Some politicians argued that the creation of a system of ‘self-governing dominions’ within the empire was the only way to secure unity, given the limited capacity of British troops and increasing nationalist sentiment in territories under British control. In the late nineteenth century, India’s educated elite had developed political theories based on the principle of ‘representative national institutions’. In Ireland, popular support for ‘Home Rule’ had been paramount for decades, and anti-English sentiment became more intense.
Similar criticism could be heard in England. The burning of thousands of Boer homes and farms by British troops, and the construction of 8,000 ‘concentration camps’ to house the evicted Boers, provoked outrage, and when around 20,000 women and children died in the camps, the anger grew. Then news reached England that the government had allowed 50,000 Chinese labourers to work in South African mines for paltry wages and in appalling living conditions. On the opposition benches, Liberal politicians took up the cry of ‘Chinese slavery’. Imperial expansion had been justified by the argument that Britain was bestowing civilization on ‘primitive’ societies. At the end of the nineteenth century, the English viceroy of India had boasted of importing ‘the rule of justice’ to the country, along with ‘peace and order and good government’. But in the wake of the Boer War, many observers regarded Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ as an excuse for exploitation.
After 1900, the English were also forced to confront their economy’s diminishing international status. In the Victorian era, English manufacturers had dominated world trade. A combination of technological innovation and cheap labour had allowed goods to be produced inexpensively in England; the availability and expansion of imperial markets, as well as mastery of the seas, had ensured they could be safely sold around the world. Meanwhile, Britain’s colonies had commissioned elaborate engineering projects from English firms, with money borrowed from the City of London. The United Kingdom had been responsible for a third of the world’s manufacturing in the 1870s, but in the early 1900s this figure fell to 10 per cent.
England could no longer claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – that title was now contested by Germany and the United States, which had been strengthened by unification in the second half of the nineteenth century and had developed modern production methods during recent wars. By 1900 the United States produced more coal and iron than England, while Germany’s mining technology, electrical engineering and chemical industries were superior. Part of England’s problem was that it had industrialized long before its rivals, and neither the government nor the representatives of capital and labour had the vision or the will to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector. England was technologically sclerotic, unable to add to its imperial territories and shut out from many international markets by the tariffs of foreign governments. Her staple export industries of iron, wool, shipbuilding and coal had entered their senescence. To compound the problem of declining exports, England was increasingly dependent on foreign imports. After 1900 there was a balance-of-payments deficit, with more money leaving the country than coming in. Over the next fourteen years, economic growth halved.
At the beginning of 1901, The Annual Register described the outlook for England as ‘full of misgivings’. A few weeks later, on 22 January, the nation’s anxiety was compounded when Queen Victoria died. As the news spread across the country, church bells tolled, theatrical performances were abandoned and traffic halted, as people poured onto the streets. For many, despair was coupled with bewilderment. It is sometimes said by foreign observers that monarchism is the religion of the English, yet by no means everyone in the country was a believer: the novelist Arnold Bennett thought that Londoners ‘were not, on the whole, deeply moved, whatever journalists may say’.
All the commentators agreed, however, that the queen’s death marked a transition in the country’s history. ‘We are less secure of our position,’ announced The Times. ‘Our impetus’ as a ‘nation may be spent’. Soon after Victoria’s death, the passing of the ethos of Victorianism was also predicted. In his parliamentary address, the Tory leader of the Commons, Arthur James Balfour, announced ‘the end of a great epoch’.
It was not long before another pillar of the Victorian establishment fell. In July 1902, Lord Salisbury resigned as prime minister on the grounds of bad health, his gargantuan weight placing an inordinate strain on his legs and heart. Ever since the split of the Liberal party over Irish Home Rule in 1886 and the defection of the Liberal Unionists to the Conservatives, the Tory grandee had controlled political life, holding office for all but three of those sixteen years. A Tory aristocrat of the old school, he abhorred the democratic tendencies of the modern age, seeing his party’s mission as representing the landed ‘governing’ class and maintaining the status quo in their interest. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse,’ was his most famous political pronouncement, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ Some observers saw, in the manner of Salisbury’s passing in the following year, an omen of the imminent collapse of the British Empire; others regarded his death as confirmation that the Victorian era had ended.
Nevertheless, Conservatives in the Salisbury mould endeavoured to deny the demise of the old order. To Tories, the Victorian verities, including laissez-faire economics and politics and the centrality to national life of the aristocracy, the crown, the Anglican Church and the empire, were sacred. Though the Liberals represented the commercial and Nonconformist sections of the English population, an influential aristocratic element within them was even more passionately committed to free-market capitalism than its rival party.
The passivity within the two parties reflected the inertia in the political system. The ‘first-past-the-post’ system of British elections made it virtually impossible for a new party to achieve an electoral victory. As a consequence, the Tories and the Liberals had shared power for decades. The right to vote was limited to males who paid an annual rent of £10 or owned land worth the same amount, which meant that 40 per cent of English males, as well as the entire female population, were excluded from the franchise. Since MPs were unpaid, only the wealthiest men could afford to stand for election to the Commons. Once elected, MPs devised legislative proposals that were modified or rejected by an unelected, Tory-dominated House of Lords, before being submitted to the monarch for approval. In addition to being the head of Britain’s church, army and aristocracy and one of its biggest landowners, the ostensibly ‘constitutional’ monarch actually enjoyed extensive executive powers known as the ‘royal prerogative’, which included the freedom to dismiss and appoint prime ministers.
In contrast to the English politicians, the country’s intellectuals celebrated the end of Victorianism, and eagerly devised plans for a brave new world. H. G. Wells compared Queen Victoria to a ‘great paper-weight that for half a century [had] sat upon men’s minds … when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’. Radicals such as Wells used ‘Victorian’ as a pejorative term; a fairer, more rational era was coming. The Liberal economist J. A. Hobson remarked on the way increasing numbers of people suddenly appeared ‘possessed by the duty and desire to put the very questions which their parents thought shocking, and to insist upon plain intelligible answers’. What is the role of the state? What is the purpose of the empire? Why should women and the working classes be excluded from the electoral process? And what are the causes and cures of economic and social inequality?