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 ■■'i-l -.,.i*». 
 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE AND 
 THE NEW 
 
 ^.-^^^rTTi 
 
 •jSL. _• 
 
 P'^o: 
 
 IS BO-jK 
 
 t.l\ 
 
 
 i r' r 
 
TH F IMPtR/AL ST 'nms: <:rp,^c 
 EDITED BV 
 
 A. P. NEWTON, M.A., D.LiT., B.Sc. 
 Cr. 8iw, cbti, u. 6rf. HI/. 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE AND 
 
 THE NEW 
 
 BY T'lE EDITOR 
 
 THE oTAPLE TRADES OF 
 THE EMPIRE 
 
 BY VARIOUS WRITERS 
 
 THE EXPLOITATION OF 
 PLANTS 
 
 Edited by Prof. J. W. OLIVER, F.R.S. 
 J. M. DENT & SONS, LTD, 
 
TBS litPBRUL arVDIBS fXRIKH 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 AND THE NEW 
 
 ARTHUR PERCIVAL MEWTON 
 
 MA., D.Ut, B.ic, 
 
 ucTOin oil coioKUi «,„o«y » th« raiTOurr or loifoo-i, 
 
 mnrmiiT iiro uxo'a couuu 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 SIR CHARLES LUCAS 
 
 K.C.B., K.C.U.r; 
 
 MCMXVi, 
 LONDON AND TORONTO 
 
 J. M. D'JNT & SONS. LTD. 
 
 PARIS: J. M. DtNT A FILS 
 
"DA I? 
 
 A Course of Rhodes Lec.ures delivered in the 
 
 University of London, University College, in 
 
 the Spring Term, 1917. 
 
 -4// rigAtI rtttrvid 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 The British Empire has t > long suffered from want 
 of appreciation by the general pubhc of the United 
 Kmgdom, and especially by the working classes. I use 
 the word appreciation in its literal sense. The worth, 
 the meaning of t! Empire, have not been duly appre- 
 hended. It has been the victim of generalities and 
 platitudes, of exaggeration on the one hand, on the 
 other of passive indifference or active suspicion. It has 
 not been, except to a very limit -d extent, the subject of 
 sane and sober study. The r has come as a great 
 stimulus to such study, and l^ a wholesome corrective 
 of distorted views. It has removed— 'et us hope for 
 ever— the mischievous prejudice which attarhed to the 
 word Empire, has identified it with democra ind free- 
 dom, and has proved to demonstration its . zing and 
 potent value alike to the citizens of the British Isles and 
 to liberty-loving peoples throughout the world. 
 
 Some little time before the war a lecture by Mr. 
 Sidney Low attracted attention to the necessity for pro- 
 moting systematic study of the Empire, and the Senate 
 of the University of London esublished a strong Im- 
 perial Studies Committee, of which Lord Milner was 
 and is chairman, and Lord Bryce a member, which in- 
 cludes leading professors and teachers of the university. 
 
vi GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 together with other men of standing and exoerienc. 
 As v.ce-chairnum of this conmuttee I ^ aK S' 
 mth some spedal knowledge of its work, and to tS 
 to the abihty, the enthusiasm and the organisi^ S2 
 of Its secretary. Dr. A. P, Newton A KmiT if *^^ 
 
 view. The Bntish Empire is a great Md h^^^i 
 organism, of which we i^ this coun^L^ th^£^ 
 part. ItisumquealikeinkindandeS^^t 
 of growth towhichnoparaUelcanbe foS'lSi 
 It jsm geruru, and because we live day by dav^^ 
 
 ^' w"' ^' f" "°* "'^^ whatTis 'and wL^ 
 
 d«erv«, it dr^ds.'to^'thl'a^^r'o.Srb^^'S 
 leachere . the teachers must be of the best aualitv • 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION vii 
 
 tea^ : and the universities, while preaching to those 
 outside, must practise within what they preach 
 
 In other words, it is desired to co-ordinate classes and 
 courses withm the universities, as is being done in the 
 University of London. So as to show how far Se 
 various branches of knowledge and science have a bear- 
 wg upon the Empire, what resources for knowledee and 
 for science the Empire provides or can be m«le to 
 provide if duly exploited : to emphasise what may be 
 caUed the Empire side of research and study, not Z 
 orier to advertise the Empire in any vulgar sen^e, but in 
 order to bring home to its citizens aU its potentialities 
 and all that it entails. "-"ura 
 
 When Imperial Studies are mentioned, history 
 naturally rises first to view, and none can doubt that 
 peater prommence than at present ought to be riven 
 
 Ia"^^^^ ^r?-^ ~""^ *»' ^^y' examinations 
 and tHrtbooks. No history, for instance, is so fruitful 
 as tbt history of our Overseas Empire, past and present 
 m Ae record of the begimiings of^natioL, l^^SJ 
 aU the circumstances of the birth and childhood of ereat 
 peoples are absolutely clear and beyond dispute. "Diere 
 is no nmt about the beginnings of the United States. 
 ^ Canada, or Australia ; there is no uncertainty about 
 the course of their development. Causes are known, 
 uT'^\ °^.' *"** *^' sequence of cause and effect. 
 H the highest object of history is admonition and guid- 
 ance from die past for the future, surely the clwrest 
 lessons can be drawn from overseas. 
 
 But hatory does not cover the whole field. Nothing 
 covers the whole field other than the whole or a3 
 the whole of knowledge. Where can constitutional law. 
 
viii 
 
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 1 -_v 
 
 Sei^tS^^r^tr^r ''^ r '<=-' ^ 
 
 Empire s" Where ca^il^ wide range of the British 
 
 been arranged and deSd ^ 7'" ''""«'^' ^^^ve 
 the lecturj have been o«h1 ^^ V^^'"^ ^'^n"' 
 
 Dent & Sons hive u„d-^='^ """^ ^'^"• 
 
 hoped, will b^ a WsS^fl"J° Pf !^h what, it is 
 problems in ,eve^^ip^« [^^ ''^f^^ to Imperial 
 I«perialStudieskctur« ' ^5"^y «"^^^'°g of 
 lecturer, sometim fby :' So T '"'" ^ =* ^»«'« 
 the series being Dr. New^ 'V/-^' ^'T'^ «<l«or of 
 
 and to dissen^ate mlSr •„„r/T^'''.'°P'°^»^« 
 contained in a pop^^Wh^rj"''?^°tial than is 
 
 the substance ofVtSnSm^''' ^"l^"'' """^'^ ^ 
 ^tended to be suS'S X T td^f '"''^ "* 
 readers, who read for solid InfrT, • "^' ^°'^ general 
 for students who dsSa^n^^' ""'* "^ ''^^ other 
 -biect as prelimina?'^: Lrd^ir^/ ' ^^^^^ 
 
 Rhodes lecturer at S ^'^^''^ °'- Newton, as 
 appropriate tide" The OWF^ •^"'^*- U"''" *« 
 follows up the Utfead of? ."?''' ^'^ *« New," he 
 our oveii LtS^d wh2"'^ "''''* "»^ ^'ough 
 emphasised or tooTCdXiS^aS" ^^Z ""** 
 
 ss^o^rar^™^^^^^^ 
 --^-----i=:-dT4rfS 
 
GENERAL INTRODUCTION « 
 
 rT ^!J"* if' r " ^"^'''-'^de Commonwealth. This is 
 the bedrock of accurate teaching about our Empire, and 
 no one is better qualified to drive the truth home/with 
 Ae wmbmed force of knowledge and sympathy than 
 Dr. Newton. His book will be followed by a grouprf 
 bot^ical lectures on the subject of " The ExpLtation 
 of Plants," these lectures having also been given at 
 University CoUege by various experts, and the book 
 being edited by Professor F. W. Oliver, F.R.S. It will 
 deal with the new work which has been done of late years 
 m various regions of the Empire in the direction of 
 makmg plants of greater use to man. The third book 
 of the series will deal with " The Staple Trades of the 
 
 ST""?' "f c^u ^, " ~""'^°« °^ '*«"«s delivered 
 at the London School of Economics. Other books will 
 foUow-it IS hoped-at the rate of about four volumes a 
 
 Thus there is ground for confidence that the many 
 aspects of a many-sided empire will be better appre- 
 ciated m the future than in the past : that love« of 
 one branch of knowledge or another will realise what 
 nches of their own special brand are stored within the 
 wide circle of Hui Majesty's dominions ; and-most of 
 SnT^V" "^ be l»°«ght home to citizens of the 
 United Kmgdom what their British citizenship gives 
 and demands, how fair the heritage, how great the 
 responsibility. 
 
 May, 1917. 
 
 C. P. Lucas. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 
 
 • • • 
 
 I. THE CONTINUITY OF IHPERUL HISTORY . 
 
 II. THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 ni. SEA POWER AND THE DEFENCE OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 TV. IMPERIAL TR/XE 
 
 V. THE DEPENDENT EMPIRE AND THE NATIVE 
 RACES .... 
 
 VI. STEPS TOWARDS IMPERUL UNITY 
 
 FAGK 
 
 V 
 
 I 
 
 34 
 
 49 
 71 
 
 93 
 III 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE AND 
 THE NEW 
 
 THE CONTirnnTY OF IMPERIAL HISTORY 
 
 The differences that mark off the British Empire 
 from other world states are numberless, but perhaps the 
 tnost noticeable of them all, from an historical point of 
 view, has been its extraordinary vitality and its power 
 of resistance to shocks that would have shattered in 
 pieces a more logically constructed and more rigidly 
 centralised organism. The most terrible of those 
 shocks was that cataclysm of civil war that in the last 
 quarter of the eighteenth century tore the Empire in 
 twain and doomed the severed parts of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race on opposite sides of the Atlantic, though dowered 
 with a common culture and desirous in the main of 
 striving towards the same ideals, to seek them on separate 
 paths and under different flags. The period of schism 
 and armed conflict that began at Lexington in 1775 and 
 closed with the Treaty of Versailles in 1783, marks, 
 therefore, the end of the first period of Empire growth 
 in ruin and apparent failure, and, as we may date the end 
 of the " old Empire " in 1783, so we may note how a 
 " new Empire " began at once to grow from that date 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 We more complex and S. 1 u""' '^'5^' <»«* a 
 
 despite the schism, .2 gS S^ 1 ''^ ^°«'"«"" '• 
 tmuation of the earli-r l^ ^ '^*" ^ «al con- 
 sion, and it is tL ptlsTo/Xf, °' ^''^'^'^ «P»"- 
 the essential fac»s thlTZ^l * i*""'" '^ P°'«t to 
 to show how almostll' l^^^j)"" ~"'r'ty' ^"'l 
 trace back to the lessons Z ^Z '"^'^^ P^^^ent 
 
 » the old Empire of th^' S«ntr''Tn«'^''' 
 centuries. seventeenth and eighteenth 
 
 building up ofLcaSer^ata?^'*^,"^^'''' ^ *« 
 decision has been made ^r /L "^"^ P*"°^ "^ wrong 
 embarked upon, "t Srely p'osSe'fo T* °' ""''"« 
 «*at cou«e and take up aeS i ^' ''"? '° *'»«don 
 that he has discerned throlhT"'' °" ** "8''^ lines 
 So in the development ofSn^itr^, °' '^' P=«'- 
 exceedingly difficult to tuiTpit ill .^^^^ P^°^*d 
 to buJd success uponT'^L""*r'"~"»'«'d 
 European nations th« first found/^ "^ • ^^"'^- The 
 sea have long since fallen ouSm?h!T*^'^^^^^ *« 
 power and have shrunk ba "k o 2 r ^¥^ ^°' *°'W 
 '?nd. The Portuguese, twho.S "^'^ °^*«' "«tive 
 
 tl^ahundredyeSthe^reaT^Mom''— "'^ ^°' »°^« 
 seas, had by the middle K '^°"^'°« « the Indian 
 
 ^ but theWresr^gm^nte^/the?""* *^^"'"^'°''t 
 'en.h severed its-ore^ir-htSttcortrj; 
 
AND THE NEW 3 
 
 and Portugal has long since ceased to play any part of 
 importance in the world s'ruggle. 
 
 Spain filled a greater and more lasting role, and for 
 three -enturies she retained a colonial dominion in the 
 New World that was more widely extended and more 
 populous than that of any other power; but the control 
 of the home government became more and more irk- 
 some to her dominions, as retarding and cramping their 
 possibilities of development ; and when, in the world- 
 wide upheaval of the French Revolution, the oppor- 
 tunity came to throw off the yoke, both governors and 
 governed welcomed the parting with a sense of relie ; 
 the Spaniard returned to absorptioii in his domestic 
 concerns, and Spain has shown no aspirations to take 
 up again the task of colonisation thit she laid down. 
 So with Holland; her oversea empire grew to its 
 maximum extent in less than fifty years, and it was 
 only during that short period that the fertilising stream 
 of colonists flowed from her shores. For a little while 
 the Dutch held lands in all the quarters of the glot?;, 
 but their strength was insufficient to sustain so great a 
 burden ; the rich Dutch empire in Brazil fell back to 
 her Portuguese competitors. New Netherland was stolen 
 away to become the English colony of New York, 
 attempts to open up the great untouched lands of New 
 Holland and New Zealand in the southern seas were 
 peremptorily checked, and Dutch enterprise found all 
 and more than all the work it could do in the main- 
 tenance and development of her trade and supremacy 
 in the islands of the Indian Archipelago. The puny 
 colonies of Sweden and of Denmark were never more 
 than mere toys for powers which, anticipating the fashions 
 
4 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 of a more modern age, had momentary aspirations for 
 oversea power and " a place in the IZ," ChluS 
 aspiration, l«d little chance of a continuing e4te„^ 
 «id were before long forgotten, with their Iririnaton 
 France, however, has played a commanding paSS 
 the colonising peoples ; for a century and a £lf Fr3 
 ajonies and French oversea enterprise were of fi^t 
 rate miportance m the world, and it seemed as though 
 she were the greatest of colonisers. But when in 
 America and m India England succeeded in bringing the 
 ambitious schemes of Lally and Dupleix to naX? Se 
 co^on^ing activities of France seemed to have efdedla 
 utter ruin, and ,t appeared as though she. like Portugal 
 had dropped from the race. For more than a hundred 
 years, say from 1763 to 1880. such a view n^ghTSve 
 been heW with truth, though there w.,s evidlceS 
 
 Sr^Bu^thT^r*'^ ''''«''"" ^" amission ov«- 
 sea. But the last thirty years have seen a wonderful 
 
 Tr:Zv'"'''u' ~'°"i^8 power, and the foundaSn 
 of a new French empire far more imposing in area and 
 m possibUities than the old. The J^t player",Se 
 present war by French colonial troops is as striC^ 
 the part played by our own Indian army, and SouU 
 
 ^iJ^\f rS'^".^''^"^ generalisaL tha fSc 
 w^ mcapable of colonisation, and that a French coW 
 was of necessity a mismanaged failure 
 
 It has been left for the British Empire to provide the 
 outetandmg exception to a general rule. By the Pelce 
 of VersaiUes the old empire, that had grad Jlv ^en 
 
 sirfd",?' "*""' °' '^^ centuries, was^olenS 
 sundered ; the greater number of King George Ill's 
 subjects beyond the sea, having successfdly vindicated 
 
AND THE NEW 5 
 
 in arms their Declaration of Independence from the 
 British Crown, formed for themselves a new nation 
 state, and the only colonial possessions that v/ere left 
 to the mutilated Empire wei . few West Indiaa islands, 
 a fishing harbour or two round the mouth of the Saint 
 Lawrence, some isolated fur-trading posts on the frozen 
 shore: of Hudson Bay, and the small French colony of 
 Can.ida, with a population of only sixty thousand, that 
 haa been annexed to the British Crown but twenty years 
 before. The old Empire before the schism had con- 
 tained within its bounds some nineteen million people 
 of British race, with the addition of the French Canadians 
 and of a few hundred Spaniards in East and West 
 Florida. In 1783 nearly four millions of the colonists 
 abandoned their British citizenship, rather more than a 
 fifth of the whole, and piactically one-quarter of the 
 population in the British Isles. Englishmen had already 
 begun to acquire territorial dominion in India, but few 
 foresaw the possibilities that lay before them, and to 
 many capable observers at home and abroad it seemed as 
 though England had played her oversea part to the end, 
 that she should disembarrass herself as soon as might be 
 of the debris of her empire, and concentrate her atten- 
 tion on the many tasks that awaited her in other direc- 
 tions that that of colonisation. A single sample of 
 these gloomy forebodings must suffice. " It is asserted," 
 wrote a colonist in 1784, " that regular supplies of 
 provisions and necessaries [for the West Indies] may, 
 with proper encouragement, be obtained from the re- 
 mainder of the British colonies on the continent [of 
 America]. These visionary suggestions are almost too 
 ludicrous to be combated, and seem intended as a 
 
* THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 Gmada. with Th" d i 1 '"5^" "* '' "« '«»«« »' 
 Jdmit of more than ZZtTr"'"' '"^' '"'"'X 
 Indie,, which require a reS anH ^"' '" "*« '^"« 
 of provisions. yG for »i,- • u ?"'* continued supolv 
 Scotia, it will be /"Rafter "of"'''"^' ««'°'" -' C 
 humanity if by the u^! ■ 'T°"''" «d a solace to 
 
 « will be' alJr;; nTSu« r%?'"''"'"^'^^ 
 »u«enance and support " »"fficiency for their 
 
 Newfoundland. tirstSe," .tr'*"- '''^^^'""'y 
 wg dominions. contaim^H ^P'■*"'" »«Jf-govem- 
 
 British stock a^ounrelo'not""'"^ °l P°P"' '' " 
 dreds. and it was 7«, j ? °' """"^ '^an a few „. 
 
 the colonies'^hThSoten^tv V"'" '""^^"^ "« 
 
 he House of CommonsTn "78Ttt°'"r ' ''" »"^ "^ 
 land nor Nova Scotia nr«^'j"""'" Newfound- 
 
 for their own peo^e and Irf ' '"'^"^"^ o^ food 
 
 scnbed as an uneven barf t "" '""'°^ «« ^ 
 
 to dwell in, and apSe„roX'" ' "« «' fo' mankind 
 
 ««nt of the people who2b.> ."''V"' '^' P"''«h. 
 
 governing doniiaio,s.Newfou2 '^^ n^^^'^ "«= «tf- 
 
 South Africa and New Sala„ J ' ^'"''^*' ^"^''-1^. 
 
AND THE NEW 7 
 
 from the coast plain of Madras and from the Ganges 
 . delu over the whole of the Indian peninsula up to its 
 northern mountain barriers and beyond. The rich 
 provinces of Malaya and all the British possessions in 
 the Far East were in 1783 hardly dreamt of; the few 
 small English factories of the eighteenth century •<non 
 the West African coast have swelled out into the „ eat 
 province of Nigeria, still with almost untouched stores 
 of wealth, while in other parts of Africa there have been 
 brought under the British flag territories of vast un- 
 developed resources and teeming native population. 
 Egypt and the Sudan have been rescued from misrule 
 and barbarism, rich islands have been added to the 
 Empire in the West Indies and the Pacific, and the 
 strategic points that guard the ocean mutes of the world 
 have all, with the single exception of Gibralur, come 
 under the British sway only within a hundred years. 
 
 The new Empire that has arisen is infinitely greater 
 in resources and in world importance than the old 
 Empire that was lost, and yet it is but an outgrowth 
 and a consequence of it; it has grown 11 and been 
 consolidated in ways that were laid dcwn before 1783, 
 and for a proper understanding of its problems and the 
 methods of their solution we must search for precedents 
 and clues in the history of the earlier time. In this 
 search we are made to realise the extraordinary perma- 
 nence and adaptability of our British traditions and 
 their power of permeating and inspiring communities 
 of men far from the island home whence they arose. 
 This extraordinary continuity of its history is peculiar 
 to the British Empire, for the new French colonial 
 empiie has little in common with the empire that was 
 
8" 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 the lessons of eS SfnS, ? "Penence than from 
 the old and the new bS.^""^^'""' ^^ile both 
 one and the same comSg /rSr ""' ""'* "^ ^ 
 
 that ^:r:^ten"tCmS;'"^i^'°^ - find 
 ''ions. There has £ ^ ' "" '*^« '^ direc- 
 Population,mai„lyofiri^h^''. *«* establishment of 
 previously'almos?™^^/°^^''f'egi^^ 
 ment among the sS „f ' ^- '^' ^'^'""^ <l«^«'op- 
 those at hoLTa^tSonlrr''"'"-'-'^^^^^ ^"^ ^ 
 tori.s inhabited by ^n TS*' acquisition of tern- 
 stage of civilisation Zd^ T P^P'^^^^ « a low 
 peoples undefSh^^ "^f °« "^^ *°^« native 
 opening up the resou^cefof Aeir .^'°^''^' ^'^^ ^°' 
 there has been an iSirion^f T'""^' '^^'^V- 
 territories inhabSd^^'^ef ^f an^"" ^"^^"^ ^ 
 complex civilisation, but onTfh^t ^"*"* '^'^ 
 
 grade in condition and ,n„ ^?^ *^^'= °' «tro- 
 
 of progress. S'work of^S p •^'^^^^ ^^P'^e 
 the second of the^e dStl! ' °^'^ ^'''^^ Empire in 
 Spain was ins!ScSnoTEn.h^?P"'' *'* *^^* ^^ 
 territory i„ tro^caTSnerL ^fi^** T^P^ *° «^ 
 tfflsuccessful, and it ^TJT e ""^^ invariably 
 Portuguese t'o exploit "e^l^ll/f"^'^ ^'^ the 
 the full. But in m^],;Z.u^^ American race to 
 on a small sc^e^nSfel f "T?^^«f«l 'Attempts 
 conditions to be d2Shld ir"'*.^°^'^''«* °f *« 
 
 -ominate^S^;^^.::--^^^ 
 
AND THE NEW 9 
 
 hopelMsly unsuccessful, and were quite outdistanced by 
 their Dutch competitors. For the first forty years of 
 Aat penod the English East India Compa^ devot^^ 
 the greater part of its energies to the attempt to acquire 
 control of the Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago 
 as heirs of the Portuguese, who by the exercise of naval 
 power had made themselves masters there at the beein- 
 nmg of the sixteenth century; the Dutch, however, 
 were prepared, m pursuit of their aim at domination 
 to expend considerable military efforts, backed by the 
 whole power of the State, while the English could 
 
 ™'J!^..°^''"'^ °' "2 ^'^P ^'°'^ '^' State, and were 
 compelled to rely on their own private resources. They 
 were, m consequence, hopelessly outdistanced, the 
 HoUanders succeeded in crushing out all competition 
 Md in securmg for themselves the mastery of the 
 Eastern Seas, and the English merchants were com- 
 peUed to concentrate their efforts for trade only upon 
 the shores of mainland India. There, in the face of a 
 strong native power, both English and Dutch were 
 bound to try different methods and to secure opportuni- 
 ties for trade not by domination but by submission 
 to the Indian authorities. In this course Englishmen 
 peraisted with modest commercial success for a century 
 
 a'Su'd^t ' '°'*/T.8 1" *^f ^'"e the typical European 
 attitude towards Asiatic power was that of deferwce 
 and subnussiveness. The lines for English policy in 
 T?? ^*iP ^"^°' civilisation were laid down in 
 1616 by Sir Thomas Roe, the first Englishman with a 
 pretence to statesmanship who examined Indian con- 
 ditions, as those that were most likely to return a com- 
 mercial profit, and attention may be directed to certain 
 
lO 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 you are like to gain as often i tol^f T"'^ *■"• " **»' "here 
 Portugal, notwiLta^ding L nL ' ,th i"^ *' "'""^^ «" *« 
 |hat he keeps soldier Sfat sp^dT trhfa e^iT' '""•°""' 
 He never profited by the Indira siicVhrlf-i^^"'" "' """"• 
 this well. It hath been aS,tr?,iJ^''"'*""- O""'"* 
 plantation here by Se s^S^*Vh/°'.°^ ** °""*' ""o seek 
 ttey prowl in all p'laS:, *ey ^possS ^n^^™f fheT','*' 'T^' 
 dead pays consume .,1! the gata^ Let tZ k '^"' ' ^-et their 
 that if you will profit, seek it at «»rf^ ^ ^' ""'""* »» » "■'«. 
 controversy it S an ^o, to X^ "'■^"'" "*'''' forwithout 
 India. ... You «mo7m lasf m,tf "f ""^ ""'* '"'' ""» » 
 one disaster would eiSier dis^^L"*,! ' '"". """' " » °°«' ' 
 extreme charge and doubtfS^event'^^Ll'"'""' ^ '" » ^^ °f 
 to chance as a war is most nnfirif ' ^""'f' "" *"'°'' «> subject 
 hazard when the remSenes^tf Lac, f"""" "?'' "'* *' •""« 
 counsel subjects to "„ec^ertbl.^™,?J '"Pf''' ="«=<=°"« »" 
 uncertainty, remedies shoulrft, ' '^' *" "^ere is most 
 
 to all occiioiB" '' ■" '° '""''' *e nearer to occur 
 
 Such a policy was practicable and successful so lona 
 
 :^?;h:^Uer.Tr"^'~^ 
 
 by the Eas^TdS S,^p\ryr ^0^1' '" ^- 
 the beginning of the nLteemh^^'ff te LnT^v' 
 
 Sv^n^XThltftt^^-^^^^^^^^^ 
 
 irreconcilable, but^^is rath rwt '* '•«*'' "PP"' 
 fruit wid> the tend„ s^tf fyolTZt td"^ 
 reality the essential continuity and SltSo^ln"! 
 
