HE FUTURE OF
THE EMPIRE
J.Saxo Mills.
'SwdpTav e\a^€9* tclvtolv KO<rfJi€i.
(Euripides)-
Spartam nactus es : hanc exorna.
(Cicero) -
Sparta is your Country : make the most of it.
THE FUTURE
OF THE
EMPIRE
AN ACCOUNT OF THE GROWTH AND EXTENT
OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, SHOWING HOW ITS
SOLIDARITY MAY BE STRENGTHENED, ITS INTER-
COMMUNICATIONS FACILITATED, AND ITS
ILLIMITABLE RESOURCES DEVELOPED
BY
J. SAXON MILLS, M.A. (Camb.)
BARRISTER-AT-LAW OF THE INNER TEMPLE
Author of Landmarks of Britisli, Fiscal History ;
England's Foundation ; The Panama Canal
Etc., &c, &-c.
LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE tf CO. LIMITED
38 Great Russell Street
1918
'A
TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER AND MOTHER
PREFACE.
The object of this book is not so much to promote
any definite theories or policies as to provide the reader
with the information on which he may base opinions
of his own. After the awful devastation of the Euro-
pean war it will be necessary to create new wealth as
rapidly as possible. The development of the resources
of the British Empire will be more important in com-
ing years than any schemes of political reconstitution.
I have therefore laid a good deal of stress on the indus-
trial and commercial aspects of our Empire problem.
I have to thank the Oxford University Press for leave
to reprint a diagram from an article I contributed to
Herbert Strang's Annual for 1916; Messrs. Nelson
and Sons for the use of a map in my book on the
Panama Canal ; Captain Richard Jebb for permission
to reproduce a constitutional chart ; the Editors of the
United Empire Magazine for allowing me to use a rail-
way map of South Africa, and the High Commis-
sioners of Canada and Australia for similar favours.
J. S. M.
London : Sept., 1917.
CONTENTS
Chap.
i. Introductory - - I5
39
56
11. Population
hi. Race
iv. The Lone Lands - - ?°
v. Communications - - 9
vi. Problem ok Dependencies - - 124
vii. Trade and Industry - - M*
viii. Defence
ix. Labour and the Land - - 2 °4
x. Closer Union - - 222
188
LIST OF
MAPS AND DIAGRAMS
Page.
Map Showing the Parts of the Empire
That Lie Within the Tropics and
in the Temperate Zones - 20-21
Canada : Showing the Northern
Limit of Wheat - - 84-85
Map of the Dominion of Canada
Showing the Railway System - 1 00-101
Railway Map of Australia - - 104-105
Map of Africa Showing the Railways
Already Constructed and Those
Projected; Also the Navigable
Rivers - - - 109
Ocean Routes - - - 118-119
i. Colonial Dependence, ii. Britannic
Alliance - - - 252
iii. Imperial Federation, lv. Imperial
I' 1. deration - - - 253
THE
FUTURE OF THE EMPIRE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke;
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak.
Thomson.
The British Empire is the outcome of a slow and
organic growth. It has grown like the British oak
under the influence of the storms and rains and sun-
shine of centuries. England never awoke one fine
morning and exclaimed, " Go to — I will have a great
Empire ! ' Most empires that have been thus the
result of conscious and ambitious design — whether the
designer was an Alexander or a Napoleon or a Kaiser
Wilhelm — have been short-lived. One is struck when
reading the history of the British Empire with the
note of ' inevitableness." The British domain has
grown not only without much conscious intention but
often against the wish and desire of its makers. Again
and again England has urged upon her captains and
governors the " consilium coercendi intra terminos
Imperii" 1 and again and again that desire has been
1 " The policy of confining the Empire within its existing boun-
(Tac. Ann. i. n.)
INTRODUCTORY
frustrated. The first parliamentary Governor-General
who went out from England to India in 1786 carried
the most precise instructions against extending the
British frontiers. Yet the years immediately follow-
ing saw a vast increase in Indian territory brought
under British rule, the reason being that England was
the only Power that could guarantee peace and order
in India and that she was compelled to go forward and
fulfil her mission.
The reader of our Empire history will supply many
other such instances. How long was it before England
would accede to the request of the natives of New
Zealand and Fiji to be taken under her protection ?
We need not dwell too much upon the German misre-
presentations, but it is certainly the reverse of the
truth that we "stood in Germany's daylight." On
the contrary we positively bowed and ushered Germany
into the possession of a colonial empire. If we had
wished we could have forestalled Germany with perfect
ease in South-west Africa, where we already possessed
the chief port. England practically made her a present
of that splendid East African possession which the
Anglo-Dutch forces have invaded and occupied during
the war. In 1877 the Sultan of Zanzibar offered to the
English the whole of the coast-line of Central East
Africa. England declined the gift and induced the
Sultan to allow Germany to acquire territory on the
mainland and thus lay the foundation of a vast and
valuable colony. So with New Guinea. In 1883
Queensland, a British- Australian colony, had actually
annexed all that part of Papua which was not in Dutch
16
INTRODUCTORY
occupation, but the Home Government would not
endorse the annexation, and again Germany came in.
This policy of renunciation on the part of British
Governments has been repeated again and again, often
to the disgust of those most nearly concerned. Indeed,
Sir Charles Lucas, the most delightful and at the same
time the most reliable exponent of our Empire's his-
tory, remarks that " the path of the British Govern-
ment round the world has been strewn with lost oppor-
tunities and rejected addresses." I am not saying
anything so foolish as that the desire for material gain
has been absent from the motives which have impelled
the British race to the founding and development ot
its vast Oceanic dominion. But I do say that
mere greed of territory has not been the only
motive or even the most powerful and conspicuous
influence. We must not attach too much importance to
the wild statements of an enemy in the heat and anger
of a great war. But a chart was recently published
in Germany entitled the " Map of England's Land
Robberies." From this one gathers that England has
' stolen " in all 19,756,614 square kilometres of terri-
tory, with a population of 356,607,820 souls — an in-
stance of " petty larceny " on a large scale. I believe
we are not accused of stealing Australia, because we
did not take that from a European Power already in
possession. It would be inconvenient for the German
critic to mention that we stole that continent from the
aboriginal savage, for Germany has done a little in
that way herself. Anyhow, it was assuredly not greed
of territory that took Governor Phillip with his boat-
load of convicts to Botany Bay in January, 1788.
17
n
INTRODUCTORY
But it appears that England has stolen all the terri-
tories she conquered from other civilised nations. How
Germany herself stands in this respect we will not stay
to discuss. But let us examine for one moment this
imputation. It is true we conquered Canada from
France, the Cape Colony 2 from Holland, Jamaica and
Trinidad from Spain. Take Canada as a test. Why
did England attack and conquer Canada, then in partial
occupation by the French? Because France was then
the enemy, because England was fighting France for
her very existence and therefore had to strike her,
as France had to strike England, wherever she could
find her. As everyone who has read Seeley's "Expan-
sion of England" knows, the French wars were fought
not only in Europe, but in Canada, in India, along the
Mississippi and wherever the two belligerents came into
contact.
So in the great European War General Botha did
not invade German South-west Africa because England
or the South African Union coveted that territory. Nor
did General Smuts invade German East Africa for any
such reasons. If Germany had not thrown down the
gauntlet to the world she might have remained for ever
in indisturbed possession of her African and Pacific
colonies. Germany was now the enemy. England and
her Allies went to war with her to defend not only
freedom and civilisation but their own security and
existence. The}' had, therefore, to attack Germany
wherever they could find her. Germany has no right
to complain if she loses these colonies and the Allies
can scarcely be accused of stealing them. Remember-
1 The British title to the Cape of Good Hope is founded on
treaty, purchase and conquest.
18
INTRODUCTORY
ing, therefore, that the British dominions are the pro-
duct of a long and organic growth through the centuries
and that they are the result of a wide diversity af
motives and forces we may proceed to give some account
of their present characteristics.
In extent of territory the British Empire is not only
the greatest political system now existing in the world,
but the greatest whereof history holds record. Accord-
ing to Gibbon, the Roman Empire, when at its zenith,
that is at the time of the Antonines, comprised an area
of 1,600,000 square miles. The Dominion of Canada
alone covers a great deal more than twice that area.
According to a convenient and compendious description
the British Empire " includes, besides several free and
self-governing nations, a vast and populous empire in
India, islands in every sea, territory on every con-
tinent ; among its subjects, representatives of every race
on the face of the earth, and in its political institutions,
in the relations between government and governed,
nearly every mode known to man." The Britannic
world covers about a quarter of the earth's surface and
shelters about the same proportion of its population.
The British Empire is, indeed, in the words of the
comic song, " very fine and large." But the ordinary
Briton is not imposed upon by these figures. He
knows very well that bigness is not necessarily synony-
mous with strength. A thing may be overgrown and
unwieldy and thus not so strong as something else
which is smaller but more manageable and better organ-
ised. A very good example is the huge and unhandy
Spanish galleon which was no match for the lighter
vessels commanded by Drake and Hawkins. Britons,
19
INTRODUCTORY
MAP SHOWING THE PARTS OF THE EMPIRE THAT
THE TEMPERATE
20
*
INTRODUCTORY
LIE WITHIN THE TROPICS (DArfK SHADE) AND IN
ZONES (LIGHT SHADE).
21
INTRODUCTORY
therefore, do not boast much about the mere size and
extent and potential wealth of their inheritance. They
know that these things bring an added responsibility,
and that the possession of such vast estates needs to be
justified not only by adequate material use but by
moral and spiritual benefits conferred upon the world
at large.
Without dwelling any longer on big figures let us
consider a few other characteristics in which the British
system of states differs from others of which we know.
First and foremost I place the large proportion of the
British Empire which is situated in the temperate
regions. Some of my readers may be surprised to
learn that the temperate portions of the Empire are
about twice as extensive as the tropical. The opposite
idea seems to prevail. The size of India is to some
extent responsible for this, because it is forgotten that
a large part of India lies outside the Tropics. But the
fact is as I have stated it. The Empire includes in
the temperate zones territories twice as extensive as the
entire area of the United States and nearly thirty times
as large as the area of Germany in Europe.
Now the political results corresponding with this
fact are momentous. It determines the whole char-
acter and history of the British system. It means that
practically everywhere throughout this vast area con-
ditions prevail within which the Briton can live and
work and thrive as comfortably and successfully as in
his old island-home. It makes the British Empire an
aggregation to which the term " Empire " is not
strictly appropriate. England has not simply laid her
hand upon territories over the seas whose inhabitants
22
INTRODUCTORY
she governs as subject peoples in a state of dependance.
She has done this, and so far perhaps the word
" Empire " is applicable to her rule. But this is not
the distinguishing feature of the British system. That
is to be found rather in the fact that the English
people, including, of course, the Welshman and Irish-
man and the innumerable Scot, have " expanded" into
other lands over the ocean where, in conjunction with
Dutchmen in South Africa and Frenchmen in Canada,
they are building up new nations, European and, let
us hope, Christian in character, which some day will
rank among the most wealthy and powerful and popu-
lous communities in the world.
