“That strange force which has so often driven the English forward against their will appears to be in operation once more,” wrote the Spectator in May, 1904; “it is certain that neither the British Government nor the British people wished to go to Lhasa.”

This reflection was criticized by other journals at the time as savouring of hypocrisy. One paper said that no mention was made of the Viceroy, and that it was obvious that “the advance was a perfectly gratuitous move on the part of Lord Curzon.” Another leading London paper attributed the whole movement to “the designs of the little group of intriguing officials”; it said that “the raid was conceived and engineered as a part of the forward policy which has always been the peril of India and of the Empire,” and added that it had been “based upon the most trivial and factitious excuses ever invented by designing bureaucrats.”

This matter is worth going into. Bureaucrats, of whom presumably I was one, are only too painfully aware that they have not a tithe of the power which is attributed to them. They certainly have not the means of making the whole British Government and British people act against their will. I sometimes wish they had. To attribute to them such miraculous power is as shallow as to believe that the Lamas exercise their hold over Tibetans and Mongols only by trickery and chicanery. Bureaucrats and priests must have something far more powerful behind them than intrigues and trickery. The question is, What is it? What does impel us? Is there really, as the Spectator suggested, some strange force driving us forward? and if so, whither is it driving us?

These questions are not applicable to the Tibetan affair alone, but to the British Empire generally; and not only to the British Empire, but to the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the Japanese Empire; to the French in Tongking and Annam, Algeria and Tunis; to the Americans in the Philippines, the Germans in Asia Minor, the Austrians in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are of fundamental importance, and go to the very root of things. They are therefore worth examination by so practical a people as ourselves.

In all these cases where one country advanced into the territory of another the forward movement has been attributed to the intrigues of bureaucrats or the crafty designs of scheming politicians. If the Germans advance to Paris, the action is attributed to the Machiavellian designs of Bismarck; if the Austrians openly declare what is already the accomplished fact of their sovereignty over Bosnia, Baron von Ahrenthal is believed to have deliberately schemed some devilment; if the French attempt to assert a predominance in Morocco, DelcassÉ is accused of plotting against Germany; if the British laboriously straighten out the affairs of Egypt, Lord Cromer is said to be designing to establish a permanent occupation of the country; and if we advance to Lhasa, Lord Curzon is accused of bureaucratic designs upon Tibet.

To take one very noteworthy case, the German invasion of France in 1870. To this day the action is ascribed to the deliberate designs of Prince Bismarck, and the story of his alteration of the Ems telegram is regarded as a proof positive of his set design heartlessly to make war on France. Yet quite recently there has appeared in the “Reminiscences of Carl Schurz,” the American statesman, who was originally a German subject and revolutionist of 1848, the account of a very remarkable interview^[65] he had with Bismarck before the Franco-German War. In a tone quite serious, grave, and almost solemn, Bismarck said to Schurz: "Do not believe that I love war. I have seen enough of war to abhor it. The terrible scenes I have witnessed harass my mind. I shall never consent to a war which is avoidable, much less seek it. But this war with France will surely come. It will be forced upon us by the French Emperor." The Ems telegram was “edited,” but no mere editing of a telegram by a bureaucrat could by itself have produced a war, much less a victorious war. We read that when King William returned from Ems to Berlin, he was quite stupefied by the outburst of popular enthusiasm which greeted him from every side, and gradually came to see that it was in truth a national war which the people needed and craved for. What Bismarck did was simply to express and personify the feelings of the people. And in a recent work by a French writer a letter by Napoleon III. is mentioned, in which he admitted that the French Government had been the aggressor in 1870.

So far as the British are concerned, it is an undeniable fact that we have over and over again been forced forward against our deliberate wish and intention. Our presence in India is the best possible example. There could not by any means have been a deliberate intention on the part of the inhabitants of an island in the North Sea to establish an Empire over 200,000,000 people at the other end of the world, at a time when they could only be reached by a six months’ voyage round the Cape, and when the islanders were engaged in a life-and-death struggle with their powerful neighbours across the Channel. “International considerations,” the “wider purview,” the “interests of the Empire as a whole,” should in all conscience have prevented the English from establishing their rule in India. And yet, in spite of all these considerations, in spite of peremptory orders from England, in spite of Governor after Governor being sent out to stop any further aggressions, English rule did extend over India. The British Government and the British people never intended, never even wanted, to supplant the Moghul Emperors. They tried their very best, from motives of clean, sheer self-interest, to leave the Sikhs in the Punjab alone, just as they are now trying desperately to leave the Afghans and frontier tribes alone. But yet they supplanted the Moghuls at Delhi and annexed the Punjab.

