Nightfall at the Malviya Bridge over the Ganges at Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. This double-decker road and rail bridge was opened in 1887 as Dufferin bridge, and built by the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway (O&R Railway) under the direction of engineer (Frederick Thomas) Granville Walton (1840-1925). In asserting warily that “the British conferred great benefits on the peoples over which they ruled” Maugham had history on his side, though more bridges and fewer Government buildings would have been nice; but as any Brexit enthusiast would confirm — and much of what is said here about the British Empire and America applies also to the EU — arguments of that kind rarely dispose subject peoples to feel more kindly. See John Bright on A Dream of Independence.
Part 1 of 2
IN the world of today the Americans occupy the position which the British so long, and for all their failings not ingloriously, held. Perhaps it would be to their advantage to profit by our example and avoid making the errors that have cost us so dear. The British wanted to be loved and were convinced that they were; the Americans want to be loved too, but are uneasily, distressingly, conscious that they are not.
They find it hard to understand. With their boundless generosity they have poured money into the countries which two disastrous wars have reduced to poverty, and it is natural that they should wish to see it spent as they think fit and not always as the recipients would like to spend it.
Précis
Writing shortly after the Second World War, Somerset Maugham urged the USA to reflect on Indian independence. The Americans, he said, were starting down the same path as the British Empire, hoping to make themselves both loved and respected by funding and shaping Europe’s war-torn nations as Britain had funded and shaped India. (53 / 60 words)
Part Two
Park Street in Calcutta during the 1930s. In its heyday, Park Street was a Piccadilly of fashionable shopping, dining and entertainment. But instead of teaching all India how to move out of the Middle Ages and into the Industrial Age, a task no country in the world was better placed to perform than Britain was, we opted (as Maugham says) to keep India a helpless dependent on our bounty. Like Oliver Twist, the Indians wanted more, but the gay evening crowd in Park Street was too much like Mr Limbkins and his Poor Law Board: see ‘Please Sir, I Want Some More!’. It was a status that no self-respecting nation, especially one whose Mediaeval pedigree rivalled our own, could bear indefinitely.
It is true enough that the man who pays the piper calls the tune,* but if it is a tune the company finds it hard to dance to, perhaps he is well-advised to do his best so to modify it that they may find it easy.
Doubtless it is more blessed to give than to receive,* but it is also more hazardous, for you put the recipient of your bounty under an obligation and that is a condition that only the very magnanimous can accept with good will.* Gratitude is not a virtue that comes easily to the human race. I do not think it can be denied that the British conferred great benefits on the peoples over which they ruled; but they humiliated them and so earned their hatred. The Americans would do well to remember it.*
* See Matthew 11:16-17. The musician must play whatever his employer pays him to play.
* See Acts 20:35. It is a rare example of a saying of Jesus Christ that may be found only outside the four Gospels.
* This obligation recalls the duties owed by a client to his Patron under the Roman Empire: to provide him with security services, to vote for him at election time and support him in legal actions, to be seen in his retinue and above all to show him obsequium, deferential respect. In return he would receive a modest sportula or dole in the form of food, money or an invitation to dinner, and a degree of protection and reflected glory. Maugham echoed Juvenal’s opinion (Satire V) that any gratitude was drowned in resentment. Patrons on a larger scale practised ‘euergetism’, i.e. benefaction, funding civic works or public entertainments again in the expectation of gratitude and loyalty, and the Patron of the whole world (the ‘ecumene’) was of course the Emperor. See Luke 22:25-26.
* In fairness to the Americans, they are not the only ones. Since then, the European Union and the global ‘Green New Deal’ have done much the same, promising wise governance and bountiful investment to what they regard as backward nation states on condition that the recipients refrain from attempting to manage their own affairs.
Précis
Maugham warned that neither money nor government expertise would endear the Americans to the nations of Europe, if thereby they created a condition of permanent and humbling dependency. Whatever the benefits might be, such a relationship had sowed the seeds of lasting resentment in British India, and the USA risked doing the same in Europe. (55 / 60 words)