This is the tremendous difference between the over-
sea Empire of England and the oversea empires of other
modern states. The transmarine possessions of Ger-
many, France, 3 Italy, Belgium, Holland and Portugal
are almost entirely in the Torrid zone, where new white
communities, developing into nations, cannot be estab-
lished. It is impossible to overestimate this primary
distinction of the British system. Let me repeat.
That system, in its essential and most enduring aspect,
is a family or group of self-governing states and
nations, each working out its political and economic
destiny, but linked together by common blood and
tradition and owing allegiance to the Throne, the
symbol and expression of unity. The Empire has,
of course, another aspect, namely, those vast Tropical
dependencies which are not yet ripe, but we hope are in
3 The French North African Colonies are in some degree an
exception. They are not unsuitable for white settlement, and they
elect members tn the Chamber of Deputies.
23
INTRODUCTORY
many cases ripening for self-government, the responsi-
bility for whose order and welfare rests as yet upon
the shoulders of England alone.
Another primary characteristic of the British system,
distinguishing it from all the empires of antiquity
and several of to-day, is its geographical dispersion.
It is not like the old Roman Empire and the Russian
Empire of to-day spread along a continuous surface,
but is scattered all over the face of the planet, its
largest blocks of territory being separated from one
another and from the Empire centre by vast ocean
abysses. Here again the political results are profound.
Hence spring nearly all our great Empire problems.
It was a comparatively easy task to create the United
States of America. The State has advanced pari passu
with the advance of the pioneers into the wilderness.
So too Canada, with its vast unbroken territory, has
become a Dominion, Australia a Commonwealth, and
South Africa a Union. But it is a very different pro-
position to bring under one and the same constitutional
roof all these far-sundered communities, to build that
long-contemplated fabric of a Federated British
Empire. Sir Charles Lucas tells us that " the problem
of Empire is, in plain English, how to hold together
lands and peoples which are distant or diverse or
both. ,,
Mechanical science has done much to abolish space
and time. If England had been in closer and quicker
touch with her American colonies in the eighteenth
century, the disagreement would probably have been
composed and the secession avoided. Even in those
days there were suggestions by Pownall and others for
24
INTRODUCTORY
closer union between England and her daughter-states.
But space and time seemed quite prohibitive. Even
Burke met these proposals for an Oceanic Empire with
the argument that Nature was against the idea.
" Opposuit Natura," he said : "a great Flood stops
me." Since then the force of the argument has been
greatly qualified. It took as long in Burke's day to
travel from London to Edinburgh as it takes to-day
to travel from England to Canada. Still it is impos-
sible wholly to neutralise the effects of the " diaspora "
or dispersion of the Empire. It has been responsible
for the arrangement of the British system into nations
or semi-independent States with a sense of individu-
ality and a jealous insistence upon autonomous right
much stronger than those entertained by the states
or provinces under any existing federal system such
as the United States or the Dominion of Canada.
We may talk as we will about the " salt estranging
sea " being in the case of the British Empire a means
of swift and uninterrupted communication between the
component parts of the Empire rather than a source of
detachment and disintegration. We may dwell upon
the marvellous effects of steam and electricity. And
indeed these have been incalculable. For example, it
used to be said in the old faithless days that the danger-
point in Australia would arise when the home, or
British-born, element had become only a small minority
of the population. Let us see how this forecast has
fared. According to- the census of 1911 there were
4,455,005 white persons, wholly British, in Australia.
Of these 3,667,672 or 82 per cent, were Australian-
born. Over 30,000 were born in New Zealand and
25
INTRODUCTORY
only 590,722 saw the light first in the motherland.
, The " danger-point " has therefore been reached long
ago. But where is the danger? What part of the
Empire followed the drums more ardently and gener-
ously in the great war than Australia ? The improve-
ment of communications in all kinds has done a vast
deal to counteract the estranging and differentiating
effect of distance. I shall have something more to say
on a future page about the political results of scientific
advance. But no development of steam or electricity,
of aviation or " wireless " can wholly do away with the
meaning of the facts that Canada is three thousand,
South Africa six thousand, and Australia twelve thou-
sand miles from the heart and centre of the Empire.
This dispersion lies at the root of all our Empire pro-
blems and must be reckoned with in future constitu-
tional arrangements.
From dispersion follows diversity. It is a common-
place that every family of mankind finds its representa-
tive under the British flag, and that everything that
man can need for his food and his industry is or could
be produced within the Britannic bounds. To illustrate
this latter theme would be to add a survey of the tro-
pical productions of the Empire to that impressive
inventory of the resources of the self-governing
Dominions contained in the Final Report of the
Dominions Royal Commission. I suppose it is
literally true that the British world could be quite
self-sustaining in everything humanity requires for use
and comfort and luxury. In many important raw
materials it holds almost a monopoly. In a large
number it is capable of supplying not only its own
26
INTRODUCTORY
needs but the needs of the entire human race for
centuries to come.
I can think only of one or two articles, such as
nitrates and potash, in which the Britannic estate are
naturally deficient. Of these I shall have to speak in a
subsequent chapter. They are scarcely exceptions to
that " infinite variety " which is as marked a feature
of the British Empire as according to Shakespeare it
was also of Queen Cleopatra.
This is perhaps the place to lay down one funda-
mental fact with regaid to the British Empire. That
Empire, in its relation to Foreign Powers, is a unit or,
to use more professional language, a " simple inter-
national person." The meaning of that phrase may
be gathered from a passage in Professor Oppenheim's
" International Law " :
International persons are, as a rule, simple
sovereign states. In such single states there is
one central political authority as government
which represents the state within its borders as
well as without in the intercourse with other inter-
national persons. And a state remains a " simple
international person," although it may grant so
much external independence to outlying parts of
its territory that these parts become in a sense
states themselves. Great Britain is a simple inter-
national person, although the Dominion of Canada,
Newfoundland, the Commonwealth of Australia,
New Zealand and the Union of South Africa are
now states of their own, because Great Britain is
alone sovereign and represents exclusively the
British Empire within the family of nations.
27
INTRODUCTORY
The Professor also tells us that
Colonial states have no international position
whatever ; they are, from the standpoint of the law
of nations, nothing else than colonial portions of
the mother country, though they enjoy perfect
self-government and may therefore in a sense be
called states. The deciding factor is that their
governor, who has a veto, is appointed by the
mother country, and that the parliament of the
mother country could withdraw self-government
from its colonial states and legislate directly for
them.
It is true, the history of the Empire for many years
has been one long record of decentralisation, of trans-
ferring more and more to the Colonies and Dominions
the control of their own affairs. The Dominions have
developed a pretty strong sense of national individu-
ality. But, despite this process of delegation and dis-
persion, the Empire still remains in its foreign rela-
tions, which is the decisive test, a political unit.
This truth has been emphasized by many jurists
and political writers. Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, Pro-
fessor of the Science of Government in Harvard
University, writes :
The actual relation of the United Kingdom to
her self-governing colonies may not be easy to
classify in the terms ordinarily used by publicists.
Whether these colonies are dependencies or mem-
bers of a confederation, whether sovereignty is
really lodged in parliament or divided, there is no
doubt that as regards foreign nations the British
Empire is treated as a single Power and that Power
28 '
INTRODUCTORY
is England. Diplomats are appointed, negotia-
tions are conducted and treaties are made on the
advice of the English ministers. (" The Govern-
ment of England," vol. II., p. 405.)
Sir William Anson, whose book, the " Law and
Custom of the Constitution " is a highly authoritative
text-book, tells us that " the colonies, however com-
plete may be their general measure of self-government,
are a part of the British Empire and are dependent
upon it."
A highly respected English paper, the Westminster
Gazette, recently defined the status of the Dominions
within the Empire as that of " sovereign states owing
allegiance to the British Crown." There is a little
ambiguity in that phrase. One of the most important
incidents of sovereignty is that a state determines its
own relations with its neighbours, decides questions
of peace and war, makes treaties and so forth. If it is
meant that this should be the status of the Dominions,
while still " owing allegiance to the British Crown,"
the results will be rather curious. King George would
no longer be sovereign of the British Empire but King
of a number of independent states — King of Canada,
King of Australia, King of New Zealand, and as such
he might through his various sets of Ministers be
entering into mutually repugnant and contradictory
treaties. As King of one portion of the Empire he
might be at war with a foreign country and as King
of another at peace with it. Nay, in an extreme case
he might even be waging war against himself. You
cannot divide the personality of a monarch any more
29
INTRODUCTORY
than you can divide the sovereignty which the Crown
symbolises.
Or, to leave the King out of the question, it is clear
that when each of the Dominions has obtained the
control of its foreign relations the Empire as a unit
will have ceased to exist. The relations between its
parts will be simply those which exist between such
countries as England and Japan. It is true, the
Dominions are already consulted with regard to treaties
which affect their interests and are even empowered
to conduct or take part in the negotiations. But those
powers are still delegated by the Imperial Government,
and the ratification of any treaty with a foreign Power
rests with the King on the advice of his Ministers in
the United Kingdom. The Imperial Government
retains effective means of controlling the action of
Dominion Governments, however little such control
may have to be exercised.
The international unity of the British Empire is
fully recognised by foreign governments. " No foreign
Power," writes Dr. A. B. Keith, " dreams of approach-
ing a Dominion Government to demand redress or to
ask for reference to arbitration. It is, of course, always
open for a foreign Power through its consular represen-
tatives to make friendly requests to a Dominion, as for
example with regard to immigration matters, which
were dealt with in part direct between the Common-
wealth Government and the Japanese Consul-General
in Australia, but where the matter becomes in any
sense of the word a question of international right,
the foreign Power has recourse to the Imperial Govern-
ment. Thus, for instance, when the Vancouver riots
30
INTRODUCTORY
in September, 1907, resulted in damage to Japanese and
Chinese property, the formal request for redress was
made not direct to the Dominion, but to the Imperial
Government. So in 1905 and the following years,
when the Government of Newfoundland interfered with
rights claimed by the United States, the Government
of that country addressed its representations to the
Imperial Government ; and the cases could be cited
indefinitely." 1
It will be understood that the preservation of this
international status of the Empire is quite consistent
with reforms in the internal machinery. The present
S3 r stem under which the foreign relations of the
Dominions and their condition of peace or war are
determined by the Executive and Parlifment of a single
portion of the Empire cannot be maintained for ever.
But if the Empire is to subsist at all as a single political
entity the reform must lie in the direction of giving
the Dominions a share in determining this one and
undivided foreign policy of the Empire, in widening
the single Executive which decides these matters by
introducing members from the Dominions, and not in
the direction of giving each Dominion the control of
its own foreign relations and thus making it practi-
cally an independent State. It is possible that the
daughter-nations of the Empire may be contented for
some time to come with the present system, perhaps
modified by the right of giving advice and of being con-
sulted by the Imperial Government, until they are
sufficiently strong and well-developed to set up as
* Responsible Government in the Dominions. Vol. iii., pp. 1455-6.