It is absurd to put all this down to scheming bureaucrats. There must have been something bigger than bureaucrats behind it all. And in the case of Tibet, though the advance to Lhasa was undoubtedly due to a very large extent to Lord Curzon’s strenuous advocacy, and without that would not have taken place for some years later, yet it is a clear absurdity to suppose that his words alone, or his words, supported only by the opinion of Mr. White, myself, and a few other bureaucrats, would have been able to prevail against the deliberate wish and intention of the Cabinet in England, then faced by an opposition which the subsequent General Election showed had the great bulk of public opinion behind it. Lord Curzon is a man of great force and ability, and a most strenuous advocate of any cause he takes up, but even he could not make a British Cabinet reverse their opinion unless he had some strong compelling force behind him.

Or, again, take the case of Lord Morley and Sir Edward Grey in this matter of Tibet. No one could have desired less than they did to intervene in Tibet. They had come into office supported by an enormous majority in the country—a majority which had had the very question of Tibet before them. They had to fear nothing from opposition in Parliament or in the country. They had shown themselves most amenable and compliant to Chinese wishes and Chinese methods. We had a right to say that the Tibetans should pay the indemnity, but we forebore to press this point, as the Chinese undertook to pay it on their behalf. We had a right to occupy the Chumbi Valley till the trade-marts had been effectively opened for three years. The trade-marts were not effectively opened—our Agent reported, indeed, that they were effectively closed—but again we did not want to press the point, and the Chumbi Valley, our sole material guarantee for the observance of the Treaty, was evacuated. We also engaged in a definite Treaty "not to annex Tibetan territory or to interfere in the administration of Tibet." Even travellers such as Sven Hedin we refused to allow across our border into Tibet. Everything we could do to avoid interference and irritation we did. And every sign of intriguing official had disappeared from India. Lord Curzon had left, Mr. White and I had retired, Captain O’Connor was in Persia, and there was a new Foreign Secretary. Yet just as many troops as accompanied the Mission at the start were moved to the frontier ready to advance into Tibet at any time. If men like Lord Morley and Sir Edward Grey so act, may it not be inferred that bureaucrats also are carried along against their will by some strange force?

To attribute these forward movements merely to the designs of bureaucrats is, then, to take but a shallow view. Single men of great force and ability and little knots of men can do a great deal, but to accomplish anything big they must have a solid backing of some kind behind them. They may, as it were, accentuate an impulse and carry it forward a stage or two farther than without them it would have gone. But unless they have this propulsion from behind they can accomplish nothing. That great men are not only the creators, but the creatures, of their time is now a truism. Born at any other period than the French Revolution, Napoleon might have been no greater than Lord Roberts or Lord Kitchener. Born in the Revolution, Cecil Rhodes might have been a Napoleon.

The overwhelming probability is that there is some strange force working in the affairs of men, and when British Governments and the British people are driven along against their will it is more reasonable to attribute this phenomenon, not to the designs and intrigues of a few officials, but to some inward compulsion from the very core of things. The paragraph in the Spectator must have been either written or inspired by Mr. Meredith Townsend, then its co-editor and author of “Asia and Europe,” a man who had lived in India, who had made a life-long study of Asiatic politics, and who honestly did not like the idea of advancing to Lhasa. When such a man wrote of the action of a strange force the matter is worth close examination.

Intrinsically, there is nothing improbable or unnatural in the idea. Individually, we all feel ourselves at times in the possession of some unknown power. We are often carried along by an irresistible impulse in spite of ourselves. Each of us must at some time or other in his life have felt that within him which will not let him rest, but impels to expression. Everyone must have experienced deep within him a great source of power which ever and anon comes welling up in forceful spiritual fountains. Some inner necessity compels us onward—longings, dreams, aspirations, greater than can ever be satisfied coming surging up from the inmost depths of our beings.

This internal force which probably most of us individually feel to be within ourselves we also feel must be working in others around us. And we have the further feeling that we are not each of us separate and isolated geysers, but are connected together and impelled by some common interior, hidden, urge and impulse. Each of us is a living centre of action, but we all draw from some one original source and spring of being. Deep in the heart of things, inherent in the very life itself, we feel there is an indwelling eternal energy or vital impulse—the “life-force” of Bernard Shaw; the “potent, felt, interior command” of Whitman; the “Élan vital” of Bergson; the “impulse from the distance of our deepest, best existence” of Matthew Arnold; surging ever upward and outward, and straining to express itself through our personalities.

