, from the power of its stemming wind, tide,
and current, has been called by the Indians ‘Sheitoun Koo noo’, the Devil’s
Boat.
64
N
otice that he happened to be able to speak Persian, still employed by British as the
official language of Indian diplomacy (until 1828).
65
The fact that a short-term governor-
general’s short-term ADC should go so far as to learn the language in conversational
detail shows that he took some measure of interest in his imperial surroundings.
If George Keppel would not generalize, he could certainly think. He could discuss
English technical progress with a foreign courtier. Nor was he a chauvinist. He felt secure
enough in his cultural position to report the Syuud’s reply to his story about the Devil’s
Boat: ‘When arts were in their infancy, it was natural to give the devil credit for any new
invention; but now, so advanced are the English in every kind of improvement, that they
are more than a match for the Devil himself.’
66
Keppel enjoyed the Syuud’s joke rathe
r
than refuting it. He passed immediately from the Syuud’s rejoinder into an analysis of the
‘Mahometan’ response to the technological superiority of infidels.
In sum, Lord Bury’s father embodied the imperialism of Britain in India and Ireland
(where he was posted), and mixed with it a bent for learning, conversation, analysis, and
irony, but not generalization. He did not leave India entirely behind, as his son would do;
the father always kept himself focused on specific cases. Years later, indeed only one
year before the Mutiny, Keppel (now the Earl of Albemarle) crusaded in the Lords
against the torture carried out by the native tax collectors working for the British in India.
‘By making our rule really beneficial to the people,’ he would write, ‘we can hope to
Tocqueville and Lord Bury 87
maintain our anomalous government, and to fulfil that which is, I trust, our destiny—to
remain forever the lords of India.’
67
Here was an imperialism phrased so as to apply only
one place, albeit a very important one. Keppel could admit that the government of India
was merely ‘anomalous’—he did not have to resolve the anomaly into some great theory
of empire.
There was one more font of imperial experience in the family: George Keppel’s
younger and rather less thoughtful brother Henry. Henry Keppel was the naval office
r
who had helped Rajah Brooke put down a rebellion in Borneo in the 1840s, and he went
on to command the China station from 1867. He sometimes went a dozen years without
seeing his brother, Lord Bury, but he put his imperial experiences before family and
friends in other ways.
68
In 1846 he published a two-volume account of the Borneo
adventures, and while he took most of the material for these volumes from Rajah
Brooke’s journal, Henry Keppel put the work together with a keen eye for detail. He
included despatches, minutes, Brooke’s report on sending five orang-utans home to the
London Zoo in 1841, and several pages by Brooke on Malay philology, including a long
vocabulary table.
69
There were no general conclusions worth speaking of. Unlike his
b
rother, Henry Keppel kept his specific areas of imperial service discrete in his mind,
dwelling on the details and the local colour. Many years later, Henry Keppel would
publish an autobiography—three volumes of disconnected social and scenic detail
reported in mini-
p
aragraphs. It was accompanied by more than a hundred line drawings
commissioned from various illustrators. The book was published in 1899 when the word
‘imperialism’ was on everyone’s lips, and yet it bore no trace of thought about that
subject or about any other.
In The Exodus of the Western Nations, Lord Bury attempted a larger and more
synthetic analysis, one covering all of Western civilization. His father had simply
p
roduced a book on the mysterious East, for all the colourful stories, military details, and
comments on Western technical prowess, the rambling and colourful book was the
opposite of pretentious. Henry Keppel attempted no more. But Lord Bury’s focus was the
idea of Anglo-Saxon purpose that he, for one, saw in the whole sweep of history.
Tocqueville had noted that a certain type of history-writing was typical of the democratic
frame of mind; it was history of the kind that seeks to look beyond particularities and
resolve them into universal laws.
70
This democratic kind of history-writing stood in
contrast to aristocratic history, which was marked by localism, detail, and the portrayal o
f
individuality. Tocqueville attempted to unite both kinds of history in his major works,
yielding the mixture of the analytical and the particular that Mill had liked so much.