31
INTRODUCTORY
" simple international persons " themselves, con-
trolling their own foreign relations in their own name
and on their own responsibility. We shall refer to
that subject later. Here it is sufficient to say that
when the Dominions thus assume the powers of treaty-
making and of peace-and war-making on their several
behalves the British Empire will have ceased to exist
as a single Power. England will no longer have the
right to expect help from her daughters in any hour
of need and peril, nor will she be under any obligation
to defend any of her former Dominions from attack
and invasion.
For one of the results of the present conditions and of
the " single personality '• of the Crown is that when
the King of England, advised by his responsible
Ministers, goes to war all his subjects in all parts of
the Empire go to war with him. This was strikingly
illustrated at the outbreak of the great European War.
Fighting was going on in Nyassaland, in the very heart
of the African Continent, almost before the first shots
had been fired in Europe. The whole Empire from the
British Isles down to Tristan da Cunha and the lone-
liest islet in the ocean wastes, belonging to the
British Crown, became at once belligerent. Never a
word was heard anywhere of any part of the Empire
standing aloof. Yet before the war this right of
remaining neutral in the case of England becoming
involved in war had often been discussed in the
Dominions. As far back as 1870 a Royal Commission
was appointed in Victoria, Australia, to consider
federal union, and this reported in favour of the
Australian colonies being accorded the treaty-making
32
INTRODUCTORY
power and the status of neutral powers under the
same crown as the United Kingdom. The section of
the Report 5 headed " Neutrality of the Colonies in
War," illustrates so curiously the two ideals of reform
already mentioned that two paragraphs are worth
quoting :
13. It has been proposed to establish a Council
of the Empire, whose advice must be taken before
war is declared. But this measure is so foreign
to the genius and traditions of the British Consti-
tution, and presupposes so large an abandonment
of the functions of the House of Commons, that we
dismiss it from consideration. There remains,
however, we think, more than one method by
which the anomaly of the present system may be
cured . . .
19. The Colony of Victoria possesses a separate
Parliament, Government and distinguishing flag ;
a separate naval and military establishment. All
the public appointments are made by the Local
Government. The only officer commissioned from
England who exercises authority within its limits
is the Queen's Representative ; and in the Ionian
islands, while they were admittedly a Sovereign
State, the Queen's Representative was appointed
in the same manner. The single function of a
Sovereign State, as understood in International
Law, which the colony does not exercise or possess,
is the power of contracting obligations with other
states. The want of the power alone distinguishes
• Pari. Pap. 1870. Sess. 2, ii., 247.
c 33
INTRODUCTORY
her position from that of states undoubtedly
sovereign.
These gentlemen did not say what the continued
allegiance to the British Crown would in fact mean
and in what positive sense Victoria would still be a
part of a British Empire when these concessions had
been made. But the Empire was not to be broken up
quite so easily as Messrs. Kerferd, G. Berry and Gavan
Duffy, signatories of this part of the Report, seemed
to imagine.
A similar suggestion of neutrality was made, it will
be recalled, in South Africa in 1899. The Prime
Minister of the Cape actually declared his intention,
when the Anglo-Boer War became imminent, of
" maintaining for the Colony the position of standing
apart and aloof from the struggle, both with regard to
its forces and with regard to its people." Subsequently ,
however, he admitted his mistake, and that " in case
of war between Her Majesty's Government and any
other State this Colony could not be neutral."
The suggestion was more recently and quite
explicitly revived by a statesman who had always been
distinguished for his imperial sympathies and regarded
as one of the best friends of closer union among the
states of the Empire. At the Imperial Defence Confer-
ence of 1909 Sir Wilfred Laurier declined to give any
assurance on the part of the Dominion Government
that in the event of war the Canadian vessels would
always be placed at the disposal of the British Admir-
alty. On November 29, 1910, in the House of
Commons at Ottawa he said : " Under present circum-
stances it is not advisable for Canada to mix in the
34
INTRODUCTORY
armaments of the Empire, but that we should stand
on our own policy of being masters in our own house,
of having a policy for our own purpose, and leaving to
the Canadian Government and to the Canadian people
to take part in these wars, in which to-day they have
no voice, only if they think fit to do so. This is the
policy we have presented."
It was evident at the Imperial Conference of 191 1
that Sir Wilfred Laurier had not re-considered his
views on this subject. In the debate on the Declara-
tion of London he intimated that while he desired
for Canada full liberty to make her own commercial
arrangements, he wished to leave the task of inter-
national negotiation in other matters to the British
Government alone, reserving to Canada to decide
whether she would take part in any war in which that
Government might become engaged. " In my humble
judgment," he said, " if you undertake to be consulted
and to lay down a wish that your advice should be pur-
sued as to the manner in which the war is to be carried
on, it implies of necessity that you should take part in
that war. . . . How are you to give advice and
insist on the manner in which war is to be carried on,
unless you are prepared to take the responsibility of
going into the war? . . . We have taken the posi-
tion in Canada that we do not think we are bound to
take part in every war, and that our fleet may not be
called upon in all cases, and therefore for my part I
think it is better under such circumstances to leave the
negotiations of these regulations as to the way in which
war is to be carried on to the chief partner of the
family, the one who has to bear the burden in part on
35
INTRODUCTORY
some occasions, and the whole on perhaps other
occasions."
The Canadian statesman, it will be noticed, does not
say " neutrality," but he apparently means it. So it
becomes important to know what neutrality involves.
It is not simply a passive state. It has its active
obligations to fulfil. Suppose England were at war
with any foreign Power and Canada decided to stand
aloof. If any English war-ship took refuge in a Cana-
dian port, the Canadian authorities would have to order
it away in twenty-four hours. It would not be allowed
to take in military stores or more than a limited amount
of fuel and provisions. Only a minimum of repairs
would be permitted and all useful information would be
refused. The neutral must forbid any recruiting in its
territories and prevent the land forces of any belligerent
from crossing its frontiers. One wonders what virtue
would be left in the political links between England and
Canada at the close of a war in which the Dominion
should thus have enforced the conditions of her own
neutrality against the mother country. Would the
sentimental bonds, of which we hear so much, still
subsist? The suggestion means, in principle and
result, separation, the establishment of the Dominion
of Canada as a sovereign independent state.
The outbreak of the great war showed how utterly
impracticable were all such fantastic aspirations. Can
we imagine any portion of the Empire remaining
neutral during that struggle or the enemies of the
Empire acknowledging and respecting such neutrality?
The only sound and legitimate view on this subject is
36
INTRODUCTORY
stated by the well-known Cambridge Professor, Dr.
Lawrence, in these words :
It may very likely happen that actual military
and naval operations never approach large parts
of the Empire. But the whole body politic is
nevertheless belligerent. Parts of it can no more
remain neutral than parts of my body can stay at
home if I decide to go for a walk. Can an instance
be found in the whole course of our history of any
colony of the British Crown being regarded as
neutral by friend or foe when the Empire was at
war? Whatever its form of government, it fol-
lowed the fortunes of the great body politic tc
which it belonged. (" King's College Lectures on
Colonial Problems," pp. 17-18.)
Elsewhere Dr. Lawrence points out that the consti-
tutions of Dominion, Commonwealth and Union are
technically grants from the central authority of the
Empire, conferring large privileges of self-government
on the most important and advanced of its component
parts. But since no control of foreign affairs is con-
veyed, no new international state is created, though
for domestic purposes something little short of state-
hood is conferred.
Despite, therefore, the internal disarray of the
Empire and the almost complete autonomy conferred
upon the great Dominions, the British Empire is still
a single Power, just as Sweden or Spain or the United
States are single Powers. It consists ultimately of one
people and one Crown. There is a sovereign authority
supreme not only in the sphere of foreign policy and
the external relations of the whole body politic, but also
37
INTRODUCTORY
in internal affairs, however seldom it may there be
brought into operation. It is, indeed, desirable that the
entire Empire should as far as possible take part in
the exercise of this sovereign authority. The ideal
system for such a purpose would be a formal re-consti-
tution of the British world on federal principles. We
are accustomed to speak of the peoples of the great
Dominions as new nations, meaning thereby that they
have acquired a self-conscious individuality and a senti-
ment of local patriotism. In this sense the term is
quite consistent with the wider loyalty which should be
common to all subjects of the King. " My shirt is
nearer to me than my coat," said the Swiss champion
of State rights, but that was no reason why he should
discard his outer garment.
A Dominion or Dependency of the Crown cannot
claim international status and the right to determine
its own foreign relations and make its own independent
treaties and yet remain a member of the Britannic
Commonwealth. The Dominions might indeed decide
to set up as independent states, and it is not certain
that any power would or could be mobilised to prevent
them. But the signs of the times point to a different
destiny, to the maintenance of the integrity of the
Empire and the freer and fuller association of all its
parts in the government of the whole on the high plane
of common interests and obligations.
38
CHAPTER II
POPULATION
" Men, not walls, make a city " (Thucydides).
" Men, not wastes and solitudes, make an empire."
One of the primary problems before the British race
is how to deal with the immense task of peopling and
developing the territories it has inherited and acquired,
and how to justify to the world its dominion over these
vast potential resources. We cannot hope to defend
and develop this great estate without a sufficient supply
of man-power. And we cannot make and keep
the Empire British in deed as in name without an
adequate supply of the British stock to leaven the ever-
growing masses of our Empire populations. We shall
always keep the door open to the desirable immigrant
from foreign lands, and each diverse race within the
British borders will always enjoy the fullest right and
opportunity of self-development. 1 But still we wish to
keep the Empire British in spirit. We wish it to
1 Let us never forget that, in the words of General
Smuts, the British Empire " does not stand for unity, standardisa-
tion, or assimilation or denationalisation." A rigid uniformity is
the very negation of the genius of our Empire. Every Briton fully
endorses the General's claim that " even nations who have fought
against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests,
their language, their religions, and all their cultural interests are
as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the
children of your household and your own blood." (Speech : May 15,
39
POPULATION
embody what we believe to be the characteristic British
ideas of justice and tolerance and freedom. We do not
wish to produce a system of uniformity in the British
Commonwealth or to impose our own culture and ideas
upon other races. But we desire the British tradition
to be fully represented in the life and growth of the
great body politic and to rest upon as wide a basis as
possible of British population. We desire British ideas
to prevail not by force or coercion, but by their intrinsic
power of attraction. Just as there must be some centre
of unity and sovereignty, so there must be a prevailing
spirit moulding almost insensibly the growth and
character of our institutions and providing a principle
of union among the most diverse human types which
shall be stronger and more abiding than all material
bonds. If this is to be, we must conserve and propagate
the British stock and provide for its adequate distribu-
tion throughout the Empire.
Let us see, briefly and roughly, how the inhabitants
of the British Empire are composed. The total present
population is variously estimated. We shall be safe,
however, in placing it at well over 420,000,000. Of
these some 315,000,000 live in India, and to these we
must add six or seven millions more British subjects on
the continent of Asia. Our African and West Indian
possessions will contain at least 45,000,000 blacks. We
thus find that at least 360,000,000 out of a total popu-
lation of, roughly, 420,000,000 are coloured subject
peoples, none of whom are, or can as yet be made,
wholly responsible for their own government and
destiny. There remain the white people of the Empire,
reckoned roughly at 60,000,000, upon whom falls,
40
POPULATION
though as yet very unequally, the burden of Imperial
responsibility and administration.