AND THE NEW „ 
 
 of our Imperial policy is nowhere better iUustrated than 
 in the histoiyof British India. To trace out the de- 
 velopment of the method of pliant submissiveness to 
 strong Asiatic powers for the sake of trade may not be a 
 particularly congenial task for the Englishmen of to-day, 
 but smce It was the deliberate policy that was adopted 
 durmg more than half the time in which Englishmen 
 have been m contact with Asiatics, and since it was, 
 at least, successful m effecting its purpose and in render- 
 ing It possible for our merchants to carry on their trade 
 ™vfH?"VlV' .*°«hy °f dose study. Down to the 
 middle of the eighteenth century the gains of the East 
 Indian trade were modest, and its importance was far 
 eclipsed by the wealth-producing capacities of other 
 trades, and pre-eminently of that in the tropical pro- 
 ducts of the West Indies, and it was not until the method 
 had been gradually modified that the Eastern trade 
 began to fiU an important place. The change began 
 when Englishmen saw their gains disappearing before 
 the success of then- enemies, the French, who had 
 adopted a new method of dealing with the r.nive powers. 
 The break-up of the dominant Mogul iX)wer at the 
 begmnmg of the eighteenth century, and the steadily 
 progressive anarchy to which India then became a prey, 
 afforded to the more ^itically minded French repre- 
 sentatives m India opportunities for the acquisition of 
 power from which the conservative and politically 
 umorous English merchants shrank. The chance of 
 dividing the Indian powers one against another, and of 
 utilismg pohtical control for the crushing out of their 
 EnglBh commercial competitors, was seized with splen- 
 did audacity by the French, and it seemed as though 
 
la 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 fm, ^i coinpeSeS to 3f °"' '"''"*''« "^''°n" 
 at home who, wh^e all w ° " weJ LTTf ^""» ^^ose 
 them. The inherent EneSh T™ ' V^ ''"'* "'»«>'«t in 
 «»d order, under Simt °^ '*"''" ^«d of W 
 *nds;n peace, is aroS Hef^d""''"/..*"' P'-^^e 
 men from attack, and our »■«. ." fe"ow-country- 
 are gradually bro'uSt i^to Z'"'^^?,^ *"> P-tect.^n 
 the British Empire in India w^ filf kT*"" "^^ ^^^^^ 
 typical of the building-up 07*.^ '^"''* "P ^ <=«tirely 
 almost all the tropical parte of ft ^f ' Possessions ik 
 for this reason the history o?i?!T^^' '"'^ ^"^^ ^°«ly 
 «g of the most detailed studv uT '"'^'^ ^ '1«^"'- 
 conscious design, but ^/^L ^' ^^^f " «ot with any 
 of trade rivalry between E^.? l^"'"*'*^"^'^^ bitter spirrt 
 ootnpetitot.. Th?St oftr ^' '^^^ ^"^"S 
 the acquisition of greater „t.l'''~''"'°" compelled 
 hut Englishmen ne^eTsLwej et'"'* ^^''Po«t,es. 
 burdens upon theirshouldeTttvfr?^ to take more 
 and mimediate purpose. 1^'e „ J °''^^'^'^ ^ fo' a direct 
 danger was removed heywe?."' '^" *«= P«^^«g 
 their tasks and to comS S J nT '°/""^ tf 
 development of their trade tL n-^"^ °^ P*^«f"l 
 India Company at home ^n/.u^""''""'^ of the East 
 were of one mL in ^e^^"i. 'V'T'"'^ ^ ^^ 
 f ye force of circumstance?Hl!, ' "u ""^^ the impera- 
 
AND THE NEW ^^ 
 
 in native politi«Tbit jS^ut Td^'' f ''''^^^ ''^^ 
 process to get EWishr„"to L\lf .^^^l^-S^y 
 cou«e of political conduct, so itT^ost^nTl,"'* 
 put an end to the oe«.«^n» • , '^possible to 
 
 when they hav on^SS ^''Sive °'A"' r'^'^^ 
 adopted and perfected thf t ,? .T ^'^ '^'^ ^^"ows 
 confpetitors, ^d^^a /ew S^yel' t£ I'^'li 
 menace m Southern India was remol!7 i^ ^""^ 
 struggle there was built up 1^1^^^' °r*« ** 
 guarded the smaU commefcialTactorilf°''KV^' '^^■ 
 Bengal from the surrounXglSchv ' ^ ^"^''' =""* 
 ence that power was avaiUblTjrL^'X " ''^'- 
 from other centres of twrl. tu "°^* a Hke menace 
 
 order and misr:[:£iredia^trflie?S^^ 
 v«n<cnce, however set Rr.Vo.v, . . ^ ^"^ ™n- 
 
 was no sWpSrbi'rrr;;eLfhrd?'^'?^^^ 
 
 was evident that the process^teWI.^l ^fj°''' by it 
 under British dominanclm..^ ^ ^"'''^" P°''''« 
 
 accelerating rate °Sl! ,^° """ ^"^ ^ "^adily 
 
 that rn.rkS^^;t^ZZtZT'T "'^^"^"^ 
 years made British\v™„, ^®^' '" *^ °«« fifty 
 
 Linsula soutX^h'rruLTX"' ?'" *'^ -^"'^ 
 earlier development in trgovSoi'TT' ^" 
 Hastmgs, the last and greatest n^vf'^ T"'"" 
 school, was at one and the saml SZT- °' *' °^'^ 
 of the governorships of the new tL "?'"|'««'°'' 
 task of laying doZ thelites Tf ,w3ef '?' *.* 
 
 o^rrcrasX^-HSTwrt^r^^^^^ 
 
 «penenceo^rhe^UXiot%o^t",ri^^^^^ 
 
»4 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 capable of undertaking that t«t «• 
 ^th the exception of cirLli;. a" P'"^^<^rs. 
 sion of dominion in InS Sl^? iST *' ««*"- 
 old plans, had maantateed tl^ S '"f' f°"°*«8 the 
 trade and the pursuit of thram of ^ ''"''"'« ^« 
 too, maintained that these werJV '^""- "^»»8s. 
 East India Company, ShTaL*; ^'°^'' '^ °^^^ 
 have followed him w«e contel^"°'' ^' """^^ «*o 
 dreams of empire and orthnJn'"''"'' °^ «''"'''°'* 
 quest ; but if in self-p°oteci„ /T" ^^^ "^ «»>- 
 government Britain had to ^ ^"5 '^^ ««d of good 
 
 dominance, he was wiSghatlH" t ''"«^'° "^ 
 methods he adopted wfrel.?^?"'''''''^"- The 
 British, and, as it seemT [LJ^ 't''^ ^'^ *yP'«lly 
 whole of the BritisrE^p,?/yj; *°« °.f -hich the 
 fi"t and greatest of our So-co^cn u ^'^' "P" The 
 to which he was pedamicallv 2 ' ^'J* '•° "«'d Plan 
 deMt with events as Cy arose ^"'^ '° adhere,- he 
 his broad design,and h w^"^:;^;"!^-^ them to fit 
 device by constant experiment Tni' ^°' **= P^°Per 
 
 " It 13 impossible," says he " ,„■..• 
 
 shape. Yet thismode is liawrto ' i • "^ '"'°"8'" « o a MrfeS 
 srope for the reproach of l.„^-,^ ""nymconveniences. I, ll"'? 
 ft. result of ail'Str pri^rS^-'i*?, ^^'"^ ^-^ki^^^"^ 
 
 EnlilCrL't^ritf'"^ -P--nts " of 
 -died in the h.to^ ^^.^^2^1^^ 
 
AND THE NEW 15 
 
 in India, and if we would search for the roots of much 
 that has made our new Empire in Asia and Africa a 
 success, we must search the rrcorls of the eighteenth 
 century. The student of Imperial history will find 
 among those masses of almost untouched material a 
 rich mme, m the working of which he may spend his 
 efforte to the profit both of himself and of the cause of 
 knowledge. Not merely will the results of his labours 
 tend to the elucidation of the history of British India, 
 but he wdl find that India has been almost as much 
 hmelf " ''*P*"^*°"" " as has been England 
 
 With the extension of British rule over large native 
 populations and its considerable success under those 
 condmons I propose to deal in a subsequent lecture of 
 th« course, and I need here say no more than that in 
 this field also English administrators and officials seem 
 to have acquu^ed their experience and to have laid dcv.-n 
 ^e broad hnes of British policy during the eighteenth 
 ceutury. The dealmgs of the old Empire with indigen- 
 ous races were on a much smaller scale than those of the 
 new, but there are many indications that the line of 
 precedente for much of our policy as regards indigenous 
 
 T^H ' f« '' ^'T *' P""''^^ °* *«= departments of 
 Indian Affaurs in the American and West Indian colonies 
 Our retoions with the negro were tainted by the evil 
 atmosphere of the slave trade, but with other races, 
 hke the Moskito Indians of Central America and the 
 Seven Nations of the Illinois country, men were work- 
 ing out the preliminary experiments and discovering 
 how to nmage a native protectorate with success. The 
 records of those experiments are lying as yet almost 
 
z6 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 untouched in the archives of the Board of Tr,AL a 
 
 and rigid conditions of the old^o^t^li^i'r^''*'' 
 years of the seventeenth centuJ^X^'trefm^f '"'^ 
 tion from these shores has neV7cSed " flow ZfZ 
 stream has wa,ec^ and waned in v^um^ S v^A a 
 
AND THE NEW ,7 
 
 S' fTP''*""- •' •"" '^'^^^ '^^ *e recurrent pres- 
 
 nifLTT' """" '"'* '*«'^"« " home t Jhas 
 ed to any sudden increase of the stream. That excro- 
 ton was of course the tremendou- secession of Puri^ 
 enngrants to the shores of Massachusetts that took pS 
 be^»een the years 1630 and 1640. when there wTrSher 
 a swarming out " from the body politic thanin out- 
 growth of the commonwealth into n^ regiont The^ 
 as m the exodus of the United Empire Lovaliits fmm 
 the newly founded United States, th^ cmda^m^n" 
 that began the new self-governing Empire, men were 
 
 moved not by individual motives, but by L^k-^ded 
 devotwn to an Idea. Their ways of thought werepro- 
 foundly modffied by the breach, as were thole Vthe 
 commuaxty they left. It was no longer the ame ; i 
 had lost much of one of the elements that had Z,t to 
 make up its character, and from the first a radiwfdffle ! 
 ence was thus established between the spirit of the old 
 
 Empire of to-day have been peopled, bit by bit, by men 
 
 I^oST' '"'^ f '^"^'' °f °P^'°"' ^'ho have left 
 their old homes only to advance their personal fortunes 
 
 te oT7 ~:2""'"^ ^, ^' fi'^' ^"ost a microcosm of 
 
 £:iS^'^a1^ran1t^i--;;Htrcir 
 zxz:^:. ^^^ °^ *^ -^''e world r^m:^ 
 
 nl,^*?^ '""^ considerations may do something to ex- 
 
 air.h <?'"?•« '^^"'^'^ ''^^^=" *e new Empke 
 and the old, a diiference that we shall realise if we con! 
 
 1760^ and then, say, the Old England and the New 
 
i8 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 have retained AT/r^T"-^ e«notn:c interests and 
 
 lina, the espec.rhom« „f i a °' V''^'"" *"<1 Caro- 
 of 1776, we«s«tlS^ f», * '^"'^"" revolutionists 
 
 country not as ^d.^dLTu^ ^^'urL^'Sd '''' ?•"' 
 with a sense of rankhW nLr^- . '^- "^V swthing 
 redressed wrone that rlnH ^a^ '"'"""^^ ««» '"•- 
 actions of ^cLi^^^Xv S I'Tk'?"'."' °^ »>• *« 
 ca^d then, to tSVaT^S^^glt'Sl^^^ "^^ « •"' 
 
 Imperial c"nS^T„d T ''" u'«'^' *•» ^'«^ ^r 
 
 between t^^ Sn^s S'tf %?" ''''"*"^«' 
 but it it in f„.» ^™P"^" .""'*'^ than their similaritv 
 
 somewhat differeK " i« S r^ *•"= °]'^- *"" '"' « 
 Where the ^.-Ju? .u"*" ""^'^W and of culture 
 
 theXSd of; :f t'hrjr ~'-- ^-ved tZ 
 
 to-day derive from ;J! '^'t^^^™'"? dominions of 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 19 
 
 protection by the imposition of order and good govern- 
 ment, the building up and maintenance of the dykes of 
 firmly organised rule against the raging storms of ex- 
 ternal anarchy, so in the growth of the white Empire 
 there is to be traced the perennial determination of 
 Englishmen to acquire the power of governing them- 
 selves m order and security, and so to satisfy their 
 ancestral right to the ensuring of " the King's peace." 
 The seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries have 
 been periods for the extension of the Empire by the 
 peaceful settlement of our people in lands that were 
 previously almost uninhabited. The eighteenth cen- 
 tury was a time of war when the Empire was widely 
 extended after victorious wars, and when in the over- 
 coming of an external menace to our security the colonies 
 of other powers fell into our hands and communities of 
 foreign stock came to be included within the Empire's 
 bounds. But even during this time of war, a time in 
 many respects similar to our own, when in virtue of 
 sea-power the colonies of the conquered fall to the con- 
 queror, the old processes of peaceful expansion were 
 gomg on, though they may be lost sight of in the more 
 dramatic happenings of the field of war. 
 
 Throughout the whole of the last three centuries 
 the same process has been going on ; Englishmen have 
 been passmg overseas, and in settling and building up 
 new, stable, self-governing communities on foreign 
 shores have founded fresh centres from which further 
 e^qjansion can go on overland. Every one of these new 
 colonies has its own characteristics, but at the same time 
 Its more striking similarities with all other English 
 communities. The British Commonwealth expands 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 •uitable environment, however ii removed from ,h^ 
 
 e^hteenth centurySo^eleXU Wvi^^^^ 
 of new communities in the CarolinaTor bryond th^ 
 Alleghanies, the process is seen to be iLticd wfth wS» 
 
 £SS:^^rtS;t:tSStS! 
 ssin°:;airth^^ij^„/:r^^^ °^ *^ 
 
 stands forth as one of the moH l^g eSn^sS 
 mherent power of continuous pohtical^g^owS! 
 
AND THE NEW ai 
 
 Whether the current of the national life of an oversea 
 community has derived from the main British stream 
 or only from a branch of it, in each case in order to 
 understand the causes that have guided its course it is 
 necessary that those who art mpt to trace it shall not 
 confine the^attenfion too narrowly to their immediate 
 subject. The term " colonial history " has, unfor- 
 tunately, in the past too frequently connoted what is in 
 reality a different thing, the " history of colonies " ; the 
 story of each particular colonial community has been 
 taken up m turn and considered with little reference to 
 the course of events in other colonies, in the United 
 Kmgdom or m the world at large. A history of this 
 sort, concerning itself solely with the events in one 
 geographical area, is incapable either of dealing with 
 those events m proper perspective or of explaining the 
 causes that underlie them. The work that is produced 
 wiU be narrowly parochial in character and cannot in 
 the widest sense be regarded as history at all. A more 
 profitable method for the study of colonial history 
 concerns itself with the progress of general movements 
 in the Empire as a whole, and finds material for its 
 la^urs m the happenings in any and every dominion 
 and colony in turn; and any one who regards colonial 
 History in this fashion will be met at every turn with the 
 necessity of tr.-.^i,ig the story back into the records of 
 the eighteenth century and beyond. The history of the 
 Empire is greater than the sum total of the history of 
 each of its parts, and that history is profoundly worthy 
 ot study. I have heard a competent scholar level the 
 reproach at the colonial history of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury that It is almost the dullest and most uninspirin- 
 
aa 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 of subjects, as involving nothing but the sordid and 
 wordy warfare of utterly undistinguished p^Sic^ 
 about matters of pounds, shillings and pen« S 
 gibe may be true if the subject be only studied !n some 
 ^ he ponderous and dryasdust com'pendia fhlt ha" 
 
 of the real broad subject of Imperial history nothine 
 could be more false. The serious student^ho S 
 ceives the function of history as the descript^n of ?he 
 development of the environment in which we live, fcS 
 abundant matter for his researches, and, whate^r E 
 
 find that they will lead him back from the new Bmpire 
 to the story of the old. He will find that, asT Ae 
 nme teenth century so in the eighteenth, commerS 
 questions and the e:2'loitation of tropical ^roduc^S 
 had a profound influence on the course of nation^ 
 policy, and it wUl be necessary for him to know somT 
 thing of the conditions of economic developmeTL 
 Europe if he is to understand and explain the an4S 
 of the western nations to secure a share of colonial power 
 -whether m the West Indies in the eighteenth cem J^ 
 or m Africa and the Far East in the nineteenth. mS 
 of world policy for the last two hundred years has b^en 
 governed by the same causes and guided in th^sS 
 way; it has been the resultant of the interplay of dl^r! 
 gent private interests with the reasoned ^iL of tiie 
 Sute. The British State has rarely initiated develop! 
 
 S/? '"•'"°'' ?''' ^ *^ P^« °"^ statesmen, 
 almost staggermg under the burden of their resoomi- 
 
 to that burden, but circumstances for two hundred yJS 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 33 
 
 have been too strong for them, and the Empire has 
 persisted in growing. 
 
 Whether we st Jy the lessons of war or of the gradual 
 extension of tbf ^»T!riire's territory in a time of world 
 peace, wheth^ : we look to he development in the King's 
 dominions o' iiirtitutioni and methods of administra- 
 tion, or turn <■' the economic sphere and examine the 
 movements of population or the progress of British 
 commerce, we find the same lessons enforced again and 
 again upon us. 
 
 The present is the child of the past ; times change, 
 but the same ancestral traits are there ; the British 
 merchant or the British colonist, the administrator or 
 the pioneer, each and every one is the descendant of 
 his forerunner in the past, with wider and riper experi- 
 ence, it is true, but in the way he faces his problems 
 generically the same. To know the bases of the new 
 empire commonwealth we must study the old, and in 
 that study we shall come more and more to realise 
 the truth of all that is involved in what we may with 
 propriety call our Imperial continuity. 
 
 I 
 
II 
 
 THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 development from The L '""^'^ °^ "^ g"dual 
 
 past to^he^S^me LTnTS%r''/""^ 1 *^ 
 present age. The fi«f Z^ !? r ^°"P^«'ty of the 
 
 of adminlt atfofthe te Ih '^.'^ '^'"^ ^'* ^ '^^^ 
 
 to describe T";* rrste^^"'''''""'^'''^^*^^'^ 
 the destinies of 'hroul^ of government whereby 
 
 swayed from thl mX/'"^''' ^"^' ''^^" ^"'■'^^d a"d 
 cerned -a^^y w^th S coloZTl .""Vl!^' •'^ -«" 
 our own stock, fo during tHerTod f.. ^^^'^ °* 
 the government of our p^ eLS T^*' °" ^"P^« 
 concern of the State, bu^fX Ea"t SaT "°* *^ 
 and it is best consider^H , „ . ■ ^'^ Company, 
 
 ing and colon^ cS^^i.^^nr^^rn"'* °*" '"'^- 
 the time at my dLosal ^f * T ^ ''^ '"ipossible in 
 stages wherebv anTrr ^ """^ ^''°"* '^^ various 
 
 that elapsed beSen Chwl T' '^"""S the period 
 
 and the^aboh?S:f^g'^*=J^^J°^y^^ ^'^^^ « ^757 
 
 The topic is of great itlS^h^SlL^^J 
 
 24 
 
OLD EMPIRE AND THE NEW 25 
 
 action are comparatively simple ; they are largely con- 
 fined to the period of the new Empire, and were governed 
 by many of the same conditions that were worked out 
 m the admmistration of other dependencies. 
 
 In the first lecture of this series it was stated that the 
 extetision of the British Empire has been brought about 
 not m the pursuit of any grandiose or imperialistic 
 design, but by men's following up of the-'r own legiti- 
 mate self-mterest, and in the attempt to protect what 
 was already in British possession. In the administra- 
 tion of the Empire, however, when once its outlying 
 parts came under the control of the British Crown, there 
 has been a continual succession of design, or, rather. 
 d«igns. Each design has been directed to the accom- 
 plishment of immediate ends ; there has been no great 
 or logically-thought-out plan to cover all the immense 
 diversities of the Empire in time or space and to bring 
 them mto . -.^le and uniform s>stem, but a constant 
 plannmg c^ ;es, each intended to fit an immediate 
 purpose, l .cry one of them was but the modification 
 and adaptation of some earlier devict, and those that 
 succeeded m their purpose remained as permanent con- 
 tobutions to the structure of the Empire, and were 
 themselves further modified as conditions developed, 
 and were adapted, where circumstances required, to 
 solve the problems of other regions, so that there ulti- 
 mately came about a broad similarity in the types of 
 organisatwn over the whole Empire. Thanks to this 
 typically English process of growth, there has never been 
 a complete uniformity of system, such-as there was, for 
 example, m the colonial empire of the Dutch. There 
 thmgs were carefully thought out in the ruling councils 
 
a6 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 of the East and West India Companies, and one type of 
 organisation was adopted throughout the whole of their 
 dominions. Thus if we study the institutions of the 
 Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, we find that, 
 despite the entire diversity of conditions, it was governed 
 m Identically the same '.vay and according to the same 
 ordmances as the mercantile factory at Batavia, and if 
 we turn to the easily accessible printed records of the 
 Dutch colony of New Netherland before it became the 
 English New York, we find that report after report of 
 aie local officials read like those from the Cape o- from 
 Surmam, and that there is a complete similarity of 
 insututions and methods of administration. 
 
 With the British colonies it is very different. Owing 
 to the very diverse ways in wl- ■-> the colonies nave been 
 brought mto being, to the dif. • , nces in outlook of their 
 founders and to the lack of a definite and fully organised 
 central control, there is an extreme diversity of system 
 within three mam groups : royal colonies, proprietary 
 colonies (whether founded by a chartered company or 
 an mdividual usually non-resident), and co-operative 
 colomes where the settlers govern themselves in virtue 
 of an agreement made between them, and later apply for 
 the grant of« charter. Nearly all of the colonies of the 
 old Empire and many o/ those of the new began their 
 work m virtue of a charter of privileges granted by the 
 Crown or by some person or body cf persons who held 
 a charter from the Crown. The sixteenth and early 
 seventeenth centuries, when our first colonial prece- 
 dente were established, were a time when feudal theory 
 stiU held complete sway, though as an economic system 
 teudalism had long been dead. It was held tl at land 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 37 
 
 beyond the sea not in the occupation of any Christian 
 prince was in an analogous position to unoccupied waste 
 within the realm of our sovereign lord, the King, in 
 whose power it lay to grant it as from overlord to tenant- 
 in-chief. The grantee, whether a person or a l-o<' .• of 
 persons, held the fief of the Crown, not by military 
 tenure or knight service, which was falling into disuse 
 in England, but by free socage, that is to say, by pay- 
 ment of some money rent and by a legal fiction usually 
 of the principal royal manor of East Greenwich, so that 
 it was boraetimes whimsically said that all the colonies 
 lay within the county of Kent. A private individual 
 unprovided with a commission or grant would have had 
 no overlord whose protection he could invoke against 
 the subjects of another power, and would be in the 
 position of a mere pirate without any rights. 
 
 The most usual form of charter was the proprietary 
 grant following the long line of feudal precedents from 
 the county palatine in which the vassal held his lands 
 of the King by fealty without payment and enjoyed all 
 rights of government within his borders. No feudal 
 services were to be performed with the occasional ex- 
 ception of homage, but the usual royalty of one-fifth of 
 all mines of gold and silver was to be paid to the Crown. 
 These pnvisions occur in the early grants of Queen 
 Elizabeth to Gilbert and Raleigh, and were employed 
 with gradual modification in all subsequent grants of 
 proprietaries, like those to Lord Baltimore in New- 
 foundland and Maryland, to the Earl of Carlisle in the 
 Caribbees, to James, Duke of York, in the province of 
 New York after the Restoration, and so on. Since the 
 proprietors held of the King, and their tenants in the 
 
a8 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 colonies held of them, the colonists, in passing be- 
 yond the sea. did not pass out of the realm, but still 
 remamed as subjects of the King, with full allegiance 
 and undimmished rights. 
 
 But there was also a form of grant not dissimilar, but 
 denvmg from a little more remote ancestry. It had 
 been usual m the Middle Ages for the King to permit 
 certam groups of his subjects to establish themselves in 
 the donunions of a foreign prince beyond the sea for 
 purposes of trade, not as individuals, but in dose 
 association m a factory, and there to govern themselves 
 accordmg to the broad provisions of the charter that 
 was granted to them, and with the power of regulating 
 their domestic relations one to another within the limite 
 ot the factory. The most important of these factories 
 was that of the Merchants Adventurers in the Low 
 
 I !J"i?"'. "* *"^ *"•= °*^«' J*e those of the East- 
 land Merchants m the Baltic countries, and in Tudor 
 times the factories of the Muscovy Company in Russia 
 and the Turkey Company in the dominions of the Otto- 
 man Sultans. So long as the merchants kept within the 
 limits of their charter they might govern themselves as 
 was found convenient, but they did not depart out of 
 the realm when they passed oversea ; they merely went 
 to a little detached bit of the realm, and still remained 
 subjects of the Crown and amenable to English common 
 law as modified by the local by-laws. The territory of 
 a chartered company partook both of '.he nature of a 
 proprietary province where the place of the King's 
 
 instead of » lord proprietor, and also of the land in 
 one of the old trading factories. The grantee of the 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 39 
 
 territory might remain in England, as was thf case 
 with the Virginia Company or the Bermuda Company, 
 with Ljrd Baltimore, the East India Company, or the 
 Hudson Bay Company in the seventeenth century, or 
 the British South Africa Company and the British 
 North Borneo Company in the nineteenth, oi it might 
 pass across the sea and thus approach more nearly 
 to the precedent of the Merchants Adventurers, as 
 happened in the case of the Massachusetts Company. 
 Agam, the proprietor might grant away a portion of 
 his rights over some of the granted territory by what 
 somewhat resembled subinfeudation, though here the 
 feudal precedents were much weakened. Thus it was 
 the Earl of Warwick who made the grant to the 
 Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony, the governor 
 of St. Christopher to the Nevis colonists, and the 
 Rfassachusetts Company to the men who left the parent 
 colony to found new settlements in Connecticut. But 
 whatever happened the chain was never broken, through 
 whatever links it passed there was never a loss of allegi- 
 ance, and the colonists always held ultimately from the 
 Crown. 
 
 It was found in many cases that the lord proprietor, 
 whether company or individual, got into constant diffi- 
 culties with the under-tenants, and since the King in 
 the nature of things is always held to guarantee to all 
 his subjects, whether within or beyond the sea, justice 
 and good government, he was merely performing his 
 bounden duty in calling his grantees to account for their 
 actions under his grants, and, when he found that their 
 conditions were not adhered to, in their surrender or 
 m forcibly resuming them by the legal process of quo 
 
30 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 warranto. The Crown thus returned automaticalh 
 into direct relations with the colonists, and the granted 
 territory became a royal colony whatever its previous 
 status had been. It was in this way that, on the sup- 
 pression of the Company in 1623, Virginia came under 
 direct royal control when only one other colony, that 
 of the Bermuda Company, had yet been settled ; Barba- 
 dos and the rest of the English colonies in the Caribbees 
 became royal colonies immediately after the Restora- 
 tion by the purchase or relinquishment of the rights of 
 the lord proprietor, the Earl of Carlisle. There was a 
 constant tendency for the colonies thus to come into 
 direct relations with the Crown, just as in the later 
 Middle Ages all the great fiefs fell one by one into the 
 hands of the King. Massachusetts and New York, 
 under Charles II and James II, the lands of the East 
 India Company in 1858, and the territories of the British 
 East Africa Company, the Royal Niger Company and 
 the Hudson Bay Company in the later nineteenth cen- 
 tury have all come into the royal hands, and the British 
 South Africa Company, with its territory of Rhodesia, 
 and the British North Borneo Company remain the 
 only Chartered Companies possessing any territorial 
 rights. The Crown, as the sole source of rights, 
 having granted privileges can resume them on com- 
 pensation of the holders or even without compensation, 
 rf the rights are abused. Though throughout the 
 history of the Empire every colony has been started 
 and has grown by reason of a fresh outburst of individual 
 uiitiative from the parent stock, all rights were derived 
 from one and a single source, the Crown, every train of 
 action leads us back to the same point, and we can realise 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 31 
 
 how, historically as well as to-day, in practice the key- 
 stone of the arch of empire is the executive power of 
 the King-Emperor, no longer, it is true, the personal 
 monarch, but the constitutional wielder of the preroga- 
 tive acting through definite channels and according to 
 the dictates of a long tradition, but nevertheless the real 
 descendant of the personal monarchy of the Tudors, 
 under whom the expansion of England began. 
 