71
Lord Bury’s The Exodus of the Western Nations, published in 1865, is a good example o
f
democratic history, even though its author was (like Tocqueville himself) a scion of the
aristocracy. Bury very definitely tried to resolve the particular into the general. He meant
the book to be a history of the whole of European and American humanity from the last
years before Columbus. Moreover, he devoted twenty pages to putting that sweep o
f
history into an even wider context, ranging back to the Crusades and beyond; he proved
to his own satisfaction why Europe had been the continent to generate an age o
f
discovery.
72
Even the book’s generalizing title, which suggests a plot for the whole o
f
Western history, pointed away from the aristocratic fondness for particularity that was
clear in the title of George Keppel’s book.
Empire as the triumph of theory 88
The Exodus of the Western Nations was democratic in another sense. Bury chose to
highlight the development of democracy itself. His theme was democracy’s advance
westwards throughout history—a theme conceived in such a way that it might have been
taken from those few world-historical pages near the beginning of Democracy in
A
merica. ‘Running through the pages of our history, there is hardly an important event in
the last seven hundred years which has not turned out to be advantageous for equality’,
Tocqueville had written. He continued: ‘This whole book has been written under the
impulse of a kind of religious dread inspired by contemplation of this irresistible
revolution [democracy] advancing century by century over every obstacle and even now
going forward among the ruins it has itself created.’
73
In The Exodus of the Western Nations, as well, history is teleological. Writing about
the eventual discovery of America by Europeans, Lord Bury claimed that every person in
‘the masses that crowded half-civilized Europe played, albeit unconsciously, his part in it.
The history of the discovery of America is the history of Europe’.
74
The grand movement
of history, ‘the irresistible development of a free people’,
75
was a racial move to the
West, from Palestine to Greece to Rome to England, and finally, yes, to Canada.
Alongside runs the more Tocquevillean theme of the growth of democracy and equality.
Of course Tocqueville and Bury are not identical. Part of Bury’s explanation for both
the westward trend of colonization and the growth of democracy involved the use o
f
some very broad racial generalities. Writing after Tocqueville had insisted on the Anglo-
American cultural underpinnings of US democracy, Lord Bury was ready to point ou
t
that
The races of America are vigorous, but they are young: Three centuries and a
half is the life of the oldest of them. Race has more to do with their peculiarities
than any other cause. The Mexican or Peruvian is emphatically Spanish. The
English Canadian, or the United States man, Anglo-Saxon; and certainly no one
ever watched a Canadian habitan take off his hat to a friend without seeing that
he was a Frenchman.
76
Meanwhile little of Bury’s evidence came from this kind of direct observation. Most
came from the discussions he had with influential North Americans. Tocqueville, too,
b
ased his work on political conversations with political people; he and Gustave de
Beaumont arrived in North America with some seventy letters of introduction, although
they entered high society without having to use many of them.
77
In Bury’s official
conversations, one can hear a similar if less self-assured research methodology.
Beginning on the first page of his Preface, Bury explained his experiences in North
America as Civil Secretary and at the same time Native Affairs Commissioner (unde
r
Governors-General the Earl of Elgin and Sir Edmund Head):
A Governor-General is compelled by his position, as the representative of a
constitutional sovereign, to surround himself chiefly by those who form his
Cabinet for the time; it therefore becomes the duty of the Secretary—the only
Englishman besides his chief in the civil employment of the Crown,—to
associate with public men of all parties, and maintain intimate relations with
politicians of all shades of opinion: the writer had thus an opportunity of
Tocqueville and Lord Bury 89
watching closely the working of our colonial system in the most important of
four provinces. Since then, circumstances have made him acquainted with most
of the leading public men in our other North American colonies, and with many
in both the Northern and Southern States of America.
78
O
ut of conversations like these came the political travel books that so many of th
e
f
ounders wrote.
There were still other points of resemblance between Bury and Tocqueville. Both me
n
p
icked liberty as the central historical condition shaping North America, and both me
n
p
ut forward a genetic theory of North American history cantering on a liberty inherite
d
f
rom England, then reinforced by distance and by a migration of the persecuted.