But we must analyse these sixty million white skins,
washed or unwashed, a little further. About 45,000,000
of these are domiciled in the United Kingdom, a small
area of 120,600 square miles. The remaining
15,000,000 are dispersed over the vast territories of
the outer Empire, mainly in the temperate zones,
comprising an area of, roughly, 8,000,000 square
miles. This, it will be seen, is something less than
two to the square mile. But we must distinguish still
further. These 15,000,000 whites are not all of the
British stock. Some two-and-three-quarter millions
are French-Canadian, who, though thoroughly loyal to
the flag, are in race, law, language and religion French
and not British. Then there are over half a million
South African Dutchmen, whose services to the Empire
during the great war can scarcely be over-estimated.
From the point of view of the effective occupation
of these great areas of ours in temperate regions, we
must admit that the existing situation is far from
satisfactory. We shall have more to say on this subject
in a subsequent chapter. But what about the prospect
of our placing in the Empire a sufficient supply of
the British stock to make and keep the Empire
British ? Considering the immensity of these temper-
ate areas, the meagre British population we have as yet
managed to settle within them, the number all told
of the British now existing in the world, the more
rapid growth of other nations and their increasing need
of outlets for their surplus population — can we hope
ever to fulfil these tremendous obligations, or must we
4i
POPULATION
confess that the British race, to use a colloquial
expression, has " bitten off more than it can chew "?
Within the last fifteen or twenty years there has
been a rapidly quickening sense of these obligations
throughout the British world. The Dominions them-
selves have awakened to the truth that not only theit
prosperity but their very existence depends upon the
increase of their people and the development of their
incalculable resources. They realise, especially per-
haps Australia, that if they do not care to consume
the provisions in the manger, there are herbivorous
animals outside who are ready and anxious to do so.
England herself has begun to appreciate something of
the meaning and value of the broader Englands over
the water. The British Empire, wrote Lord Durham,
is " the rightful patrimony of the English people, the
ample appanage which God and Nature have set aside
in the new world for those whose lot has assigned them
an insufficient portion in the old " — and this is in a
sense still true though England has long ago rightly
transferred to the Dominions the ownership of their
vacant lands.
Only within the last ten years has any attempt been
made to direct the stream of emigration from these
islands to the oversea Dominions. It was not earlier
than 1905 that the great rush to the prairies, the
middle section of Canada, set in. A great and gratify-
ing change has since been made in the destination of
our island emigrants. In 1880 three times as many
people were leaving these shores for the United States
as went out to British North America, Australasia and
South Africa taken together. By 191 2 the proportion
42
POPULATION
was almost exactly reversed, three times as many going
to these British dominions as to the United States. The
following table gives the figures for the whole Empire
and for all foreign countries : —
Emigrants from the United Kingdom.
Year. To the Empire. To Foreign Countries.
1902 92,223 ... H3,439
1903 130,952 ••• 128,998
1912 331,063 ... 136,603
1913 321,504 ••• 148,087
It will be seen that the proportion going to the Empire
advanced from about 44 per cent, in 1902 to about 68
per cent, in 1913. I can imagine no more vivid illus-
tration than this of the rapidly growing appreciation
during recent j-ears of our imperial interests and
obligations. There is no question about the quantity
of the inflow of population into the Dominions. We
have to ask ourselves rather what are the quality and
the origin of the " new chums," and how Canada
especially is contriving to assimilate these additions to
her population that come otherwise than on the wings
of the stork.
Let us look back for a moment along the course of
Canadian history. Half a century ago or more the
Federated Dominion of Canada consisted of British
provinceson the Atlantic seaboard and the St. Lawrence
River (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec)
and, three thousand miles away, another British pro-
vince which had upheld the flag for many years on the
Pacific slope and had been induced to join the
43
POPULATION
Dominion by the promise of a trans-continental line
linking East and West. It was a splendid feat of
imaginative and prescient statesmanship by which the
Canadian leaders of those times " leapt the wilderness,"
three thousand miles wide, between Ontario and
British Columbia and laid down the shining parallels
to link the two oceans and to make possible a united
Canada. We shall have more to say on this subject in
a future chapter. Here I may add that another indis-
pensable influence in the upbuilding of a Canadian
national sentiment was the tariff, establishing free
trade all along this immense line. Goods could thus
travel from one seaboard of Canada to the other free
of duty, while they had to pay the full duty on crossing
the American border. All this was prophetic work,
achieved long before the latter-day inflow of settlers
into the prairie region. The railways and the tariff
were essential preliminaries to the making of what we
call to-day the Canadian nation.
Canada is still divided into three distinct sections —
the Eastern or governmental portion, well-settled, with
a fairly long history behind it and, even in the French-
Canadian province, an established British tradition ;
the Pacific slope beyond the Rockies, where
British Columbia, British in fact as in name, holds the
gateway of the West ; and between these two the middle
or prairie region, the illimitable cornlands, whose
human and political history, despite an annual produc-
tion of 200,000,000 bushels of wheat, is only just
beginning. From a political point of view this last is
the speculative and dubious section of the long line.
East and West the British tradition and sentiment are
44
POPULATION
firmly established. How are these to take root and
flourish in this vast middle region which is filling up
at a rapid rate with a population drawn from almost
every human tribe on the face of the earth?
Let us take the figures of immigration into Canada
for the year 1913. The new comers numbered in all
418,870, unquestionably the largest " dump " of popu-
lation which a state with seven and a half million
people was ever expected to assimilate. But it is more
important still to notice the composition of this great
invading army which almost recalls the migration of
Goths and Vandals in the days of the decline rather
than of the up-building of a great world-empire. Of
the 418,870 only 156,984 came from the home of the
British stock, 115,751 crossed the frontier from the
United States and 146,135 were a highly hetero-
geneous contingent from European countries. Or let
us take the figures of the entire immigration into
Canada between July 1, 1900, and March 31, 1913 : —
Total — 2,521,144.
From the United Kingdom ... 973,730
From the United States ... 891,129
From continental Europe ... 656,285
It will be noticed that not much more than one-third
came from the original seed-plot of the British
character and tradition, that nearly two-thirds were
recruited from foreign countries. These are the
people for whom the Upper Canada Bible Society prints
the Scriptures in seventy different languages.
It will be noticed, also, that more than a half of
these have come northwards across the political
45
POPULATION
boundary between the Dominion and Republic. Some
of these immigrants are even the descendants of men
who some fifty years ago migrated in the reverse
direction. This is. an important consideration. These
new-comers of course are English-speaking, and it is
impossible to estimate the unifying effect of a common
language. " So sensible were the Romans of the
influence of language over national manners," writes
Gibbon, " that it was their most serious care to extend,
with the progress of their arms, the use of the Latin
tongue." " The exclusive use of Latin," he observes,
" was inflexibly maintained in the administration of
civil as well as military government." Moreover, the
American immigrant shares with the native-born
English stock a long literary and historic tradition.
He is accustomed to the principles of English Common
Law, and, what is no less important, he will have no
difficulty in finding or making in his new country a
religious home in some one of those many Protestant
denominations which are as widely dispersed as the
English-speaking race. There is assuredly
no foreign nation whose members we ought
to welcome more heartily to the British
dominions and to British subjecthood than
the United States of America. Yet we must not
forget that in a political sense these too are foreigners,
that they bring with them into the Dominion no
familiarity with English political institutions and no
inherited loyalty to the British Crown. They have all
to be rigged out as good Canadians (not simply as
good Western Canadians) and as good Britons.
Unless every effort be made, fiscal, social and
46
POPULATION
political, to impress upon the American immigrants a
sense of their new allegiance, the inflow of so large a
number of these pioneers across the middle section
of the long Canadian line, will tend to strengthen
that North and South gravitation which the railway
and the fiscal policy of the Dominion have been ex-
pressly designed to counteract. The American settler
in the Central provinces looks into the country he has
left across a near and invisible frontier. He is far
removed by barriers ph3'sical and substantial enough
from the headquarters of British government and
tradition in East and West. Still further eastwards
three thousand miles more of ocean separate him from
the administrative centre of the political system to
which he now belongs. Moreover the "annexationist"
idea never quite disappears. On both sides of the 49th
parallel there are always people to whom it seems
inevitable and desirable that Canada and the United
States should form one great continental power. 1
am not discussing that question, but simply stating
the problem which lies before Canada if she is to
continue along the lines of policy which, with the
approval of the vast majority of her people, she has
hitherto pursued.
Briefly the problem is this — how is Canada to
assimilate, that is, make loyal Canadian and British
citizens of these myriads of foreign nationals who
must help to fill up her waste places if they are to be
filled up at all ? Is she destined to be undone by the
very auxiliaries she calls in to help her in the task of
state-building? Canadian statesmen are fully alive
to the magnitude of this problem. Consider the fol-
47
POPULATION
lowing words of Mr. George Foster, Minister of Trade
and Commerce in the Dominion :
Within the Empire, containing 400,000,000
people, there are only 65,000,000 (rather an over-
estimate) of the white race, 45,000,000 in the
United Kingdom and the rest in the oversea
dominions. If the Empire is to remain a British
Empire and its civilisation to remain British, the
British stock must be increased rather than dimin-
ished, because other stock is flowing into the
vacant spaces of the Empire. You have an idea
that the United States, for example, is absorbing
a lot of people from outside, and that to assimilate
them is a great task. But the United States has
ninety millions of people. It receives for assimi-
lation one million yearly. It has ninety-two
people to mother and father each new-comer.
Take Canada. This year (1912) Canada will
perhaps find 500,000 people coming in from
abroad. Our population is only eight million.
Canada, therefore, has only sixteen people to
father and assimilate each new-comer. The prob-
lem, I say, is to keep the British stock dominant.
You can do it only in two ways — by assimilation,
or by actual injection of new stock.
We have good reason to believe in the assimilative
powers of the British race and British institutions.
We may have faith in all kinds of unifying and recon-
ciling influences. But these agencies must have a
chance. They cannot succeed without the presence
and adequate supply of British men and women to set
them in motion. Where are these to come from?
48
POPULATION
For we must remember that the Canadian, vast and
imperative as it is, is perhaps not the most urgent
problem of settlement within the Empire. The need
of Australia, perhaps of South Africa also, is even
greater. The island continent of Australia, more than
three million square miles in extent, not, as was long
assumed, mostly a waterless and sterile wilderness
with a narrow fertile coastal strip, but a great and
resourceful Empire in itself capable of holding at the
least ioo million people, has to-day just about
5 million. The wonder is that this great continent,
with its tempting tropical frontage and its charms of
landscape and climate, should have been left open for
European settlement at all. A look at the map shows
that Australia and New Zealand are simply extensions
southwards of the eastern or Pacific coast of Asia.