 The England of the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury from which the first colonies were peopled was very 
 different in constitutional outlook from the England of 
 the eighteenth century and of to-day. The executive 
 power of the Crown was universally admitted without 
 question to be supreme, and all matters of administration 
 came solely within its purview and did not concern 
 Parliament, save where they impinged upon the tradi- 
 tional rights of the people in matters of liberty and 
 finance. It was not until the revolutionary period of 
 the Long Parliament that it claimed a power of inter- 
 ference with administration, and, as soon as it did so, 
 its unanimitv disappeared, and Parliament, as well as 
 nation, was split into contending factions. At first, 
 then, matters of administration in the colonies as much 
 as in Englan ' were the affairs of the Crown, and Parlia- 
 ment solely had concern with them where the financial 
 interests of the King's English subjects were concerned ; 
 occasionally the charters of colonising companies were 
 submitted for its acquiescence, as were often the grants 
 of other monopolistic trading companies, but only in 
 the same way. 
 
 The granting of privileges and the administration of 
 colonies being in the hands of the King, were dealt with 
 
33 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 by him through the agency of his ministers, the Lords 
 of the Privy Council. The first device employed for the 
 government of colonial affairs after the assumption of 
 direct royal control over Virginia in 1633, was the usual 
 one of a Commissjon, such as was, f- •• instance, employed 
 in the admmistration of the Navy where the matters to 
 be dealt with were too te.nical for the whole Privy 
 Council, whose hands were filled with an immense ami 
 of detailed administration. Just as a special commis- 
 sion was entrusted with Virginian affairs, so the affairs 
 of New England, then unpeopled but having a valuable 
 commerce in furs and fish, which gave rise to many 
 difficulties, were entrusted to a separate commission, 
 the New England Coun, a, but in neither case was the 
 devic. a success ; the powers of the commissic is lapsed 
 after a short time and colonial affairs once more passed 
 into the hands of the undifferentiated Privy Council. 
 It was already, however, becoming the practice of the 
 Privy Council to delegate the preliminary consideration 
 ot affairs of a special character to separate committees 
 01 Its members, and during the reign of Charles I special 
 committees of the Privy Council, assisted by experts 
 —usually merchants of experience— were set up in 
 a somewhat informal way to deal with matters of 
 trad-: and also with the regulation of colonial affairs, 
 which were closely akin thereto, and, in fact, were 
 mtertwmed with the general commercial policy of the 
 country in .very direction. This business was recog- 
 nised as falling entirely within the competence of the 
 executive, and though Parliament often objected to 
 details of the action of the Government in such matters 
 as the imposition of customs duties, it could only claim 
 
AND THE NEW 33 
 
 them to be grievances where they infringed upon the 
 nghts of merchants resident in England. 
 
 Parlument tacitly acquiesced ia the view that the 
 
 grievances of the King's subjects in the colonies must be 
 
 peutioned agamst in their own local assemblies. Just 
 
 M the Kmg s subjects in Scotland had a Parliament of 
 
 their own, so might those in Virginia or Barbados have 
 
 each an assembly where the people or their represenu- 
 
 Uves gathered together under forms modelled on pre- 
 
 cedent might explain their grievances and take counsel 
 
 together for their redress at the hands of their sovereign 
 
 ord such redress being secured through the actions of 
 
 Ae local deputy of the executi\. power, the governor. 
 
 Even when all authority was usurped by the Lone 
 
 Parliament, its members do not appear to have claimed 
 
 -ny right to mterfere with the local autonomy of the 
 
 colonists, «id they seem always to have admitted tha 
 
 Ae assemblies beyond the sea had concurrent authority 
 
 v«d. themsdves, each in the proper part of the EmpirJ^ 
 
 rTtififnT TT^^ "'"'''' ^ *« ^"'^' °f Barbados 
 raufied by the Commonwealth in 1652 : " No taxes 
 customs, loans or excise shall be laid '^r levy made on 
 any of the inhabitants of this island without their con- 
 sent m a general assembly." Frcm that date representa- 
 uve assemblies elected by colonists possessing the right 
 of sufifnige as fixed by law have be^ann Jly elecfed 
 ^d called together, who, with the consent of a Leg^- 
 
 nIrH^"°"i"°T'"''* ''y ** C'°^' have unifor^y 
 passed laws for the good government of the colony 
 
 d^uf^T", V'""'' ^°'« "^ *« ~«""1 of the ruling 
 clique m England ever the colonies was frankly a mattef 
 of revolution m pursuit of self-protection against the 
 
34 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 setting-up of Royalist naval bases in the colonies, 
 whence a privateering war might be waged against 
 English commerce. The imposition of control was 
 carried out by the Protector, not in the exerciie of the 
 old functions of the dispossessed Parliament, but as the 
 holder of the kingly power in commission. 
 
 With the Restoration the general course of constitu- 
 tional development was resumed, and again colonial 
 administration, like the regulation of trade, became 
 solely the affair of the King, and was dealt with by 
 means of his executive agency, the Privy Council. 
 There was for a time a subsidiary and advisory body, 
 the Board of Trade and Plantations, but all effective 
 power was retained by a special committee of the 
 Council, and before long the advisory Board was dis- 
 solved, to be re-erected in the time of William III. 
 
 At the end of the reign of Charles II we have an empire 
 perhaps more logically planned and with a clearer 
 separation of powers than ever before or since. Supreme 
 over the whole is the King, assisted by his ministers or 
 executive agents, who form a small inner rmg within 
 the Privy Council and wield direct executive power in 
 England. The legislative power for the redress of 
 English grievances and those concerning sea trade is 
 vested in Parliament, then, as now, in its Upper House, 
 the highest Court to which all English judicial appeals 
 lie. In Scotland there is the same thing with the same 
 ministers as supreme executive, but there is an entirely 
 different and indepf ndent Parliament, and the highest 
 Court of Appeal is entirely Scottish. Ireland is in an 
 anomalous and subordinate position, as will be shown 
 later, but in Jersey there is again the same overlord with 
 

 AND THE NEW 35 
 
 the same inner ring of the Privy Council as executive 
 though for convenience the King has a special executive 
 officer m the island, his lieutenant-governor; the 
 legalatiye power in the island lies in its own assembly. 
 So m all the royal colonies, like Barbados, Virginia, and 
 Massachusetts, but owing to difficulty and delay of 
 access here, the immediate executive power is vested in 
 the Kmg s deputy m the colony, his Governor, assisted 
 m the exemse of his functions by his own executive 
 Council. The judicial power in the colony is exercised 
 by the Governor's nominees as exercising a part of the 
 functions of the King, and appeal from their judgments 
 lies to the Crown itself, aided by its own private ma- 
 dimery, the Privy Council, and not by the peculiarly 
 English machmery, the High Court of Parliament 
 
 The period about 1680 saw the most logical and 
 perfect development of the whole system, but even then 
 It was begmning to lose its symmetry. The various 
 parts of the Empire had common interests mostly in 
 matters of trade, where it was sometimes necessary for 
 •he King to consult his people and take legislative action. 
 Such consijltation always took place by debate in the 
 fcnghsh Parliament, and the colonies willingly acquiesced 
 m Its power to legislate in those commercial matters 
 Which were of common interest to the whole Empire. 
 I he English House of Commons thus held a pre- 
 donunant position among legislative assemblies, and we 
 can get an illustration of the way in which it regarded 
 Its powers by reading the preamble, for insUnce, to the 
 Navigation Act of 1663— 
 
 ™h'.?. '^'"i "" Majesty's pUntations beyond the seas are 
 mhabited and peopled by hi, subjects of .hi his 4gS"m"f 
 
36 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 England ; for the maintaining a greater correspondence and kind- 
 ness between them and keeping them in a firmer dependence upon 
 «t, and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto 
 it in the further equipment and increase of English shipping and 
 seamen, vent of English woollen and other manufactures and 
 commodities, rendering the navigation to and from the same 
 more safe and cheap, and making this kingdom a staple not only 
 of the commodities of those plantations, but also of the com- 
 modities of other countries and places for the supply of them 
 ... [be it enacted, etc.]." 
 
 The plantations were regarded, therefore, not as 
 possessions or landed estates, but as detached parts of 
 the King's dominions, required to play their own part 
 for the general benefit of all the King's subjects. 
 
 In the affairs of England the power of Parliament over 
 the executive was steadily growing, and an important 
 controversy in the reign of Charles II showed that in 
 Imperial matters it might also grow by a belittling of 
 the position of colonial assemblies as legislative bodies 
 and placing them in a position of subordiiution to the 
 King's ministers in a way that had long ceased to be 
 possible for the English Parliament. The controversy 
 concerned the powers of the legislative assembly of the 
 island of Jamaica, and really raged round the question 
 whether that Assembly was co-ordinate with or sub- 
 ordinate to the English Parliament. Did it hold a posi- 
 tion analogous to the Scottish Parliament of the time or 
 to the Irish Parliament, fettered as it was by Poyning's 
 Law passed as an Act of the English Parliament in 
 the reign of Henry VII, and therefore unmistakably 
 subordinate. 
 
 The question was brought up in an acute form in 
 1677, and the Council of ministers, in this case assembled 
 as the Lords of the Council of Trade and Planta- 
 
AND THE NEW 37 
 
 tions. expr«sed their intentions in no ambiguous way • 
 Havmg cbrected our thoughts towards the co.^-' 
 quences and effects which have been produced o™ 
 arise from this authority derived unto the said free- 
 holders and pknters [Le. the elected Assembly of 
 Jamaica], wh.ch we observe to have received a dailv 
 increase by the resolutions they have taken less agree- 
 able to your Majesty's intention ... [we adviseT thit 
 for the future no legislative assembly b^ called ^Aou 
 your Majesty's special directions . . . [thattheActeto 
 be submitted shaU be prepared in Engl J aLd t«n ! 
 mitted to the Governor], that the Governor upon receSt 
 of your Ma^sty's commands shaU then sdonTn 
 assembly and propose the said laws for their c^^ent 
 so that the same method in legislative matters be made 
 useof in Jamaica as m Ireland by Poyning's Law." 
 
 ,n Jil'^T*'"" t', ^"^^"^ ^"^ °^ fundamental importance, 
 and the Assembly stood up manfully for ite rS 
 The representatives of the people insisted upon their 
 ngh to tax themselves as they thought fit, anfrefSed 
 
 2 to tJ!^ ff .** ^"^^l °l *^ ^"Blish GovemS 
 as to the fashion m which the money was to be raised 
 even when they admitted that the revenue w^ neT«- 
 sary for the defence of the island. Their address to Ae 
 Governor, in reply to his proposals, shows us something 
 of he principles that were at stake : " We humbly bel 
 
 MaTesrfhr"^ ^ ''*'"'"" ""^° ^ "'""^ ^^'^ 
 Majesty the great mconvemences which are likely to 
 
 redound unto this island by this method and Sn r 
 
 of passmg of laws which ... will not only tend to the 
 
 &uT?rT'T "' *' P"^^"' P'^'«"' but like- 
 wise put a very fatal stop to any further prosecution of 
 
38 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 the improvement of this place, there being nothing that 
 invites people more to settle and remove their family 
 and stocks into this remote part of the world tho.. the 
 assurance they have always had of being governed in 
 such manner as that none of their rights should be lost, 
 so long as they were within the dominions of the King- 
 dom of England. ... It is no small satisfaction that 
 the people by their representatives have a deliberative 
 power in the making of laws, the negative and barely 
 resolving power being not according to the rights of 
 Englishmen. ... We hope that ... his Majesty may 
 be induced to give an instruction to your excellency to 
 pass such laws as are municipal and fit for us and in 
 the same manner which has ever been practised in this 
 island and other his Majesty's colonies." In the end 
 the Assembly successfully vindicated their rights, the 
 obnoxious proposals were dropped, and it was thus 
 demonstrated that all the settled colonies had legislative 
 assemblies that were independent and co-ordinate with 
 the English Parliament. 
 
 The only link between the colonies and England was 
 the Crown, which interfered comparatively little in their 
 domestic affairs, and when it did so, exercised its power 
 through the Privy Council or its appropriate committee. 
 In 1696 a permanent Board of Trade and Plantations 
 was set up by Order in Council to advise the Crown 
 about colonial matters and the allied questions of trade, 
 but for many years it never had anything but a sub- 
 ordinate character, and executive functions as before 
 remained in the hands of the Privy Council and the 
 agents most closely associated with the royal power, the 
 two Secreuries of Sute. Down to the Revolution of 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 39 
 
 1688 the King's ministers, the supreme executive officers 
 of the whole realm, were both in theory and practice 
 what they were called, the nominees and agents of the 
 monarch. But with the Revolution matters began to 
 undergo a radical change, and ministers became not the 
 nominees of the personal King, but of " the King in 
 Parliament," a very different thing. The prepon- 
 derant party in Parliament had not merely an influence 
 over the appointment of the principal ministers, but 
 before very long almost the whole say as to the group 
 of men to be appointed. Note, too, that " the King 
 in Parliament " meant the King not in the Jamaica 
 Assembly or in the Virginia House f Burgesses, but 
 the King in the English Parliament, and when this 
 change had come about, the Parliament that had the 
 power to dictate what ministers should be appointed 
 had obviously also the power of effectively criticising the 
 actions of those ministers when appointed. Colonial 
 matters were at first of little interest to English members 
 of Parliament ; ministers were allowed to do as they 
 thought best, and neither the importance of the change, 
 nor even the change itself, was realised by the colonists 
 during the first part of the eighteenth century. 
 
 All the King's functions with regard to his colonies 
 were discharged nominally through, but in reality by, 
 his Secretary of State. Of these, the greatest executive 
 officers from the reign of Elizabeth down to the present 
 day, there were in the early part of the eighteenth 
 century two, each endowed with identical powers, in 
 theory being two men holding between them a single 
 office. For practical purposes, however, there was a 
 division of duties, the Secretary for the Northern De- 
 
40 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 partment dealing with external affairs relating to the 
 powers of Northern Europe, and the Secretary for the 
 Southern Department deaJing with foreign affairs relat- 
 ing to the powers of Southern Europe, but both alike 
 acting in home affairs. The affairs of the colonies were 
 usually in the hands of the Secretary for the Southern 
 Department, who was the more important, and so we 
 find that for a long period all colonial affairs were dealt 
 with by the celebrated Southern Secretary, the Duke 
 of Newcastle. The Board of Trade and Plantations was 
 merely his advisory body, and was little consulted, so 
 that we have to look for the really important papers 
 relating to colonial ::dministration not among its records, 
 but among the much more voluminous and miscellaneous 
 records of the Secretary of State, what are technically 
 known as State Papers, kept in the State Paper Office. 
 But by the middle of the eighteenth century colonial 
 affairs were becoming much more important and much 
 more interesting, for they were playing a vital part in 
 the great struggle of England and France in North 
 America. Details of colonial administration were much 
 more frequently mentioned in the English House of 
 Commons, and from the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 
 1748 onwards down to the American Revolution we get a 
 long fight by the House of Commons to make its control 
 over ministers in the exercise of their executive functions 
 concerning the colonies as real as it already was in 
 matters of administration in England. This struggle 
 marks the greatly increased importance of colonial affairs 
 in the life of the old Empire, and the same thing is 
 shown in the many devices adopted by ministers to deal 
 with colonial matters. Down to 1748 the executive 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 41 
 
 power of the Board of Trade and Plantations was 
 negligible, but in that year the Earl of Halifax, a states- 
 man of the front rank, was appointed to the Presidency, 
 and he devoted himself to an increase in the importance 
 of his functions and to securing the transfer of all matters 
 relating to the colonies from the Secretary of State to 
 the Board. He desired, in fact, to raise the Presidency 
 to the rank of a third Secretaryship of State, and during 
 the period 175a to 1757 he was successful in gathering 
 power into his own hands out of those of the weaker 
 £uen who held the Secretaryship. With Pitt's advent 
 to power in 1757 Halifax failed in his further endeavours, 
 and things reverted nearly to their old position, Pitt 
 deciding the steps to be taken in all the important 
 colonies where English and French interests came into 
 conflict, and Halifax's executive power being confined 
 to the details of administration in the colonies that were 
 not so much affected by the war, and where conditions 
 more closely resembled those of peace time. When 
 Halifax retired, in 1761, matters reverted to their old 
 footing, all the functions were again assembled in Sitt's 
 hands, as Secretary of State for the Southern Depart- 
 ment, and the Board of Trade and Plantations sank into 
 even greater impotence than before. Its service pro- 
 vided safe and easy unemployment for the sinecurist, 
 and so remained until it was finally abolished by Burke's 
 Sinecure Act in 1782. 
 
 All subsequent developments of colonial administra- 
 tion therefore derive from the executive power of the 
 Secretary of State. By the middle of the eighteenth 
 centui-y the Secretary had become definitely in practice 
 the nominee of the party having a majority in the 
 
4a 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 English House of Commons, and among the many 
 mattf rs that now came to an issue between the colonies 
 and the Mother Country, the greatest principle that was 
 at stake was mvolved in the question whether the 
 Parhament of Great Britain was the supreme legislative 
 assembly for the whole Empire, or merely the first 
 among many equal assemblies. 
 
 That this was the issue was clearly realised in the 
 first period of the struggle, but as time went on and 
 matters drifted nearer and nearer to armed conflict, the 
 clear principle tended to become obscured with other 
 issues, and notably with the struggle that was siraul- 
 Uneously going on between the King and the English 
 people, the last fight in Britain between the ideas of a 
 personal and those of a limited monarchy. The result 
 of the bloodshed of the American Revolutionary war was 
 to settle both controversies in favour of the British 
 House of Commons ; the King of the Empire constitu- 
 Uoii was proved for all time to be the King in the British 
 Parliament, capable of acting in matters of State only 
 ftrough ministers acceptable to the majority in the 
 House of Commons ; and just as clear an issue was 
 decided m the other struggle— the British Parliament 
 was ^dommant among the debr-s of empire that was 
 left after the schism, and had mounted to a position of 
 unassailable supremacy as the Imperial Parliament. 
 The successful vindication of their Declaration of 
 ^dependence by the Thirteen Colonies was foUowed 
 by a stiffenmg of control over the remaining colonies 
 prompted by a determination to prevent them following 
 the evU example. The power of the Executive to con- 
 trol colonial legislatures was extended from matters c' 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 43 
 
 external commerce to domestic concerns, and the passage 
 of Acts of Parliament like the Canadian Constitutional 
 Acts of 1791 and 1840, and the Act for the Abolition of 
 Slavery, marked beyond all possibility of mistake that 
 in practice as well as in theory the position of the 
 Parliament elected by the people of these islands was 
 supreme throughout the Empire. 
 
 Never during the period of the new Empire has this 
 supremacy of the Imperial Parliament in theory been 
 abrogated, but in practice what it won after the schism 
 has been, bit by bit, relinquished so far as concerns the 
 territories that we now know as the self-governing 
 Dominions. Though the supremacy of the Imperial 
 Parliament over all the realms of the Crown is in theory 
 still complete, there are few things less likely to happen 
 in the political world than for a party majority in the 
 British House of Commons to legislate in any way 
 concerning the internal affairs of a Dominion. The 
 relinquishment of supremacy at first went on by the 
 series of executive acts that were involved in the grant- 
 ing of Responsible Government, but it was completed 
 and made final by the passing through the Imperial 
 Parliament of the great series of federating Acts of 
 Parliament : the British North America Act of 1867, the 
 Commonwealth of Australia Act of 1900, and the Union 
 of South Africa Act of 1910, where the British Parlia- 
 ment has simply acted in a registering capacity for 
 decisions that had been arrived at by the peoples of 
 the dominions concerned. 
 
 But the new Empire does not consist solely of self- 
 governing dominions, there are vast and populous terri- 
 tories for which the legislative powers of the Imperial 
 
44 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 Parliament elected by the people of the British Isles 
 are still complete and are repeatedly exercised. There is 
 a good deal of difference, even here, between the way in 
 which the exercise of this power is carried out as com- 
 pared with the exercise of legislative powers concerning 
 British affairs. Less intimate scrutiny is given to the 
 measures that are proposed ; they are isrgely left to be 
 discussed by experts, if they are discussed at all, but 
 in the great majority of cases they are merely registered 
 at the request of die executive which has had them 
 drawn up by its special expert agency, the Colonial 
 Office, which in practically every case forms its views 
 in concert with the men on the spot. 
 
 The Colonial Office, therefore, is still of first-rate 
 importance in the government of the Empire as a whole, 
 and we ought to know something of the way in which 
 it has come into being. With Pitt the whole executive 
 power relating to the colonies was again gathered up 
 into the hands of the Secretaries of State. The final 
 blow to the influence of the Board of Trade and Planta- 
 tions was given when the Earl of Shelburne was Secre- 
 tary for the Southern Department in 1766, and the 
 Board was reduced to a purely advisory position, all 
 Colonial governors being directed to send their corre- 
 spondence to the Secretary of State. In 1768, owing 
 to the extreme pressure of business that arose from the 
 acquisition of Canada and other French territories in 
 North America, a third Secretary of State was ap- 
 pointed, the Secretary of State for the Colonies or for 
 the American Department. Lord Hillsborough, Lord 
 Dartmouth, and Lord George Germaine, who filled the 
 office in succession, held also simultaneously the office 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 45 
 
 of President of the Board of Trade, and used the 
 machinery of the Board as a branch of their ovm office. 
 With the loss of the thirteen colonies, the business of 
 government was considerably reduced, and by Burke's 
 Sinecure Act of 178a the offices, both of the third Secre- 
 tary and President of the Board of Trade, were abolished, 
 and the two remaining secretories became Secretaries 
 for Foreign and Home Affairs respectively. The victory 
 of the House of Commons in vindicating its control over 
 colonial affairs was marked by the Home Secretary being 
 entrusted with all matters relating to the colonies. 
 When war became in 1794 one of the principal businesses 
 of the executive, a third Secretary of State was again 
 appointed, this time as Secretary of State for War, and 
 as the West Indian colonies were then exceedingly im- 
 portant strategically, colonial affairs were entrusted to 
 him in 1801, while matters of trade remained in the 
 hands of the Home Secretary until a new Committee of 
 the Privy Council for Trade Affairs was set up, our 
 present Board of Trade. During the long period of 
 peace after 1815 the Secretary of State for War and the 
 Colonies was really more concerned with his growing 
 colonial functions than with the management of the 
 Army, which was largely dealt with by the Commander- 
 in-chief at the Horse Guards, but neither function was 
 regarded as of first-rate importance, the secretaryship 
 being usually conferred upon one of the lesser mem- 
 bers of the Cabinet, and the tenure of most of its holders 
 was of brief duration. In 1854, with the outbreak of 
 the Crimean War, the duties of the third Secretary of 
 State became too great for one man to perform, and a 
 fourth secretaryship was set up, leaving the third 
 
46 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 charged only with colonial business. In i8f8 when 
 hd« can,e under the sole control of the SjJ" 
 ^LS'tT^J ''* ^"""'y ''' Sute for IndTa ;,, 
 
 t«I!!f *^r"u'^t °^ '•«^«'°P»ent having thus been 
 traced whereby the successor of one of the orin^«,? 
 nunmerial agents of the Crown is charg d 4h "S 
 nve functions concerning the colonies underThe «Si 
 cmtrol of the British Parliament, it now re«a as to c^" 
 sider .n summary fashion the progressive Soces^ of 
 ddferentution m function that has ione on under the 
 
 It was stated a moment ago that the Colonial Secretan^ 
 tZrTJ" ",''y/"'^ °f the nineteenth centu^^ 
 I^ril''°"'''°^''~"''''^^P«'tance.andsra7J!^ 
 
 ^ilt^f""ZT' P'^'^^^'y characteristic of th" 
 Secretary s subordinates as a somewhat logical con- 
 sequence. The period has been dubbed by colo^fj 
 hmonans the " Mr. Mother-country "leriS Ster , 
 celebrated lampoon attributed to CharleT^uief o„e 
 of the most earnest colonial reformers r ,he ti^ 
 
 ^d «T'« '^"'^"'' ^*'* ''y ~'°««»^ "t tl:. olunde^g 
 and self-sufficient ineptitude of the Colonial Offi^deTfa 
 of Ae time long left rankling memories of " I^S 
 Stteet in all the white dominions, but gradual^ J 
 Srv °"' ^*^8"^ting of responsible X^'m^ 
 men they were lareely emancipated from its con^l 
 and the functions of the office bifurcated in twoSv 
 
 "eTwi"7Srd% °" ''•= r ''^"'^' - i-™r 
 
 meni was „ranted to one colony after another fh. 
 Colonial Secretary's position in regard to Z^l^ 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 47 
 
 to be those of an administrative official, and he came 
 more nearly to be in the position of a Foreign Secretary 
 charged with delicate diplomatic negotiations with grow- 
 ing nations who, in matters of administration, were in 
 a practical position of independence. The change was 
 finally marked, after the Imperial Conference of 1907, 
 by the foundation within the Colonial Office of a separate 
 Dominions Department, the work of which has become 
 more and more closely associated with that of the new 
 Committee of Imperial Defence, again in essence a 
 Committee of the Privy Council, that fecund mother of 
 committees, and with the permanent secretariat of the 
 Imperial Conference established after its meeting in 
 19". The work connected with the self-governing 
 Empire is necessarily much further removed from the 
 control of the British Parliament than is that concerned 
 with the dependent empire, and the Colonial Secretary 
 in dealing with it has returned almost to the position of 
 one of the Stuart Secretaries of Stote, but now directed 
 in the carrying out of high matters of policy not by a 
 personal monarch, but by the Cabinet, or even, perhaps, 
 the Imperial Conference as a whole. It is impossible 
 for the historian to dogmatise about changes that are 
 going on actually as he writes, and while it would cer- 
 tainly have been wrong to have made the foregoing 
 statement even in the early part of 1916, it is by no means 
 so wrong in the spring of 1917, for we now seem to be 
 witnessmg a change wherein the choice of the King's 
 ministers to serve in his Cabinet for Imperial affairs is 
 no longer limited to the indirect nominees of the British 
 Parliament, but may be made in appropriate ways from 
 the whole empire. 
 
48 
 
 OLD EMPIRE AND NEW 
 
 The work of the Colonial Office ai relates to what are 
 techmcaUy called "the Crown Colonies and Places" 
 remains administrative and detailed, and is often carried 
 into effect by means of Acts of the British Parliament, 
 herein acting as a real Imperial legislature. The work 
 has become one of increasing complexity, and often 
 approximates to that performed by the India Office. 
 We may appropriately class i* is the work of thi un- 
 differentiated Colonial Office, and it will be best dealt 
 with in a later lecture of the course. 
 
