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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of titles around, there was a whole subculture, a considerable subset of the 3,000,000

readers, writing for these journals, both for the famous titles and the obscure ones. (The

more exalted of these generalist journals began to decline in the face of the specialized

professional journals of the 1870s and 1880s.)

And that is not all. The Victorians published speeches, pamphlets, and books, not just

articles; it was the Victorians and not Harold Robbins ‘who gave ink its great

breakthrough’.

They had no problem finding a place for all their ink, since paper had

never been cheaper. With the 1861 repeal of duties on paper, and the adoption (starting in

1857) of esparto grass (alfalfa) as an alternative to rags in paper-making, the price o

books and other printed materials tumbled (and prices could tumble due to the abolition

of price-fixing for books in 1852).

Pamphlets on various secular as well as theological

subjects poured out. They were a stock-in-trade not only for bookstores but also for the

wholly itinerant booksellers who were numerous in the streets of London; even more

pamphlets would seem to have been on offer from the proprietors of semi-

ermanen

open-air bookstalls.

The by then 200- to 300-year-old world of print capitalism and

shared literary experience, once so important for shaping British nationalism,

exploded

into cacophony. Indeed, the idea of publishing short works was so widespread in the mid-

nineteenth century that small but quite serviceable printing presses became one of the

more popular gifts for upper-and middle-class boys throughout the English-speaking

world.

The proto-imperialists of the Colonial Society put out more than their fair share of the

pamphlets or privately printed speeches of the time. People actually bought items like

this. Anthony Trollope, for one, accumulated pamphlets in large numbers, including a set

on ‘Colonization, Emigration, &c’.

Beyond the writers of pamphlets or articles,

however, the Colonial Society could boast dozens of men who wrote real books. There

were even a few professional writers—such as Delabree Pritchett Blaine, who wrote

reference books on animals and sports. In his modest way, Blaine helped to interpret and

tame the expanding world. When he surveyed sports, he looked back to recreation in the

Bible and out to recreation in contemporary India and Africa; this was the frame he chose

for his story of the leisure of Englishmen.

But there were many more founders who,

rather than being professional writers for the whole of their adult lives, simply dabbled in

this field as they did in others. Perhaps some of the resulting tomes owed their existence

to vanity publishing, but ‘vanity publishing’ is a modern term. In the mid-nineteenth

century that line of business was not the unchallenged province of a few special vanity

houses. Instead it was a key activity even for major publishers. One barrister, Alfred

Hyman Louis, was keen enough to pay £50 to have a large book published by Richard

Bentley. At the same time (1867) Bentley was also publishing Wilkie Collins on terms

vastly more generous than what Alfred Hyman Louis received; Wilkie Collins actually

got paid. For his £50, Louis was none the less able to put his own incredibly wordy

opinions before the public (or anyway before the 500 lucky souls anticipated in the print

run), and he did so in the name of a respectable press.

And what issue so moved Alfred

Louis to write such a long book and pay £50 for it? The subject was how Napoleon III’s

‘imperialism’ within France, plus his meddling in Italy, were the greatest danger to

England—the country whose sole aim and struggle since the Reformation had been

devoted to the fight against ‘imperialism’. (Again, the word ‘imperialism’ was not

The founding of the colonial society 23

applied to England by any of the Society’s author-founders during this period.)

As we will see, many of the members wrote on democratic, historical, o

archaeological themes, themes that led them to think about the nature and purpose of the

larger British Empire. Often these themes were injected into works with the unlikeliest o

titles, such as Frederick Aloysius Weld’s

ints to Intending Sheep Farmers in New

Zealand (1851). The unlikely books are often the most interesting, for they show how

wide the world was, and how many paths there were to the imperial themes of 1868. Such

ooks show how far one has to look for an imperialism of dribs and drabs, as opposed to

the more public and more coordinated imperialism of a later period. We cannot restrict

ourselves to the neat category of books on ‘imperial affairs’, or any other category from a

later time.

Whatever the members wrote, they were trying to make sense of the rich diversity o

henomena in the world. They were trying to make sense of it by appealing to ever large

categories—socially as well as intellectually. Socially, they were sharing their visions o

the world with a reading

ublic composed of people who go beyond the categories o

‘imperialists’ or ‘gentlemen’. This reading public extended further across British society

than did the socio-economic or professional groups already reviewed, and the writers o

the Colonial Society were more than just the gentlemanly capitalists.