Their name, Australasia, exactly defines their posi-
tion. Looming upon the north there are some 500
millions of Malays, Javanese, Chinese, Japanese,
rapidly outgrowing their boundaries. The wonder is,
I say, that this pleasant and fertile land was not
painted brown or yellow long before it appeared as a
half mythical Terra Australis on Frobisher's map of
the 1 6th century or was visited by Torres and Tasman
and Cook. Nothing could illustrate more vividly the
deficiency of the pioneering instinct in these Oriental
peoples.
Our failure after 130 years' possession of Australia
to touch more than the fringe of the great task of
colonisation and development leaves us to-day with
one of the most serious weaknesses in our imperial
position. Think of the swarming hordes of Chinese,
49
n
POPULATION
the fifty millions of Japanese, the populous archipela-
goes to the north of Torres Straits. Even the island
of Java supports thirty million people and Australia
is as large as sixty Javas. Yet meantime the Northern
Territory, the inviting portal of the Australian conti-
nent, comprising in itself some half million square
miles, scarcely contains the white population that
would fill a small English village. This failure to
justify to any approximate degree our possession of
these huge areas constitutes a great present danger
which can only increase with the progressive awaken-
ing and modernisation of the East. The vanguard of
civilisation and commerce which passed from the Meso-
potamian rivers to the Mediterranean and from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic is about to sweep still
further westward by the shining waterway now open
through the narrow lands of the American isthmus.
The very meagre population we have managed as yet to
settle in our great territories that border upon that
ocean is an insufficient basis for the influence that
should be ours in those regions.
Nowhere is the need for development and popula-
tion greater than in Australia. That country is still
without railway connection between south and north
and east and west. From a strategical point of view
alone this is a serious matter. Happily the Austra-
lian people are full of courage and enterprise, and full}'
alive to their duties and responsibilities. These two
trans-continental railways are now in course of con-
struction, 3 and Australia has entered the emigrant
2 The West and East connection is almost completed
5°
POPULATION
market of this country with characteristic vigour.
This revival has been quickly manifest in the emigra-
tion statistics. In 1S95 ou ^y IO >567 people left this
country for Australia. In 1907 the figure was still
only 15,139. But in 191 1 it suddenly mounted to
80,770, and in 1912 stood at 96,800. Or, to put it in
another way, Australia's net gain by immigration dur-
ing the first year after federation (1901) was only
2,059. In 191 2 it was over 80,000.
But we have not by any means exhausted the calls
of the Empire upon the British breed. South Africa
has her own special and urgent requirements. With a
native population six or seven times as large as the
white, the need of increasing the latter scarcely re-
quires any demonstration. A great deal of South Africa
is no doubt unsuited for that closer settlement and in-
tensive agriculture which alone secure a large and
growing population. But much is so suited and a
general process of breaking up the large individual
farms and estates will have to be carried out. Rhodesia
set an excellent example to the Union before the
war in the Chartered Company's new scheme of land
settlement. She has also set apart half a million acres
to find homes for the disbanded soldiers and sailors of
the Empire.
Many other demands upon our home population are
certain to be made in the future. For example, there
are the highlands of the British East African Protecto-
rate, where the landscape is so strange]}' reminiscent
of the home country and the climate is " the most per-
fect expression of all that is meant by the word tempe-
rate." Here a good two million British people might
51
POPULATION
find healthy and prosperous homes, and for political
and administrative reasons this is greatly to be
desired.
One of the most important tasks of statesmanship
in the future must be to create new wealth and to
develop the latent resources of the Empire. The only
way to do this is to wed the labourer to the land. That
any able-bodied subject of the British Commonwealth
should during the next century or two be workless and
wageless should be a crime and an absurdity. Even
now we are only awakening to a sense of these elemen-
tary facts and duties. The British Empire occupies
about one quarter of the land surface of our terraqueous
globe, and yet the white population planted upon the
soil and engaged in agricultural pursuits is, men,
women, and children all counted, only 13,400,000.
Those are all the white persons living on and by the
land in the United Kingdom and the Dominions over
the seas. Meantime the rural population of Germany,
whose share of the world is not one-tenth of England's,
has 20 million people on the land, while France has
iS millions out of a population of 36 millions.
The problem, we may almost say, concerns primarily
the United Kingdom. A flourishing agriculture in these
islands will mean not only a less dependence on over-
sea supplies of food and a consequently stronger defen-
sive position, but also a larger country population of
which the surplus will be available for migration to
the broader acres in the new lands of the Empire.
Among the many lessons of the great war it taught us
none so clearly and forcibly as this — that we cannot
afford in these islands to be so dependent as we have
52
POPULATION
been on sea-borne supplies of the simplest necessities
of life. We have learnt that we shall hold our liber-
ties just so long as we are able to feed our people. Let
us consider that if the submarine attacks on our long
lanes of sea-transit had been just a little more effec-
tive, we might have been reduced to submission,
despite the size and spirit of our armies. It is intoler-
able that v\-e should ever again depend on importation
for about four-fifths of the wheat and three-quarters
of all the food we islanders require.
After a half century's devastation of our home
ploughlands, of depopulation of our English shires and
villages, we are, let us hope, beginning to re-colonise
England. We have done something in the past in the
way of developing the small holding, but the work has
been scrappy and haphazard. We have known little
about the sound principles of land-settlement, whereas
the Dominions have learnt much through many years
of study and practical experience. For a long time
past the Dominions have been striving to make settle-
ment on the land attractive. They have provided for
the advance of capital to the settlers and for expert
advice and guidance for those who are unskilled in
land cultivation. They have encouraged co-operation
and have arranged for the new settlers to be placed
in groups so that they shall not fail through isolation
and loneliness but enjoy the social and material advan-
tages of community life.
There are many differences between old and new
countries, but these are the conditions of success in
both. The scientific re-colonisation of the United
Kingdom has become an economic, social and defen-
53
POPULATION
sive necessity. Our agricultural population had been
shrinking until it had become too scant for the safety
and well-being of the nation. We must breed more
men and women in our country districts, and we must
again have an abundant rural population, the surplus
of which should go to people and cultivate British land
over the seas.
It is unthinkable that we should ever fall back into
the old habit of laisser jaire with regard to these ques-
tions of migration and population. We shall in future
conserve our manhood in order that we may be able to
utilise our advantages and justify our vast dominion
over palm and pine. It has been suggested that emigra-
tion from this country to foreign lands should be
made illegal. That is not an English method. We
must attain the same object by making the conditions
of land settlement under the British flag so attractive
that there will be no inducement for the migrant to
alight elsewhere. But the claims of our English agri-
culture are first and foremost. There are three chief
means by which we may increase our country-bred
people. Firstly, we must reform our educational
system so that an increasing number of each genera-
tion may be inclined and qualified to take up a career
on the land ; secondly, we must revive the old tradi-
tion of " Merrie England," making country life and
pursuits more attractive ; and thirdly, the Home Gov-
ernment must develop land settlement on prescribed
and scientific lines.
We shall have more to say about Empire resources
in a future chapter. But meantime let us not forget
that England also is a portion of the Empire and that
54
POPULATION
there is still a great scope for extending the produc-
tivity of these islands. We might, for example, grow
all the sugar in these islands which we have been
importing in vast quantities from the Central Empires
of Europe, and reap enormous benefits, social and
economic, from this splendid industry. The prosperity
and greater self-dependence of the United Kingdom
are necessary to the welfare and security of the Empire
as a whole.
55
CHAPTER III
RACE.
Haec est in gremium victos quae sola recepit,
Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit
Matris, non dominae ritu : civesque vocavit
Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.
(Claudian De Cons. Stilich. A.D. 400. 150-153.)
She alone has clasped the conquered to her bosom and has made
men to be one household with one name, after the fashion of a
mother rather than an empress ; and has called her vassals citizens
and has linked together far distant regions with a bond of love.
It has often been noticed that the word " Empire '
in its common signification applies to only one part
of the British system. Great is the force of vocables,
and the words " Empire " and " Imperialism " have
been perhaps responsible for more needless antagonisms
and confusions of counsel than any other terms in our
political lexicon. Of late years there has been some
improvement in our political nomenclature. We do
not talk nowada3^s about " India and the Colonies '
as if that were the true principle of distinction. We
know that the dividing line runs between the autono-
mous states of the Empire on one side and the Crown
Colonies in their various stages of development on the
other. In fact, we have begun, in deference to the
susceptibilities of the self-governing states to restrict
the word " colony " to the tropical possessions and to
speak of the great self-governing states as " Domin-
ions." This more accurate distinction between the
56
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self-governing Dominions and the tropical subject
possessions of the Crown is now recognised in
the Colonial Office, which is divided into two corres-
ponding departments.
To give an account of the peoples that inhabit the
Empire would be to describe the human race. Every
tribe and family of men under the sun finds its repre-
sentatives under the British flag. There are a few
facts, however, which should be especially noticed. In
the first place, the distinction between the temperate
and tropical regions of the Empire does not exactly
correspond with that between white and coloured
settlement. Side by side with and interspersed among
the white people of temperate South Africa is a vast
native population, negro in type, which flourishes
there quite as well as the whites and increases in num-
bers rather more rapidly. On the other hand, there
are tropical regions which, owing to their altitude
above sea-level, will probably prove well suited for
white settlement. The whole of Southern Rhodesia
is in the Tropics, but a great part of the country is
3,500 feet and more above the sea-level, and there
seems to be no reason why white people should not
live and work there in perfect health. The demon-
stration is indeed not yet complete. We cannot say
how far altitude corrects the influences of a vertical
sun or whether the second and subsequent generations
of the white settlers will not show a gradual deteriora-
tion.
The same remarks apply to the wonderful highland
country in the back country of British South Africa.
57
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Perhaps the most interesting and fateful problem of
the kind relates to the Northern Territory of Australia
to which I have already referred and of which
I shall have more to say in the next chapter.
Though well within the Tropics, the " Territory,"
even in the coastal zone, is not strictly tropical in
character, being free from the deadly and distinctive
characteristic of jungle. The question with regard to
that country is of the greatest importance, because on
the answer depends the ideal of a " white Australia '
and the whole future history of the Continent.
On the whole we may say that the colder parts of
the earth are much more habitable by the coloured
races than are the tropical by the white. The British
population in India, mostly official and military in
status, can never be other than exotic there. "India,"
as Sir Arthur Lawley has said, " has in her climate
a protection more permanent and more effective against
social invasion than any act of alien immigration could
ever afford her." We must think of this when we
come to discuss the Asiatic question in the colonies.
It is true that much may be done in the future to
make the torrid zone more habitable by European
people. The great medical discoveries with regard to
the transmission and method of treatment of yellow
fever and malaria will help enormously in the work of
tropical sanitation. At Panama we have an object-
lesson in what can be done in this direction. But we
must remember that Surgeon-General Gorgas enjoyed
advantages which are not likely to be repeated on a
large scale. He had lavish financial resources at his
disposal, and the Canal Commission had practically
58
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unlimited powers in the zone forty miles long and ten
miles wide running across the narrowlands. It could
devise and enforce whatever regulations it pleased.
We must not, therefore, expect too much from the
Panama precedent. Much may be done to lessen the
virulence of tropical diseases, but he would be a san-
guine person who expected that the tropics in general
could ever be settled by white people without a certain
and progressive deterioration in character and
physique.
