The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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One valley
led to the next, each river to its headwaters, every sea to the other
shore.

Later on
the urges of a higher kind were added to these material, if often
obscure, impulses. For example, since the
nineteenth century if not earlier, the
British Empire had regarded itself as an improvement society,
dedicated to the
elevation of mankind. Raised to the summit of the world by their own systems,
the
British believed in progress as an absolute, and thought they held its keys.
“AUSPICIUM MELIORIS AEVI
was the motto of the imperial order of chivalry,
The Most Distinguished Order of St. George – ‘A Pledge
of Better Times.’ “12 The
British way was the true way, from
free trade to monarchy, and it was the
privilege of Britons to propagate it across the world. Through the
agency of
Empire the slave trade had been abolished, and through the Empire many a
Christian mission had
journeyed to spread the word.

The
desire to do good was a true energy of Empire, and accompanying it
went a genuine sense of duty, Christian
duty. Occasionally, particularly in the
mid nineteenth century, their task was powerfully Old Testament in
style, soldiers
stormed about with Bibles in their hands, administrators sat like bearded prophets
at
their desks. “By the 1890s it was more subdued, but still devoted to the
principle that the British were
some sort of Chosen People, touched on the
shoulder by the Great Being, and commissioned to do His will in
the world.”13

It cannot
be said that the pride of the British was unjustified. Apart from
the mighty Empire whose structure I shall
examine in due course in this chapter,
the British were creators too. Having escaped the social convulsions
that shook
the rest of Europe, they provided a model of liberal but traditional stability.
Their
original mastery of steam, and all that came from it, had given them a
technological start over
all other nations, an advantage they put to imperial uses.
In addition, the flexibility of their unwritten
constitution was handy for an
expansionist state. The British as islanders knew more about the world than
most

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