But before we can draw any more conclusions about the writings and habits of mind o

the founders, we need to look at a few case studies. How did aristocratic position,

rofessional identity, involvement with missionaries, and involvement with business o

investment contribute to the kind of thinking and writing that was the key activity of the

founders?

Empire as the triumph of theory 24

The usual suspects

The aristocracy

First there is the question of how many members had titles. If the empire has been called

a system of outdoor relief for the upper classes, was the Colonial Society simply the

indoor version—a club for aristocrats? The answer seems to be no. Only sixteen of the

126 members (by 3 November 1868) were closely connected with the peerage in some

demonstrable way by the beginning of 1869. (See Table 3.1). After that the proportion

fell, with only eight among the remaining eighty-seven.

Yet if adding up the aristocrats in the Colonial Society is to have any value, bare

calculations like these need to be weighed against a real mid-Victorian aristocrat’s

concerns and attitudes. Lord Salisbury was hardly a typical aristocrat, but his example is

instructive.

In the 1850s, the young Lord Robert Cecil (as Salisbury then was) went to Australia

and India. He had suffered from physical and nervous weakness, and travel was

prescribed as the cure. So off he went, not wanting to go and not in the finest of spirits.

Table 3.1 Aristocrats joining the society

New members Peers

Others

Aristocrats at

joining

†

Peers cr. after

April 1969

26 June 1868 3 3 6 2

27 June to 12 August

1868

26 8 3

15 August to 3

November 1868

11 2 1

11 November to 30

December 1868

00 0 1

20 January to 25

February 1869

41 5 2

10 March to 13 April

1869

12 3 1

Total 11 13 24 10

Notes

Sons of peers, brothers of new peers, and sons-in-law of Dukes and

Marquesses.

†

uals the sum of the first two columns.

Once he had got clear of the United States and had returned to British territory, he went

to the Australian gold-fields. The natural scenery made the greatest impression on him,

ut he was also impressed by one aspect of the social scene: the refined deportment of the

miners, who behaved so much better than the people he had met in California. Australia,

he concluded, could boast more properly deferential working-class people and fewe

uppity middle-class types than California could, and Cecil did enjoy a little deference

very much. But Australians still did not show the full measure of deference; at his

second-to-last dinner in Melbourne, he was caught in the middle of a food fight. He was

not amused, and spent half the night fussing over his clothes. It was with social details

like these, and not employment or investment opportunities, that he filled his travel

diary.

From the gold-fields, the young Cecil went off to Tasmania. He spent most of his time

there as an invalid, although he would write up his experience of Tasmanian colonial

politics for the Saturday Review. As it happened, he was nursed in the home of anothe

founder of the Colonial Society, the Colonial Secretary of Tasmania—a man whom,

years later, Salisbury did not recognize without a good deal of prompting; Cecil had afte

all spent most of his visit in a delirium.

He was far from getting over the nervous

temperament that had prompted his family to send him abroad.

If there is no particular evidence of a hunger for empire on Cecil’s part in his early

tour, what about later in life? Certainly he made no effort to adopt the empire as a

location for his own career. Even though he was a younger son who could not have

counted on inheriting the Marquessate until the death of his brother in June 1865,

Salisbury did not look to the empire for employment. This was despite the fact that he

was perennially short of cash until he became Marquess early in 1868. He took jobs, but

he took jobs that were in the domestic economy. On returning from his forced trip to the

antipodes, he worked first as a political journalist, and then in 1868 he became the

director of an entirely non-colonial railway (with which he had no association before

1868).

Nowhere in these financially straitened years did he consider any employmen

connected to the colonies.

He did show decidedly imperialistic behaviour as Indian Secretary in 1866 and 1867,

when he pushed for the expansion of British power in Burma. In doing so, he seems to

have been trying to please certain well-

laced China traders who wanted a new market.

They warned that other European powers would move into Burma if Britain did not.

Salisbury, as he was soon to be, apparently agreed.

But during most of his service as

Indian Secretary (under the courtesy title of Lord Cranbourne), he tried to do his best fo

the Indian people—and this meant rejecting commercial developments, including

railways, that did not seem to be a compelling use of the taxpayers’ money.