79
Bot
h
m
en saw what they were doing as an advance on the technique of earlier writers. ‘A ne
w
p
olitical science is needed for a world itself quite new’, Tocqueville wrote, possibl
y
p
rompting some of Mill’s praise of Tocqueville as a founder of all future politica
l
s
cience.
80
Bury associated himself with a new current of social rather than military o
r
R
ankean history. He did not name Ranke, but the good historians in his view ran fro
m
V
oltaire to Guizot, Macaulay, and Buckle, among many others. What he thought he wa
s
a
dding to their achievement was the emphasis on two continents at once.
81
Thus Bury was aware of his own generalizing tendencies, and he saw them as bein
g
d
ifferent from the history written by certain earlier figures, presumably including hi
s
f
ather. He was interested in the social preconditions behind politics, and he was sure tha
t
t
hese preconditions held the key to the new history:
A great change has of late come over both readers and writers of history. As in
other sciences isolated facts must be patiently accumulated before generalization
is attempted, so in the science of history there was necessarily a period during
which facts were stored up without comment…it is only in comparatively
modern times that the real objects of history have been understood. Voltaire led
the way in France…. He said that his aim was rather to discover what society
was like, how men lived in the privacy of their families, what arts were
cultivated, than to recite in the ordinary fashion of history a mere record of
disasters, combats, and human wickedness.
82
W
ell, Bury did not live up to all of that. Perhaps, like many historians, he wa
s
o
verdrawing the contrast between the approach of his own generation and the approache
s
t
hat had gone before. Certainly he was overdrawing the social element that would appea
r
i
n his own work; it was full of official political reports rather than history from the botto
m
u
p. Yet he had plenty of Tocquevillean or analytical ambition. He was quite deliberat
e
a
bout moving away from his fathe
r
’s particularism. He was quite deliberately drawin
g
a
ttention to the myriad facts of modern life, and to the way his generalizations could brin
g
o
rder to them.
In The Exodus, the subject of Western history down the centuries did not make fo
r
b
revity, a fact noted even by the most appreciative of the boo
k
’s contemporar
y
r
eviewers.
83
The most hostile of the reviews took the book to task for encumbering it
s
c
olonial theme with so many ‘wearisome and trivial details’ about Early Modern Frenc
h
i
nns and so much else, included to illuminate worldwide rather than merely colonia
l
Empire as the triumph of theory 90
history.
84
The plan of his book was significant. Events had moved from the Near East, across
Europe from Southeast to Northwest, and then across the Atlantic to North America. A
Victorian reviewer put it as only a Victorian could:
It is a remarkable fact in ethnology that the tide of human wandering,
everywhere its direction has been known or ascertainable, has invariably set
from the east towards the West. The successive waves of population which have
flowed over Europe were continually rolled in from Asia, till the consolidated
Gothic power opposed an insurmountable barrier to their encroachments?
85
So which nation was, quite literally, in Bury’s main line of history? Which nation was
now the chosen one? That nation was Canada, Bury said—which was ‘ten times large
r
than the old thirteen states hemmed in between the Mississippi and the Atlantic’.
86
To portray this movement of history and give Canada what he thought was its due,
Bury announced his intention to do in his book something he asserted that no one had
done before, which was to disregard ‘the fictitious boundary line of the Atlantic and give
us the old and new world in the same picture, the action of providence working through
physical laws and human nature on America and Europe contemporaneously’.
87
He
would do both continents in one book by looking for the underlying laws. The result was
not, perhaps, the most balanced of world histories. Lord Bury spent most of his first
volume detailing the general social, religious, and political history of Europe since the
fifteenth century; he stopped now and then to describe the voyages of discovery to
America, and the racial and political consequences of Spanish colonial policy. In the
second volume, he looked in detail at the Seven Years War, sped past the American
Revolution,
88
and spent the bulk of the volume on Canadian affairs of recent decades.
Writing during the US Civil War, Bury mentioned that North America was already
occupied by two English-speaking federal states; Canada would most likely be the third,
and ‘a Federal union must in its nature be democratic’.