Another fact to notice is that the white population
of the self-governing colonies is not altogether, though
it is predominatingly, British in strain. At least half
the white settlers in South Africa are Dutch, and there
are two and a half million French in Canada. There is
no evidence of any extensive fusion between the two
leading white races in Canada. Unlike the Boers in
South Africa, the French Canadians live, broadly
speaking, in an enclave of their own and constitute a
province in themselves. Boer and Briton, despite their
unfortunate difference in the past, are much more
nearly akin than British and French and much more
likely to coalesce by intermarriage and other social
influences.
It is a fact of some importance, too, that the coloured
and subject peoples of the Empire have greatly in-
creased their proportion to the white in recent years,
largely owing to fresh annexations. This increase is
likely to continue from other causes. Sanitary science,
humanitarian influences and the Pax Britannica will
all tend in this direction. We rightly regard it as a
part of our Imperial vocation to protect the life and
59
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health of our subject peoples by every means in our
power. It is said that 10,000,000 people died in
Bengal in the great famine of 1769. The barbarities
of Dervish rule reduced the population of the Soudan
in quite recent times from 8,500,000 to 2,000,000.
Lord Cromer has told us that while the policy of pre-
serving and prolonging human life — even useless
human life — is the only policy worthy of a civilised
nation, it has in some Indian provinces produced a
highly congested population and thus intensified the
struggle for life of the survivors. Here one need only
remark that our sanitary and humanitarian efforts and
our imposition of peace and a higher regard for human
life will tend to increase the proportion of the coloured
to the white populations of the Empire, and perhaps
to complicate still further its facial problems.
Despite the overlappings just mentioned, we may
say broadly that the British Empire is divided into
territories which are suitable and, as we think, designed
for European settlement, and territories where the
coloured man, black, yellow or brown, can alone live
in health and comfort and efficiency. There is little
likelihood that the white man will ever compete for
the actual occupation of India and other tropical colo-
nies and protectorates, even where there is vacant
room. But there is and has been for many years a
tendency for the coloured inhabitants of the tropical
colonies to overflow into regions where the white man
can make his permanent home and where he is build-
ing up new states on civilised and European founda-
tions. Here we touch a problem which involves the
whole question of the relations between the white and
60
RACE
coloured races under the Flag. The immediate pro-
blem, however, affects Indian people only, for the
negro races are not migrating in the same way into
European communities and, moreover, they do not
compete with the white man on the same economic
plane, as do the Indian immigrants.
There is no doubt about the ideal settlement of this
question. We should all like, if it were possible, to
throw the Empire open without let or hindrance to all
its subjects, without regard to race or colour or creed.
We should like every British subject to feel himself
at home and in his own country, whether he is in
Calcutta, or Cape Town, or Sydney or Vancouver.
This was the ideal which the Roman Empire seems
fairly to have realised. Everybody remembers the
oft-quoted words of the Roman poet, Claudian, in his
splendid rhapsody on the power and glory of Rome.
' Hers," he writes, ' is that large loyalty to which
we owe it that the stranger walks in a strange land as
if it were his own ; that men can change their homes ;
that it is a holiday affair to visit Thule and to explore
remote regions at which we should once have shud-
dered ; that we drink at will of the waters of Rhone
and Orontes ; that we are all one people." * And a
little later a Spanish priest, Orosius, the Christian
apologist, who at St. Augustine's request wrote a
supplement to the " City of God," and can scarcely
have been expected to have much loyalty for a secular
Empire which had long persecuted Christianity, pays
a similar tribute to the freedom which prevailed under
1 Claudian, De Consulatii Stilichonis (A.D. 400).
6l
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the world-wide Romania of his days. " Everywhere,"
he exclaims, " is my fatherland, my law and my reli-
gion." " Such was the Roman achievement, but Rome
had no such Imperial problem to face as that which
confronts England in her 350 millions of subject races
for whose welfare and government she is directly
responsible.
Still the Roman ideal was for a long time confessedly
our own. When in the middle of last century we
brought the Indian Peninsula under the sovereignty of
the British Crown, the Imperial Government expressly
pledged itself to make no distinction in law either in
favour of or against any race or colour. When Sir
George Napier, Governor of Cape Colony, annexed
Natal in 1843, he issued a preliminary proclamation in
which he declared " that there shall not be in the eye
of the law any distinction or qualification whatever
founded on mere difference of colour, origin, language
or creed, but that the protection of the law in letter
and substance shall be extended impartially to all."
There can be no question about the meaning of these
pledges. It is not surprising that they should have
been invoked by the leaders of Indian opinion when
protesting against the very real disabilities inflicted
on their fellow-countrymen on those very grounds
which were repudiated by the Imperial Power. " Dis-
tinctions and qualifications " have been deliberately
made in Canada, Australasia and South Africa on
" difference of colour, origin, language and creed."
Australia and New Zealand have imposed a severe
2 " Ubique patria, ubique lex et religio mea est." Paulus
Orosius, Historiae Adversum Paganos. Bk. V. 2.
62
RACE
educational test which effectually closes the door to the
Indian immigrant. Canada has excluded Indians by
insisting that all immigrants shall come by through
ticket on continuous journey from their country
of origin, a provision which positively favours the
Japanese as against the Hindoo. Canada has also
insisted that each Asiatic new arrival must bring ^40
with him. South Africa has shut the door sans
plnase on any fresh immigration from India, with the
important proviso that one lawful wife and the minor
children of any domiciled Indian who has not already
a wife in South Africa shall have the right of entry.
Also the Union Government has promised to admit by
special permit as many as twelve educated Indians
each year.
It is not necessary to review the history of this
very acute and dangerous controversy in its South
African aspect. The conditions there are exceptional.
" We in South Africa," said General Smuts at the
War Conference, " are not a homogeneous popula-
tion. We are a white minority on a black continent,
and the settlers in South Africa have for many years
been actuated by the fear that to open the door to
another non-white race would make the position of the
few whites in South Africa very dangerous indeed."
It is an economic as well as a purely racial question.
The Hindoo competes with the white man in a way
not possible to the Kaffir. He becomes a shopkeeper
and small trader. Being able to live on a few pence a
day ; he thus cuts out his white neighbour and de-
presses the whole standard of life and comfort. But
the racial and social question is not absent. It is
63
RACE
impossible to segregate completely the European popu-
lation from the coloured man whether he be a primitive
Kaffir or a free Indian immigrant. Yet the admixture
of very diverse races is not desirable. The half-caste
generally reproduces the vices rather than the virtues
of his parentage. In the face of these considerations
one cannot den}^ to a province like Natal, which is
governed b}^ white men and where white men can live
and work and multiply, the right to defend the purity
of the white stock and to avoid the evils of an irregular
miscegenation.
Now this does not necessarily imply any claim of
superiority over the Indian, the scion of an ancient
civilisation, on the part of the white European. It in-
volves simply the recognition of a difference. Here is
what Sir Robert Borden had to say on the subject
at the War Conference : " Mr. Chamberlain has stated
in a sentence the ideal and the aspiration of the self-
governing Dominions with regard to their present
social order and the type of civilisation which they are
desirous of building up. It must not be understood
that because of that ideal and because of that aspira-
tion they desire to cast the slightest reflection on other
ideals of civilisation which are of a more ancient order,
and which may, and undoubtedly do, possess certain
advantages and merits to which we cannot altogether
lay the same claim. But there is the ideal and the
aspiration to which I have alluded. Of course it is
manifest that public opinion in all the Dominions
of the Empire must be taken into account, because it
would be idle for any government to undertake what
public opinion would not in the end sanction or sus-
64
RACE
tain." Sir Charles Lucas said a wise word on this
subject in his King's College Lecture on the " Influ-
ence of Science on Empires " : "The more science leads
and fashions thought, the less will colour present itself
as a prejudice, and the more will the preservation of a
line of distinction between widely different races be
regarded, not as a matter of superiority or inferiority,
but as a natural distinction which all parties think well
to maintain."
The Indian ought to be as jealous of preserving
his own racial purity and ethical types as the Euro-
pean. And with regard to India, let us not forget
that we are speaking of a country where there are 147
distinct languages and a large variety of sharply dis-
tinguished religious creeds. India, indeed, covers as
large a variety of race and religion as the continent of
Europe itself. All this surely brings us into sight of
a friendly settlement of this long- vexed question.
Nothing could have better illustrated the need and
value of a permanent and consultative Council of
Empire than the discussion which took place on this
question among the representatives of the Empire,
including India, at the Imperial War Conference.
South Africa, indeed, had already advanced a long way
towards a modus vivendi on this question. As already
indicated, the problem reached an acute and critical
stage in that country. This is not surprising when we
remember that Natal has far more than 100,000
Indians, originally introduced about the year i860, to
help in the tea and sugar plantations, a number ex-
ding that of the white inhabitants of the Province.
Altogether there are more than a quarter of a million
65
E
RACE
British Indians settled in the territories of the Union.
Some reference has already been made to the regula-
tions in South Africa with regard to Indian settlers
and immigrants. It is now generally recognised that
however severely new immigration may be restricted,
the position of those already settled in the country
must be made as favourable as possible. Regarding
the question as it affects the Dominions generally, the
War Conference recommended to the various govern-
ments represented a Memorandum drawn up by
the Indian delegates, which suggested the following
basis for an agreement :
(i) As regards Indians already permanently settled
in the Dominions they should be allowed to bring in
wives (subject to the rule of monogamy) and minor
children, and in other respects should not be less privi-
leged than Japanese immigrants.
(2) Further admissions of Indians for labour or
settlement should, if possible, be regulated on lines
similar to and not less favourable than those govern-
ing the admission of any other Asiatic race.
(3) If this is not possible, there may be reciprocal
treatment in India and each Dominion of immigration
for purposes of labour or permanent settlement. If a
Dominion is determined to exclude these two classes of
immigration from India, India should be free to do
the same as regards that Dominion. It would be
clearly recognized that the exclusion in either case
was not motived by prejudices of race but was the out-
come of different economic conditions.
(4) Along with such exclusion reciprocal arrange-
ments would be made for granting full facilities for the
66
RACE
admission of tourists, students and the like, and for
business visits entailing temporary residence, so long
as this residence was not for labour purposes or for
permanent settlement.
The Memorandum also made another suggestion
which, if adopted, may help to remove this problem
permanently from the controversial danger-zone. It
was that an outlet should be found in East Africa for
the overflow of the Indian populations. East Africa
lies very conveniently for India. The climate is not
dissimilar, and in the natives many of the Indians
would find their own co-religionists. Moreover, such
Indian immigrants ought to be of the greatest service
in developing the cotton plantations and other pio-
ductive industries in these rich territories. On the
whole the Empire seems to be happity weathering a
controversy which threatened not only to produce
bitter antagonism between India and the great
Dominions, but to alienate the good-will and loyalty of
the entire Indian people.
