IMAGE EVALUATION TEST TARGET (MT-3) 1.0 I.I I: I 36 m 2.0 1.8 1.25 1.4 1.6 ■« 6" ► Vi / ^ ^'^z ^i y /^ Photographic Sciences Corporation ,\ «- ^9> V signifie "A SUIVRE", le symbole V signifie "FIN". Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre filmds 6 des taux de reduction diffdrents. Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul clichd, il est film6 d partir de Tangle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche & droite, et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre d'images ndcessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m6thode. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 /^-i- (ft^.jC^, /I J COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE BY A BYSTANDER Partly reprinted from ''The Toronto Weekly Sun." Toronto : Wm. Tyrrell & Co. 1900 COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE Whatever may be for Americans the main issue in the Presidential campaign, for the world at large it is that between Imperialist Plutocracy, and the American Commonwealth. Shall the American Commonwealth remain what it is, follow its own destiny, and do what it can to fulfil the special hopes which humanity has founded on it, or shall it be turned into an imitation of European Imperialism and drawn, with the great mili- tary powers of Europe, into a career of conquest and domination, impairing at the same time its own demo- cratic character^ as all experience tells us that it must? Shall it be ruled by the spirit and in the interest of the American people, or in those of the Europeanized plutocracy which has its commercial centre in the fin- ancial offices of the East and its social centre in the drawing-rooms of New York ? This is the main issue for humanity. Puritan New England could not last, though it served as the foundation, and left strong traoes on national character. America was bound to undergo the general influences of the world's progress and to be embraced by the world-unifying agencies of electricity and steam. The original elements had been largely diluted by foreign inflow*, which, however, had been assimilated in a wonderful degree. Still, the American Republic was the home of democracy and the hope of laboi*. It promised to do something more than the Old World communities towards rectifying the injustice of nature and equalizing the human lot. The eyes of the masses everywhere were turned to it. To ihe enemies of equality and freedom everywhere it was an object of aversion and alarm. Loud was the shout of exultation 4 COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. with which, at the moment of secession, aristocracy and plutocracy in Europe hailed its apparent fall. Freedom from Socialism, other than imported, proved the general soundness of the industrial republic. There was reason at all events i;o hope that human- ity would here be rid of two of its banes in the Old World, State Churches and standing armies. Where there was no danger of war there could be no occasion tor a standing army beyond what might be necessary for the maintenance of order in a community receiving foreign elements little trained in their countries of origin to recognize any authority but force. The inter- nal conflict caused by slavery was at an end. Nothing apparently was left to give birth to war. The w^ar with Spain, that most ardent of patriots, John M. Forbes, held, as his biography tells us, to have been made foi* the purpose of keeping a political party in power. It seemed that peace might be preacned to all peoples and governments more effectually than any conference could preach it by the spectacle of a mighty nation thriving beyond all other nations by honest industry and living on friendly terms with all its com- peers, yet, as a powder, respected by the w^hole world. But the resources of the continent, marvellously de veloped, and financial speculation have bred a body of wealth having its centre in the East, headed by a fabulous multi-millionairism, entrenched in a multi- plicity of great corporations and trusts, daily absorbing money and extending its influence, feeling more and more the general unity of its interests, and threatening, if its ascendancy is not moderated, to dominate the State. For some time the class was timid, shunned pol- itics, rather shrank from sight, fearing that public jeal- ousy might be aroused. Now it is past that stage and is beginning to turn its wealth into power. This it may do to an indefinite extent. It may buy legislatures, : COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. judiciaries, municipalitieg^ perhaps even Churches. A Senatorship we have seen it purchase without dis- guise. It may command the public journals and thus control public opinion. It may kill commercially any- one who opposes it. Even universities, fed by its bounty, may fall under its political influence. A limit can hardly be set to the extension of its power in an age in which the universal object of desire is money with the enjoyment which money provides. No one who is right-minded can desire to array labour against capital or to interfere by violent mea- sures of repression with fair gains, with the discharge by capital of its necessary functions in the conduct of industry, or with its just mfluence in the political sphere. But it would be an evil day on which supreme power should pass into the hands of accumulated money. Of the wealth, much has been made by the organization of industrial enterprises beneficial to the community at large, while some has been made in ways not so beneficial. Not a little has been nobly spent on public objects and institutions. But the best of multi-millionaires leaves heirs, It is useless to rail at a class for following its natur- al bent. Multi-millionairism does no more. Its luxury and ostentation are as natural as they are conspicuous. A famous ball bespoke at once its profuse magnificence and its disregard of democratic sentiment. At heart it sighs for a court and for aristocracy. It is even intro- ducing the powde I -headed footman while he is going out of fashion in England. Its social centre is shifting more and more from the United States to monarchical and aristocratic England, where it can take hold on the mantle of high society, get more homage and sub serviency for its wealth, hope perhaps in the end to win its way to the circle of royalty, and, if it becomes nat- uralized, to obtain a knighthood or even a peerage. It COM. MON WE A L IH OR EMPIRE. barters the hands of its daughters and its millions for aristocratic connection. One of its leadin^^ members has just abandoned his native country for the country of his class, while