To many of the deepest thinkers this is of all things the most real—to some it is the only thing that is real. The solid mountains may be merely an aspect or appearance of the true reality behind. But to many this “great world-force, energizing through Nature”; this “creative and urging principle of the world”; this unseen cosmic impulse; this indwelling spirit pervading every human being, and ever striving to unfold itself; this pulse and motive, “the fibre and the breath,” is the one certainty, the one genuine reality.

We may, then, very safely assume that there actually is a strange force driving us on. The highest intelligence affirms that it is so, and intuition, a still higher guide, confirms the view. The practical question is: What is the direction in which it is driving us?

It has been expressed in various ways—as harmony, as freedom, as the union of all with all, as unity in multiplicity and multiplicity in unity. The direction in which this impulse is believed to press is towards fuller individualization and completer association. Each is driven to express his own individuality more completely, but he equally feels impelled to associate others more closely with him. There is a tendency towards the balancing between individualization and association, till the individuals become more and more free and perfect individuals, but only as they become more and more closely united in harmonious association. And, according to McTaggart, the closer the unity of the whole, the greater will be the individuality of the parts, and at the same time the more developed the individuality the closer the unity; the impulse may be towards greater differentiation, but it is not to separation or opposition, and our harmony with our fellow-beings will always be more fundamentally real than our opposition to them. Towards isolation, unsociability, or dissociation, there are no signs of the impulse tending. It seems to be all in the opposite direction.

And perhaps it is here that we may find the true reason why, as the Spectator observed, we English have so often been driven forward against our own will. It is when we have found ourselves in contact with disorder or repugnance to association that we have been so often compelled to intervene. We find by practical experience that the affairs of the world will not work while there is disorder about. We find that except on ocean islands there can in practice be no such thing as real isolation. And experience proves to us in the everyday working of human affairs that in one way or another order has to be preserved. It was the existence of disorder that drew us into both India and Egypt, and it is fear of disorder recurring if we leave that keeps us there. It was the anticipation of disorder which Russian influence might cause which drew us into Tibet in 1904. It is a similar anticipation of the disorder which Chinese action may bring about that is causing even the pacific Lord Morley to sanction the assembly of troops on the Tibet frontier in 1910. In none of these cases have we ever really wanted to intervene. We have intended, and we have publicly and solemnly declared our intention, not to intervene, or, if we have to intervene, to withdraw immediately. But yet the impulse comes. Somehow we have to intervene; somehow we have to stay. And not only we find this, but other great nations find the same. Practical statesmen find nothing so disturbing to their wishes and intentions as contact with a weak, unorderly people. They try for years to disregard their existence, but in the end, from one cause or another, they find they have to intervene to establish order and set up regular relations—they are, in fact, driven to establish eventual harmony, even if it may be by the use of force at the moment.

Yet all the time they feel that there is a delicate mean to be observed in these matters. If they think only of order and nothing of individualization they will find those among whom they are preserving order impelled against them. This balancing of order and freedom, of association and individualization, is always the difficult task. It is our trouble now in India, though it may be parenthetically noted that in isolated and secluded Tibet there is far less freedom for the individual than in Bengal under our alien rule, and that there is less freedom in a native State than in a British province in India, for we try in India as in Egypt to give the individual all the play we can within the limits of order.

That there is a strange force driving us on, and that it is impelling us in the direction of freedom with union, or of the one through the other, is, then, a reasonable assumption to make. And if this is so, we are not merely drifting along on a mere tendency—we are being driven onward by a forceful impulse. If, then, we find that the direction in which we are thus being impelled is towards what is, in itself, obviously good and desirable, should we not be wiser, instead of standing stubbornly athwart the impulse, to throw our whole selves in with it, to immerse ourselves in it, to let it permeate us through and through and to utilize our intellects to give this general impetus practical, definite effect?

Instead of fostering isolation, acquiescing in seclusion, and encouraging unneighbourliness in Tibet, in Afghanistan, and all along our frontier, would it not be better to work whole-heartedly with the great World-Impulse towards more and more intimate union combined with ever-increasing freedom? Independence, indeed, we may respect, but surely not isolation. To individuality we may allow the fullest play, but hardly to unsociality.

Further, recognizing that forceful impulses mean flux and movement, and that therefore we can never expect finality, should we not place less and less faith in settlements and treaties, and repose increasing trust in personal contact, flexible and adaptable, ever ready for change in details, but ever deepening and tightening the essential attachment of man for man? It is through personalities that individuality is brought out, association fostered, and harmony attained. It is through living human beings that suspicions are dispelled, jealousies melted, prejudices dissolved, and peoples united. The Tibet Treaty was good; would not an agent at Lhasa have been better?