Recent events, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia, have aroused much debate about the moral principles that should underpin the foreign policy of the Western democracies. When New Labour, for example, came to power in Britain, in 1997, it committed itself to what Robin Cook called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ but that concept proved difficult to define and even harder to apply to complex international issues. The problem is not a new one, however, for it has bedevilled British foreign policy for over 200 years.
No major British statesman has been more associated with the concept of a moral foreign policy than William Gladstone (1809-98), the Victorian Liberal leader, who was four times prime minister (1868-74, 1880-5, 1886, 1892-94). In 1879, when he was out of office, he laid down what he called ‘the right policies of foreign policy’, which included the preservation of peace, the love of liberty and respect for the equal rights of all nations. Gladstone did not just formulate these principles, he also applied them to international issues of the day – most famously in his concern for the plight of oppressed peoples including the Neapolitans (1851), the Bulgarians (1876) and the Armenians. But Gladstone’s most telling humanitarian statement related to the Afghans. In 1879, during the famous Midlothian election campaign in which Gladstone skilfully to attacked Disraeli’s policies and leadership, he made a simple moral observation that still has resonance today:
Remember the rights of the savage as we call him. Remember that ... the sanctity of human life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can be your own. Remember that ... mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilisation, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its unmeasured scope.
Gladstone’s remarks were occasioned by British military action in the Khost Valley in south-eastern Afghanistan – the same area where both the Americans and the Royal Marines carried out operations against al-Qaeda earlier this year. The parallel between recent events and those in the Victorian period is striking, for in both cases events on the other side of the world suddenly and unexpectedly propelled Afghanistan into the political limelight. Just as the attacks in New York, on September 11th, 2001, led to the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, so the Russo-Turkish war in the Balkans (1877-78) led to the Anglo-Afghan war of 1878. In both cases the rulers of Afghanistan were regarded by Western powers as the local stooges of hostile forces with world-wide influence.
In the nineteenth century Afghanistan was a crucial chess piece in what was known as ‘the Great Game’ – the competition for territory and influence between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. The first British intervention in Afghanistan, in 1838, was prompted by the decision of the ruling emir to receive a Russian envoy. This was regarded as a threat to British India by the viceroy, Lord Auckland (1784-1849), who mounted an invasion of Afghanistan, which deposed the emir, Dost Mohammed, and restored a former ruler, Shah Shuja. But in 1842 the troops were forced to retreat from Kabul and were then massacred by the Ghilzais in the Kyber Pass. Out of 4,000 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers only a handful survived. This was the most serious defeat suffered by British imperial troops during the Victorian era, but the Indian army restored imperial prestige by returning to Kabul and obtaining the release of British prisoners before withdrawing.
Gladstone, who was then a young member of Peel’s Tory Cabinet, welcomed the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan because he regarded the intervention as not just an error but a crime. His view was shared by another young Tory politician, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), who questioned the justification for the Afghan war and predicted that the British Empire would decline if it violated the rights of foreign states. But thirty-five years later, when Disraeli was prime minister, he changed his tune and endorsed another intervention in Afghanistan. Gladstone, by contrast, remained consistent with his earlier attitude.
After 1843 British policy was to keep out of Afghanistan and to retain influence over the emir by paying him a subsidy. But in 1878 the events of 1838 seemed to repeat themselves. When the Indian viceroy, Lord Lytton (1831-91), learned that the emir, Shere Ali, had received a Russian envoy at Kabul, he despatched a mission to the emir which was stopped at the frontier. This created a crisis in Anglo-Afghan relations which alarmed Gladstone who feared that Britain was going to repeat ‘the deadly error of the Afghan War’. He thought that the best way to preserve British rule in India was not to attack its neighbours but to ensure good government within India. But Gladstone’s fear that Disraeli might distract public attention from domestic problems by ‘a great Asiatic feat’ was realised in November 1878, when the Indian government declared war on Afghanistan and sent its troops across the border.
Gladstone criticised Disraeli’s government for not consulting Parliament and for fighting with Indian money and troops. Although he was dissuaded from joining an ‘Afghan Committee’ which opposed the intervention, he immersed himself in the Afghan issue which he mixed with his ‘rescue work’ with prostitutes as an entry in his diary reveals:
Dined with the Wests – an Affghan evening. Saw Witney X. Read Indian Bluebook.