he continues to draw a royal income from the industry of New York. Its growth on the body politic may be, as we are told it is, the operation of natural law. But so are growths on the physical body^ against which, nevertheless, w^e guard. That the plutocracy is at once conscious of the giMi- eral identity of its interests, and feels that Imperialism is congenial to it, is shown by the unanimity wifh which it ranges itself under the Imperialist banner in this contest. Even with Silvei' magnates the bias of class, it appears, is stionger than that of Silver. If you have an Empire, you will, under one form or another, have an Emperor. You cannot help commit- ting a measure of autocratic power to the head of the executive, thereby changing his character and the character of the constitution. President McKinley is an autocrat in regard to the acquired possessions of the United States, if they are not covered by the constitu- tion. The Queen, constitutional in Great Britain, is an Empress in India ; though in this case the government of the Empire has been effectually separated from that of the constitutional country by delegation to a vice- roy, with an entirely separate service. A standing army is the necessary appendage of Empire, and it brings with it not only the means of armed repression in case of conflict between the hold- ers of power and the people, but the military spirit of absolutism and professional caste, which is congenial to oligarchic and adverse to democratic sentiment ; as Germany, dragooned by her military aristocracy, too well knows. The army at home, though constitutionally under the command of the President, is practically under the con- COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. 7 ti'ol of the same democratic influences by which the ex- ecutive generally is controlled. The army in the de- pendencies would be more absolutely at the President's command. The change would soon extend to the spirit of the American people. The effect is already seen. Lan- guage on questions between right and force at vari- ancie^ not only with the Declaration of Independence, but with anything that would have been heard fifty years ago, may now be read in the Imperialist press. It is true that there is throughout the world a tendency of sentiment in this direction ; that evolution and the survival of the fittest have been everywhere propagat- ing the gospel of force; while the gospel of human brotherhood, justice, and mercy, preached by Jesus and professed by Christian nations, has been losing influence even with Churches. Yet, apart from this general ten- dency, the immediate effect of Imperialism on Ameri- can sentiment may be distinctly seen. A relapse, not only from American but from civil- ized principle, has already taken place. In all defences of the sanguinai-y subjugation of the Filipinos it is as- sumed that the people were sold and bought with the land. Under the feudal system the serfs were sold and bought with the land, though in the case of the free tenants attornment was required. The general idea that the people, as a matter of course, passed with the land by cession or transfer long afterwards prevailed. But it has been discarded by modern civilization. When Savoy was transferred from Sardinia to France, a plt^bis- cite was taken. In the case of the Ionian Islands the desire of the people to be transferred from Great Brit- ain to Greece had been clearly expressed. The treaty for the transfer of St. Thomas from Denmark to the United States was made conditional on the assent of the inhabitants, to be taken by vote, as it actually was. 8 COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. s/ though the treaty afterwards went off on other grounds. Newly-created monarchies are now entitled not of the land but of the people ; Louis Philippe was King, not of France but of the French ; Napoleon III. was Emperor of the French; Wilhelra II. is not Emperor oi Ger- many, but German Emperor. In the case of Alsace and Lorraine the transfer of land and people together was by the stern right of conquest in a war in which the people had taken part. This cannot be pleaded in the case of the Filipinos, who had been recognized by the Americans as allies in the war against Spain. The language which has been held on this subject by Impe- rialist speakers and journalists grates harshly on the ear of modern morality. Nor can anything be less relevant as precedents than the natural extension of the American people over the unpeopled spaces of their own continent, or the acquisition of Louisiana, with the tacit assent of its inhabitants, and provision for their incorporation into the Union, before the expedient of a plebiscite had become known. Is it impossible that a democracy, without any formal change of its constitution, should pass under the yoke of wealth ? History furnishes at least one notable in- stance of the kind. The Republic of Florence, without change of its political forms, was effectually enslaved by the wealth of the Medicis. Florence was small, it is true. But so was the w^ealth of the Medicis com- pared with the collective fortunes of the United States. Nor had the Medicis, at the time of their usurpa- tion, a standing army, which American plutocracy will soon have, on a large scale, if Imperialism gains the day. The tendency of Imperialism to an increase of the power of the executive at the expense of the represen- tative is already seen in England, where the House of Commons has of late been manifestly losing power while the Ministry has manifestly been gaining it. COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE, This is so evident that a writer of mark on female suf- frage doubts whether it is worth the while of the women to strive for parliamentary representation when the authority of Parliament is so clearly on the wane. The tendency of war to exalt the executive at the ex- pense of the representative will not be denied. The War of Secession made the President for the time almost a dictator, though Lincoln's character was a per- fect security against usurpation. War^ and everything that excites tlie passion for war, favours political reaction by turning the thoughts of the people away from internal improvement r.6. reform. The British polity is founded on traditional attach- ment to a constitution handed down, with successive developments, from the Mi<-Mle Ages. The i^'Tierican polity ' unded on allegiance to principlob -uch as are s'^*- forth in the Declaration of Independenue. If alleg- iance to these gieat principles is renounced, as by the forcible assumption of dominion over other communi- ties or races it