Ill 
 
 SEA POWBH AND THB DEFDICB OF THE EMPIRE 
 
 When in the dosing years of the fifteenth century 
 Bartolomeu Diaz anc Vasco da Gama sailed round the 
 Cape 01 Good Hope out into the Eastern seas, and 
 Christopher Columbus found his way across the Atlantic 
 to the shores of a New World, they brought to an end 
 Oie Middle Ages of Christendom and began a new era 
 MedijBval Europe had seen almost all its struggles fought 
 out upon the land ; its contests, both military and com- 
 merci^d, were waged by peoples who looked inland for 
 the sphere of their activities, and only upon the water 
 of the Midland Sea did sutes employ sea power to 
 further their desires for wealth and greatness. With the 
 coming of the new age the men of Western Europe faced 
 about to look out over the waters of the ocean m search 
 of power, and those waters which before had marked 
 impassable liniits to their activity became the scene 
 whereon the struggles of the nations were to be fought 
 out for three hundred years. Spain, Portugal, England, 
 France and HoUand have striven upon the waters of the 
 AUantic for power and greatness, and when, at the end 
 of the long fight, Britain was left indisputably " mistress 
 of the sea," she had won not only sea power but, what 
 »s inextricably bound up with it, the opportunities of 
 empire that are denied to those who fail to hold the ocean. 
 E 49 
 
50 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 It was upon the sea that Britain won her old 
 Empire, upon the sea that she saved herself from de- 
 struction when that old Empire was snapped in pieces, 
 and it was the supremacy at sea that she won in her 
 fight against Napoleon that gave her peace for the forty 
 critical years during which she was building up her new 
 Empire on sure foundations. The sea has been to 
 Britain not a boundary, as it has been to other powers, 
 but almost a part of her own domain. Along its high- 
 ways her sons have gone out to the uttermost parts of 
 the world, and over it wealth has poured back to the 
 central mart. To gain the mastery of those highways 
 during the eighteenth century, the century of war, 
 Britain had to fight hard and long, and no Englishman 
 of that century could forget that whether in peace or 
 war by her sea power the British Empire stood or fell. 
 But the nineteenth century was a century of peace upon 
 the ocean, and in peace the sea is free to all. The 
 ubiquity and all-pervasiveness of British sea power was 
 such that its existence was barely remembered, and there 
 were few who recollected that it was the medium apart 
 from which the empire could no more live than it could 
 have grown up. A foreign challenge to Britain's sea 
 power was necessary to wake men from their easy 
 dreams, and to show them that of all the conditions that 
 govern world power those of the sea change least from 
 age to age. The continuity of Imperial history is no- 
 where more remarkable than in this direction, and I 
 propose in this present lecture to devote my attention 
 to an examination of some of the broader oudines of 
 that continuity. 
 The great maritime discoveries that marked the change 
 
AND THE NEW 5, 
 
 from the mediaeval to the modem age were no isolated 
 phenomena due merely to the genius of one man or 
 
 IIT^ i "* ^'T °! ""'"• ^''"y ^ ^^"^ P«P"ed for 
 and led up to by a long series of inventions in the sphere 
 of practical navigation, like the use of the mariner's 
 compass, the construction of properly dravwi charts, 
 and the evolution of astronomical methods of cal- 
 culatmg position. These inventions were largely the 
 product of Italian genius, and to Genoese sailors, too. 
 were due the improvements in the building of the lieht 
 Portuguese fishing-craft that made it possible for them 
 to undertake long ocean voyages. , Castile and Portugal 
 were ready first of aU the western nations to make L 
 of Italian skill, and to them fell the first mastery of the 
 newly explored oceans, and therefore the opportunity 
 of estob!i.hmg for themselves oversea empires without 
 competition. Spain fo* many years held an almost 
 unchaUenged position which she had taken without 
 fightmg, but Portugal, under the lead of her great 
 viceroys Almeida and Albuquerque, had to wage a great 
 naval struggle against the Arab powers who had pre- 
 ceded her before she could hold sway over the whole 
 Indian Ocean and could carry on the development of 
 her empire and her commerce unimpeded. Till after 
 the middle of the sixteenth century the two Iberian 
 nations divided oceanic power between them almost 
 without a rival, and the foundation of colonies beyond 
 the »ea by other nations was impossible. France was 
 toe first to take up arms to vindicate the freedom of 
 toe seas, but owing to her difficulties at home she did 
 not persist m her efforts, though the massacre of her 
 colonists under ViUegaignon on the coast of Brazil and 
 
53 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 undfr Ribaut in Florida showed that all attempts at 
 colonisauon were impracticable so long as Spain and 
 Portugal held the sea. The vital blow to the Iberian 
 supremacy came from the hands of the sailors of Eng- 
 Isttid, but though the defeat of the Armada heralded 
 the sure declme of their dominion, it did not complete 
 U. The slow wane of Spanish power had to go on for 
 nearly twenty years longer before either the English, 
 the French or the Dutch could establish colonies beyond 
 the sea secure from the expectation of Spanish attack. 
 Even as late as 1630 Spain, when she could put forth 
 her strength, still held the command of the Caribbean 
 Sea and could dear out the intruding colonists of other 
 nations, as she did the English and French from St. 
 Christopher m 1629. But her decay was proceeding 
 apace, and when the Dutch could seize and hold with 
 mipunity the rich colony of Brazil, Spanish sea power 
 was seen by all to be at an end. Dutch, French and 
 English could sail and colonise in the West Indies almost 
 where they would, with haidly a fear of Spanish reprisals. 
 For the first seventy years of the seventeenth century 
 we may say that sea power was in abeyance between 
 the English and the Dutch. Neither laid claim, as the 
 Spaniards had done, to world dominion, and, therefore, 
 in times of peace all unoccupied shores lay open for 
 colonisation by any power. This period was, there- 
 fore, the great penod of colonial beginnings by all the 
 maritime nations, but where a power could establish 
 lull control of the sea, the colonising and trading activi- 
 ties of other powers were excluded, and it was thus upon 
 the power of their fleet that the Dutch founded their 
 monopoly of trade in the waters of the Indian Archi- 
 
AND THE NEW 53 
 
 pelago. The rise of the sea power of the Dutch was 
 extraordinarily rapid and the growth of their commerce 
 was correspondmgly great, and since, like the Spaniards, 
 their policy was an exclusive one where it might be, 
 England was hostile to it and determined upon attack. 
 The three Dutch wars were fought out entirely at sea, 
 and are of prime importance in the history of the em- 
 pire, for though many events in them added little to 
 the glory of English arms, they were finally decided in 
 our favour, and left Britain in a position above all other 
 maritime states, while they convinced her best states- 
 men of her absolute dependence upon sea power for 
 her empire, her trade and her existence. It was the 
 navy that gave to England the Dutch colony of New 
 Netherland, but perhaps the most important lesson that 
 she learned was the necessity of seizing and holding 
 strategic pomts upon which the actions of the navy could 
 be based. The operations of the Parliamentary fleet 
 against the Royalist colony of Barbados were directed 
 to the thwarting of Prince Rupert's design of making 
 that island a base for privateering operations against the 
 commerce with the colonies ; the seizure of Jamaica 
 m 1655 was designed to give us the command of the 
 Caribbean, and the annexation of St. Helena in 1652 
 was meant to further the protection of English trade 
 with the East Indies. The period of the Dutch wars saw 
 England s first entry into the Mediterranean, and the 
 acquisition of Tangier from the Portuguese was designed 
 to give us a place of arms whence our sailors might guard 
 our commerce with Leghorn, the ports of Italy and the 
 Levant. The value of Tangier for this purpose was 
 overrated, and when, a few years la'er, a forward naval 
 
54 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 policy was abandoned and retrenchment was under- 
 taken, its forts and harbours were dismantled, and this, 
 our first strategic place in the Mediterranean, was 
 abandoned. 
 
 While England was advancing her sea power at the 
 expense of the Dutch, a new competitor was coming to 
 the fore. Louis XIV and his minister, Colbert, were 
 determined to develop French commerce and the French 
 colonies by all the means in their power, and they saw 
 that this could only be done by the strengthening of 
 their fleet. In the war that ended with the Peace of 
 Ryswick in 1697, neither France nor England was strong 
 enough to carry on hostilities beyond the ocean, and it 
 was mutually agreed that the war should be confined to 
 Europe, and that the colonies of each power should 
 remain neutral. The oceanic war was restricted to 
 privateering against commerce, while the fleets were 
 fighting out their battles in the Narrow Seas. Engli ;h 
 commerce suffered terribly in the conflict, but it ulti- 
 mately ended in her favour, and her sea power was left 
 in a stronger position to withstand the French menace 
 when the war of the Spanish Succession broke out 
 five years later. She was not sufficiendy powerful in 
 this war to tmdertake great expeditions beyond the sea 
 against the French colonies, but she gained and held the 
 great strategic base of Gibraltar, and when the war ended 
 with France's exhaustion, Britain gained her profit from 
 the war in the colonial sphere. Her claims to Hudson's 
 Bay and Nova Scotia were admitted in the Treaty of 
 Utrecht, and by the firm establishment of her power in 
 the Mediterranean she was placed in a strong position 
 for future struggles. Thanks to her naval strength, 
 Britain was able during the years of peace to develop 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 55 
 
 the resources of her colonies in security> and to make her 
 West Indian islands the great source of wealth that they 
 remained throughout the century. 
 
 The later wars of England and France in the eigh- 
 teenth century are the classic field wherein have been 
 studied the effects of sea power upon the struggle for 
 oversea empire, and I need here do no more than point 
 to one or two outstanding features of the story. In 
 the war of the Austrian Succession, neither Britain nor 
 France could use the weapon of sea power with com- 
 plete effect. The English statesmen of the time were 
 neither particularly competent nor particularly lucky 
 in their choice of commanders, but the navy was pre- 
 served inuct, and at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle France 
 was forced to give up her conquests, because she had 
 not a strong enough fleet to support them. In the Seven 
 Years War, however, it was shown beyond the possi- 
 bility of doubt that oversea possessions that are not 
 strong enough to stand alone must fall to the power 
 that, under the shield of a dominant navy, can transport 
 her armies across the sea and keep them supplied. In 
 the years immediately preceding the war, while neither 
 England nor France was supreme in the Indian Ocean, 
 but Mauritius was held in force and a powerful and 
 undefeated French fleet was based upon it, Dupleix 
 could carry on his designs in Southern India with every 
 prospect of success, but when the command of the Indian 
 seas passed to the British fleet the edifice of French power 
 began to crumble at once. Clive's victories, that began 
 the building of our Indian Empire, were based firmly 
 upon the command of the sea, and the gims of Admiral 
 Watson's ships had as real a share in the reduction of 
 Bengal as had the bravery of Qive's sepoys. 
 
56 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 It is one of the greatest glories of WiUiam Pitt that 
 he not only planned grandiose schemes for the extension 
 of Bntam s colonial power, but that he saw the essential 
 condition for the success of his schemes in an unsparing 
 use of sea power. The period of the Seven Yea« War 
 IS always remembered for its victories, but it is more 
 mstructiye to remember some of its failures and the 
 long and patient tightening of the grip of the British 
 navy upon the ocean before those failures could be turned 
 mto success. Pitt realised above all others the blow to 
 Bnt«h power that had been given by Byng's failure in 
 the Mediterranean and the consequent loss of the naval 
 base of Mmorca, and he brought home to his countrymen 
 as no one else had done the pre-eminent r61e that the 
 navy plays in the maintenance of the Empire. Not aU 
 his schemes for the use of the navy were well designed, 
 and his abortive attempts to employ the ships in "side- 
 shows gainst French ports show us that even the 
 greatest of English war ministers might make mistakes. 
 But his greater plans were sound, and by his support 
 of the long and unspectacular processes of blockade he 
 graduaUy wore down the naval power of France, his 
 admirals cleared the sea for the secure dispatch of exoe- 
 dmonary forces for the reduction of the French colon^s, 
 and one by one they fell to British arms. Senegal was 
 the first in 1758, to be foUowed a little later by France's 
 stronghold of Louisbourg, guarding Canada at the 
 mouth of the St. Lawrence, Guadeloupe surrendered in 
 May 1759, while Boscawen, Hawke and other admirals 
 held the French fleets wherever they could find them, 
 prevented the despatch of reinforcements to any of the 
 threatened colonies, and kept the seas clear for the trans- 
 port of English forces wherever they were needed. The 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 57 
 
 command of the sea was not maintained by great and 
 victorious fleet engagements, but by the long-continued 
 grinding pressure of Hawke's blockade, and it was only 
 after most of the French colonies had fallen, that in his 
 great victory in Quiberon Bay, in November 1759, he 
 could give the finishing stroke and thus ensure that the 
 colonies that had been won with the command of the 
 sea need fear no danger of reconquest. Our American 
 colonists might secure local successes against the enemy, 
 but they were not strong enough to maintain their 
 conquests so long as France could despatch troops and 
 stores in safety. But when once the command of the 
 sea was secure, each part of the Empire could aid the 
 other, British expeditionary forces could do their work, 
 and when Canada fell before the arms of Wolfe upon the 
 Heights of Abraham, a real part of the credit of the 
 victory was due to the men of the blockading squadrons 
 tossing upon the waters of the Bay and the Channel. 
 
 As the Seven Years War illustrates for us the right 
 principles to adopt for the full use of sea power, so the 
 War of American Independence illustrates the dangers 
 that arise when those who govern fail to understand its 
 use. Regarded purely from the belligerent point of 
 view, the struggle was an essentially maritime one. 
 Britain, resting content with the prestige she had gained 
 under Pitt, had neglected and starved her navy for the 
 sake of economy, while France, on the other hand, had 
 done all she could to make her fleet efficient. A proper 
 use of British power would have prevented the French 
 from ever sending an army to America to assist the 
 revolted colonists to secure their independence at the 
 point of the bayonet, but the British Government in- 
 tentionally allowed this to take place under the convoy 
 
58 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 of De Grasse's fleet in order to reserve their available 
 naval forces for the re-victualling of the garrison of 
 Gibraltar. Naval strength was frittered away upon 
 secondary objects, and though many creditable actions 
 were fought, they accomplished nothing; French 
 power again began to raise its head in India because of 
 Suffren's victories in the Indian Ocean, and Cornwallis 
 had to surrender at Yorktown because the fleet on which 
 he was dependent could not arrive in face of a superior 
 French force. The decay of Britain's naval power and 
 the loss of the greater part of her old Empire stand in 
 the relation of cause and effect, and it was only owing 
 to her rapid power of recovery and to Rodney's victories 
 over a navy that was seriously weakened by France's 
 financial exhaustion tha^ the West Indian colonies were 
 retamed to become the nucleus of the new Empire. 
 Gibraltar was held, thanks to Lord Howe's success in re- 
 victualling it, but the weakening of Britain's sea power 
 raised up for her difliculties in many parts of the globe. 
 The troubles with Spain in regard to the Falkland 
 Islands and her exaggerated claims in the Nootka Sound 
 question to territory upon the Pacific coast would never 
 have been urged if Britain's sea power had been as 
 strong as before ; but, luckily, the disasters of the 
 American war had brought forth fresh stores of energy 
 to repair them, the fleet was no longer neglected as it 
 had been, and the mere show of force was sufficient to 
 repel the Spanish claims to our outpost in the Southern 
 Seas, and to preserve the coast that Vancouv had 
 explored, for British occupation and the founda of 
 thecolony of British Columbia when the time was r pe. 
 The twenty years' struggle against revolutionary 
 France and Napoleon differed from earlier wars in that 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 59 
 
 the conditions at sea were more favourable to England 
 and she had the opportunity of immensely increasing 
 the lead she had won. Thanks to her command of the 
 sea, which was never seriously jeopardised, she could 
 transport expeditionary forces wherever she thought 
 fit, she could support and carry on great wars for 
 the extension of her Indian Empire without fear of 
 interference, and she could reduce the colonies of her 
 enemies, one after another, at will. Many of these 
 expeditions were muddled and bungled, for it does not 
 follow as a matter of course that the power having 
 the command of the sea necessarily thereby gains the 
 colonies of her enemies ; she merely has secured the 
 opportunity of trying to do so, which is denied to those 
 without sea power. The actual conquest of the colonies 
 must be undertaken by land forces for whom the navy 
 simply acts as carrier, and the problem becomes a mili- 
 tary one. The Napoleonic war made Britain the heir 
 of every other colonial power ; Trinidad was seized 
 from Spain, Mauritius from France, Ceylon, Demerara 
 and the Cape of Good Hope from the Batavian Republic, 
 not to be returned at the Peace, for their strategic posi- 
 tion was such as to make them of importance to the 
 supreme naval power. Java had also been captured and 
 held for some years, and if Britain had been urged on 
 to the conquest of oversea territories mainly by greed, 
 she would have retained it as the most valuable of all 
 Holland's colonial possessions. But it had no strategic 
 value, and Britain's ministers saw the greatness of the 
 task that she already bore in India, they shrank from 
 further additions to our responsibilities for the govem- 
 meirt of Asiatics, and the East Indian islands were 
 iwwned to the new Orange monarchy in Holland. The 
 
6o 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 colonies that England retained were naval bases that so 
 long as she maintained her supreme fleet would give her 
 command of the principal trade routes of the world, 
 and she then began the process, which she steadily 
 pursued for many years, of developing strategically 
 situated trading stations that should aid in the further- 
 ance of her oceanic commerce, like Penang and 
 Singapore, Aden and Hong Kong. The destruction 
 of Dutch prestige in Asia by the conquest of Java had 
 an important effect in the Far East, for it broke up their 
 monopoly of the trade with China and Japan, and made 
 it possible for Englishmen to enter fully on that trade 
 with China which added so much to the wealth of the 
 empire in the course of the nineteenth century. 
 
 The whole result of the period of war was to leave 
 England in a position to profit more by oversea trade in 
 the subsequent time of peace than any other power. 
 Her position is India was impregnable from any oversea 
 attack, and on the land side there was no European 
 power yet within reach, so that her military strength 
 might be devoted to the task of giving peace to the whole 
 peninsula. The growth of her trade enabled her to 
 shoulder the tremendous burden of debt without fear 
 of any repudiation of her liabilities that would have 
 brought social revolution and have caused her people to 
 break away from the old lines of ordered development 
 of ancient precedents. Britain, securely based upon 
 the sea, could peacefully pursue the well-being of her 
 colonial possessions and the consolidation of her new 
 Empire free from all fear of attack by another power. 
 If the dominion of the sea had been left in the less 
 certain position in which it stood after the Peace of Aix- 
 la-Chapelle in 1748, or that of Versailles in 1783, Britain 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 6i 
 
 could never have permitted that freedom of action to 
 her colonists that gradually cleared away all bitter 
 memories and allowed them to develop their national 
 consciousness free from consUnt interference from the 
 home country. If the colonies had been open to serious 
 attock from the sea it would have been necessary to 
 mainuin strong military forces within their borders, 
 and there could never have been that progressive with- 
 drawal of those small British forces that were reuined 
 until the colonists were strong enough to cope with all 
 their own local dangers. It was the silent power of the 
 British fleet that in the second and third decades of the 
 nineteenth century saved Australia and New Zealand 
 from being shared with France when her new aspira- 
 tions for colonial power made her seek for fresh posses- 
 sions m the unoccupied lands of the southern seas. 
 The complaisance of England has made her naval 
 supremacy little irksome to other powers. France 
 could take Tahiti and New Caledonia, and Germany 
 Samoa and New Guinea, without protest from Britain, 
 where any other power that has had control of the sea 
 would have attempted to pursue an exclusive policy. 
 The supremacy of the British navy through a hundred 
 years of peace has preserved a real freedom of the sea 
 for all nations, and, thanks to this freedom, all nations 
 have been enabled to enter upon the field of colonial 
 expansion in peace and to the extent that their means 
 would allow. Moderation and the use of sea power 
 not only for the sole benefit of the British Empire, but 
 for the good of all nations alike, has preserved . for a 
 century from challenge, and thus it has come about that 
 the peoples of the world have taken the freedom of the 
 ocean almost for granted, and even Englishmen began 
 
6a 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 to forget how our empires, new and old, have been 
 based upon the sea, and that without the guardiance 
 of the fleet none of our new dominions could have come 
 mto being. To many observers, and especially to the 
 omnisaent pedants of a nation that had never leamrd 
 the lessons of sea power, it was easy to attribute the 
 growth of the British Empire to luck, or to overmaster- 
 ing English greed, and they would deny or depreci«e 
 the truth of Raleigh's words : " Whosoever commands 
 the sea commands the trade ; whosoever commands the 
 trade of the world commands the riches of the world, 
 and consequently the world itself." 
 
 Even the lessons of the American Civil War were not 
 appreciated, and men failed to see what a tremendous 
 weapon sea power had placed in the hand of the North 
 for exhausting and overcoming the rebel Confederates 
 according to the strictest precedents of blockade laid 
 down in the century of war. For eighty years all the 
 world s wars, save one, were fought out entirely upon 
 iMid, and fleets were used only for police purposes, for 
 the transport of troops, or as floating batteries for attack 
 upon forts, as in the Crimean War and the bombard- 
 ment of Alexandria. The inexplicable neglect of the 
 study of the broader aspects of modern history in 
 England, and especially of naval history, covered the 
 lessons of the past in complete oblivion, the domain of 
 imperial strategy was reserved for the teaching of the 
 great contmental masters of land war, who knew nothing 
 of oceanic conditions, and the navy was allowed to 
 dedme, not merely relatively to the tasks it had to per- 
 form, but also absolutely. But as the nineteenth century 
 wore to Its close the competition in armaments began 
 to stretch to the sea, and powers that had never had a 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 <3 
 
 bSlSU"' *° *"'" "'~'' '"" P^'V"""^ o' «WP- 
 
 •nX »*?*"^8 '« **"' *«• « Stake came in the early 
 iunet«. from the publication of the epoch-maS 
 worta of the great American «£..,, Admi«l mS. 
 
 SLv" u ""'*'" °^ *''* '"^""'^^ "^ *" P<»ver upon 
 history, as he was proud to acknowledgerupon \he 
 
 fSof M^S^'^'w' ^'^ ^"'" Laughton, for lo^g P^! 
 fessor of Modern History .n the University of London. 
 
 ^lTV\^Tl^'/'°'^' '° Englishmen with almost a 
 ^d shock the fact that though Briuin's sea power 
 had been for nearly a cc.itury safe from challenge; the 
 
 were'lrr^" "''"' ''^ '^ ' ^'^^''"^ "-t^ht K5e 
 were stJ^ there, as ever, wh.!,- (he vulnerability of the 
 
 weU-d«cted naval force. The territory of the empire 
 »,„rw r" """""".'"'y "'""led, its populations of British 
 stock hved widely dispersed, but united by the sea"o 
 
 ~onU ?",'^8*'^T Z"l ^^' ^y *'« British fleet ; the 
 K w "l«* !^f'>* had become largely depender 
 for their food and the raw materials of the maniActuts 
 
 st« tL?*" T'' '"'^ ''^^«' "P°" '»'« cargoes oS: 
 Ships that, so long as peace should last, could con.e 
 without hindrance, but which the momen the im of 
 ^should sound would be even more liable to «pTu« 
 than had been the merchantmen of those eighteenth- 
 century campaigns that Mahan described. 
 The lessons of the war between China and Japan in 
 
 to^d T' 'l-^'f '"«^'y ^°"«''' "P°" '^"^ ^"' did "luch 
 tL F I ?:'"°« V'?^''''"^' '^'^ ^* »l««'t one voice 
 the English people demanded that the naval defences 
 of the emp« should be put upon a proper footing. 
 
64 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 that all lee-way should be made up, and that the world 
 should be shown unmistakably that British sea power 
 was still unassailably supreme. Mahan's teachings had 
 a profound effect in England, but they had even more 
 influence on the policy of the power that, since its victory 
 over France in 1871, had been secretly planning to seize 
 world power. The German Empire seriously began 
 the acquisition of colonial possessions in the early 
 'eighties, but so long as Bismarck remained in power, her 
 colonial ambitions were only pursued in a somewhat 
 dilettante way, and apparently rather because the posses- 
 sion of colonies was regarded as the luxury of a first- 
 rate power than with any more deep-seated motive. 
 The accession of an Emperor who announced vigorously 
 that Germany's future lay on the water, and who was 
 a firm believer in Mahan's doctrine, marked a new 
 and very serious departure of pohcy. 
 
 The embarkation of the German Empire on a great 
 policy of shipbuilding that rapidly raised her fleet from 
 a condition of comparative insignificance to a high 
 place among the navies of the -rid, together with the 
 persistent public agitation thai went on with govern- 
 mental approval for the educa^■on of opinion by Navy 
 leagues and societies, began to show the British people 
 that some day or another their supremacy at sea might 
 be challenged, as it had been in the eighteenth century, 
 and we were forcibly reminded, almost in spite of our- 
 selves, of the bases of Imperial power. The possession 
 of a powerful navy by a State that had no reason to 
 apprehend oversea invasion, and whose maritime 
 interests, important as they were, were entirely incom- 
 mensurate with the strength of its fleet and were in no 
 danger of attack, might not indicate a spirit of aggres- 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 65 
 
 sion, but, at any rate, it indicated an ability to become 
 an aggressor if the time were propitious. The last years 
 of the nineteenth century did more to show that these 
 wTn^^S^B^f B«»«dless. The Spanish-American 
 War of 1898 deprived Spain of the last relics of her 
 - colomal power, because her fleet was utterly unable to 
 cope TOth the superior power of the United States ; it 
 pomted the old lesson that colonies must fall to the 
 power that holds control of the sea and that can transport 
 and victual its armies at wiU. safe from the fear of halTile 
 attack. 
 