Early in December 1879, Gladstone addressed his Greenwich constituents, at Woolwich, in a long speech which has been ignored by his biographers. He focused almost entirely on Afghanistan – a subject which, he observed, ‘is to an Englishman one of the most painful in the world’ because it had been the scene of ‘the greatest military disaster that had fallen upon England for generations’. This was a reference to the 1842 massacre, which he regarded as God’s retribution on Britain for embarking on an unjust war in Afghanistan. He feared that a similar outcome would now recur:
It is written in the eternal laws of the universe of God that sin shall be followed by suffering. An unjust war is a tremendous sin. The question which you have to consider is whether this war is just or unjust. So far as I am able to collect the evidence, it is unjust ... If so ... the day will come – come it soon or come it late – when the people of England will discover that national injustice is the surest road to national downfall.
Gladstone’s comments were loudly cheered and afterwards he wrote in his diary: ‘spoke over two hours. Great crowd, perfect attention, much enthusiasm’.
A few days later Parliament was recalled and Gladstone repeated his criticisms in a speech to the House of Commons which he described as ‘an accusatory task, not congenial’, but one in which he ‘knowingly, over-stated nothing and set down nought in malice’. He appealed to the government not to visit the sins of the Russians on the emir or the sins of the emir on the frontier tribes. He accused the government of repeating the mistake that had been made in 1838:
To err is human and pardonable. But we have erred a second time on the same ground and with no better justification.
Gladstone’s speech was dismissed by The Times as ‘a furious anatomy of Blue-books’ which ignored the danger of Russian intrigue – but such criticisms did not deter him.
The Afghan war, coming so soon after the crisis in the Balkans, heightened Gladstone’s conviction that he was carrying out the will of God:
For when have I seen so strongly the relation between my public duties and the primary purposes for which God made and Christ redeemed the world? ... In the great physical and mental effort of speaking, often to large auditories, I have been, as it were, upheld in an unusual manner and the free effectiveness of my voice has been given me to my own astonishment. Was not all this for a purpose? ...
But Gladstone then characteristically humbled himself by observing that God sometimes employed, as instruments for good, those with whom ‘He has yet a sore account to settle’.
Gladstone regarded the invasion of Afghanistan as ‘war with dishonour’ – in stark contrast to Disraeli’s claim to have achieved ‘peace with honour’ at the Congress of Berlin a few months before. But when Parliament reassembled, in February 1879, Disraeli was able to claim that the Afghan war was virtually at an end, for British troops had occupied Kandahar and the emir, Shere Ali, had fled from Kabul and soon died. However, critics of the campaign seized on a report by the special correspondent of the Standard – a Conservative newspaper – that villages in the Khost Valley had been looted and burnt by troops and that prisoners had been shot while trying to escape. The troops were commanded by Major General Frederick Roberts, whose decisive victory at Peiwar Kotal had ensured the success of the invasion and gained him promotion and the thanks of Parliament. The Standard’s correspondent claimed that Roberts was anxious to avoid a cry of ‘Afghan atrocities’ and had been ‘unmanned by visions of Exeter Hall’ – a reference to the Nonconformist venue in the Strand where Gladstone had condemned the Bulgarian atrocities.
The atrocity allegations were raised in Parliament by George Anderson, the Radical Liberal MP for Glasgow, who had admired Gladstone’s stance on the Bulgarian atrocities. Anderson was informed that Roberts regarded the destruction of the Afghan villages as ‘a severe lesson’ but ‘not more than the occasion deserved and the safety of the force required’. Roberts had ordered eleven villages to be looted and burnt after their residents had allegedly ignored a warning not to help the insurgents. The prisoners had been shot on the orders of a Pathan officer who was later exonerated by a Court of Inquiry. Roberts later described the shootings as a ‘most unfortunate occurrence’ which had been exploited by the anti-war party in Britain.
In May 1879, the new emir, Yakoob Khan, signed the Treaty of Gundamuk, by which he agreed to receive a British mission at Kabul in return for a subsidy. But the peace did not last, for in September Major Cavagnari and the members of his mission at Kabul were murdered by insurgent Afghan soldiers. This led to another invasion when Roberts re-occupied Kabul and punished those held responsible for the massacre.
By the time Gladstone embarked on his Midlothian campaign, late in 1879, interest in the Afghan war had declined and other issues – notably the economic depression – had come to the fore. So Gladstone paid less attention to the Afghan question than he had done a year before and he did not even refer to recent events like the Treaty of Gundamuk or the massacre of Cavagnari’s mission. But in his first Midlothian speech, he indicted the Tory government for breaking up Afghanistan – something the Cabinet was contemplating at the time – although he acknowledged that the Afghan government had always been notoriously weak.