Salisbury had a mission: To defend the interests of the landed classes and to resist all

of modernity, including democracy, capitalism, and imperialism. This was clear enough

in 1858, in his first major publication (an article on parliamentary reform), but it became

still more pronounced during the American Civil War.

By 1865, he was openly

dismissive of ‘the nuisance of “the American illustration”…[with which] for years the

world has been sorely vexed’.

While in America he saw the failure of two of the

henomena that he most wanted to resist: democracy and capitalism; in America, they

revealed their inability to coexist with well-ordered civilization. The conflict in America

Empire as the triumph of theory 26

showed ‘[t]he collapse of the great experiment of democracy, the sudden transition from

unbroken peace to ferocious war on the part of a people whose devotion to mere gain was

thought to be engrossing’.

Indeed, arising from America’s hateful democracy and the

capitalist system (which could not restrain or moderate mob violence) there was anothe

hateful tendency—yes, imperialism, the expression abroad of the mob’s violence and

greed. Cecil asserted that the Northern democracy, already guilty of war crimes on a

larger scale than ever before in world history, was in a plain fight for ‘empire’. After the

war, the Southerners would have to endure a police state, and the North would be made

up of ‘a multitude triumphant in the gratification of its evil passions’.

Thus, a policy o

imperialism went hand in hand with the kind of mob rule prevalent in American

democracy. And the future Lord Salisbury was against both mob rule and imperialism,

whether they were run from Washington or London. The British settlement colonies were

socially primitive places full of boasting, and full of people ready to murder the natives; it

was quite understandable, he wrote, and quite right for the aborigines and the Maori to

recognize the colonists for what they were, and resist them as best they could.

In dozens

of articles (mostly written before 1868), he strongly opposed the displacement or killing

of native peoples (chiefly the Maori) in the name of a progress that he did not believe

in.

Salisbury thought little of the Tocquevillean thinking that led so many founders

towards the imperialism of the Colonial Society. He would cite Tocqueville, but only to

argue against him—Salisbury argued that neither democracy nor equality were advancing

in the world, and nor should they.

At times, he conceded that distinctions of birth migh

well recede, but only to be supplanted by gross distinctions of wealth.

At other times he

held firm: ‘Political equality is not only a folly—it is a chimera. It is idle to discuss

whether it ought to exist; for, as a matter of fact, it never does.’ And therefore, he wrote

on the same occasion, aristocrats—raised to uphold the family honour and never tasting

want (and with it temptation or corruption)—ought to be the openly admitted leaders o

any society, rather than the leaders being America’s corrupt mediocrities.

Believing in

1862 that the American Civil War showed that ‘democratic institutions have failed’, he

was thankful that measures to Americanize and democratize British institutions had been

rejected by Parliament in recent years.

Salisbury was on the side of world aristocracy, not world democracy. As Indian

Secretary, he overturned precedent and the judgement of the Council of India to allow

Mysore to remain under aristocratic Indian rule; he approved an adoption in the ruling

family, rather than taking the traditional step when there was no male heir, which was to

annex the state to the British Raj. And generally he castigated those who demeaned

native Indian aristocrats.

Unlike the other founders, Salisbury had never set himsel

dreaming about the transfiguration of the world at the hands of English-speaking

colonists.

Not for him these abstractions, for he explicitly avoided abstractions as well as empire;

as he put it, ‘When great men get drunk with theory, it is the little men who have the

headache.’

Besides, why would he want an empire when most of the world’s English-

speakers were grubby, common? As he knew too well from his own harrowing

experience as a young traveller, they might throw bread at one.

He had not changed his mind about the pointlessness, the democratic grubbiness o

The usual suspects 27

empire by the time the Colonial Society came along, although he did join. But he would

egin not so much to change his mind but to raise his sights about the empire soon after.

As Indian Secretary for a substantial period in the in the 1870s (1874–78), he grew

accustomed to playing on a wider stage beyond Anglo-Saxondom. He worked against the

spread of Western education and liberalism in the subcontinent; he was contemptuous o

Indians who wanted education, much less political power.

And, even more than in his

first term as Indian Secretary, his aristocratic leanings helped him learn the techniques o

indirect imperial rule (rule through native princes) that later British governments

—

notably his own—extended to Africa and Oceana.