89
So Bury was as optimistic fo
r
the survival of Canada, his third federal state, as he was for the Confederacy, his
second.
90
Indeed, the gunnery manual that he had some involvement in producing in
1864 had paid some attention to Confederate advances in gun design, advances that might
have seemed to augur well for the Southern cause.
91
Yet to Bury, North America offered
rather more profound subjects to consider than the survival of the Confederacy. Once
again, the continent held federal states, and as we saw above, Bury believed that these
federal states had to be democratic rather than aristocratic or monarchical. There was the
grand theme.
Bury spent the final two chapters of The Exodus describing what an increasingly
democratic Canada would look like. The inevitable separation from the mother country
should and probably would come about without the intervention of the United States, and
without leading to the messiness of the American version of democracy. Bury went so fa
r
as to propose a native Canadian monarchy. It would prevent the constant and prolonged
excitement typical of America’s regularly scheduled elections.
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He wanted even more
steps like these to be taken in preparation for Canada’s eventual self-government—for i
f
there were enough preparation, the Canadians would preserve the empire’s unity o
f
Tocqueville and Lord Bury 91
feeling after the advent of self-government.
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Canada would have the best of both worlds,
namely British decorum and North American populism.
The happy vision of a self-governing empire is worth pausing over. Bury’s expectation
that Canada would indeed govern itself has convinced some scholars that he had to
undergo a conversion from the pro-separatism of the Exodus in order to found the
Colonial Society.
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But I do not think that Bury underwent any such conversion. In his
early years, as we have already seen, he argued against any diminution in British
involvement with native affairs in Canada, and against any cut in imperial expenditure on
that score. The Indians still needed British intercession against the settlers. Bury’s was
always a tempered separatism; indeed, his was less a separatism than a fondness for the
spread of the English-speaking world, and an acceptance of the Tocquevillean spread o
f
democracy within it. He reached this position early and he did not move away from it,
even after 1868. He came out against the Imperial Federation League when it was
founded in 1886; federation would mean a weakening of the self-governing colonies.
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Bury’s position was consistent; self-government could not loosen the most importan
t
imperial ties, for they were emotional. They were safe in his head. He always posited an
enlarged and friendly (and self-governing) English-speaking world as the teleological en
d
of world history.
Bury was no separatist who had to convert himself, or be converted, to the imperialism
on view in the 1868 society he founded. The old category of ‘separatist’ does not apply.
The better category is ‘intellectual imperialist’. And if the intellectual break between
separatism and imperialism must go, so must the chronological break. The idea of his
conversion in 1868 must be replaced by a picture of continuity in his thinking. (The
discontinuity—the change—in 1868 was that he and other like-minded men came
together, not that each of them suddenly developed his own imperial interests.) Bury’s
travels and ideas and writings came together in his mind over the course of the 1850s and
1860s, as his own (as well as his nation’s) activities and interests ebbed and flowed
around the world, and he tried to find some general meaning to it all.
After the loss of America, Bury wrote, Canada was a second chance for the British
Empire—a second chance for Great Britain to separate amicably from some of her North
American daughter democracies, with whom she would share what might be called the
new world order. Bury had a huge cultural empire in mind. This was the highe
r
imperialism, and it was far more important than preserving London’s direct powers o
f
governance abroad. North America (north of the United States) held the next thrust, the
next locus, on the grand path of European history from Southeast to Northwest. Bury had
found his universal law. The British Empire of the 1860s could stand, under that law,
alongside the empires that furnished the Victorian mind; it was the newest and by far the
worthiest example of empire within a world history that is the story of empires, moving
from East to West—
b
ut it would have to develop into a freer association. The tight
control that had been tried after the American Revolution, and even before, had been a
mistake that the Englishmen of his day should learn from.
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And not only Englishmen. Bury believed the Scots should be interested, too, and afte
r
The Exodus came out he tried to restart his political career by appealing to their imperial
instincts. The occasion was December 1868, after the foundation of the Colonial Society.
Bury campaigned to take back the seat he had once held for the Northern Burghs (Wick),
Empire as the triumph of theory 92