Here we may refer briefly to that great Monroe
Doctrine of the Southern Island-Continent — a " white
Australia." It is certainly a very heroic injunction,
this of 5 million white people to some 1,000 millions
of vari-coloured Asiatics to " keep off the grass " of
a continent three million square miles in area. This
slender settlement upon the fringe of the " great lone
land " is determined to hold the entire country from
strait to strait and ocean to ocean for European and
Christian civilisation. As an earnest of her determi-
nation, Australia has provided herself with a con-
siderable fleet of her own and has established universal
67
RACE
military service. She has passed a Coloured Race
Exclusion Act and dispensed even with the Kanaka
or Pacific Island labour once imported to the sugar
plantations of Queensland. There is no doubt of her
determination to settle and develop the Australian con-
tinent by means of the white man only.
The practicability of this ideal depends upon whether
the northern tropical parts of the continent, and espe-
cially that great undeveloped area known as the Nor-
thern Territory, are suitable for "white" habitation.
The evidence is as yet insufficient. We must know not
only whether growm men and the children of this
generation can live in fair health in these coastal
tropical regions, but whether women can live there,
and whether the next generation will preserve the
normal standard of health and vigour. We may well
hope that these questions may be answered favourably,
for if the help of the coloured races be necessary to
develop and populate the " Territory," it will be diffi-
cult to build a zereba strong enough to confine the
coloured people within the tropical areas and prevent
them dribbling into the temperate parts of the conti-
nent and reproducing all the difficulties that have
occurred in Natal. Actual labour may possibly be
admitted under indenture, but India now prohibits the
emigration of workers under those conditions, and
China is likely to do the same in the future.
Yet the Northern Territory cannot be left empty and
desolate. If the task is much longer neglected it will
certainty be undertaken by invaders from the swarm-
ing populations of the islands and continent to the
North. It is an awful and imminent problem for the
68
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Australian people and a matter of deep interest to
the Empire. We shall return to the subject in the
next chapter. Here I would only add that if coloured
labour prove to be indispensable in the Northern parts
of Australia, help should be sought from our Indian
fellow-subjects rather than from Oriental peoples who
owe no allegiance to the British Crown and are un-
touched by British influence.
69
CHAPTER IV
THE LONE LANDS
" England looking on her Colonies can say : ' Here are lands and
seas, spice-lands, corn-lands, timber-lands, overarched by zodiacs and
stars, clasped by many-sounding seas ; wide spaces of the Maker's
building, fit for the cradle yet of mighty Nations and their Sciences
and Heroisms. Fertile continents still inhabited by wild beasts are
mine, into which al! the distressed populations of Europe might pour
themselves and make at once an Old World and a New World
human. By the eternal fiat of the gods, this must yet one day be ;
this, by all the Divine Silences that rule the Universe, silent to
fools, eloquent and awful to the hearts of the wise, is incessantly
at this moment, and at all moments, commanded to begin to be.
Unspeakable deliverance, and new destiny of thousandfold expanded
manfulness for all men, dawns out of the Future here. To me has
fallen the godlike task of initiating all that : of me and of my
colonies, the abstract Future asks, Are you wise enough for so
sublime a destiny? Are you too foolish ?' "— {Carlyle, Latter-day
Pamphlets, No. IV.)
As we look round the Empire and observe the aching
solitudes and unharvested El Dorados of which it still
largely consists we are inclined to ask what is the real
root of our title to some of these undeveloped estates.
Take the Continent of Australia, for example. Where
are our title-deeds to that ? It was never ceded to us
by treaty, we certainly never conquered it in a military
sense, and we never bought it. Somebody may suggest
that we have the right conferred by prior discovery.
But in the first place Torres, the Spaniard, and
Tastnan, the Dutchman, were cruising round Terra
Australis and landing on its shores fifty years before
70
THE LONE LANDS
England arrived in the persons of William Dampier
and Captain Cook.
An interesting story is told in connection with our
first settlement in that country. In January 1788,
Governor Phillip arrived in Botany Bay with his 750
convicts, the rather unpromising nucleus of what was
one day to be a great civilised nation. Six days after
the Governor's arrival, we read, two vessels were seen
hovering off the coast. They proved to be ships of the
French Navy engaged in a voyage of discovery to
southern seas. Leaving Tasman and Torres out of the
question, are we to say that we owe our possession of
Australia to having been one week ahead of the other
fellows in planting a handful of settlers in the country ?
In the second place the old claim to the possession of
sovereign rights over any territory on the ground of
prior discovery or even formal annexation with nothing
further to support that title was long ago contested by
England. We remember the answer returned by Queen
Elizabeth to Mendoza, the Spanish Ambassador, who
complained to her of certain acts of Francis Drake : —
As, said Her Majesty, she did not acknowledge
the Spaniards to have any title by donation of the
Bishop of Rome, 1 so she knew no right they had
to any place other than those they were in actual
possession of ; for that their having touched only
here and there upon a coast, and given names to
a few rivers or capes, were such insignificant
l Referring to the Hull of Pope Alexander VI (1403), which por-
tioned out the New World between Spain and Portugal.
71
THE LONE LANDS
things as could in no way entitle them to a
propriety further than in the parts where they
actually settled and continued to inhabit.
Let me briefly state the generally accepted view on
this question, so far as it can be defined. Prior
discovery, and even authorised annexation, do not in
themselves confer a title to sovereignty. They can
confer only an inchoate or inceptive title — a title which
to become conclusive has to be " completed by effective
occupation within a reasonable time." Here then, in
default of conquest, cession or purchase, we have to
find, or fail to find, our title to our Australasian and
other territories under the Flag. Have we supple-
mented our original annexation of these vast territories
by " effective occupation within a reasonable time " ?
Some idea has already been given of the extent to which
we have occupied and developed this southern continent.
Its area just falls short of three million square miles,
and the white population (almost wholly British) just
touches five million persons. The aborigines, perhaps
30,000 in number, are rapidly dying out and need not be
considered as an ethnical factor in Australian develop-
ment. We have therefore placed up to date about i 2 /^
persons on the square mile of this vast continent, as
compared with 618 to the square mile in England and
374 in the United Kingdom.
It is about one hundred and thirty years since
Governor Phillip landed where the great City of Sydney
now stands. Is that a "reasonable time," and have
we "occupied effectively "? We have to ask what is
meant by " effective occupation." The existing state
72
THE LONE LANDS
of juridical opinion on the subject seems to be fairly
represented by a declaration adopted by the Institute
of International Law at Lausanne in 1888 : —
INTERNATIONAL DECLARATION RELATING TO THE
OCCUPATION OF TERRITORIES.
Article i. — The occupation of a territory under
the title of sovereignty will be recognised as
effective only if it combines the following
conditions :
1. The taking of possession of a territory
enclosed in certain limits made in the
name of the government.
2. The official notification of the taking of
possession.
The taking of possession is accomplished by the
establishment of a local responsible power, provided
with means sufficient to maintain order and to
ensure the regular exercise of its authority within
the limits of the occupied territory. These means
may be borrowed from the institutions existing in
the occupied country.
Now we may fairly say that we have fulfilled the
technical conditions so defined over this territory of
3,000,000 square miles. Whether we have done so in a
reasonable time or not is perhaps no longer an
important consideration. The Australian Government
does maintain order and ensure the regular exercise of
its authority even, I think we may say, over the
Northern Territory where there is as yet only about
one white person to every 300 square miles. But we
must remember there is a tendency, likely to be
73
THE LONE LANDS
strengthened in the future, to interpret "effective
occupation " rather more strictly. In our own
municipal or national law we have seen a tax placed
upon land withdrawn from use and cultivation. A
gentle but effective compulsion is thus applied to the
owner either to use the land himself or to sell it to
somebody who will. The same notion is emerging in
the international sphere. As population grows denser,
and the demand for comforts and luxuries increases,
we may be sure that no nation will be held justified
in claiming sovereign rights under any title over
territories whose resources it is unwilling or unable to
develop for the benefit of humanity in general.
Happily, as we shall see, we are now, after a long
period of apathy and negligence, alive to our
responsibilities in this respect.
It is difficult to give any approximate conception of
the areas in our tropical or temperate possessions whose
development is still almost wholly a task for future
years or centuries. But we can take a few examples of
these undeveloped territories and briefly survey their
extent and resources. Not so very far away from our
own shores we have in Nigeria alone a valuable
tropical empire, three times the size of the United
Kingdom. Northern and Southern Nigeria are now
united under a single administration. In the recent
history of Nigeria we get a striking illustration of the
magical effects produced by the railway line. In 1896
a line was begun, running northwards from Lagos, and
was continued in 1909 for 307 miles in that direction
as far as Jebba, that is, through the densely populated
country of Yoruba. The result was an enormous
74
THE LONE LANDS
increase in trade. Meanwhile in 1907 another line
further north, 356 miles in length, had been con-
structed. These lines have now been linked up and
run as far as Kano in Northern Nigeria, which is thus
in direct railway communication with the sea at Lagos,
a distance of 712 miles. Another valuable line runs
from the coast at Port Harcourt on the River Bonny,
an eastern mouth of the Niger, and will soon join the
main line already mentioned at Kaduna, which means
500 more miles of track. There is also a light railway
from the Bauchi tin fields to the main line at Zaria,
which connects this important mineral area with Lagos,
766 miles away, a journey which can now be accom-
plished in about forty hours.
These railwaj-s have let the light into this part of
the Dark Continent with a vengeance. Towns and
trading posts have sprung up along the lines and the
trade and revenues of Southern Nigeria at least have
gone forward by long strides. Between 1904 and
19 10 the trade of Southern Nigeria advanced from
^5,000,000 to ;£i 1,750,000, and in the latter year that
colon} 7 achieved what was almost a record in the history
of tropical administration by realising a surplus of
^340,000 in its financial accounts. There is a great
future before this territory in the development of such
products as cotton, cocoa, rubber, maize, tin, coal and
palm products. Coal is an especially fortunate
addition to Nigerian assets. 3
Southern Nigeria, therefore, scarcely belongs to this
chapter on " Lone Lands," though we arc still only in
'The Udl coalfields, now tapped by the Kastem Railway from
Port Harcourt, are estimated to cover an area of 2,000 square miles.
75
THE LONE LANDS
the early days of its economic history. But Northern
Nigeria, with which it is now united, a territory of
256,400 square miles, and a vast reservoir for the
supply of raw materials for many industries, is still
almost undeveloped owing to its remote geographical
position.
Let us now shift the telescope lens to another region
of the African continent further south to Rhodesia,
Northern and Southern, which together form a territory
equal to Germany and Austria-Hungary added
together. These two provinces, which are administered
by the British South Africa Company under Imperial
supervision, are separated by the great African river,
the Zambesi, which near Livingstone, the administra-
tive headquarters of Northern Rhodesia, takes its
appalling leap over the Victoria Falls. Rhodesia is
wholly within the Tropics, but a great portion of it lies
at 3,500 feet and more above sea-level, making the
country practicable, so far as can yet be ascertained,
for white settlement. Indeed, if Sir Leander Jameson's
aspiration is to be fulfilled, Rhodesia may one day be a
great British state in the very heart of what was until
quite recently savage Africa.