By 1900, Prime Minister Salisbury’s imperialism was very clear. So was his contempt

for the more cheese-paring aspects of democracy at home. He bemoaned Great Britain’s

lack of a secret service, of conscription, and of a military caste. The empire needed all o

these things, but the Treasury had always put short-term economy before the vital task o

uying the apparatus of a strong and centralized worldwide regime. (Here he prescribed

for Britain all the characteristics of the police state that thirty-five years before he had

predicted as the fate of America.

) Typically, he was not afraid to make these comments

in public; his own Chancellor of the Exchequer almost resigned over this attack by the

Prime Minister on the fiscal authorities of his own government, accusing them as he did

of being too parsimonious to found a secret police.

If he had come to terms with

democracy, he had done so on his own terms, in part through the development of his

‘referendal theory’ of the role of the House of Lords. That is, he maintained that the

Lords ought to prevent elected governments from carrying out any major and

controversial initiative not yet put before the voters in a general election—so that in

throwing out a key government bill, the Lords would be forcing a general-election-as-

referendum on the controversial new policy. Here at least Lord Salisbury had found a

lace in his heart for general elections, especially when the Liberals were in power and in

conflict with the Lords (a conflict that was not duplicated under Conservative

governments). And he even found a place in his heart for democracy more generally—as

the chief and most realistic bastion against socialism. But as we have seen, he also made

his strange speech in favour of a secret police. He was a strange and fascinating mix of a

man.

Few of the aristocrats joining the Colonial Society in 1868 or 1869 would ever share

the young Salisbury’s hearty detestation of English settlers, or the older Salisbury’s

eculiar take on the policing needs of the Mother Country. As a young man, Salisbury

had been weak and neurotic, and it would seem that as he grew older he overcompensated

for this early weakness.

In the end, what Salisbury shows us is not what all the

aristocrats in the Colonial Society were like—far from it. What he shows us is that we

cannot simply point to aristocrats, even those who were short of cash as Lord Salisbury

was, and assume that their ideas about the empire were prompted by a desire to make

money or find employment. Some aristocrats, Salisbury among them, may have

conceived of themselves in a less modern, less cash-centred, and if you will, a more

romantic way. That may be why one refers to the British aristocracy rather than the

British plutocracy, at least for the Victorian period. A desire for money may have

motivated other aristocrats to look in an imperial direction, but we will have to wait and

see.

Empire as the triumph of theory 28

All in all, the aristocracy and near-aristocracy (people closely related to the titled) were

never dominant except among the Society’s officers. Among the office holders it was

dominant, but the Society was hardly the only group to create enough honorary offices

for all the grand people. In all, once again there were twenty-four members of the

aristocracy and baronetcy (counting the title holders themselves, their heirs, the younge

sons of peers, and the sons-in-law of Dukes and Marquesses) among 223 members. This

was a significant but by no means overwhelming number. They represented a British and

Irish aristocracy of about 550 male peers, somewhere between 850 and 950 baronets, and

a much larger number of sons and sons-in-law ranking high enough to qualify for the

moment as near-aristocrats.

Meanwhile, there were ten Colonial Society founders who would receive a newly

created peerage later on. Did they already expect one? In the case of Cabinet Ministers,

probably yes—

ut there were only six such men. We can add them to the aristocratic

group and make a still less than overwhelming thirty. The other four were bureaucrats

who were on the job in the 1860s, and such officials were to become the first sizeable

group of bureaucrats in British history to be ennobled. As late as 1868, they had no

reason to expect that they would be, and they would not have fully identified themselves

with the aristocracy.

The bulk of the membership came from elsewhere.

Was the Colonial Society the creature of one or another political party?

What then of the 185 lesser people, those who were neither aristocrats nor near-

aristocrats by 1869—or rather what of the 123 of the 185 who are identifiable? They

ranged from these bureaucrats to MPs of the solid and middling sort (see Table 3.2), and

on down to office clerks. What were their ties to the empire? We shall work our way

down the social scale.

The variety of the MPs’ educations is striking, for it shows their different stations in

life—they were no solid social bloc. Only nine of the thirty-eight Colonial Society

members who would ever serve in the House of Commons were Old Etonians; one of the

nine was Lord Bury, the heir to an earldom, and six more of these nine were aristocrats.

Only eight other past, present, or future MPs in the Society had been to any of the othe

great public schools. That leaves nineteen MPs from outside the great English schools.