must be, the moral foundations of the Republic will be shaken, and the sentiment which in American hearts has taken the place of European loy- alty, will lose its sustaining pow^er. A subtle influence had already been at woik to un- dermine the originality and independence of Ameiican character, aims, and institutions. The United States, after all, are colonies thrown off' from an adult civiliza- tion. The general verdict of history is that greatness comes, not from colonies so thrown off", but from the wild-stock which has the germ of independent life in it- self. The Greater Greece was much the lesser in any- thing but bulk. Little, except of a material kind, has hitherto come cf the colonies thrown off from adult civilizations in later days, such as those of Spain, Portu- gal, Holland, or France. They have lacked the germ of original and independent life. The American colon- lO COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. ies of Great Britain were founded not merely by emi- gration, but by se«^ession, religious or social, and were ultimately torn away from the mother country by a political convulsion. These things combined seemed to give them a life-germ of their own. A marked and even bitter antagonism was for some time the result. This, so far as the American plutocracy is concerned, has now given way to the force of social attraction. That the ancient antagonism should cease, that every trace of angry memories should be effaced, and that international bitterness should give place to perfect amity, is w^hat right-minded men on both sides desire and do their best to bring about. But it is not desir- able, either for America or for humanity, that Ameri- can civilization should be re-absorbed into that of the Old Country, or that the original and independent life of America should be lost. Participation with the British Empire in aggrandize- ment is held out as a new" life to the American people. Principally by maritime war, Great Britain has acquired a miscellany of possessions, Imperial and col- onial, scattered over the globe. For their protection she is compelled to keep up a fleet such as will make her mistress of all seas, thereby, perhaps involuntarily, threatening the maritime independence of other nations, which, to avoid passing under her naval yoke, think themselves obliged to vie with her in lavishing on the building of battleships the bread taken from the mouths of their people. The people of the United States have no interest in dominating over all the seas, nor any inducement to partake of the general envy and enmity which such domination inevitably breeds and w^hich are already felt by Great Britain to be assuming a dangerous form. Americans are tempted to embrace a policy of tribal- ism, undef the form of a league of the Anglo-Saxon I ( COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. II I ( race, which is to overshadow the world. A return to tribalism sounds like relapse into barbarism. Besides, the tribal unity in this case is largely fictitious. In the United Kingdom, three-fourths of Ireland, the High- lands of Scotland, almost the whole of Wales and the West of England are Celtic, not to mention a large scat- tering of Flemings, Huguenots, and other immigrants. In the United States there is a great mixture of races. There was a mixture in the original foundations, and there has been a vast inflow of motley immigration. The population of the United States is not tribal but human ; human also ought to be its policy. That the English language is spoken and that English law and institutions have been largely adopted by the great community of the New World is matter of just pride for Englishmen. But we do not want the New World to be turned out of its course and made untrue to its destiny by an ethnological fancy plainly at variance with fact. Nor should it be forgotten that Great Bi'itain carries with her not only her fifty millions of English-speaking people, but her three hundred millions and more of Hin- doos and other races differing as widely as possible from the Anglo-Saxon type, A league of States in diff'erent parts of the globe, bound together merely by origiti or language, yet sworn to fight in each other's quarrels, whatevei' the cause and without regard to the merits of the case, would be a conspiracy against international morality and the in- dependence of all nations such as would soon compel the world to take arms for its overthrow, Nobodv would be cajoled by such phrases as "spreading civil- ization" or "imposing universal peace." The world does not want to have anything imposed on it by an Anglo-Saxon league or by a combination of any kind. Commercial gain would be the real object, commer- cial cupidity would be the sustaining principle of the 12 COMMONWEALTH OR EMPIRE. league. But in their commercial policy the two nations at present are diametrically opposed to each other ; Great Britain being for free trade. America being for protection. That Great Britain will ever renounce free trade, under which her wealth has multiplied, seems about as likely as that the Thames will reverse its course. Mutterings of reaction, political rather than economical in their source, and local rather than national, are heard from time to time ; but they die away. Americans are exhorted to embrace " the strenuous life." Is it not a strenuous life that has produced the United States with all their marvels of wealth, intelli- gence, and civilization ? Is nothing strenuous but ex- ternal aggression ? The American constitution is not suited for playing the British game. In England foreign policy remains in the same hands enough to preserve its continuity and the general identity of its aims. A Foreign Minis- ter, retiring from office, still sits in Parliament and still has his voice in the councils of the State ; while the Foreign Office is largely in the hands of permanent officers of the highest class. But an American Secre- tary of State, retiring from office, hardly ever* takes his seat in Congress, so that the thread of an Imperialist policy would be abruptly broken off every four years, and there could hardly be community of design or con- tinuous co-operation with the Foreign Office of Great Britain. Instead of unity of counsels, angry divergence might result. Nor does it seem likely that the demo- cratic character of the American Republic could be so completely eliminated from its diplomacy as to make it an apt yoke-fellow for a monarchical and aristocratic country like Great Britain. The monarchical and aris- tocratic influence in Great Britain has been consider- ably strengthened, as it was sure to be, by Imperialism