BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Imperialist identification with Rome continued throughout the latter nineteenth century
from the Don Pacifico affair of 1850, when Palmerston had echoed a popular sentiment by
declaring that, just as Rome protected any Roman citizen who could say civis Romanus sum, “the
watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect a British subject in whatever land he
may be.” 31 In 1895 Chamberlain exhorted the British people to “build railroads [in Africa] as the
Romans built roads,” and voiced the conviction that “the only dominion which can in any way
compare with the British dominion is, of course, the old empire of the Romans.” 32 Lord
Rosebery posed the rhetorical question in 1900, “Are we, like the Romans, not merely a brave,
but also a persistent, business-like, alert, governing people?” 33 Even those who debunked British
affinities with Rome sought out differences in order to show that Britain would prevail where its
ancient counterpart failed. “If Imperial Rome had held at her disposal a small fraction of that
mental vigour which is at the disposal of England now,” wrote J. B. Bury in 1896, “her Empire
would never have succumbed, as it did, to the Germans.” 34
31 Don Pacifico was a Moorish Jew and British subject whose claims against the Greek
government prompted an anti-Semitic mob to burn his Athens residence. British support
eventually led to an embargo and seizure of Greek vessels in the Piraeus followed by Greek
capitulation. See Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 3rd series, 112 (1850): 443-44,
the debate on Don Pacifico and Greece, 25 June 1850, quoted in Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign
Policy of Victorian England 1838-1902 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), “Selected Documents,”
301-2. Two days later Gladstone replied, “What then, Sir, was a Roman citizen? He was the
member of a privileged class; he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all others
bound down by the strong arm of power.” Gladstone deplored the idea that the British were to be
“the universal schoolmasters.” Hansard’s, 575-76, quoted in Bourne, 306.
32 Daily Telegraph, 24 August 1895, 3.
33 Lord Rosebery, “The British Empire,” reprinted from the London Times in Living Age,
22 December 1900, 734.
34 “The British and Roman Empire,” Saturday Review, 81 (June 1896): 645. Some
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