Some men were educated privately, others in the army (four) or the navy (only one). At

the university level, only twenty-one of the thirty-eight MPs had been to Oxbridge, with

eight from Cambridge, twelve from Oxford, and one other man (Bulwer-Lytton) who

attended

oth; only one other MP in the Society had a university education in the United

Kingdom (at Trinity College, Dublin).

If only a fraction of the MPs in the Colonial Society had an Oxbridge background,

almost by definition most of them had an identifiable political party. In all, forty-eight

members did. The party system was attenuated and confused in the mid-nineteenth

century, yet by 1868 loyalties were crystallizing around Disraeli and Gladstone. Dod’

arliamentary Companion, which came out frequently throughout this period, was able

to trace the affiliation of most MPs.

Even some non-MPs had a party affiliation. O

course peers and those who held a government office made their party or at least thei

The usual suspects 29

sympathies known; commoners outside of Parliament sometimes held another office that

revealed their party, such as that of London alderman (in the case of one member, Si

David Salomans, Bart, a Lord Mayor).

As it happened, there was no Tory predominance that might have helped to explain

Disraeli’s increasing interest in empire. Among the members who joined by 3 Novembe

1868, there were sixteen Conservatives and fifteen Liberals—

lus three others whom

od’s, being a nineteenth-century publication, could identify as ‘Liberal-Conservatives’.

And there were three members of the Reform Club not otherwise identifiable politically;

these three may be added to the Liberal column to make eighteen.

In keeping with the less exalted character of the members who joined in the late

eriod, between November and April, only fourteen can be identified by political

sympathy; five were Conservatives and ten (one identifiable politically only because he

was in the Reform Club) were Liberals. Another handful belonged to the Carlton, and

thus may have been Conservatives. The Carlton Club was not yet exclusively

Table 3.2 New members by parliamentary membership

New members Former MPs

by date of

joining

Sitting

MPs who

joined

Total MPs by

1869, non-

aristocrats only

†

New

MPs

after

1868

26 June 1868 3 4 3 (2) 1

27 June to 12

August 1868

2 12 5 (3) 1

15 August to 3

November 1868

12 2 (1)0

11 November to

30 December

1868

00 00

20 January to 25

February 1869

1 3 1 (0)

‡

10 March to 13

April 1869

32 1 (1)1

Total 10 23 12 (7) 5

Notes

Many had gone on to inherit or to receive a peerage.

†

Sitting and former MPs who were not connected to the aristocracy (see Table

2.2) by the date they joined the Colonial Society. (The numbers in parentheses

are those who would never go on to be connected to the peerage or baronetcy.)

‡

One of these men did go on to receive a peerage; he was the only one of the

MPs first elected after 1868 to become a peer. Since he would have had no

reason to expect honours when the Colonial Society was founded, I have not

classed him as an aristocrat.

Empire as the triumph of theory 30

Conservative, but it was on its way. We may be sure that if those Colonial Society

founders who belonged to the Carlton were not Conservatives, then they were certainly

not Liberals either.

Some of the members who were Liberals in this period would wind

up as Liberal-Unionists in the late 1880s and the 1890s; a few even became

Conservatives by that point. But when it was founded the Society was non-partisan.

Lawyers

How many members had a professional tie to the empire?

We will begin with barristers, who were not very far socially—much less

geographically—from the establishment that we have already looked at. First off, how

many were there? In the 1860s, England had more than 600 barristers—almost all o

them in the Inns of Court in legal London, stretching barely a mile from the Thames to

the Grey’s Inn Road. This cosy world was suffering an explosion in the numbers of men

at law. The old legal dinners at the Inns or out on circuit were no longer enough to

ind

the profession together, a point that influential members of the profession worried about

in the 1860s and 1870s.

So how many of the barristers in the Colonial Society were

outside the higher political class that we have already looked at, whatever their physical

proximity to that class at large dinners?