 The most important indication, however, was given 
 by the steps that led up to the outbreak of war in 
 South Africa. Germany had begun her colonial career 
 m South-west Africa almost at the nadir of British power 
 and prestige m the sub-continent. She had expended 
 great sums of money in trying to build up a colony by 
 ar&fiaal means, had accumulated there considerable 
 mlitary equipment, and while in apparently complete 
 friendship with Great Britain had done aU she could 
 to cultivate relations with the Boer republics of the 
 Transvaal and the Free State, which were desirous of 
 getting nd of even the shadowy links that bound them 
 to the British Empire. It would be foreign to my 
 purpose to enter here into the story of those intrigues, 
 
 ^u K 'f T 'T /^* '^"* y" **y «>« be properly 
 told but the cdebrated telegram from the Em^ror 
 WiUiam to President Kruger marked a readiness to find 
 profit for Germany in Britain's difiiculties, and the 
 tremendous agitation that was engineered against our 
 conduct of the war pointed in the same direction. 
 There is littie doubt that had Germany had a free hand, 
 or could she have found allies in the adventure, the 
 
66 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 British Empire would have been faced in 1&99 with the 
 same problems that she had failed to deal with a htmdred 
 and twenty years before. But circumstances were not 
 the same. The prestige of the British navy stood higher 
 in 1899 than in 1779, and where before had been neglect 
 and corruption was now the highest degree of skill and 
 vigour. The German navy could by no means be 
 compared with the fine fighting force of Old France, 
 the heart of Germany's rulers failed them, and Britain 
 fought out her land war unmolested and never had to 
 fire a shot at sea. Both countries learned the lesson 
 beyond mistake, the continuity of history was triumph- 
 antly vindicated, and Germany set herKlf to work to 
 reduce Britam's lead by the bidding of a fleet under 
 her succcMive Navy Laws that should be not uncom- 
 parable in strength with that of the strongest naval power. 
 The ten or twelve years that followed the South 
 African War will be memorable as the time when the 
 "subjects of the King beyond the sea for the first time 
 really began to see how all their life and prosperity wai 
 built upon sea power, and how they had as vital an 
 interest in the Navy as had the people of the United 
 Kingdom. The uttfamiliarity of the Dominions with 
 sea power is no reflection upon them, for it requires a 
 good deal of imagination for a man born and bred in 
 Winnipeg, who has never seen the sea, to realise that a 
 good deal of his fate may depend upon the issue of a 
 battle fought, say, among the fogs of the North Sea. 
 Defence, to most colonists, was a local affair dependent 
 upon the action of militia troops aided by a few battalions 
 of professional British soldiers against undisciplined 
 native hordes. The support and manning of the navy 
 in the new Empire, as in the old, was entirely a matter 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 67 
 
 for the people of the United Kingdom, as was the con- 
 duct of the campaigns that were fought on the North- 
 west fronuer of India, the only land frontier of the 
 empire save one. The long land frontier of Canada 
 needed not a soldier from end to end, and military 
 operations meant litUe more than matters of police 
 Every Englishman is familiar with the sea, he knows 
 niany sailors, and pride in the navy has been bred in 
 his bone for generation.. He has little difficulty in 
 real|sing the need for sea power if he is not misled by 
 his leaders, and he is, therefore, in a much easier posi- 
 tion than many of his fellow subjects in the Dominions. 
 
 i r**! **^°."^ °^ **^ P°*" fi'"st came home to 
 the island peoples of the Dominions, fofcthey, beine 
 separated by blue water from all other peoples, could 
 realise most clearly how the continuance of their peace- 
 ful development was entirely dependent on the freedom 
 of the seas under the one power that by her exercise of 
 undisputed sea power for a century had shown that she 
 could be trusted to use it properly, and not to abuse it 
 tor her own selfish interests. 
 
 Neid^oundland, which lives by the sea, has always 
 token her share in the manning of the navy; New 
 Zealand, an island home, soon showed her eagerness 
 to make her contribution, while the Australian colonies, 
 that till recent years have only been linked together by 
 sea commumcations, as one of the earliest acts of their 
 newly founded Commonwealth began to establish a 
 Royal Australian Navy of their own as a contribution to 
 the common defence. Cape Colony, too, has done what 
 she could, though with the menace of a military power 
 upon her land frontiers she might have been excused 
 had she not seen all the implications of sea power 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 Canada depends less upon the sea and more upon the 
 inntunerable land conununications that link her with her 
 great neighbour to the south than any other part of the 
 empire, and she was thus the last of the self-governing 
 nations to uke the great new step forward and to get 
 ready to shoulder her part of the burden of Imperial 
 naval defence. 
 
 The Imperial Conference of 191 1 saw for the 
 first time the Dominions taken into full counsel 
 in the matter of defence by the Imperial Govern- 
 ment. The military aid that had been given by the 
 Dominions in the South African War showed that on 
 that side a new precedent had been created. With the 
 exception of some aid rendered in the wars in Egypt, 
 neither in the new Empire nor in the old had colonial 
 troops taken part in other than their own local struggles, 
 but in South Africa men from Canada, Australia and 
 New Zealand came to fight in the general defence of 
 the empire, and it was dear that the burden of that 
 defence no longer rested, as it had done for three 
 hundred years, on the people of the United Kingdom 
 alone. The Indian Army was not employed in that 
 struggle, but a similar precedent had been set at an 
 earlier date when Indian troops were brought to Malta 
 for general Imperial purposes. The debates that fol- 
 lowed the Defence Conference of igii in political circles 
 throughout the empire were of infinite value in bring- 
 ing home, not only to the white subjects of the King- 
 Emperor, but also to many of his Asiatic people, the 
 essential truth that the problems of Imperial defence 
 are one. Men realised the conditions that safeguarded 
 all our empire's life, and which were summed up three 
 hundred years ago by a master thinker for the realm of 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 69 
 
 ha day : " Thus much is certain," wrote Bacon in his 
 Essay on the True Greatness of Kingdoms ; " he that 
 commands the sea is at great liberty, and may uke as 
 much and as little of the war as he wiU. Whereas those 
 that be strongest by land are many times, nevertheless 
 m great straits. Surely at this day with us of Europe' 
 the vantage of strength at sea, which is one of the 
 prmcipal dowries of this kingdom of Great Britain, is 
 great : both because most of the kingdoms of Europe 
 are not merely inland, but girt with the sea most part 
 of their compass, and because the wealth of both Indies 
 seems m great part but accessory to the command of 
 the seas." 
 
 We have here not only a crucial maxim for our people, 
 but when it is interpreted in the light of history as 
 applicable to the whole empire into which the England 
 of Bacon's day has grown, it may do much to convince 
 us of the continuity in space and time of our Imperial 
 expansion and of the sea power upon which it has 
 been based. 
 
 I have devoted almost all the time at my disposal to 
 a consideration of this, the essential condition of our 
 Imperial defence, because, as it seems to me, throughout 
 our history military power and its exercise have always 
 been successive to the establishment and maintenance 
 of naval power. Even to-day, when we see armies of 
 millions of our fellow subjects from all parts of the 
 empu-e battling for freedom upon the fields of Europe, 
 the truth of this statement cannot be denied, but we 
 are driven to ask ourselves a question to which, I fear 
 It IS impossible as yet to find a satisfactory answer! 
 Throughout the Middle Ages land power was supreme 
 and sea power played only a comparatively subsidiary 
 
70 OLD EMPIRE AND THE NEW 
 
 part ; the principal trading routes of the world were 
 overland, and all traffic by sea was precarious and un- 
 certain. Improvements in the arts of navigation and 
 shipbuilding brought a change, and throughout the 
 tnodem age sea power has been the more important 
 factor in world history ; the great trade routes have all 
 been over-sea, and wealth has poured into the coffers 
 of the maritime nations. But we are now at the opening 
 of a new age wherein improvements in the means of 
 transport have made land travel quicker and safer than 
 sea travel. Are we destined to see land power once more 
 predominant over sea power or is it not more likely 
 that there will be equilibrium between the two, and that 
 strength will lie with those peoples that can combine 
 them both < Two great land routes have been com- 
 pleted within the last fifty years : those railways that 
 cross the American continent from the west to the far 
 west and the Trans-Siberian railway to the far east ; 
 two more are approaching completion : the Cape to 
 Cairo railway and the railway route to the middle 
 east and India. Two of these routes run through terri- 
 tories belonging to the British Empire, and of the last, 
 and perhaps the most importont, one through the middle 
 of the Old World, Britain holds securely the further end. 
 In the great struggle for sea power and oceanic com- 
 merce Britain has played the foremost part ; in the 
 economic struggle of the future she will start with 
 many advantages both on land and sea. May not the 
 peoples of the British Empire, with their superabundant 
 stores of energy, initiative and determination, be destined 
 to fai at least as important a part in the future develop- 
 ment of the land routes of the new age as they have done 
 upon the sea routes of the past and present < 
 
 ;• 
 
IV 
 
 If 
 
 IMPERIAL TRADE 
 
 It cannot be complained that the historians of the 
 older Empire have neglected the vital part that was 
 pbyed by questions of trade in its foundation and up- 
 buildtng, and it would rather be truer to say that they 
 have had a tendency to atuch undue weight to the con- 
 stant economic discussions and the repeated enactments 
 upon the commercial relations between the colonies and 
 tiie mother country, and thus to lose sight of many 
 factors of at least equal importance in the life of the 
 empire. Be dut as it may, there can be no doubt that 
 the systeautic regulation of commerce i^yed an exceed- 
 ingly important part in all colonial affairs in the later 
 half of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth 
 cenhffy; but a great reaction took place after the 
 granting of responsible government, and it became the 
 fashion to think of the colonies in connection with any 
 matters rather than with their trade. The extreme 
 policy of /ai'««r faire that was adopted in the 'forties 
 of the nineteenth century with regard to the trade <rf 
 the Empire after the repeal of the Navigation Acts and 
 the practical abolition of Customs duties in Great 
 Britain appeared to involve an entire breach of con- 
 tinuity with the past, and it seemed as though the 
 71 
 
73 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 introduction of the policy of Free Trade Made «K the 
 precedents of the old Coloeial System for ever obsolete. 
 But looking back now we can see that the old system 
 of excessive commercial regulation and the nineteenth- 
 century system of almost entire abandoMnent of regtda- 
 tion form in reality the complementary ports, the crest 
 and the trough, ol one great wave in the history of the 
 Empire, and that, despite the cUins of their extreme 
 advocates, neither system was the soit of heaven-sent 
 revelation suitable for the circumstances of all time 
 that thev supposed it to be. 
 
 The thread of historic cowtinuity in the economic 
 lift ot the Em(>it« certainly wore very thin in the 
 days of the ascendancy of the Manchester School, but, 
 thanks to the many other less material strands binding 
 the colonies to the mother cotmtry, it has never been 
 snapped, and the history of the old Empire is nowhere 
 fuller c^ lessons and wa'^ings for us to-day than in 
 those chapters of it that deal with trade regulation, with 
 tariiiis, aiKl with the laws relating to shipping. There 
 are only a limited number of weapons at the dis- 
 posal of the economic reformer, and in no field is 
 there more temptation to believe that any device that 
 is adopted is bound to be a perfect remedy for the 
 economic ilk it is intended to aire, and to forget the 
 instances in history where a similar device has resulted 
 rather in harm than in good. The doctrines of the 
 economist are adhered to with a fervour that is else- 
 where met with only in the theological sphere, and the 
 supporters of rival theories are often as intolerant of 
 one another as any bigots can be. The lessons of history 
 to those of us who cannot claim to have received the fuU 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 73 
 
 economic iMpiration would appear to indicate that in 
 the sphere of conunerdal regulation, as in most others, 
 drctmistances alter cases, and what is the best course 
 to adopt in one country and one age is by no means 
 bound to prove so in another and for all time. But, 
 unfortunately, whatever plan of commercial regulation 
 or commercial licence is adopted will certainly fill some 
 pockets and empty others, and there will always, there- 
 fore, be vested interests to shout at the top of their 
 voices for and against it. The trading classes in 
 every modem community, having all wealth-producing 
 machinery at their disposal, have always very great 
 weight in the national councils, and whenever questions 
 of trade and industry come up for decision have always 
 a tendency to shoulder aside as visionary amateurs those 
 who, not being " business men " in the least pleasant 
 sense of the term, prefer " commonwealth " to wealth. 
 This trait has been noticeable all through the modem 
 age of English history, and especially so in the relations 
 between the mother country and the colonies, which, 
 till the middle of the nineteenth century, were mainly 
 valued for their trade, and were expected to return 
 dividends like any other commercial speculation. But, 
 as in the political realm we have come in recent years 
 to look at the colonies in a truer light, so in the economic 
 realm we have come to see that the getii.g of riches 
 is not the only aim, and that Imperial well-being is a 
 higher goal than the filling of the money-bags of the 
 trading classes. 
 
 The first expansion of English activities beyond the 
 sea came about in pursuit of gain in the cliannels of 
 mercantile enterprise, and the history of this expansion 
 
74 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 datcf back far beyond the story of the fornution of extra- 
 European colonies, and leads us back to the esublish- 
 ment of English suples in the great trading centres of 
 the Low Countries, on the shores of the Baltic and in 
 the ports of the Scandinavian countries in the Middle 
 Ages. For the genesis of the English chartered com- 
 panies, which have played such an important part in 
 the building of the British Empire, we must look to the 
 later years of the fourteenth century, when English 
 merchants began to throw off the yoke of the Italians 
 and the Hatueatic merchants, who had previously 
 almost monopolised our foreign trade. The charters 
 granted by Henry IV to the Merchant Adventurers and 
 to the Eastland Company for the esublishment of self- 
 governing factories in foreign parts are the first pre- 
 cedents in the long line of royal grants to chartered 
 companies, and it was in the support of their privileges 
 and during the long two centuries' struggle of England 
 to relegate foreign enterprise to a subordinate position 
 and to become mistress of her own trade, that the 
 policies of commercial regulation were worked out that 
 had such an important influence on later history. It 
 was during the period between 1399 and 1600 that 
 England was converted from a rather backward agri- 
 ctiltural country, exporting only raw materials, into one 
 that had large exports of manufactured goods, and 
 during the same time, but especially during the last 
 fifty years of it, England gradually built up a mercantile 
 marine that could not only carry all her trade with 
 European countries, but was ready to seek for oppor- 
 timities of trade much further afield. The system of 
 commerdal regulation was slowly improved in the long 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 75 
 
 struggle againit the merchants of other nations for 
 rommercial autonomy, and England owes much to her 
 Tudor monarchs for their skilful generalship in the 
 struggle. Our English rulers differed from those of 
 Portugal, Spain and France in preferring to make their 
 profit out of the commercial enterprises of their subjects, 
 not by investing capital in those enterprises, but by 
 taking toll through their customs on all goods exported 
 from or imported into the realm. Since a large pro- 
 portion of their revenue was derived from these customs, 
 it was necessary that the rulers should see that they were 
 efficiently collected and that duties were laid upon 
 goods to the best advantage. Constant care and attend- 
 ance was bestowed by the Tudors on these matters, and 
 the Customs system, that lasted fight onwards till the 
 reforms of Huskisson and Peel in the nineteenth cen- 
 tury, was that founded by the statesmen of the late 
 sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to replace 
 the medizval system of customs dues that had almost 
 all been levied on the export of raw materials. 
 
 The new system of duties was not only designed by 
 the Tudors and modified and perfected by the Stuarts 
 with the end of producing revenue, but it was also pro- 
 tective and planned so as to encourage the progress 
 of English manufactures and the sale of those manu- 
 facttues beyond the sea. Two other devices were 
 combined with the protective tariff for the same ends. 
 The long series of English Navigation Laws had its 
 rudimentary beginnings in the reign of Richard II, and 
 was designed to make it easier for English merchants 
 than for merchant strangers to make a profit in goods 
 imported into this country, while, on the other hand, 
 
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76 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 the regulations of the oversea trading companies were 
 designed to further the sale of good English manu- 
 factures in foreign parts, and to ensure the conduct of 
 the trade not only for the private profit of the merchants, 
 but also for the national benefit. In their earliest forms 
 neither the Navigation Laws nor the regulated company 
 of merchants could secure very great results, owing 
 to theu: imperfections and to the inability of the weak 
 central authority of the State to enforce its regulations 
 with any degree of completeness ; but with the gradual 
 improvement in the machinery of local administration 
 under the Tudors, and the establishment of really effi- 
 cient governmental control, it became possible to enforce 
 whatever regulations were made concerning shipping, 
 and to convert the Navigation Laws into an effective 
 weapon which Queen Eliwbeth's great minister, 
 Burghley, wielded with ruthless vigour to secure the 
 final victory for England in the long fight against the 
 Hansa. From Burghley's time onwards there was no 
 object to which successive ministers of the Crown gave 
 more anxious care and attention than to the fostering 
 of the trade and commerce of the nation, and the 
 reigns of the first two Stuarts were peculiarly a time 
 of economic investigation and careful scientific study of 
 ways and means. At no period have the writings of 
 economic theorists, who were at the same time practical 
 merchants, been more carefully studied by the country's 
 ruJjrs, and the inaccurate character of some of their 
 conclusions should not blind us to the admirable pioneer 
 work that they did. 
 
 The old device of the regulated Company for foreign 
 trade, where each merchant traded for his own profit 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 77 
 
 according to the regulations laid down for the whole 
 body, was gradually abandoned in favour of a better 
 instrument, and the new trades set up under Elizabeth 
 were worked upon a closer form of co-operation in the 
 joint-stock company, to the capital of which merchants 
 subscribed definite amounts in ships, goods or money, 
 and from whose profits, when realised, they drew 
 periodic dividends. It was the gradual perfecting of 
 this device under the Stuarts that gave personal initiative 
 its opportunities in founding colonies and searching 
 for new trades, and to the successful use of it the first 
 foundation of our oversea Empire is due. There was 
 a continual struggle on the part of merchants who 
 were not free of the companies to secure a share of the 
 profits without contributing to the burdens that were 
 borne by the Company in order to ensure the satisfac- 
 tory esublishment and maintenance of the trade, and 
 the constant attacks of these interlopers or "free- 
 traders," to use the term of the time, upon the exclu- 
 sive privileges or monopolies of the Companies, were a 
 persistent spur to them to administer their privileges 
 well and efficiently. The " free-traders " of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries had nothing in common 
 with tile Free Traders of the nineteenth. They had 
 no objection to the system of Protection of home in- 
 dustries, but they fought against the system of monopoly 
 trading by privileged companies, and desired to secure 
 for themselves a share in those privileges without 
 incurring a share of the obligations which those privi- 
 leges involved. Their attacks almost always in the long 
 run ended in the absorption of the malcontents into 
 the company whose privilege they attacked ; there was 
 
78 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 a constant infusion of new blood into the ranks of the 
 privileged merchants, and there was never in the British 
 Empire, what there was in other countries, a gradual 
 gathering of all commercial privileges into the hands 
 of one or two close corporations. The English State 
 played its part in the process by holding the balance 
 even between the competing interests, md by taking 
 its toll through the Customs indiscriminately both from 
 the privileged Companies and from the free-traders. 
 As the administrative machine was perfected, so it be- 
 came possible to enforce impartially for the benefit of 
 all Englishmen the laws of navigation that at an earlier 
 date had been more honoured in the breach than in 
 the observance. 
 
 The culmination of the work that had been done by 
 Burghley came with the Navigation Ordinance of 1651, 
 whereby the Government of Cromwell, dowered as it 
 was with despotic power, was enabled to enforce the 
 protective policy of its predecessors and to hand on to 
 the Government of the Restoration a system of trade 
 management that was extremely efficient, so far as 
 England was concerned. By a series of legislative 
 enactments between 1660 and the end of the century, 
 the system was perfected and thoioughly enforced in 
 English ports, to the great benefit of our commerce and 
 the complete victory of English merchants over their 
 Dutch competitors. 
 
 I showed in an earlier lecture how the period of the 
 Dutch Wars gave England her first victory in the 
 struggle for sea power, and thus made it possible for 
 her to maintain and develop her oversea Empire. The 
 struggle was intimately bound up with the economic 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 79 
 
 struggle, and the victory that England secured was of 
 as great an importance in the materia! life of the Empire 
 as in its political life, though the commercial struggle 
 with the Dutch began earlier and lasted longer than did 
 the naval struggle. The English policy of commercial 
 regulation was much more flexible and gave much 
 greater room for the exercise of individual initiative 
 than did the more rigid and exclusive system of the 
 Dutch. England had many advantages, for she was a 
 great manufacturing as well as a great trading nation, 
 and since the State had other sources of wealth than 
 those derived from trade, she could survive financial 
 disasters to her merchants much better than could her 
 Dutch rival. While the struggle went on, her pioneers 
 were gradually founding plantations beyond the sea, 
 where raw materials were produced that she could not 
 raise for herself. Her system of commercial regulation 
 and protection was being perfected while her colonies 
 were being founded, and the processes went on in imison 
 and often under the work of the same individuals in 
 the Board or Committee of Trade and Plar'ations. It 
 would have been entirely strange to the. .o regard 
 the colonies as anything other than detached communi- 
 ties of Englishmen across the sea, so that the whole 
 Commercial System was automatically and insensibly 
 expanded to cover the whole Empire. 
 
 The practical economists of the Restoration period 
 had an enormous influence upon the policy of the State, 
 and having the advantage of nearly a hundred years' 
 study of commercial theory to work upon, they were 
 able to formulate logical plans for the complementary 
 development of the various parts of the empire that, 
 
8o 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 for rounded completeness, cannot be surpassed, even 
 at the present day. If we read, for example, the works 
 of one of the practical writers, like Childs, in the late 
 seventeenth century, we cannot sum up his aims better 
 than in words like these : " The establishment of a 
 consolidated and self-contained empire based on 
 reciprocal and preferential duties. To free the British 
 Empire from economic dependence on forei; :>untries 
 . . . [and to] stimulate the production of tood-stuffs, 
 cotton, sugar, palm products, and other essential raw 
 materials, and to protect and give every encouragement 
 to the Impe-ial Mercantile Marine " — ^words extracted 
 from the programme of a propagandist league published 
 in the newspapers in the month of February, 1917. 
 
 By a judicious system of legislative enactment the 
 statesmen of the Restoration designed that while the 
 mother country should provide the refined manufac- 
 tures for the whole empire, the tropical plantations 
 should direct their attention to the raising of the great 
 staple products like sugar, and should be supplied 
 with labour from our African factories, and with the 
 foodstuffs they required for their sustenance from the 
 temperate farming communities of the northern colonies, 
 who would also find employment in producing the naval 
 stores that were requisite for the English navy that 
 guarded and protected the commerce of them all. The 
 empire would thus be self-sufficing, and could obtain all 
 the commodities it needed from within its own borders. 
 Customs duties were levied in one part of the empire 
 upon the products of other parts, but they were always 
 lower in rate than those charged upon goods brought 
 from foreign countries, and there was thus evolved upon 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 8i 
 
 paper a complete system of Imperial preference designed 
 upon the most scientific lines that were possible to the 
 best econom^ts of the time. Just as the Reconstruc- 
 tion period of the late seventeenth century saw in action 
 the most logical system of Imperial administration that 
 England has ever had, so it saw also the most logical 
 sutement of a system of Imperial preference which 
 commended itself to almost universal acceptance for a 
 whole century. The action of the system was ex- 
 pounded m numberless writings during its predomi- 
 nance, but by no one so well as by the fairest and yet 
 the severest of its critics, Adam Smith, who, in a cele- 
 brated passage in his Wealth of Nations, sets it forth as 
 a gigantic system of national shopkeeping. 
 
 "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of 
 raismg up a people of customers may, at firsf sight, 
 appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. 
 It IS, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of 
 shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose 
 
 governmei^t IS mfluenced by shopkeepers England 
 
 purchased for some of her subjects, who found them- 
 ^Ives uneasy at home, a great estate in a distant country. 
 The price, mdeed, was very small .. . and amounted 
 to little more than the expense of the different equip- 
 ments which made the first discovery, reconnoitred the 
 coast and took a fictitious possession of the country. 
 The land was good and of great extent, and the culti- 
 vators, havmg plenty of good ground to work upon, 
 and being for some time at liberty to sell their produce 
 where they pleased, became, in the course of little more 
 than thirty or forty years (between 1630 and 1660). so 
 numerous and thriving a people that the shopkeepers 
 
8a 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 and other traders of England wished to secure to them- 
 selves the monopoly of their custom. Without pre- 
 tending, therefore, that they had paid any part either of 
 the original purchase money or of the subsequent ex- 
 pense of improvement, they petitioned the parliament 
 that the cultivators of America might for the future 
 be confirmed to their shop ; first, for the buying all 
 the goods which they wanted from Europe ; and, 
 secondly, for selling all such parts of their own produce 
 as those traders might find it convenient to buy." 
 
 The quotation of a single passagR such as this might 
 lead us to acquiesce in the view held by some of the 
 doctrinaire economists of the nineteenth century, that 
 the old colonial system was narrowly and selfishly de- 
 signed for the sole benefit of English merchants and 
 manufacturers, but this does less than justice to our 
 ancestors. The ideal of a self-sufficing empire was 
 certainly applied with a selfish bias by British ministers, 
 but it was common to all the Western nations, and was 
 striven after by other colonial powers with far less con- 
 sideration for the interests of their subjects oversea, 
 and a far greater greed for the profit of the trading and 
 governing classes at home. Adam Smith's strictures 
 upon ill-applied systems of commercial regulation were 
 directed against all such systems and not especially 
 against the English system. He showed in many pas- 
 sages how that system was infinitely more liberal and 
 less selfish than the systems of other colonising powers, 
 and his work is rather a testimonial to those who had 
 founded and governed the old British Empire tlian an 
 unrelieved criticism against them. 
 
 Colonial imports enjoyed highly preferential rates 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 in England, and large bounties were given from the 
 Exchequer to stimulate such colonial industries as would 
 enable England to avoid having recourse to foreign 
 countries for their purchase. Societies were founded in 
 the eighteenth century to encourage colonial arts and 
 commerce, and the production of numberless commo- 
 dities from indigo and cochineal to wines and silks were 
 fostered by every means at the Government's disposal. 
 Designs such as these were the principal preoccupation 
 of the government in colonial affairs in the first half of 
 the century, and we must acknowledge that the colonial 
 policy of this country was far more altruistic and liberal 
 .'n every way than the contemporary policy of other 
 nations, and it even compares favourably with the way 
 in which the colonial possessions of certain powers are 
 dealt with to-day. There was a general acquiescence 
 of the colonists in the value of the system, and some of 
 them believed in an even more restrictive system for 
 the general good of the splf-sufficing empire. Such an 
 attitude is only natural when we consider the truth of a 
 stotement made by Edmund Burke : " The act of navi- 
 gation attended the '■olonies from their infancy, grew 
 with their growth, and strengthened with their strength. 
 They were confirmed in obedience to it even more by 
 usage than by law." 
 
 But there were certain sections in the colonies of New 
 England who made their living by regular evasions of 
 the Navigation Laws, and by trading with the islands 
 in the French and English West Indies regardless of 
 all regulations, even of those which we should nowadays 
 consider absolutely necessary for the protection of the 
 revenue. With the period of reconstruction after the 
 
84 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 m 
 
 Seven Yean War, the Home Government attempted 
 to clean up the corruption and the slackness that had 
 anended the enforcement of the Acts and to stop up 
 the leaks that made the collection of ctistoms duties 
 in the colonies more costly than remunerative. The 
 methods they adopted were ill-advised, a.id since they 
 were contemporary with what the colonists considered 
 to be atucks upon their indefeasible political rights, 
 the objections to the harsh methods of the Govern- 
 ment's employees focussed antagonism to the whole 
 commercial system. 
 
