Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/64



The Boer War was both a turning-point in my career and an illumination to my understanding of the real relations between economics and politics which were to occupy so large a place in my future work. The persistent opportunist pressures by which our widespread Empire had grown up and the relative parts played in the process by political ambitions and commercial gains had become a matter of close attention since Lord Beaconsfield had organized the Prince of Wales’s visit to India and had staged the magnificent imperial parades at Queen Victoria’s two Jubilees. The conscious pride in our Empire had become a new and potent factor in our national sentiment and was beginning to evoke some envy and criticism in foreign quarters. Mark Twain, watching the Jubilee procession, remarked that “The English are mentioned in Holy Scripture — ‘Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.’” So long as our colonial possessions, a quarter of the globe, were free to the trade and the migration of other nations, no active sense of grievance was evoked. But when Joseph Chamberlain set out to convert the Empire into a close preserve by his policy of tariffs and preferences, and the magnificent projects of Cecil Rhodes began to influence