On the second day of his Midlothian campaign, Gladstone returned to the topic of Afghanistan in a minor speech at the Forester’s Hall, in Dalkeith. His audience included women who, he claimed, had little taste for ‘the harder, sterner and drier lessons of politics’, so he appealed directly to their emotions. He referred to the current war in South Africa with the Zulus who had been mowed down by modern weapons when they had tried to defend their homeland. But Gladstone claimed that the fighting in Afghanistan, during the previous winter, had been sadder still. He noted that many of the troops deployed in Afghanistan were ‘not British and not under Christian obligations and restraints’ and he denounced the actions taken against the hill tribes:
Those hill tribes had committed no real offence against us. We, in the pursuit of our political objects, chose to establish military positions in their country. If they resisted, would not you have done the same? ... The meaning of the burning of the village is, that the women and the children were driven forth to perish in the snows of winter ... Is that not a fact – for such, I fear, it must be reckoned to be – which does appeal to your hearts as women ... which does rouse in you a sentiment of horror and grief, to think that the name of England, under no political necessity, but for a war as frivolous as ever was waged in the history of man, should be associated with consequences such as these?
Gladstone’s oratory was moving but his arguments were not entirely convincing. Although the immediate cause of the Afghan war was relatively trivial, it reflected an understandable, if exaggerated, fear that Afghanistan would become a Russian satellite. The destruction of the hill villages was in response to attacks on the troops and was intended to deter further assaults. The practice was cruel but Gladstone produced no evidence – and tacitly implied that he had no evidence – that women and children had died in the snow as a consequence of such action.
Gladstone’s remarks at the Forester’s Hall do not seem to have aroused much public sympathy for the Afghans. The Liberal Daily News commented only on Gladstone’s conservative views on the place of women in politics, while The Times deplored his pre-occupation with God and foreign affairs at the expense of domestic issues. But when Gladstone spoke in Glasgow, a few days later, he claimed that he had hardly opened his mouth on Afghanistan since he had come to Scotland. He then made good the omission by declaring that the money spent on the Afghan war should have been spent on the current Indian famine and by condemning the ‘forward policy’ – the expansion of India’s north-west frontier – as ‘a phantasmagoria’. Britain, he argued, should have dealt directly with the Russian government rather than punishing the emir.
Gladstone’s failure to arouse as much indignation about Afghanistan as he had previously done about Bulgaria reflected the different scale of the atrocities in the two countries. In Bulgaria, the notorious Turkish ‘bashi-bazouks’ had killed tens of thousands of civilians and destroyed a hundred towns and villages. The Bulgarians, moreover, were Christian Europeans, whereas the Afghans were Muslim Asians who even Gladstone had described as the most warlike and the most fickle highland people in the world. But the significance of such racial and religious stereotyping should not be exaggerated for the Victorians were surprisingly well informed about Afghanistan, despite its isolation and lack of modern communications. The Illustrated London News, for example, reproduced many pictures of Afghan people and places, made by its own artist on the spot, which focused on the picturesque and historic attractions of the country.
Gladstone believed that the Koran had been an evil influence on the civil government of non-Muslims in the Ottoman empire, but his application of the same moral standards to both Bulgaria and Afghanistan illustrated his relative lack of Christian prejudice. When he returned to Midlothian, on the dissolution of Parliament, in March 1880, he asked whether the Afghan war could be justified by the government ‘of a country which calls itself Christian’.
The Afghan issue did not contribute significantly to Gladstone’s election victory at Midlothian, for his narrow majority – two hundred votes – had been predicted before he had begun his campaign. But his criticism of the Afghan war was an important part of his general indictment of Disraeli’s Tory government, which helped him to return to office, as prime minister, at the head of a large Liberal majority, in April 1880.
Gladstone was now in a position to practice what he had preached in regard to Afghanistan. He wished to evacuate the country as speedily as possible not just for moral but also for pragmatic reasons. The long-term occupation of the country would require large numbers of troops and much expenditure – something that was of particular concern to Gladstone, who was now Chancellor of the Exchequer as well as prime minister. Even so, the troops remained in Afghanistan for another year after Gladstone’s return to power.
In the summer of 1880 there was a long campaign against Ayoob Khan which ended when Roberts defeated him at Kandahar, but then there was a protracted civil war between Ayoob Khan and Shere Ali. It was not until January 1881 that the government announced that Kandahar would be evacuated, a decision that Disraeli censured in his last speech to the House of Lords before his death. The evacuation took place in April 1881 but even then two small border areas of Afghanistan were retained as part of British India. This created an ethnic and security problem on the north-west frontier which still confronts Pakistan today.