We can check for barristers who were excluded from the law profession’s evening

club, namely the House of Commons. Of the hardly overwhelming number of barristers

or former students at the Bar who had joined the Colonial Society by 13 April 1869

—

namely twenty-six—exactly half would never be MPs. Eight of the thirteen who were

never to sit in the House of Commons were members of the Colonial Bars rather than one

of the Inns of Court, so there were only five English barristers who were never to sit in

the Commons. And two of these five non-MP English barristers went on to serve with

great distinction in the government in other capacities. They were Herman Merivale and

Frederic Rogers, both of whom were senior civil servants in the Colonial Office. The

other three were Alfred Hyman Louis, author of articles and some rather hectoring,

rivately printed books on British, European, and American politics (and whom we met

in Chapter 2); Henry Philip Roche, the Registrar of the Court of Bankruptcy; and Henry

Pering Pellew Crease, a Cambridge man and Middle Templer who was the Attorney

General of British Columbia when the Society was founded (despite the distance, he

managed to join the Society on 3 November 1868).

Crease would later be a judge of the British Columbia Supreme Court, but with the

likes of him—despite the fact that he was a Middle Templer—we have reached down into

a more mixed part of society, about which there are new things to learn regarding the

depth and variety of the Victorian world. Henry Crease was involved in various failed

usiness ventures in Upper Canada, moved back to England for a while, and then moved

ack to North America, establishing himself on the Pacific Coast in the late 1850s. He

failed in his attempt to keep the capital of confederated British Columbia on the

mainland. He indulged in idle speculation with A.R.Roche, secretary of the Royal

Colonial Society, about transcontinental routes.

His wife Sarah, on the other hand, seems to have had a more satisfying, more creative

The usual suspects 31

life. A landscape and botanical watercolourist, her work on Canadian subjects was shown

at the London Exhibition of 1862, and found its way into a work of travel published in

London. In her pictures she made the Canadian West look busy and urban.

husband’s public business seemed more provincial by contrast. We have begun to reach

down to those founders of the Colonial Society who were members of the local elite o

one colony or another, rather than of the imperial capital. They were making themselves

at home in the empire, and trying to make sense of it.

Turning then from the English barristers to the colonial ones, those who were not

trained at the Inns of Court and with whom we are well and truly outside the Westminste

orbit, we find a highly varied group of people. There was Adam Crooks, a highly placed

Canadian lawyer who wanted to replace the self-

erpetuating committee that ran the local

Bar (and on which he sat) with a democratic system.

Appropriately enough for a lawye

and a booster of the legal profession, Crooks was the son of a pioneering figure in paper-

making. To boost paper consumption still further, he edited the

ournal for Education fo

Ontario.

Other colonial barristers included William Alexander Fane De Salis, an Oxonian

barrister and Count of the Holy Roman Empire—with one brother who was a pastoralis

and trader in Australasia and another who was an officer in the Indian Army.

Most

notably of all, there was Francis Peter Labilliere, the former Melbourne barrister who

went on to found the Imperial Federation League in 1884 (he joined the Colonial Society

on 5 April 1869). These barristers were quite a varied group, but one thing is clear: They

were not, by and large, just up the road from Whitehall; they were not the average

denizens of the Old Bailey. Socially, they were lower than that. Unlike the Colonial Bars,

the English Bar took years of study, and was therefore closed to most (although

obviously not all) young men of the more middling sort. The various colonial bars o

which these men were members were easier to get into. The young H.C.E.Childers left

England in part because he did not fancy his chances in the Inns of Court. After briefly

serving as a bureaucrat in Victoria, Australia, he was able to join the colony’s bar with

only a few months of spare-time study. Even Childers himself found the local Ba

‘weak’.

Standards of admission and training were no higher in Upper Canada, where

(until 1857) untrained attorneys could perform most of the functions of a barrister, and

even the number of real if locally produced barristers was ballooning.

Yet despite the

easy access to the colonial Bars, the number of barristers—home and colonial together

—

who were in the Colonial Society was not very impressive. (Solicitors, for their part, are

harder to trace, and ranked much lower socially, with no unified solicitor’s profession in

England until 1873.

) Perhaps most of the barristers had more parochial concerns than

oining a pro-imperial society.

The law careers of the barristers who did join the Colonial Society do illustrate, as we

have seen, that at least a few Englishmen had their own varied and more or less

accidental reasons for showing an interest in the empire by 1868. Many had a family

connection. A few had looked to the settlement colonies as a way to establish themselves.

There was no homogeneous group of barristers in the Colonial Society—

ut there were

individuals who become informed about the empire in a variety of ways.

One other fact stands out about the legal work of the members. Some of the non-

arliamentary barristers had a hand in actually running the empire out in the field. These

Empire as the triumph of theory 32