 The break-up of the empire in 1783 harmed the 
 seceding colonies even more than those that remained 
 loyal, and they were left in a state of economic chaos 
 until, in pursuance of > mutual interests, and especially 
 those of the West Indian plantations, the British Govern- 
 ment readmitted the United States to commercial 
 intercourse. But the break-up of the empire did not 
 involve the abandonment of the commercial system, 
 and It was, in fact, more closely applied and more 
 efifidcndy regulated than before. The payment of 
 botmties on certain exports from the colonies, which 
 had been one of the main expedients in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century, was abandoned, but the system 
 of colonial preference was much extended. Colonial 
 products were admitted into the United Kingdom at 
 rates much below those on foreign produ'<'s, and by 
 the enactment of the British Parliament home prodt ts 
 received a like preference in coiOnial markets. The 
 duties against foreign commodities were so high ss to 
 be practically prohibitory, but the revenue secured upon 
 English goods in the colonies was not reserved for 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 85 
 
 Imr ' purposes, but was paid over, after the cost of 
 coll, , Imperial officials had been deducted, to 
 
 the funds of the colonies in which they were collected. 
 The system was exceedingly complex and unscientifi- 
 cally administered. It CO' >ined extraord jiar^ at.omalies 
 that had grown up in the long course of its operation, 
 and the constant tinkering with the duties that went on 
 under the pressure of the various interests at stake 
 resulted in making these anomalies worse instead of 
 better, and colonial preference certainly did more harm 
 to the general interests of Imperial trade than it did 
 food to the colonies. It was, therefore, peculiarly 
 liable to attack by those who were influenced by Adam 
 Smith's teaching and who, without his broad and sutes- 
 manlike view of the ques.'ion, urged that Briuin should 
 cut away all the anomalies of the colonial system and the 
 colonies themselves in order to save expense in main- 
 taining them, and to be able to make more profit by 
 trading with foreign countries. The crude views of 
 the advocates of this schema were really narrower and 
 more designed to serve the selfish ends of the mother 
 country in any that were luged by the suj-twrters 
 of the preferential system. Writing in 1835, Richard 
 Cobden put tii*se views in their most uncompromising 
 form — 
 
 " Wc have been planting and supporting and govern- 
 ing countries upon all degrees of habitable, and some 
 iJat are not habitable, latitudes of the eath's surface ; 
 and so grateful to our national pride has been the 
 spectacle that we have never for once pai-sed to inquire 
 if our interests were advanced by so niuch nomiaal 
 greatness. Three hundred mlUioi;s of debt have been 
 
86 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 accunulated— millions of direct taxation are annually 
 levied — restrictions and prohibitions are imposed upon 
 our trade in all quarters of the world for the acquisition 
 or maintenance of colonial possessions ; and all for 
 what < That we may repeat the fatal Spanish proverb : 
 " The sun never sets on the King of England's domin- 
 ions." For we believe that no candid investigator of 
 our colonial policy will draw the conclusion that we have 
 derived, or shall derive, from it advantages that can 
 compensate for these formidable sacrifices. . . . " K 
 we 10 longer offer the exclusive privileges of our market 
 to the West Indians, we shall cease, as a matter of justice 
 u.d necessity, to compel them to purchase exclusively 
 from us. They will be at liberty, in short, to buy wher- 
 ever they can buy goods cheapest, and to sell in the 
 dearest market. They must be placed in the«very same 
 predicament as if they were not a part of his Majesty's 
 dominions. Where, then, will be the semblance of a 
 plea for putting ourselves to the expense of governing 
 and defending such countries i " 
 
 Adam Smith had urged his views in a sound and 
 realistic manner, but some of thosn who claimed him 
 for their own indulged in vain imaginings that vitiated 
 a great part of what they wrote. They stated that it 
 was better to increase the purchasing power of foreign 
 countries rather than of our colonies, for we had no 
 expense of maintaining foreign governments while we 
 had to support colonial governments at the expense of 
 the British taxpayer. No appeal to other considerations 
 than mere finance could be justified, for according to 
 these enthusi-ists the reign of perpetual peace was now 
 assured, no foreign country would ever dream again of 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 87 
 
 attacking the British Empire, and those who nuintained 
 the contrai-y and desired to keep up still an army and .. 
 navy were simply desirous of bolstering up thr r own 
 interests and preventing the arrival of the millennium 
 of the trading classes, who would engage in a delirious 
 round of buying cheap and selling dear. 
 
 Luckily for the future of the Empire, the extreme 
 views of the advocates of a policy such as this had n 
 chance of acceptance, and the statesman to whom the 
 adoption of Free Trade was due expressed sentiments 
 corresponding much more closely with reality and in 
 terms worthy of remembrance : " If you Ic properly 
 at the relations between yourselves and the colonies," 
 said Sir Robert Peel, " you muit consider your colonies 
 entitled to be put on a different footing from foreign 
 countries, and that it is perfectly fair to give to articles 
 of colonial production a preference in your markets over 
 articles the produce of foreign countries. I am dis- 
 posed to think even that you ought to carry the prin- 
 ciple of assimilat-on, if you can, so far as to consider 
 the colonies an integral part of the Empire for all 
 commercial purposes." 
 
 Peel seemed to contemplate the retention of all the 
 commercial relations of the colonies within the com- 
 petence of the Imperial Parliament, and the same 
 assumption was made by the Earl of Durham in his 
 Report on Canada in 1839. He laid it down that 
 while it cannot be desirable that we should interfere 
 with the internal legislation of the colonies in matters 
 which do not affect their relations with the mother 
 country, there are certain matters in which the Imperial 
 Parliament must necessarily retain control. " The 
 
88 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 constitution of the form of government— the regula- 
 tion of foreign relations and of trade with the mother 
 country, the other British colonies and foreign nations— 
 and the disposal of the public lands, are the only points 
 on which the mother country requires a control. This 
 control is now sufiSciently secured by the authority of 
 the Imperial Legislature ; by the protection which the 
 colony derives from us against foreign enemies ; by the 
 beneficial terms which our laws secure to its trade and 
 by Its share of the reciprocal benefits which would be 
 conferred by a wise system of colonisation. A per- 
 fect subordination on the part of the colony on these 
 pomts IS secured by the advantages which it finds in 
 the continuance of its connection with the empire." 
 
 The actual course adopted was of a dual character 
 correspondmg to the bifurcation of the empire in the 
 second half of the nineteenth century into self-governing 
 dommions and Crown colonies. With regard to the 
 second of these a modified system of regulation of their 
 commercial relations has been retained by the Imperial 
 Goyerrmeut, though the practice lias been more closely 
 assimilated to that adopted for India in the last years 
 of the Commercial System than to that then employed 
 for the North American colonies. The Imperial Govern- 
 ment there had complete control of the duties upon 
 imports, but the tariff was only adapted to revenue-pro- 
 ducing purposes, and in hardly any case was there any 
 differential duty fc" the purpose of protecting British 
 manufactures. The _ontrol of the Imperial Govern- 
 ment has been retained, only small revenue-produdng 
 tariffs are imposed, and there is no preference either to 
 the products of those territories in the home markets 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 89 
 
 or to the manufactures of the United Kingdom in the 
 colonies. 
 
 With the self-governing dominions a different policy 
 has been adopted something akin to that laid down by 
 Adam Smith in a passage exhibiting to the full his 
 political acumen. " To propose that Great Britain 
 should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies 
 and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact 
 their own laws and to make peace and war as they 
 thought proper, would be to propose such a measure 
 as never was and never will be adopted by any nation 
 in the world. ... If it was adopted, however. Great 
 Britain would not only be immediately freed from the 
 whole annual expense of the peace establishment of the 
 colonies, but might settle with them such a treaty of 
 commerce as would effectually secure to her a free trade, 
 more advantageous to the great body of her people, 
 though less so to the merchants, than the monopoly 
 which she at present [circa 1770] enjoys. . . . [This 
 would dispose the colonies] to favour us in war as 
 well as in trade, and instead of turbulent and factiotis 
 subjects to become our most faithfiJ, affectionate and 
 generous allies ; and the same sort of parental affection 
 on the one side, and iilial respect on the other, might 
 revive between Great Britain and the colonies which 
 used to subsist between the colonies of ancient Greece 
 and the mother city from which they descended," The 
 writer of this passage assumed that the colonies would 
 pass completely into the position of foreign states, 
 but the same result was obtained without any such 
 breach. 
 
 From about 1850 onwards the self-governing colonies 
 
90 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 have been entirely free fiom Imperial control in matters 
 01 trade, and have been able to conclude commercial 
 treaties of their own with foreign powers regardless of 
 the policy of the mother country, but this has been found 
 entu-e y compatible with the retention and deepening of 
 the allegiance they owe to the Crown and their pride 
 in the empire to which they belong. Every colony 
 has gone its own way in these matters : Australia has 
 chosen to enact Navigation Laws not very dissimilar 
 to those of the old colonial system ; Canada, which re- 
 garded with regret the abolition of Imperial preference, 
 when It suited her interests, but when, on its expiry, 
 the States refused to renew it, and caused much financial 
 hardship to the colonies in consequence, all liking for 
 such arrangements was quenched, and when, in 1897, 
 overtures were made for the conclusion of another 
 Reciprocity Treaty, Canada refused them, and retorted 
 by granting to the products of the United Kingdom a 
 preference m her markets without any reciprocal advan- 
 tage. This brought Imperial preference to the fore 
 again in a new way, and sentiment in its favour was so 
 strong in the mother country as to compel the denun- 
 ciation of the invidious Commercial Treaties with the 
 German Empire and Belgium, which stood in the way 
 of acceptance of Canada's generous offer. The West 
 Indies, which suffered most by the abolition of the 
 old system of Imperial preference, have always been 
 the strongest advocates of a return to a preferential policy 
 m trade matters. The great agitation of the matter in 
 recent years has made the question one of current 
 politics, and m the era of economic reconstruction which 
 must mevitably follow the present war, some decision 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 91 
 
 must be come to on the matter of tariffs and commercial 
 regulations within and around the Empire. 
 
 The temper in which the political struggles over the 
 question of Imperial Preference were carried on in 
 the period following upon Canada's new adoption of the 
 policy did not conduce to a cool and historical examina- 
 tion of the rival policies at issue, but among the lessons 
 that the present war has taught us, a pregnant one has 
 been the indication that it is not always conducive to 
 national well-being to pursue too expansive a policy of 
 hospitality to foreign enterprise, just as the lessons of 
 history teach us that a policy of national exclusiveness is 
 fatal to progress. The fascinating ideal of a self-suffic- 
 ing empire is again appealing to the minds of citizens, 
 and it is to be hoped that in striving to ensure a nearer 
 approach to that ideal they will not neglect the valuable 
 guidance that is to be drawn from a study of the story 
 of the old Empire, the real advantages that then accrued 
 both to colonies and mother country from the pursuit 
 of a similar ideal as well as the very grave dangers that 
 it also brought in its train. 
 
THE DEPENDENT EMPIRE AND THE NATIVE RACES 
 
 In the first lecture of this course it was pointed out 
 how British energy had built up the empire in three 
 ways : first, by emigration into the void ; secondly, by 
 the acquisition of tropical territories inhabited by native 
 races of low culture, and, thirdly, by the establish- 
 ment of domination over highly civilised Orientals. I 
 have already said something about the continuity of 
 our Imperial history in the first and third of these 
 directions, and in this lecture I propose to deal with the 
 second, involving, as it does, a consideration of the 
 acquisition and administration of what are now techni- 
 caUy known as " Crown Colonies and Places," but wliat 
 has also been called more descriptively the " depen- 
 dent Empire " in contradistinction to the self-governing 
 Dominions. 
 
 The growth of this dependent empire in the course 
 of the nineteenth century, and especially within the 
 last quarter of that century, has been vast both 
 in territory and population, and it has hardly been 
 full realised by the people of these islands, who, 
 by reason of it, have become responsible for the 
 government and general welfare of many millions of 
 subject people in the most diverse stages of cultural 
 development, from the most primitive of races like the 
 ga 
 
OLD EMPIRE AND THiI NEW 93 
 
 Bushmen of South Africa, the Indians of British 
 Guiana, or the Papttans of New Guinea, up to com- 
 paratively ctiltured races like the Hausas, or^the Fulahs 
 of Nigeria, the civilised Malays of Further^India, and 
 so to the Maori race in New Zealimd, who now in many 
 cases approximate in condition to the British colonists 
 themselves. The diversity of conditions to be dealt with 
 by those who are responsible for the government of this 
 dependent empire are almost infinite, and it might, at 
 first sight, appear impossible to find any principle of 
 government that should cover them all, and yet the 
 difficulty is more apparent than real, and there has been 
 in truth one great and all-pervading method adopted 
 through the numberless devices for dealing with the 
 immediate conditions of these subject races that, being 
 based upon a sotmd and general principle, enables us to 
 see the history of this extension of British power as a 
 whole. 
 
 The story is intimately bound up with, 7v>d dependent 
 upon, the experience of British administration in India, 
 and without that experience it is to be doubted whether 
 England could have undertaken the administration of 
 enormous blocks of native territory with such immediate 
 success as she has done in the last forty years. The 
 influence of Indian methods has been both direct and 
 indirect. In Egypt and the Sudan, in Ceylon and the 
 Malay Peninsula, all that was best in Indian methods of 
 administration has been applied to suit local conditions 
 with entire success. • But the exigencies of time will not 
 allow me to deal with this side of the subject, and I must 
 also exclude any consideration of our dealings with the 
 Chinese immigrants of Hong Kong and Singapore, 
 
94 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 where Indian experience has been less direct in its 
 effects, but still has had a very powerful influence. 
 The history of the old Empire and of British India in 
 the eighteenth century continues down through this 
 channel to the history of the new. If England had 
 entered upon the work of tropical colonisation for 
 the first time in the later nineteenth century, it is 
 much to be doubted whether her rulers could have 
 shouldered the burden of new responsibilities with 
 so great a measure of success. In many instances 
 the early governors of new native territories hac' 
 had their training in the ranks of the Indian civil 
 or military service, and were familiar with all its high 
 traditions. Other powers who had not this fund of 
 experience to draw upon have fallen into many of the 
 pitfalls in their management of their native subjects 
 that Englishmen learned how to steer clear of in the 
 middle of the eighteenth century, and it is interesting 
 to note how in the sphere of colonial power, as in the 
 social world, the purvenu is little liked and makes many 
 blunders from which the ruler of long experience is 
 free. Indian traditions have not been of sei-vice only 
 in British colonies, and our American cousins have 
 profited much by them in the government of their new 
 njrive subjects in the Philippines. 
 
 The continuity of Imperial history in the government 
 of primitive peoples is by no means so clearly apparent 
 as it is in other directions. Where the old Empire had 
 to deal with but a few thousands of natives, mostly Red 
 Indians of North America, the new Empire has some- 
 thing over forty millions of native subjects in the Crown 
 colonies alone, a number almost equal to that of the 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 95 
 
 population of the United Kingdom. We cannot expect, 
 therefore, to find anything more than the germ of our 
 present methods in the records of the earher Empire, 
 and the matter is complicated, too, by our recollection, 
 perhaps our disproportionate recollection, of the evils 
 of the Slave Trade that vitiated all the relations of the 
 Englishman and the negro for a hundred and seventy 
 years. 
 
 The English pl-titations within the tropics were, 
 during the first fifty years of their existence, dependent, 
 as were those in the temperate zone, for their supply 
 of labour upon the importation of white indentured 
 servants. These indigent men and women took service 
 with their masters, the planters, who were provided 
 with capital sufficient to maintain them, for a definite 
 term of years, usually either three or seven, under 
 nominal indentttres of apprenticeship, like those uni- 
 versally prevalent in England at that day. In the 
 comparatively favourable conditions of ..le mainland 
 colonies, like Virginia, the white servant often served 
 out his indentures under conditions of not much greater 
 hardship than those of the agricultural labourer in 
 England, and having regained his freedom became 
 himself a planter, or took up a salaried position as an 
 overseer or manager on some plantation owned either 
 in the colony or in England. But in the plantations of 
 the West Indies the conditions were much less favotu:- 
 able, the utter inexperience of Englishmen in dealing 
 with a tropical climate, and the perpetual difikulties 
 over food stuffs, caused terrible hardships to the white 
 labotirers and an awful rate of mortality. The Spaniards 
 in the Indies and the Portuguese in Brazil had never 
 
THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 attempted to ctiltivate their plantations with white 
 labour, as did the English and the French, but from 
 quite an early period had purchased negro slaves from 
 the Genoese merchants, who, since the middle of the 
 fifteenth century, had made up the labour deficiencies 
 in Portugal from the West African coast that had been 
 explored by them. The slave market of Lisbon was a 
 great source of labour supply from the middle of the 
 fifteenth century well on into the seventeenth, for both 
 Portuguese and Spaniards were from their long subjec- 
 tion to Moorish rule thoroughly familiar with the use of 
 slave labour for agricultural purposes. 
 
 John Hawkins' celebr'.li:d attempts at the smuggling 
 of slaves into the Spanish colonies, that ended in disaster 
 in 1569, were the first and last efforts of an Englishman 
 to enter upon the traffic for dose on a hundred years, but 
 right on from the beginning of the seventeenth century 
 the Dutch and Flcnings took a very large share in the 
 trade, and made large profits by supplying negroes for the 
 plantations and mines of Spanish America and Brazil. 
 Their raids on the African coast kept the interior in a 
 constant state of war, and almost entirely put a stop to the 
 peaceful trading relations which had at first prevailed 
 between the negroes and Europeans. It was impossible 
 for white men to proceed far inland from the coast, and 
 intercourse between Europeans and the native tribes 
 of the interior of Africa was entirely impracticable until 
 the second half of the nineteenth century, and the settle- 
 ments of the white men were for three hundred years 
 nothing but isolated and strongly guarded forts rotmd 
 the rim of a continent shrouded in impenetrable 
 darkness. 
 
 ( 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 97 
 
 About the 'ime of the conquest of Janiaica by 
 the English in 1655 they began to find insuperable 
 difficulties in working their plantations in the Vest 
 Indies with white labour, and as they had at last dis- 
 covered in sugar a staple pro-^uct that was extremely 
 prohtable, their requirements for labour became very 
 pressmg. Under these circumstances they began to 
 purchase negroes from the Dutch traders, who had a 
 surplus to sell, since they had glutted the Spanish 
 market, and after the Restoration, when the West 
 Indies entere 1 on an amazing prosperity, the traffic 
 became so profitable that English merchants deter- 
 mmed to begm the transport of negroes on their own 
 account in competition with the Dutch, and as part of 
 the general struggle against them for commercial and 
 maritime supremacy. The Royal African Company 
 was therefore founded, under the patronage of Prince 
 Rupert and the Duke of York, afterwards James II, 
 and Englishmen entered upon the evil traffic in earnest. 
 It was never regarded with favour in England, and was 
 attacked both en moral and religious grounds, though 
 such objections were always suppressed by appeals to 
 the necessities of the West Indian planters for a supply 
 of cheap labour suited to the conditions of a tropical 
 climate. 
 
 The arguments that were used for a justification 
 of slavery m the old Empire have not been unheard 
 m connection with some controversies about the exploi- 
 tation of tropical products in the new, and we ought to 
 realise that the victory of the forces of right and justice 
 m Engi:sh methods of dealing with subject races in the 
 mneteentn century have only been possible because of 
 
98 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 the courageous appeals to the cotucience of Englishmen 
 by the opponents of slavery in the eighteenth. The 
 slave trade was certainly aj source of profit to some 
 English merchants, but its gains were always precarious, 
 as is shown by the extremely chequered history of the 
 African companies, who were always on the verge of 
 bankruptcy. That opposition to the trade was not 
 confined to moralists and only urged upon ethical 
 grounds, we may realise by a single quotation from 
 one of the best economists of the eighteenth century*. 
 Malachi Posdethwaite, himself a member of the African 
 Committee, in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and 
 Commerce, published before the break-up of the old 
 Empire, propounds the following queries with regard to 
 the Slave Trade : 
 
 "Whether this commerce be not the cause of 
 incessant wars among the Africans. — Whether the 
 Africans, if it were abolished, might not become as 
 ingenious, as humane, as industrious, and as capable of 
 arts, manufactures and trades, js even the bulk of 
 Europeans. — ^Whether, if it were abolished, a much more 
 profitable trade might not be substituted, and this to 
 the very centre of their extended country, instead of the 
 trifling portion which now subsists upon their coasts. — 
 And whether the great hindrance to such a new and 
 advantageous commerce has not wholly proceeded from 
 that unjust, inhuman, unchristian-like traffic, called the 
 Slave-trade, which is carried on by the Europeans." 
 
 The fight for the furtherance of views such as these 
 was a long one and waged with considerable bitterness 
 in the House of Commons and ujroughout the country, 
 but it served both the British Empire and the cause of 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 99 
 
 civilisation, for during the coune of the seventy years 
 that ended with the Act for the Abolition of Slavery in 
 1833, it was deeply burnt into the conscience of the 
 English nation that all men, even those who are lowest 
 in the scale of human civilisation, have inaliena . 
 rights which can hardly be expressed better than in the 
 words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence, though he himself would hardly have admitted 
 that they applied to negroes "We hold these truths to 
 be self-evident, that all men are . . . endowed by their 
 Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among 
 these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, [and] 
 that to secure these rights, governments are instituted 
 among men, deriving their just power from the consent 
 of the governed." 
 
 The most important sort of historical continuity is 
 wh,U we may call a positive continuity, whereby the 
 precedents of an earlier time are carried on and modified 
 by a series of almost imperceptible changes to meet the 
 new but similar conditions of a later age. But there is 
 also a kind of negative continuity whereby early prece- 
 dents, that have produced notably evil results, are 
 changed for a diametrically opposite course. Just as a 
 child may learn by bitter experience what course of 
 action to avoid, so England has learned in imperial 
 matters from the bitter experience of the Slave Trade 
 and the lessons imprinted on the conscience of her 
 people during the long fight for its abolition. The 
 lessons of the old Empire with regard to the negro have 
 been learned not as those to follow, but as those to avoid. 
 
 The tendency of nations, as of individuals, when they 
 have abandoned a bad course, is to run to excess in an 
 
100 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 opposite direction, and the England of the first Re- 
 formed Parliament was no exception to the rule. Just 
 as in the eighteenth century she had erred in denying 
 to the negro all rights to liberty, so she erred in the next 
 era by accepting the dictum of Je£ferson that I have 
 omitted from my quotation, that " all men are equal," 
 and rushed to confer upon the negroes of her African 
 possessions all the political rights of citizenship that 
 were possessed by her own people resident there. The 
 results were neces^^arily evil, for though all men have 
 equal rights to lib< y and justice, their claim to the full 
 political rights of c^Lizenship must be judged by their 
 capacity to exercise their rights for their own good and 
 that of the political community in which they dwell. 
 In the politics of South Africa questions as to the treat- 
 ment of native races have played a peculiarly unfortunate 
 pari, and well-meaning but visionary philanthropy, that 
 was entirely ignorant of local conditions and thought 
 that the practical business of government could be 
 carried on by a pedantic and inflexible adherence to the 
 maxims of die copy-book, involved the sub-continent 
 in much trouble and bloodshed. The wire-pulling 
 influence of t'^e philanthropists of Exeter Hall over the 
 British Government in the middle Victorian period led 
 the Colonial Office into many unfortunate mistakes, ?id 
 its indulgence in much tminfor^ied interference with 
 local administration as regards the negro imbued the 
 white colonists with that contempt and dislike for 
 " Downing Street " that made them regard it as char- 
 acterised mainly by a meddlesome ineptitude and a 
 Pharisaical ftissiness about matters it neither troubled 
 to examine nor understand. 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 SOI 
 
 The period of indifference to what are now the Self- 
 Governing Dominions, when the most advanced social 
 reformers beUeved our colonial possessions to be 
 politically mischievous and declared that the nation 
 would be much better off without them than with them, 
 was also characterised by an unreasoning readiness on 
 the part of the same reformers to believe that any 
 Englishman who passed oversea and came into contact 
 with the negro was thereby changed into a ferocious 
 slave-driver who could in nowise be trusted to guide his 
 relations with the subject race aright, but must be 
 continually checked and thwarted by interference from 
 home. As time has gone on it has become clear that 
 each of these views was equally false, and men came to 
 see not only that our colonies are a political and com- 
 mercial necessity, buc that there is a clear line of de- 
 marcation Lc.iffeen those in the temperate zone and 
 those in the tropics. In the former homogeneous 
 comr ' .ies of European descent have developed and 
 attaii to nationhood wich appropriate constitutions 
 under le supremacy of the British Crown and the 
 I'ullest i sponsibility for solving their own administra- 
 tive and social problems. In our tropical possessions, 
 however, we have come to see that a long and gradual 
 process of material and political development is neces- 
 sary under the administrative control of the white race, 
 and that such development can only take place when 
 there is an enduring partnership between the white and 
 coloured races. Some other European powers that have 
 taken a hand in the development of tropical possessions 
 in the latter part of the nineteenth century have failed 
 to recognise the necessity of such a partnership, and 
 
loa 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 have sought progress in a ruthless exploitation of the 
 native races for the profit of their rulers, but Britain 
 has been saved from such a policy by her previous 
 experience in India and in her American colonies, where 
 she had found it possible to govern races far different 
 from her own by insistence upon those principles of 
 justice, order, and respect fcr right that have been the 
 cardinal virtues of our English system. 
 
 If we turn to the relations of the old Empire with 
 native races other than the negro in an attempt to dis- 
 cover whether there are any traces in the story of those 
 relations of an attemnt to build up a sound and tm- 
 selfish policy, we fii. that from the very beginning 
 Englishmen gained their fi'st fix>ting on the American 
 shore by virtue of agreements with the chiefs of the 
 Indian tribes who hunted there, and the stories of all 
 the early colonies are filled with negotiations and 
 treaties with the first owners of the soil, as, for example, 
 that of Warnes with Togreman, the Carib chief, on 
 which the first English title to St. Christopher was 
 based. Taking all in all, we may say that English rela- 
 tions with the natives were good and peaceable, and it 
 was only at a 1. ter date, and after the colonies had be- 
 come thoroughly settled, that difficulties arose concern- 
 ing the wide extent of territory that had been transferred 
 by the original treaty from the Indians to the white man, 
 and there was an outbreak of serious war between 
 the two races. The conclusion of treaties between a 
 highly civilised race and unsophisticated aborigines 
 may not involve any great consideration for native rights, 
 and the arrangements will almost certainly enure to 
 their disadvantage, but the desire to acknowledge even 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 109 
 
 in this way the claims of the first owners of the soil does, 
 at least, ensure that the dotninant race shall have some 
 respect for justice and legality. 
 
 The practice of Spain in gaining a foothold on 
 American soil was different, and was derived from the 
 doctrine of mediaeval Christendom, that the infidel has 
 no rights to the land, and that the only duty of Christians 
 towards him is to ensure that he shall be brought to the 
 True Faith. The rights of Spanish settlers to their 
 lands have solely been based upon the right of conquest, 
 while those of Englishmen and Frenchmen, the latter 
 an important matter in Canada, have always been based 
 upon agreements with native chiefs, or what is known 
 as " Indian title." 
 
