A Growing Reputation
Herbert Bury distinguished two kinds of overseas investment, and only one was worthy of Englishmen.
1915
King George V 1910-1936
Herbert Bury distinguished two kinds of overseas investment, and only one was worthy of Englishmen.
1915
King George V 1910-1936
Herbert Bury, whose duties as an assistant bishop to the Bishop of London took him all over Europe, came to believe that Britain’s place in the world depended not on bending other countries to our will or draining their resources, but on helping them to grow.
abridged
IT must ever be remembered that people who cannot leave their own country must judge largely of other countries by what they see of those who come from them. If English ideas, manners, and customs are held in favour and esteem in Russia and Siberia it can only be, therefore, because English men and women have worthily represented them there in business and commerce, by upright and moral conduct.
Englishmen have succeeded amongst the Russians for precisely the same reason that they have succeeded in building up vast colonies and a huge empire. They have developed, and not exploited.* There is a way of becoming rich by exploiting resources at the expense of those employed. True development, on the other hand, is cultivating and bringing into use the resources of a country and improving the conditions of life for those who produce them at the same time.
abridged
This remark would have drawn a sardonic laugh from critics of the Empire such as Adam Smith and William Cobbett: see A Conflict of Interest and Free Trade, Free Peoples. But the objects of their reproof were politicians and their big business cronies, headquartered in London and, if doomed to go abroad, always itching to come home. The private Englishman (or Scotsman) whom Herbert Bury saw in Russia, setting up enterprises such as Muir and Mirrielees, at that time Moscow’s flagship department store, lived among Russians and knew that his prosperity was bound up with theirs. Colonial regions benefited from many such men, though they were frequently at loggerheads with London. See for example our posts tagged Sir Stamford Raffles.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.
Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.
How in Bury’s view can people from England gain respect among people living abroad?