After the evacuation, Parliament thanked the British and Indian troops for their services, but the Irish Nationalists, taking a leaf out of Gladstone’s Midlothian speeches, accused the troops of ‘slaying a number of people with whom we had no righteous quarrel and devastating their country’. Gladstone himself was careful to avoid his earlier moral stance, though he acknowledged the Afghans’ valour in defending their religion and country. He later denied, rather casuistically, that he had ever stated that ‘the forward policy’ was immoral. Yet the gap between Gladstone’s rhetoric in opposition and his policy in office was much less wide with respect to Afghanistan than it was with respect to some other countries such as Egypt. This was mainly because his moral stance on Afghanistan was reinforced by essentially amoral military, financial and political considerations. The return to a policy of non-intervention in Afghanistan was a reversion to a mid-Victorian orthodoxy, rather than simply a reflection of Gladstone’s personal views.
It is difficult in other respects, too, to trace the direct influence of Gladstone’s moral stance on British policy in the north-west frontier region. Certainly his condemnation of village burnings did not stop the practice by the Indian army. In 1897 the young Winston Churchill reported that many villages in the valleys immediately to the east of the Afghan border had been destroyed by Sir Bindon Blood’s Malakand Field Force. Churchill considered the legitimacy of village-burning in his first book. He pointed out that because the tribesmen ambushed the troops at night and then withdrew to the mountains – where they could not be found – their villages were routinely destroyed. He described the practice as ‘cruel and barbarous, as is every thing else in war’, but no worse than the bombardment of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Such cruelty continued to characterise combat on the north-west frontier until the end of the British Raj in 1947.
Nevertheless Gladstone’s criticism of the treatment of civilians during the Afghan war had some lasting influence. In 1900, when Frederick Roberts, the hero of the Afghan War, was made commander-in-chief in South Africa, during the Boer war, he did not sanction the burning of villages. It was only after Roberts returned to Britain that Boer settlements were systematically burnt and the women and children from them forced into concentration camps where many died from disease. This policy was denounced as ‘methods of barbarism’, by the leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. He had supported Gladstone’s 1879 Midlothian campaign, which he now echoed with his claim that a barbaric policy was being carried out in the name of a Christian nation.
Gladstone’s exhortation to ‘remember the rights of the savage’ was ignored by all his early biographers until the passage was quoted in John Morley’s authoritative Life published in 1903. Morley, as an agnostic, particularly appreciated a moral principle that transcended Christianity. The precedent he established was followed by later historians, including J.L. Hammond and M.R.D. Foot, who remarked that the passage summed up Gladstone’s whole appeal to mankind. Winston Churchill also quoted the passage in A History Of The English-Speaking Peoples to illustrate Gladstone’s concern that British policy should conform with moral law.
In recent years, however, historians have become more wary of morality dispensed by politicians. Colin Matthew attributed the emotional character of the ‘rights of the savage’ speech to the fact that it was addressed to women, while Roy Jenkins described the passage as an example of what Morley had described as Gladstone’s ‘intellectual sentimentality’. But Morley had clearly not regarded Gladstone’s remarks in that light and it is surprising that Jenkins was so unconcerned with the moral issues that Gladstone raised.
Other Liberals, however, have valued Gladstone’s counsel more highly. In the House of Commons, in April 2001, Paddy Ashdown quoted the ‘rights of the savage’ passage and described it as a code of survival for our own time. The continued relevance of Gladstone’s remarks was dramatically enhanced, a few months later, when Afghanistan suddenly became the focus of the ‘war against terror’. The Taliban were soon overthrown, but for months afterwards American air attacks continued to cause the deaths of many innocent civilians. Thus Gladstone’s affirmation of ‘the sanctity of human life in the hill villages of Afghanistan’ still remains highly pertinent both to the particular circumstances of that country and to the general need for global humanitarianism.
For Further Reading:
W.E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester, 1971 edition); John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 volumes (London, 1903); H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875-1898 (Oxford, 1995); Field Marshall Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Forty-one Years in India, 2 volumes (London, 1897), Winston S. Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force (London, 1989 edition); Duncan Brack and Tony Little (ed.), Great Liberal Speeches (London, 2001).
- Roland Quinault is Reader in History at London Metropolitan University.