 The early English colonising companies were by 
 no means indifferent to missionary enterprise, and 
 this object was almost always stated among those 
 justifying the establishment of colonies. A quota- 
 tion from the first instructions given to the English- 
 men who came into contact with the Moskito Indians 
 of Central America, a tribe with whom England re- 
 mained in the closest a:>d most friendly relations for 
 over two hundred years, may illustrate this point. 
 Writing in 1633, John Pym, the Treasurer of the Provi- 
 dence Company that was attempting to found a colony 
 on the shores of Nicaragua, gave to his employees the 
 following directions : " Because the hope of the business 
 ^{of colonisation] most specially depends upon God's 
 blessing, therefore we pray and require you to make 
 it your first and principal care to carry God along with 
 you in all places by the diligent performance of holy 
 duties in your own person, and by setting up and 
 
104 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 Hv^K loLT """""P °l ^ '■•' ">* hearts and 
 
 ^.ous to the very heathen, and be mfin.^e y p^S 
 to the business you take in hand by drawing the cu«e 
 of God upon your endeavours. You are to end«r 
 
 thel^ MosWtoTd' °^ 'f u°\' ^'^'''^ E«gJ-«d ^d 
 tnese Moskito Indians of the Nicaraguan coast afford, 
 
 STde:r^ '"^ r^ unprLed^orSt 
 tracing the development of native policy in the old 
 
 foTp^nrr^l Mississippi which was conquered 
 
 from France along with the colony of Canada in 176, 
 
 Job.™, of ft, colo., of n™ Y„k, „to iJX." 
 
AND THE NEW 105 
 
 much trading, with the Iroquois tribes and was highly 
 respected by them, was chosen to be " sole suoerin- 
 tendent of the affairs of the Six United mtL^^S 
 alhes and dependents." and for nearly twenty yeis, till 
 his death m 1774, he held the position. H^ See 
 
 Brit.rr "''^"''y "^^ ^^^°""'''y '^'«°«'» '° by the 
 Briush Government, he handled the situation in re- 
 gard to the Indians with considerable success, and he 
 worked out a thorough and efficient system of dealing 
 with native races which he expounded in long and 
 carefully written dispatches to the Colonial Secretaries 
 at home. Johnson died before the outbreak of the 
 Revolution, and by the Treaty of Versailles the Indians, 
 both of the Thirteen Colonies and of the newly won 
 lUmois country, were handed over to be dealt with by 
 the Government, or, rather, lack of government, in 
 hose days of the United States, but Britain still reTLd 
 
 s^nrrJ'll''' ? •'"T'''^''* North American posses- 
 sions, and the plans that Johnson had laid down con- 
 tinued to mfluence Britain's plans for dealing with them, 
 
 ^ifl to'th T°!5^''''^^-''' ''°^° '''^°"g'» '« ""broken 
 Cham to the Indian policy of the Dominion of Canada 
 
 to-day, which has also derived from the parallel historical 
 
 devekpment of the long Indian experience of the Hudson 
 
 Bay Company It is hard to say whether the expe-ence 
 
 gained with the Indians has had any effect uf our 
 
 policy with regard to native races in other parte of the 
 
 world, but when we remember that both'Canadian 
 
 affaus and those of other colonies were, from 1783'to 
 
 1840 under the -irect control of the same set of officials 
 
 in the Colonial Office, it does not seem unlikely that 
 
 the precedents of British North America may have had 
 
jo6 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 some influence, say, in Sierra Leone, peopled as it was 
 Urgely by negroes from Nova Scotia, when new methods 
 had to be adopted in place of the old brutal rapacity of 
 the slave-hunters of an earlier time. 
 
 Though in the practice of the eighteenth century 
 there was the germ of our modem policy of governing 
 subject races for their own good, and in such a way as 
 to ensure their gradual advancement in the scale of 
 civilisation, it has been reserved for the administrators 
 of the new Empire to carry that policy into effect on a 
 great scale, and the major part of the work has been 
 done in the course of the last forty years. It is im- 
 possible here to trace out even in oudine the develop- 
 ment of the policy, and all that I can do is to make a 
 few general statements concerning it, and to say some- 
 thing about the central machinery by which it has been 
 carried into effect. 
 
 While in the self-governing empire the problems 
 to be dealt with have been preponderantly political, 
 and material development has only filled a very 
 subordinate part, and has been rightly left to the ini- 
 tiative and resources of the individual citizens, in the 
 dependent empire the reverse has been the case. The 
 problems of political government havp been compara- 
 tively simple, and have only exhibited much difficulty 
 where the Crown colonies, owing to the presence of 
 populations of European descent, approximate in a 
 greater or less degree to the condition of dominions. 
 In colonies like Jamaica and Mauritius, where this is 
 the case, it has required considerable skill and judgment 
 on the part of the Colonial Office at home and the 
 governors abroad to steer a middle course in the 
 political sphere, and to ensure that the white popula- 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 107 
 
 tions in the colonies, who are capable of esercising 
 the full rights if citizenship, shall be to some extent 
 masters of their fate 5 though even here, owing to the 
 essential financial necessity of relying upon the resources 
 of the Imperial Exchequer to save the colonies from 
 bankruptcy, it has been impossible to grant full respon- 
 sibility, and there has grown up a whole gradation of 
 governmental forms from what is almost responsible 
 government in purely local affairs, such as there is in 
 Jamaica and Barbados, downwards to purely benevolent 
 despotism. 
 
 The general tendency in colonies and protectorates 
 where there has remained any practicable form of 
 indigenous iiative government has been to retain 
 and strengthen its forms and to exercise the des- 
 potic control of the Imperial Government to guide and 
 permeate this native government with the proper spirit 
 and to use its forms wherever possible to carry Imperial 
 policy into effect. Such work has been done, for 
 example, in the native states of the Malay Peninsula and 
 the great province of Nigeria, but there are many other 
 instances in the tropical parts of the world. Our policy 
 has been directed to solve the problem of the strong 
 living with the weak for the general benefit of the empire 
 and mankind, and yet so living as to ensure the safe- 
 guarding of those fundamental interests of the weaker 
 races that are also the interests of all— the assurance of 
 peace, the maintenance of order and justice by the forms 
 of law to the exclusion of caprice on the part of the 
 governors, the enforcing of the conception of equality 
 of rights before the law, the discouraging of any destruc- 
 tive tendency towards exploitation of the weak by the 
 strong, and the building up of a Sute wherein every 
 
io8 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 man, however low in the scale of civilisation, can be 
 raised, little by little, through the processes of edu „„on, 
 political and social, to secure the fullest expression of 
 himself. The time is far distant until all native com- 
 munities, when educated and civilised, can be admitted 
 en masse to the full political rights of citizenship in the 
 empure, but it may be claimed with truth that it has now 
 for many years been the settled policy of the new Empire 
 to regard every native as a potential citizen, to whose 
 advancement every step in his instruction and manage- 
 ment must conduce. The phrase " the White Man's 
 burden has been misused and cheapened, as have all 
 good phrases, but, at any rate, the ruling races of this 
 enipire have done their best to shoulder that burden 
 
 I showed in an earlier lecture how the Colonial Office 
 m the nineteenth century has gradually bifurcated into 
 two branches : the Dominions Department dealing with 
 the self-governing dominions, and the undifferen- 
 tiated remainder. The only Imperial officials in the 
 self-governmg colonies have -or many years been the 
 governors, no longer executive officials, but rather in 
 the position of constitutional rulers, only capable of 
 taking formal action through and with the advice of 
 their ministerial advisers, who are responsible to the 
 elected legislatures. In the Crown colonies, however, 
 there is a complete hierarchy of Imperial officials, and 
 there has grown up under the control of the Colonial 
 Office a great Colonial Civil Service recruited both at 
 home and in the colonies themselves. The Secretary 
 of State for the Colonies, wielding, as I have shown, 
 the ancient executive power of the Crown, is, there- 
 tore, sWl a most important administrative officer, and 
 as his functions have increased and become more and 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 109 
 
 more complex, so he has had to build up within the 
 Colonial Office a more and more differentiated system 
 for the carrying out of these functions. The first 
 tendency, which was characteristic of the middle period 
 of the nineteenth century, was to divide the department 
 into sub-departments, each charged with all mattcw 
 relating to the colonies in one particular geographical 
 area and working almost independently of the others. 
 But this system gave rise to many difficulties and 
 considerable overlapping, and during the momentous 
 Colonial Secretaryship of Mr. Joseph Cliamberlain, that 
 marked an epoch in the empire's history, it was aban- 
 doned for one better adapted to secure continuity of 
 policy, not only in time from one Secretary of State to 
 another, and in each colony from one governor to 
 another, which has always been one of the aims of 
 British policy, but also in space from each part of the 
 dependent empire to every other. The political and 
 general government of all the Crown colonies was 
 entrusted to the undifferentiated secretariat charged 
 with their general management through the Colonial 
 Service composed of all ranks, from governors and 
 colonial secretaries down to clerks and cadets, while 
 the material well-being of the colonies was entrusted to 
 various sub-departments. The commercial and finan- 
 cial requirements of the colonies were confided to the 
 care of the office of the Crown Agents for the Colonies, 
 who became the advisers and agents both of the Secre- 
 tary of State and the local governments, both in the task 
 of raising loans in the city for the financing of public 
 works and other purposes and in the expenditure of 
 such loans. The office of Crown Agent for a Colony has 
 a very long and interesting history behind it, dating far 
 
no OLD EMPIRE AND THE NEW 
 
 back into the period of the old Empire, and it would 
 be an interesting subject of inquiry to trace its develop- 
 ment and that of the parallel office of Agent-General, 
 which belongs to the self-governing dominions, from 
 the agents of the American and West Indian planutions 
 in London in the eighteenth century. 
 
 The control of measures directed to securing the 
 health of the populations in the Crown colonies and the 
 fostering of research into the problems of tropical 
 diseases was entrusted to the sub-department of the 
 Medical Adviser to the Colonial Sea eUry, while matters 
 relating to the exploitation of tropical products were 
 left to be dealt with by the expert departments of the 
 Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and the laboratories of 
 the Imperial Institute, which is closely under the control 
 of the Colonial Office. , The importance of the material 
 development of our tropical deper incics is attracting 
 more and more attention on the part of the home 
 Government, and various agencies have been set up, 
 partly from funds provided by Parliament and partly 
 by private enterprise, to further special objects in this 
 direction. The problems of tropical exploitation are 
 still a long way from solution, for they involve a com- 
 plex interplay of social, political and economic factors 
 that makes immense demands upon the capacities of 
 those who have to deal with them. In the last two 
 decades of the nineteenth century new nations have 
 taken up tasks that were previously familiar only to 
 Britain and to Holland, but none have yet succeeded in 
 displacing the British Empire from that priority of 
 success in the administration of native races that has 
 been attained by long and patient experiment. 
 
VI 
 
 STEPS TOWAKDS IMPERIAL UNITY 
 
 The process of development within the outer lands 
 of the British Empire along two widely divergent lines 
 has, within the last thirty or forty years, been more 
 dearly realised by the people in the United Kingdom, 
 and a new nomenclature has come into everyday use to 
 express differences that, at an earlier date, were hardly 
 recognised. Even as lately as the middle of the Victorian 
 era it was customary, both in official publications and 
 in common speech, to class all the territories beyond the 
 sea that owned the sway of the British Crown as " de- 
 pendencies," and, except in the case of India, which 
 has always filled a different position, to use this term 
 and the term " colonies " as synonymous. 
 
 They have long ceased to be so, for whereas the 
 former term has been narrowed down to signify those 
 parts of the empire that are paternally governed from 
 the outsidp. the word " colonies " is still used loosely 
 to indu any possessions beyond the sea, save India. 
 The Secretary of State for the Colonies is still the channel 
 of communication with the Dominion of Canada and the 
 local government of Sierra Leone, and the great society 
 that during the half century of its existence has done so 
 much to foster tlie interests of an United Empire, and 
 III 
 
iia 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 is concerned alike with self-governing white dominions 
 and with tropical possessions where there may be but 
 a handful of men of British stock, bears the name of 
 " The Royal Colonial Institute." The present nomen- 
 clature, however, recognises three groups among the 
 oversea possessions of the Crown. 
 
 (a) " Self-governing Dominions." The Dominion 
 of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Union 
 of South Africa, the Dominion of New Zealand, and 
 the Colony of Newfoundland have almost the status of 
 independent nations. With their internal affairs and 
 with their commercial relations with foreign coun- 
 tries the Imperial Parliament has nothing to do, but 
 foreign policy that may vitally affect their well-being 
 is still directed by the British Secretary of State for 
 Foreign Affairs, in whose appointment the peoples of 
 the dominions have no say. 
 
 (6) " India," the common term used to cover those 
 vast Asiatic territories whose peoples owe varying 
 degrees of allegiance, not to the monarch as King of the 
 United Kingdom, but as Emperor of India. The Indian 
 Empire, consisting of British India under direct rule 
 and of many Feudatory States, each administered by 
 its own ruler, is self-contained and governed for the 
 benefit of its inhabitants nominally from London, but 
 in reality in accordance with the dictates of a carefully 
 preserved tradition that is guarded and administered by 
 a class of Englishmen of the Indian Civil Service whose 
 whole lives are devoted to the task. Indian affairs are 
 being removed more and more from the detailed con- 
 sideration of the overburdened Imperial Parliament, 
 and India is approaching closer to autonomy, though in 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 "3 
 
 manen of fint-ratc importance Parliament still exercises 
 supreme influence. 
 
 (e) " The Dependencies," including Crown colonies. 
 These are governed by the Colonial Office, which works 
 under the closely exercised scrutiny of Parliament, and 
 is subject to criticism for any of its actioa<i. For these 
 dependencies the Exchequer of the United Kingdom is 
 financially responsible, and Imperial control is real and 
 direct. There are also under the control of the Foreign 
 Office various protected native sutes, but these are 
 gradually approximating to the condition of " depen- 
 dencies," and there is a general tendency to transfer 
 them to the care of the Colonial Office and to deal with 
 them according to its usual methods. Egypt and the 
 Sudan occupy au anomalous and at present indeter- 
 minate position, but the methods employed for their 
 government under the Foreign Office approximate to 
 those used in India, and they are controlled according 
 to the same principles. 
 
 It now becomes our task to inquire whether, in this 
 empire comprising governments of widely divergent 
 types, there are to be discerned any tendencies towards 
 a more closely knit organisation, and whether these 
 tendencies have any roots in the history of the old 
 Empire, such as we have seen to exist in detailed matters 
 of administration. Political communities that are faced 
 by common difficulties and are not too far removed 
 geographically from one another, are strongly drawn to 
 meet those difficulties with common action and accord- 
 ing to an agreed plan. When the communities are fully 
 sovereign states, the union for joint purpose takes the 
 form of an alliance wherein each state fully retains its 
 
n4 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 freedom of action and unanimity is necessary before 
 anything can be done. Such an alliance is usually 
 directed to a military end either of defence or offence, 
 and it is dissolved when the causes of its formation are 
 removed. The earlier British colonies were formed 
 by independent effort and stood to one another very 
 much in the fashion of small separate states, their only 
 common superior, the power of the Crown, being so 
 far removed as to exercise little joint control. We find 
 them behaving to one another, though, of cottrse, only 
 on a very small scale, just as though they were entirely 
 independent ; the colonists of Virginia undertook actual 
 military operations against Lord Baltimore's immigrants 
 into Maryland, and the men of Massachusetts behaved 
 towards Mason and Gorges' colonists on the shores of 
 Maine in a way very little less harsh than that in which 
 the Virginia Company treated the French colonists on 
 the same coast. The separative tendency was far more 
 characteristic of all the colonies of the old Empire than 
 any tendency to tmite, and when any colonies did com- 
 bine for common action of their own free will, they 
 did so only in the face of a really pressing danger, and 
 behaved exactly like powers that were foreign to one 
 another, the alliance being dissolved by mutual consent 
 as soon as the danger was removed. 
 
 Union of the colonies by their own free will was not 
 the only form of union, for on occasion union was forced 
 upon them by the action of the Crown, the most notice- 
 able attempt in this direction being made in the later 
 Stuart period, when James II, in 1685, annulled the 
 charters of the New England colonies one after another, 
 and united them all with New York into a consolidated 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 "5 
 
 province under the government of Sir Edmund Andros. 
 The union, though designed to secure better defence 
 against the Indian menace, was bitterly resented by the 
 colonists, and they were preparing for armed resistance 
 to it when the abdication of James II removed the 
 necessity, the government of Andros at once collapsed, 
 and the colonies resumed their independence relative to 
 one another, and all their separative tendencies had full 
 scope. The temporary union of the colonies of their 
 own free will for common purposes had taken place forty 
 years before in face of a pressing danger of attack by 
 the powerful Indian tribes that surrounded them. The 
 colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth and 
 Massachusetts confederated in 1643 to provide for 
 joint measures against the threatened expansion of the 
 Dutch colony of New Netherland into the territory 
 behind the British settlements and for general defence. 
 The New England Confederation, as it was called, 
 was rather a league of independent states who con- 
 tributed men and money for a common purpose than 
 any closer union, and was marked by all the difficulties 
 and jealousies that characterise such leagues, and when 
 once the fears of Dutch aggression were removed it 
 fell asunder and the colonies resumed all their earlier 
 freedom and independence of action. 
 
 In the face of the dangerous French menace in North 
 America, in the first half of the eighteenth century, 
 common action on the part of the English colonies was 
 conspicuous by its absence, and such common measures 
 as were taken were imposed upon the colonists by the 
 Home Government in the face of constant opposi- 
 tion, both covert and overt. The English ministers 
 
ii6 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 endeavoured to secure that assistance should be rendered 
 against the French by all the colonies, but it was found 
 impossible to get any adequate help from New England, 
 and Virginia, the colony most threatened by French 
 attack, was left to bear the brunt alone, save for the 
 assistance afforded from the mother country. This 
 state of affairs was so unsatisfactory and so disquieting 
 to the most far-seeing among the colonists, that after 
 the inconclusive Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, men's 
 minds were turned to find some means of common 
 action, and publicists, like Benjamin Franklin, began 
 to contemplate the possibility of uniting the colonies 
 into ? single system, so that all the powers of England 
 in North America might be turned towards a common 
 end. The difficulty ,caused by the forward policy of 
 the governors of Canada had been rendered more serious 
 by their success in attracting the most powerful Indian 
 tribes to alliance with them, and the' British colonies 
 were threatened with all the horrors of a serious Indian 
 invasion, to which the disunited colonies, each with its 
 own separate Indian policy or lack of consistent policy, 
 would be imable to oppose any effective resistance. 
 Urged on, therefore, by the prompting of certain far- 
 seeing men in America, the British Government in 1753 
 summoned representatives from all the more important 
 colonies to meet at Albany in the middle colony of 
 New York, there to consider the possibility of a union 
 of all of them for their common security and defence. 
 This Albany convention, called for an express purpose 
 and attended by commissioners who came bound by no 
 special instructions but with the duty of working out a 
 practicable plan, is of great interest in the history of the 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 117 
 
 empire as the first of the long line of conventions that 
 have met since with similar purposes. It had certain 
 precedents in the earlier history of England when, faced 
 with some great and pressing difficult* , t::t it-prpsen- 
 tatives of the people have met to take outisel togerher 
 for one express purpose unfettered b. the traditi mal 
 forms that govern them in parliaments .^ .i'. oi^s-mhlies. 
 The conventions of the Restoration in 1660 and the 
 Revolution in 1688 differed in form from colonial con- 
 ventions, but they were infused by the same spirit, 
 whereby in the face of a great national emergency the 
 people send their delegates to take counsel together in 
 full palaver and talk things right out in the earnest 
 desire to find a comprehensive remedy for their ills. 
 There are earlier instances of such meetings in English 
 history when men could only cope with their difficul- 
 ties unshackled by a rigid insistence upon the regular 
 political forms of their time, and when they had to work 
 out their plans for reconstruction in a spirit of com- 
 promise. To speak of the barons' meeting at Runny- 
 mede or the earliest meetings of Parliament as having 
 any connection with colonial conventions in the eigh- 
 teenth and nineteenth century may seem fanciful, but 
 one can trace many analogies between them and can 
 discern through the long course of English history a 
 succession of such " comings together," when in the 
 face of hard realities men had to throw aside their 
 leisurely and ceremonious political procedure of normal 
 times and betake themselves to simpler and more 
 primitive means of securing agreement on fundamental 
 constitutional principles. 
 The Albany Convention of 1753 sat in private for 
 
ii8 
 
 TrfE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 ;i 
 
 some time, and under the prompting of Benjamin 
 Franklin drew up a detailed plan for an organic union 
 of the colonies which was unanimously accepted by the 
 delegates. Before the plan could be adopted, however, 
 it had to be ratified by the colonial assemblies who had 
 appointed the delegates. Franklin saw that the final 
 carrying out of the plan must be through an Act of the 
 British Parliament, the only legislative body that could 
 see the problem whole and that could pass legislation 
 affecting all the colonies ; but the home Government 
 wisely remembered from the earlier history of the 
 empire that no such plan could be forced upon the 
 colonists without their consent, and determined to wait 
 for its ratification by the assemblies before taking 
 action ; but such ratification proved entirely impracti- 
 cable in the face of the particularism and parochial out- 
 look of the assemblies, and Franklin wrote in despair : 
 " All the Assemblies in the colonies have, I suppose, 
 had the Union Plan laid before them, but it is not likely, 
 in my opinion, that any of them will act upon it so as to 
 agree to it or to propose any amendments to it. Every- 
 body cries, a Union is absolutely necessary, but when 
 they come to the manner and form of the union, their 
 weak noddles are perfectly distracted." 
 
 Franklin's prescience was not at fault, and when 
 Wolfe's great victory at Quebec removed the French 
 menace, the colonial assemblies were confirmed in 
 their obstinate refusal to surrender any part of their 
 autonomy. All hopes of uniting the colonies within the 
 British Empire were destroyed, and when the next joint 
 meeting of colonial representatives took place it was 
 in the first mutterings of the coming storm, and was 
 
ANL THE NEW 
 
 "9 
 
 designed not to further, but to thwart. Imperial policy. 
 The need for common action for the defence of the 
 colonies that had proved impossible of attainment by 
 mutual agreement led the Government to take the 
 easiest course that lay open to them — to provide the 
 necessary forces at the expense of the British taxpayer 
 and to attempt to recover the cost by the imposition of 
 duties upon external trade, such duties to be collected 
 by a reorganised and efficient Imperial system of revenue 
 officials. This course vvas met by unanimous opposi- 
 tion and obstruction on the part of the colonists, and 
 the more liberal statesmen, both in Great Britain and 
 America, attempted to find a way out of the difficulty 
 by proposing the representation of the colonists in the 
 Imperial Parliament and the conversion of the British 
 Empire into a unitary state. 
 
 Traditions of particularism were again too strong for 
 them, the plan was shown to be utterly impracticable 
 owing to the extreme differences of condition and out- 
 look in the various parts of the empir-. md the colonies 
 came together only in the Stamp A ' gress of 1765 
 to concert joint measures against tu ,posals of the 
 British Government. The Congress met in New York, 
 and prepared petitions to King George III, asking for 
 the repeal of the duties imposed upon the colonies by 
 the Stamp Act of the British Parliament, and resolu- 
 tions were adopted declaring that Parliament had no 
 right to tax the colonies. The Congress was a real 
 colonial convention to cope with a pressing difficulty, 
 and since it marks the first concerted action by the 
 colonies in face of the Imperial Government it is there- 
 fore an important stage in the history of the empire. 
 
I30 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 'I 
 
 The further steps taken by the colonies in their resist- 
 ance to the royal power need not concern us, hut we 
 may remark as the struggle went on how it resulted in 
 brmging about closer and closer alliance between the 
 colonies, at every crisis leading to further meetings of 
 delegates after the nature of conventions, such as the 
 First Contmental Congress that met at Philadelphia 
 in 1774 to consider " the united interest of America." 
 The existence of a party in the colonies that desired to 
 exaggerate and intensify the difficulties with the mciner 
 countty m order to secure their independence was 
 matched by that party in England who used the griev- 
 ances of the colonists as a means of attack upon the King 
 and his mmisters, so that the armed struggle when it 
 came was m its early stages rather a civil war between 
 factions within the empire than a fight between one part 
 of the emptfe and another. But even when the Tories 
 bad been thrust out from the colonies to become the 
 United Empire Loyalists and to found a new empire, 
 the necessity of unity was only learned by those who 
 tought for mdependence by the slow and gradual process 
 of experience, and even the difficulties and trials of the 
 war were insufficient to teach the Whigs that some- 
 thmg more than an alliance between sovereign States 
 was necessary if the dearly won independence of the 
 new Umted States of America was to be maintained. 
 
 The period immediately following the close of hostili- 
 faes was, m some ways, more difficult and danger-'w 
 than even the war itself, just as the period of Recon- 
 sttuction that followed the American Civil War of 1861- 
 1865 was full of extreme troubles and of danger The 
 narrow parochial interests of the States led them to 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 lai 
 
 follow their own desires and shirk responsibilities for the 
 common defence in every way possible, and regardless 
 of the interests of their neighbours. 
 
 America was lucky in possessing men like George 
 Washington and Alexander Hamilton, of the highest 
 capacity for statesmanship, and they were convinced 
 that no alliance between sovereign commonwealths 
 would suffice to cope with the dangers that faced them. 
 Under their influence, therefore, the device of a con- 
 vention quite independent of the ruling authorities was 
 once more resorted to, at first only to deal with the mere 
 question of customs duties between the various States. 
 
 The Cmtoms Convention met at Annapolis in 1786, 
 and as soon as it began to consider the subject sincerely, 
 its members found that the real question to be dealt 
 with was infinitely wider than any question of detail. 
 In the crisis with which the States were faced it became 
 clear that the only prospect of solution lay in the calling 
 .'f a convention with entirely unlimited powers, wherein 
 the delegates should be free to discuss all the difficulties 
 on broad grounds of principle. The Annapolis Con- 
 vention, therefore, adjourned to Philadelphia, where it 
 met again, behind closed doors, in May 1787, and set to 
 work on an entirely fresh field, and to examine the whole 
 basis of government unfettered, as far as it might be, 
 by anything that had gone before. From May to Sep- 
 tember 1787 the Convention pursued its labours, and 
 found that it was only possible to secure any advance, 
 not by the imposition of the will of the -Tiajority upon 
 the minority, but by arriving at a series of compromises 
 between divergent views with which every one could 
 agree. 
 
 N 
 
xaa 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 Here we have, as it seems to me, the essential 
 difference between the meeting of a convention and 
 that of a legislative assembly. In Parliament decisions 
 are made by a majority vote, and the minority, bound 
 by long tradition, are willing in the long run to acquiesce, 
 but in a convention such acquiescence cannot be 
 obtained, and it is necessary to arrive at a compromise 
 in which every one will join. Confronted with the 
 choice between comparative anarchy and a prospect of 
 good government, men of English stock, who have 
 governed themselves for centuries and who have in- 
 herited a kind of political intuition, a sort of ancestral 
 memory of past compromise:, are willing to give way a 
 little on matters in which in more peaceful times they 
 would insist on having their way. Such were the 
 matters on which, in the fateful Convention of 1787, 
 the delegates came bit by bit to agreement until, finally, 
 there was evolved a Constitution that, out of thirteen 
 disunited sovereign States, made a nation, and that, 
 when accepted by popular vote throughout the States, 
 came into operation in 1789, the same year that saw the 
 break-up of the old French system and the embarka- 
 tion of France upon a course of constitutional change 
 marked by an entirely different temper, and carried 
 through by methods as different as they well could be. 
 
 Though the Convention of 1787 was marked by a 
 wonderful spirit of compromise that made its work of 
 nation building lasting, it could not carry that work to 
 completion, and what it did gives, in some ways, an 
 example to avoid as well as an example to follow. In 
 the first place, it left unsolved the most difficult point 
 of all : it neither made a complete and unitary govern- 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 laB 
 
 ment with the old States merely left as provinces, nor, 
 on the other hand, did it leave the States with their 
 powers u impaired ; they simply transferred a part of 
 those powers into the hands of the national government 
 and, as some mainuined, retained all final power in their 
 own hands. The solution of the question, whether the 
 Union were a nation or only a dose league of sutes, 
 did not come for seventy years, and involved the United 
 States in a terrible civil war before the Federal majority 
 could impose its will upon the Confederate minority, 
 and prove the Union to be one and indivisible. The 
 other evil in the work done by the Convention was its 
 rigidity and, to some extent, its crudity. This is, I 
 think, the best lesson for us to-day to learn from its 
 story; where its members devoted their attention to 
 clearing up by practical devices difficulties with which 
 they were all familiar, their work was well and truly 
 done and has been lasting, but where they left the 
 practical sphere and evolved from their own inner 
 consciousness logically complete systems of govern- 
 ment they were bounded, as are the men of every age, 
 by the limitations of their time, and when they made 
 their devices as binding upon posterity as they could 
 they placed the dead hand of their limitations upon their 
 descendants, and crippled an J stunted their political 
 growth towards complete liberty and adaptability. But 
 however crippling the system within which it is con- 
 fined, political growth will go on, and the United States 
 has been no exception to this rule, for many of the most 
 admired devices of the Convention of 1787 have been 
 twisted without formal enactment in ways never in- 
 tended by their authors, and the constitutional history 
 
134 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 of the United States affords many instances of the 
 fictions and unwritten assumptions that are necessary 
 to make even a rigid system work, and that in our own 
 formless and happily flexible constitutional practice 
 abound. 
 
 While the Revolution gave to America her inde- 
 pendence it won for England the final victory in the 
 long struggle between King and Pariiamtnt, which was 
 henceforth supreme. In the new Empire the control 
 of Parliament over the colonies was so absolute and so 
 repeatedly exercised that there could be no possibility 
 for groups of colonies freely to come together into 
 organic union until their peoples were masters of their 
 own fate, though the British Government could impose 
 union from the outside, as it did when Upper and 
 Lower Canada were united under a single government 
 after the Rebellion of 1837. But when responsible 
 government had once been granted to the colonies in 
 British North America the way for free growth lay open, 
 and once more it was stimulated by external difficulties 
 and the union of colonies was fostered by the need of 
 overcoming a danger that affected them all alike. In 
 the middle of the nineteenth century there were in British 
 North America, besides the united colony of Canada, 
 the Maritime Provinces of Nova Scotia, including Cape 
 Breton Island, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward 
 Island, inhabited by a homogeneous community of the 
 same race with identical interests and faced by the same 
 economic difficulties, but each provided with its own 
 apparatus of legislature and executive, and none of them 
 strong enough to face its difficulties alone. Though 
 there were many reasons urging the Maritime Provinces 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 135 
 
 to union among themselves, there were aL<>o many reasons 
 to prevent iheir confederation with the greater colony 
 upon the Si Lawrence, which was faced with its own 
 difficulties owing to the presence within it of the British 
 colonists of Upper Canada and the French in Quebec. 
 Luckily, however, as time went on and the gift of 
 responsible government did its work, divisions in Canada 
 ceased to be traced upon racial lines, and parties divided, 
 so that men of each race were found upon opposite sides. 
 But this resulted in almost a complete deadlock in 
 government, and it seemed impossible to find a way 
 out from unceasing party wrangles. There was in the 
 minds of the more far-seeing Canadian statesmen a 
 desire to open up the still virgin lands of the North- West, 
 and to carry the British flag right across the continent 
 to the Red River Settlement and onwards to the new 
 British colony that had been founded upon the shores 
 of the Pacific. Such a task was too great to be under- 
 taken solely with the means at the disposal of Canada, 
 and men began to look forward to the possibility of a 
 confederation of all the British North American colonies 
 which would be strong enough for any work. 
 
 All the colonies were faced alike w'^h economic dis- 
 tress, owing to the running out of the Reciprocity Treaty 
 of 1854 with the United States, Canada's best customer, 
 the certainty that it would not be renev; -d and the inevit- 
 able loss of the best and nearest market for their pro- 
 ducts. The difficulty being a pressing one, and shared 
 in common by all, but specially by the Maritime 
 Provinces, the traditional device was adopted, and the 
 Maritime Provinces agreed to meet in Convention 
 unfettered by past arrangements and by full discussion 
 
ia6 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 
 to find a way out. The Conference, or Convention, 
 met at Charlottetown in 1864, where only the Maritime 
 Provinces were represented, but it was at once seen that 
 it was futile to deal with only a portion of the problem, 
 and the Convention adjourned to Quebec, there to deal 
 with all the matters at stake in the broadest possible 
 way Again the typical methods of a convention were 
 adopted where independent powers were in treaty, 
 and where, therefore, matters could only be decided 
 with unanimity, where it was impossible for a majority 
 to secure acquiescence in its decisions by a minority, 
 and where, therefore, it was necessary for all men to 
 use their pow to the utmost in order to secure com- 
 promises that would work. The convention sat behind 
 closed doors, and as its proceedings were not reported 
 it was possible for nien to consider only the work in 
 hand, regardless of what their cc."tituents would think 
 of them. Seventy-two resoluti jr i v. ere at length agreed 
 upon to bring about the proposed confederation, but 
 before they could be carried into effect they had to 
 receive the adhesion of the peoples of the various 
 colonies, and the securing of this adhesion proved the 
 most difficult part of the process, as it is always likely 
 to be when changes are in contemplation that will pro- 
 foundly affect the interests of all concerned. It took 
 nearly two years of intense political activity, and many 
 dangers had to be surmounted before the delegates 
 of all the colonies could come to England charged 
 with powers to effect the final stage, and in concert 
 with the Imperial Government to secure the passage 
 through Parliament of the Bill in which the resolutions 
 of the convention had been embodied, and which. 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 137 
 
 when it received the Royal assent, becaThe the British 
 North America Act of 1867, the charter of Canadian 
 confederation. 
 
 The history of the Dominion of Canada shows how, 
 even when all the parties are inclined towards federa- 
 tion as a means of surmounting common difficulties 
 and the initiative comes from among them, yet immense 
 obstacles have to be overcome before agreement can be 
 arrived at. But when the initiative comes from the 
 outside and a scheme of federation is urged upon the 
 colonists by external authority, the history of Souch 
 Africa shows us that the difficulties become so great 
 as to be insurmountable, and outside pre?sure really does 
 more harm than good. The first mention of a policy 
 of federation in South Africa, as far b;»ck as 1856, is due 
 to Sir George Grey, then Governor of Cape Colony, but 
 responsible government was not then in operation, and 
 it vas not until after 1873, upon the granting of respon- 
 sible government to the Cape, that the Colonial Secre- 
 tary of the time. Lord Carnarvon, attempted to thrust 
 a scheme of confederation upon South Africa modelled 
 upon that in Canada. A conference was summoned 
 to discuss the scheme in London, but this did not par- 
 take in the least of the essentially free-will nature of a 
 convention, and in spite of all that could be done the 
 project resulted rather in the intensification of South 
 Africa's difficulties than in their amelioration. Though 
 Lord Carnarvon insisted on pushing his scheme through, 
 and an Act on the model of the British North America 
 Act was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1877, it 
 never came into operation, and in i88a its provisions 
 lapsed. 
 
ia8 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 The lesson was not lost upon the home Govern- 
 ment, and it was not tmtU responsible government had 
 been granted to the newly conquered territories 
 after the South African War that the question of union 
 again became a matter of practical politics. What had 
 been impossible and even mischievous when thrust 
 upon the colonies from outside, became capable of 
 achievement when men came to see that only by means 
 of union could be found a solution to the crying diffi- 
 culties that faced war-worn South Africa. Among all 
 the British dominions the subcontinent alone has to cope 
 not only with the problems of the white race, but also 
 with the presence around them of a more numerous 
 and highly prolific negro race. Each of the colonies 
 had its own native policy, marked by a greater or lesser 
 degree of liberality, but the problem was complicated 
 by the presence on their borders of a foreign and 
 aggressive military power in the colony of German 
 South-West Africa, garrisoned with powerful forces, 
 suspected of unworthy designs against British rule, and 
 noted for an exceedingly brutal policy towards its native 
 subjects. In his great Memorandum of 1907, Lord 
 Selborne, the Governor-General, pointed out how 
 essential it was to the well-being of all Afrikanders and 
 of the natives themselves that a common native policy 
 should be a( opted in all the colonies. The adoption of 
 such a policy was the greatest difficulty to be dealt with, 
 but many other thorny questions, including that of a 
 Customs Union, were awaiting solution, and men's 
 minds in South Africa were gradually turned towards 
 the only method by which all such questions could be 
 placed in the hands of those who would have power 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 139 
 
 enough to deal with them. The first step towards 
 union came about, as in the United States and in Canada, 
 upon comparatively minor points, when in May 1908 
 a conference met at Pretoria to deal with the questions 
 of the tariff and of railway rates. Again the questions 
 merged into the larger one of political union, and in 
 October, 1908, a fully powered Convention met at 
 Durban to talk out the whole problem and to deal with 
 it by what are now becoming the traditional methods 
 of compromise, sheltered by privacy and aided by good 
 will. The Convention sat with only a short vacation at 
 Christmas until February, 1909, and the whole period 
 was filled with negotiations of the most delicate character 
 in order to balance the conflicting interests at suke. 
 Though South African statesmen recognised the desira- 
 bility of imion, there was at first no strong current of 
 public opinion in favour of it, and as such a general 
 consensus is essential for the ratification of any scheme 
 agreed upon by a constitutional convention, great im- 
 portance must be attached to the propaganda work done 
 by the Qoser Union Societies throughout South Africa. 
 They had a fertile field to work upon, for men's minds 
 had been jolted out of their traditional ruts by the 
 happenings of the wa' ">d they were in a mobile con- 
 dition favourable t.- the exception of new ideas. When 
 the form of the new Union had been decided on it 
 remained to submit it for ratification to the various 
 legislatures, and, as in Canada, the gaining of their 
 assent was a matter of some difficulty. The process, 
 however, by the exercise of Uct and goodwill and backed 
 by public opinion, was at length completed, and the 
 whole of the arrangements agreed upon were registered 
 
X30 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 by the Imperial Parliament in the South Africa Act, 
 1909. 
 
 The story of the formation of the Australian Common- 
 wealth is in many ways similar to that of the other 
 dominions, but with special features of its own. The 
 colonies have been less interfered with by the outer 
 world than any others, they have had no pressing native 
 problem to deal with and the colonists are of homo- 
 geneous race. But, despite all these advanuges, it was 
 found impossible to press union upon the colonies from 
 outside. When responsible government was brought 
 into operation in 1850, clauses permitting the union of 
 the colonies for common purposes were inserted in the 
 Australian Government Act at the desire of the Colonial 
 Secretary, Lord Grey. But the colonists would have 
 nothing to do with such suggestions, and considerable 
 friction occurred before the home Government woitld 
 leave them in peace and cease the attempt to drive them 
 towards a logically designed union at a pace that was 
 faster than they cared to go. The project of federation, 
 however, was not lost sight of, but was still urged by 
 certain statesmen in Australia as a means of facilitating 
 the growth of the colonies. The first urging towards a 
 consideration of the matter as one of practical politics 
 came from a shock administered from the outside. Far 
 removed as Australia is from all other powers, it was 
 with a most unpleasant awakening that she learned of 
 
 £e annexation of Northern New Guinea by the German 
 ppire in 1883, and realised that her peaceful isola- 
 tion was at an end and that she had now an aggres- 
 sive neighbour within her own waters. The united 
 Austr^ian colonies would be stronger in face of any 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 131 
 
 difficulties that might arise than they cotild be singly, 
 and an incentive to federation was thus supplied. The 
 result was not a very striking move forward, for 
 Australia's difficulties were not yet real enough to over- 
 come her parochial jealousies. Political communities 
 that live far removed from the clash of world politics 
 fail to realise the comparative pettiness of their internal 
 affairs as compared with the great differences of principle 
 that divide nations. England herself has been too insular 
 in her outlook at many periods of her history, and the 
 United States have, till recent years, stood in complete 
 isolation from world problems; the Australian States 
 have been no exception to the rule, and their diverse 
 local interests have always tended to loom larger before 
 their eyes than the more remote difficulties that they 
 might have to face together. The shock of the German 
 annexation was soon forgotten, and the Federal Council 
 Act that was passed by the British Parliament at the 
 request of Australia in 1885 was a very imperfect step 
 forward in the direction of a working union, and was 
 much weakened by the refusal of the oldest colony, New 
 South Wales, to take part. 
 
 The next step forward again came from a shock 
 administered from outside, this time in 1889, from a 
 report upon the military defences of Australia, or rather 
 upon its entire defencelessness. This resttlted in the 
 summoning of a convention to deal with all the diffi- 
 culties of the colonies, again as in Canada, in two 
 stages, an informal conference leading on to a national 
 convention with full powers. The Convention met in 
 Sydney in 1891, but it differed in iwo ways from the 
 Canadian Convention of 1864: the evils to be cured 
 
lya 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 were not so serious and acute as to make men forget 
 their particularism, and the Convention chose to do its 
 work with open doors and thus fettered by the need of 
 keeping in touch with pubhc opinion. The labours of 
 the members resulted in the preparation of a scheme, 
 but the legislatures of the various colonies refused to 
 have anything to do with it for all kinds of reasons, and 
 the advocates of federation came to realise what we can 
 now see clearly to have been the case in all the do-' 
 minions, that no such sweeping constitutional change as 
 federation is possible, unless there is an overwhelming 
 body of public opinion either in favour of it or ready to 
 accept any course that will get them out of really serious 
 political difficulties. Since these latter did not exist 
 in Australia, it was necessary to educate public opinion 
 by a positive propaganda. The work of the Australian 
 Natives Association and the Australian Federation 
 League were at length effectual in achieving their pur- 
 pose, great public enthusiasm was aroused, and in 1897 
 a new G)nvention with full powers was assembled in 
 Adelaide, and took up the whole question in a serioits 
 way that had not been possible before. There was, 
 in fact, a positive incentive behind the Convention's 
 labours, and though it chose to do its work in public, 
 it was successful at length in producing a scheme 
 which was acceptable to three colonies : Victoria, 
 South Australia, and Tasmania, but not to New South 
 Wales, while Queensland and West Australia stood aloof. 
 However, there was now sufficient driving force to get 
 things done, and at length, in 1899, a scheme agreed to 
 by all the colonies but West Australia was brought to 
 &igland for registration by the Imperial Parliament. 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 133 
 
 Much discussion took place with the home Government 
 over certain provisions of the scheme, but in the result 
 it was passed through Parliament exactly in the form 
 in wb'-h it had been agreed to by the Australian people. 
 The self-governing dominions of the Empire now 
 comprise three great unified political communities, but 
 two colonies, each with its own special problems, the 
 Dominion of New Zealand and the Colony of New- 
 fotmdland, remain unabsorbed. I have tried to give 
 you in outline the steps that led up to the formation of 
 each of the great schemes of closer union, because, as 
 it seems to me, they illustrate that continuity of Imperial 
 growth which is the main theme of these lectures. 
 The schemes that were drawn up differ in every way, 
 but the process whereby they were reached seems to 
 have been practically the same in each case. Wherever 
 I have directed your attention to this Imperial continuity, 
 I have tried to show that the process cf historical growth 
 is still continuing, and that whilst we are studying the 
 history of our own peopk we are also living it from 
 day to day. Time is one^the Past shades into the 
 Future at a moment that we call the Present, and the 
 continuous processes of the recent past will inevitably 
 be the processes of the immediate future, so that all 
 the free-will of our own generation will of necessity be 
 conditioned by the action of the men who have gone 
 before us. It will not seem entirely unwarrantable, 
 therefore, if we employ an extension of the historic 
 method to examine the broad conditions that will govern 
 the further solution of the problems of Imperial unity. 
 These problems are of peculiar interest to the peoples 
 of the British Empire to-day, for there can be little doubt 
 
134 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 that the actions of the next few years will have as great 
 an influence upon the life of the Empire in the future 
 as had those of the people of 1787 upon the life of 
 the United States. The last fifty years have seen the 
 cementing together of three great self-governing nations, 
 each owning the sway of the British Crown, but the last 
 and infinitely the greatest task remains to be done, 
 either by our own generation or by those that will 
 immediately follow it— the cementing of a great organic 
 union of the whole British Empire. 
 
 What are the drawbacks and what the assets with 
 which we shall begin the task i We belong to an empire 
 of infinite diversity, containing peoples in every stage 
 of political culture, from the lowest to the very highest, 
 yet bound together only by the slightest of legal links, 
 our common alle-iince to the descendant of the long 
 line of English fc rgs ; the great self-governing nations, 
 Britain, Canada and the rest, are faced with local 
 problems that differ from one another almost as much 
 as problems can do ; the people of these British islands 
 have for centuries been familiar with the conditions, 
 and have borfie all the burdens of world power, and 
 they have been rewarded with a wealth and material 
 prosperity that have placed them among the richest 
 peoples of the world 5 the peoples of the dominions 
 have had to devote their energies to the conquering of 
 the wilderness, they have had litde attention to spare 
 to world politics, and though their standard of general 
 well-being is higher, their average wealth has been less 
 than in this country, and they are familiar neither with 
 an excess of riches nor with the problems of grinding 
 poverty. The peoples of India have lived under the 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 135 
 
 despotic conditions of an Asiatic civilisation, and have 
 become accustomed to look for more than a century 
 past to the Government of the United Kingdom for the 
 guarantee of good and unselfish government, the task 
 of guarding which has been entrusted to the statesmen 
 of Britain alone, and has never been shared with our 
 brothers across the sea. So, too, the many subject 
 peoples of the dependent Empire know that they may 
 rely upon English faith, but few of them know much 
 of the peoples of the dominions, and these know little 
 of them and of their problems. And yet the Empire 
 of the future must contain and satisfy the aspirations of 
 them all. 
 
 Federate, unify, if you will, the self-governing 
 peoples of the Empire, and you have only dealt with by 
 far the easier part of the task. India, and the varied 
 diversities of the dependent Empire, remain to be dealt 
 with, unified as yet only in one respect, their reliance on 
 the peoples of the United Kingdom for the order and 
 good government they so highly prize. To whom 
 must they look in a more closely organised empire as 
 their governors < To the people of the United Kingdom 
 as before i In that case the people of the dominions 
 will have little more say in Imperial affairs than they 
 have at present, and the United Kingdom will remain 
 the immensely predominant partner. Or must they 
 look to the ministry of the federated self-governing 
 empire i The peoples of the dominions must, then, 
 shoulder burdens and responsibilities from which they 
 now are free, and must be willing to pledge their credit 
 when necessary to secure the good government of 
 subject peoples in every part of the world. He would 
 
«36 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 be a bold man who would predict that they vrill never 
 be ready to do this, but it requires little courage to 
 predict that they will be aided to solve the problem if 
 they can learn aU its implications, if, in fact, those whose 
 duty It is to discuss Imperial questions will remember 
 and will bring before their constituents the difficulties 
 and burdens of empire as well as its advantages. 
 
 The liabilities that await us when we commence our 
 task of Imperial reorganisation are very great; but, 
 luckily, the assets we possess are greater. The peoples 
 of British stock have a common heritage of political 
 tradition, a store of experience of the methods of demo- 
 cratic self-government that has been gradually accumu- 
 lated during the centuries, and that gives them a sort 
 of intuitive knowledge of the most likely way of attack- 
 mg a political problem that is the possession of few other 
 peoples. They owe a real and wholehearted allegiance 
 to a monarchy that has ceased to be swayed by personal 
 caprice, but now works within the lines of a continuous 
 tradition guarded by constantly changing agents who 
 are but the nominees of those they govern, and who 
 have ultimately to answer for their actions to them. 
 The executive tradition is shared in by all parts of the 
 Empire, it is bound by few written instruments, and 
 being handed on from generation to generation it is 
 so flexible that it can be varied gradually to fit almost 
 any circumstances that arise. Consider how even now 
 this executive, prerogative power of the Crown is being 
 varied from day to day to fit the new circumstances of 
 the Empire, and to carry us through the difficult period 
 of transition when the exigencies of war demand the 
 co-operation of every part of the Empire, and yet no 
 
AND THE NEW 
 
 137 
 
 formal machinery exists to secure it. The prerogative, 
 that m the seventeenth century was the enemy of 
 popular government, is now the storehouse of inex- 
 haustible expedients with which to cope with difficult 
 ctfcumstances. 
 
 The Crown has since the earliest ages had the right 
 to caU upon any of its subjects for advice, and meetings 
 of the King's servants " can be held to take counsel 
 together as to the advice to be given with a minimum 
 of formality. The first of such informal meetings, to 
 which men from the outer parts of the Empire were 
 invited, took place in London during the Jubilee celebra- 
 tions of 1887. This was a purely consultative confer- 
 ence for the general ventilation of Imperial matters, 
 and It was foUowed in 1894 by a partial conference in 
 Ottawa, directed solely to the securing of the co-opera- 
 tion of the dominions represented for certain limited 
 and material ends. The real development of the 
 Imperial Conference began in 1897, when the " Queen's 
 servants," the Premiers of all the self-governing colonies, 
 were summoned to confer together in London under 
 tt« presidency of the Secretary of State for the Colonies. 
 This was a clear rea^ition that the people of the 
 dommions must have a larger say in the guidance of 
 empu-e policy, and since that date the development 
 of the Imperii Conference has gone far and fast. The 
 progress has not been entirely unchecked, for when in 
 1905 a responsible proposal was put forward to setup 
 an Imperial Council in place of the Conference, the 
 proposal was not welcomed by the colonies, for it meant 
 a forced step aside from the line of development, and 
 would have committed them to formal organisation. 
 
138 
 
 THE OLD EMPIRE 
 
 which must necessarily have a continumg life, while 
 the less formal meetings of the conferences at the 
 mvjtation of the Crown left the colonies free to accept 
 or refuse the invitations as they saw fit. 
 
 The conferences of 1907 and 1911 are constitution- 
 aUy recognisable as meetings of " the King's servants," 
 to use a Restoration phrase, or, if you prefer a Tudor 
 one, we may «U them, with propriety, meetings of 
 U)rds of the Council," summoned to advise the Crown 
 on certain matters involving the exercise of the Royal 
 prerogative, which now stretches far beyond the Uxoits 
 of thwe islands. The meetings differ little in form 
 trom the long line of other meetings of the sort through- 
 out the last three centuries, but within the last few 
 months another step forward has been taken, and now 
 the meetings of the King's counsellors from the Empire 
 as a whole" are absolutely identical with those of the 
 committee that has swallowed up all the executive 
 functions of the Privy Council. Privy Councillors can 
 only attend those meetings to which they are summoned 
 and so tiie Crown calls in different counsellors according 
 to the busmess to be done. Now on certain days the 
 meetmgs of the War Cabinet are attended not only by 
 Its British members, but also the Secretary of Sute to 
 speak for India, the Secretary for the Colonies to care 
 for the mterests of the dependent Empire, and Privy 
 Councillors from each of the self-governing dominions. 
 These meetings, according to the Prime Minister of the 
 United Kingdom, have as much power and the same 
 authority as any other meetings of the Cabinet. We 
 seem, m fact, already to have achieved under the xgis 
 of the smgle mstitution that is common to all parts of 
 
 ll 
 
AND THE NEW i^ 
 
 Ae Empire, the Crown, a unity of executive control 
 for the purposes of the war that will be one of Z 
 g«atest of our assets in dealing with our colm 
 difficulties m the coining time. ^^ 
 
 We have another valuable asset in the experience of 
 dealing with these constitutional problems that I have 
 dea^t with m this lecture, and which I may cil the 
 
 Convention method." When the next step fTrwlrd 
 
 rr7«tw""n^'*'^- As I imagine, when the time 
 IS ripe there wUl be summoned by the Royal authority 
 a convention of delegates from the Empire^o SS 
 iwr"°". "^ ^P*'^ organisation as a whole ; the 
 
 t^uny^-Tf T^ *•"'' ^^'^ ^"^-^ <!«>» »«d with 
 an unlimited reliance upon the efficacy of compromise. 
 
 « complete, but not before, it wiU be placed before the 
 
 ^fore their )udgment can be made, many further paees 
 ISS: ^' ^^" ^.*° fi"«d. The membei. <rfT 
 fintlmpeml Convention maybe able to agree upon 
 no plan and, even if they do agree, their plL may be 
 
 ^Sl* '° "^ ^'"' ^^« appomted^he^'yS^ 
 «^nt^ factor m the success of the Convention method 
 M the exutence of an overwhelming public opinion that 
 a forward step towards unity must bi taken L the bSt 
 mterests of the Commonwealth. Such a coLtusI 
 ^ZZr ^ reached only by the widest spread o 
 knowledge concernmg the problems to be deSt with. 
 For this spread of knowledge two conditions are neces- 
 sary, a sincere desire for understanding on the part 
 of every atizen. and a spirit of goodwill. Whatem 
 
I40 OLD EMPIRE AND THE NEW 
 
 bappctu and whether it is given to thtt'gtneration'or 
 another to see the atuinment of an organiied democratic 
 empire in which all citizens of full political suture bear 
 an equal part, where-- all have their appointed share in 
 Oe maintenance oi liberty, order and good govern- 
 ment, we citizens of the Empire of to-day have, at leat*, 
 been privileged to see the fuU realisation of both these 
 immary conditions. The desire for understanding of 
 the Imperial problem grows daily among all classes, 
 and it is one of the most important duties of our 
 umversities to do all that they can to satisfy this desire, 
 a duty for the fulfilment of which their new agencies for 
 Imperial studies are designed. 
 
 The spirit of goodwill is almost universal. On the 
 fields of Flanders and of Picardy, amid the rocks of 
 Gallipoli and the sands of Mesopotamia, men from all 
 the quarters of the Empire, the heirs of all the proud 
 traditions of our British stock, the descendants of the 
 early pioneers from Holland and old France, men from 
 the ancient world of India together with those from the 
 dependent Empire, who owe to it most of their civilisa- 
 tion, all have been willingly pouring forth their blood 
 that the Empire that they love may live. None can 
 deprive us of the spiritual unity the Empire has there 
 attained, and thereon there will be built, soon or late, 
 the British Commonwealth, the Empire of our dreams. 
 
 FINIS 
 
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