Certainly the economic foundations for such a state
are broad enough. Perhaps in some respects the pace
of Rhodesian development has been forced. It has
enjoyed the favour of such immensely wealthy patrons
as Rhodes and Beit. It has already a railway system
of nearly two thousand five hundred miles of track. It
is splendidly equipped with schools, thanks largely to
the munificence of Mr. Alfred Beit, who in 1906 left
^200,000 for such purposes. Three of the Rhodes
76
THE LONE LANDS
Scholarships of ^300 each per annum, tenable at the
University of Oxford, are allocated to Rhodesia.
Indeed no community in the Empire is so richly
endowed with educational facilities, in proportion to
population, as Rhodesia.
It has a very wide range of productivity. The gold
output has already touched three million pounds
sterling a year. As a ranching country it is rapidly
growing in favour. The cattle that are concentrated
into Liebig's beef extract roam its hills and valleys,
and as the ranching areas in the United States and the
Argentine shrink before the advancing wave-line of
closer cultivation, Rhodesia will take an increasing part
in the world's meat-supply. But, apart from cattle,
maize, tobacco and citrus fruits (oranges and lemons)
are becoming great sources of wealth, and ostrich
feathers, sugar and vegetable oils are likely to be
important products. Most fortunately, too, Nature
has provided rich seams of coal. At present those of
the Wankie Colliery, south of the Victoria Falls, are
the only coal measures being worked, but the yearly
output exceeds 200,000 tons and there seems to be no
limit to the possible output. Rhodesian coal should be
available for the steamship traffic and railways of East
Africa and its coasts in general. The wasteful habit
of wood-burning cannot too soon be discontinued.
Rhodesia develops steadily. Agricultural co-operation
is extending and markets are being organised. The
white population is still only about 30,000, but it is
increasing at the rate of some 3,000 a year, and when
great movement for closer settlement along the
77
THE LONE LANDS
railways is in full swing, the progress, we may hope,
will be rapid and continuous.
The extension of the main railway beyond the Congo
border into the richly mineralised district of Katanga
is opening up an important trade with the Congo State.
The country is well linked up with the distant ocean
at Beira and Capetown and is already included in one
of the grandest of world-tours. For Rhodesia has a
tremendous attraction in the stupendous Victoria Falls
of the Zambesi, which are twice as broad and two and
a-half times as high as Niagara itself. After that
tremendous leap the great river tears along for forty
miles within a very narrow channel and at that distance
begins at last to recover its equanimity. The railway
bridge crosses the river in rather appalling proximity
to the Falls, and Mr. Rhodes 's wish that the
passengers might feel the floating spray of the cataract
is often fulfilled.
Some day before long it will be possible to proceed
along the Cape to Cairo Railway to Uganda and East
Africa, but until then we must take the train to Beira
and sail northwards along the coast past what was
German East Africa to Mombasa, the chief port of the
British East African Protectorate. This is a territory
of 200,000 square miles in extent, about as large, that
is, as Germany. Inland is another Protectorate, 90,000
square miles in extent, named Uganda. No doubt
these two will be united some day, like Northern and
Southern Nigeria, under a single High Commissioner
of British East Africa.
East Africa falls naturally into three divisions —
i. A coastal tropical region capable of producing all
78
THE LONE LANDS
the characteristic tropical products — cotton, cocoa-nuts,
rubber, sisal (a kind of fibre) and ground nuts. Copra,
or the dried "meat" of the cocoa-nut, is largely used
for the manufacture of soap, while the vegetable oil
of palm kernels and ground nuts goes largely to the
making of margarine. Cotton, however, is the most
promising staple, and hence in future years should
come much of the fibre used in the factories of
Lancashire. But I fear East Africa is a rather painful
example of the uncultivated estate. True, it has been
provided with a highly useful railway line running
from Mombasa to Port Florence on Lake Victoria
Nyanza, a distance of 500 miles, but even this rich
coastal belt is only in the beginnings of its development.
ii. An inland tropical region, which covers also
Uganda, where again there are enormous possibilities
of wealth in all tropical kinds. Railway building into
and in Uganda is one of the most imperative needs of
the future.
iii. Between these two a highland region which,
though lying right across the Equator, has been
described as "the most perfect expression of all that
is meant by the word 'Temperate.' The days are
warm and sunny, but rarely as oppressive as mid-
summer heat in England, for the breeze is always
fresh ; nights are cool and even cold in the higher
parts. Again and again the visitor is gladdened by a
spot which recalls the edge of a Surrey common or by
a stretch of deep bracken reminiscent of Scotland." 3
These intermediate highland regions might support a
3 Captain L. S. Amery, M.I 1 ., in " Union and Strength."
79
THE LONE LANDS
white population of two or three millions, though life
at an altitude of 5,000 or 6,000 feet is apt to depress
and irritate certain constitutions. Still these uplands
afford a very desirable refuge and sanatorium for
officials and traders and planters sweating in the plains
to the North and South, and a large white population
planted thus in the heart of these Protectorates would
be a strong civilising agenc}^ and a powerful support
to the official administration.
Most of the staples of the temperate and sub-tropical
zones yield abundant harvests in these uplifted regions,
in many cases, owing to the double rainy season, two
harvests in the year. Maize, tobacco, coffee, bananas,
ramie (fibre), sisal, apples, peaches, pine-apples
flourish, and there are fair prospects for sheep and pig
farming and for dairy-work. Whether wheat can be
grown successfully seems as yet uncertain.
But we must now take a far flight to the undeveloped
country par excellence of the British Empire — the
Northern Territory of Australia, to which frequent
references have already been made. This is a huge
rectangular block of country 560 miles wide and 900
miles long with an area of 523,600 square miles —
bounded on the North by the Indian Ocean, on which
it has a long front, on the South by the State of South
Australia, and on the East and West by Queensland and
Western Australia. It was administered by the South
Australian Government down to 191 1, when it w ? as
taken over by the Commonwealth. Its white popula-
tion would still not suffice to fill a small English
village. For nearly thirty years this population has
increased at the sober pace of about one man per
80
THE LONE LANDS
annum. It is inhabited also by twenty or thirty
thousand aborigines of an extremely primitive type,
who are gradually dying away before the advance of
white civilisation. It need hardly be said that they
have no affinity whatever with the Maoris of New
Zealand, who are a highly intelligent race, supposed by
many to have migrated to New Zealand from India.
In the Northern Territory, too, we may distinguish
three broad divisions — a coastal, central and southern.
The coastal zone stretches from the northern sea-coast
too miles inland, and includes the mouths of several
magnificent and navigable rivers, the Victoria, the
Roper and the Daly. This is entirely in the Tropics,
though not in every respect tropical in. character, as it
is fortunately free from jungle. The ideal of a " white
Australia " depends upon whether this northern torrid
belt is habitable by white people. The data can only
be acquired by lapse of time during which it will be
seen whether women and children can stand the
conditions and whether the next and the following
generations deteriorate.
But in any case the country cannot be left
undeveloped. Sugar, cotton, tobacco, rice, rubber will
all flourish, and, though only the surface has as yet
been scratched, already three million pounds worth of
gold, silver, tin and copper have been extracted. The
Commonwealth is taking a very living interest in this
vast empty region. The Government has appointed a
very able administrator, Dr. Oilruth, who is inspired
with a great faith in the prospects of the country. It
may prove necessary to obtain indentured coloured
labour for development, or recourse mav be had to
81
THE LONE LANDS
Maltese and other white Southern European races. If
the Asiatic is admitted as a free labourer and settler,
the future of the country will be compromised, because
it is impossible to build a sort of Chinese wall across
it and forbid the coloured races to spill over into the
white communities to the South and East and West.
The central table-lands are a wide-spread pastoral
country bounded on the South by the Macdonnell
ranges, and south of this again is a sandy track much
of which is a real thirst-land under the ten-inch rainfall
line, though vast stores of subterranean water, not,
however, all sweet and usable, are known to exist.
These inland tracts include very extensive areas
suitable for wheat production and dairy-farming and
still broader expanses well-fitted for stock and
especially horse rearing. This country will be
gradually opened up when the North to South railway
line is built. As yet only a brief section has been
constructed, running from Darwin southwards to Pine
Creek or a little beyond.
The old idea that the Continent of Australia is
nearly all sand and stones with a fertile coast-strip may
have furnished a comfortable excuse for leaving it
undeveloped and much of it even unexplored, but it is
not true to fact. Certainly a good deal of the Southern
parts of the Northern Territory are, as the late Lord
Salisbury would have expressed it, rather " light soil,"
but the latent resources of this huge island-continent,
animal, vegetable and mineral, are incalculable, and
Australia may some day carry with comfort a white
population of a hundred million people.
Let us now pass to a re^'ori as sharplv contrasted as
83
THE LONE LANDS
possible with these hot and dry lands under the
Southern Cross, to the North-West Territories of
Canada and the shores of Hudson Bay, the ancient
haunt of trapper and hunter and fisherman. Here it
is important to note that the northern limit of wheat
production is defined by the summer isotherm of 57. 5 .
This line of mean summer heat trends from the 58th
parallel of latitude in the Peace River Country of
Northern Alberta, a lone and bleak land, down
south-eastwards to the southern extremity of James
Bay. This enormous country includes the whole
prairie region proper and outside the prairies 20 to 50
million acres of cultivable land. Within this line also
and north of Lake Winnipeg there is an unconsidered
trifle of some 5,000 square miles of good and payable
soil.
But it must not be thought that the regions outside
the wheat lands are valueless. There is incalculable
wealth in the fisheries of lake and river west of Hudson
Bay and in the Bay itself. All round the Southern
shores of the Bay are magnificent forests, good for
unlimited manufacture of paper-pulp. The reindeer
might be reared in large numbers in the regions north
of the wheat isotherm and in Ungava, the rather
mysterious country east of Hudson's Bay, where there
is also a strong probability of mineral wealth.
This enumeration by no means exhausts the tale of
Empire estates awaiting development, though it may
possibly have exhausted the reader. Tn British
Guiana on the old "Spanish Main," in British Hon-
duras and in Trinidad there are some 25 million acres
of cultivable land still unoccupied. Tn British Guiana
83
THE [.ONE LANDS
MAP OF CANADA. WITH THE SUMM
NORTH KRN LIMIT
S 4
THE LONE LANDS
HERM, INDICATING ROUGHLY THE
/HEAT PRODI < I ION.
85
THE LONE LANDS
alone arc three million acres of savannahs in the
interior suitable lor ranching, and eleven million acres
more of easily accessible lands, lit for arable and
pastoral purposes, in the river valleys. In this colony
rubber and limes nourish wonderfully, and an immea-
surable force of water-power is available.
There is no question that down to late years the
British people have slept upon their great inheritance,
especially the tropical parts of it. We may date the
new sentiment of empire-citizenship and the new sense
of trusteeship in face of these vast empire possessions
to the early eighties of last century. I shall give some
account in a later chapter of the influences which led
to this revival of what we must call, for want of a
better term, " Imperial sentiment." The germ of the
ideas of Empire co-operation may be found in the
proposals for a joint fund for naval defence, made by
Mr. Jan Hofmeyr, the South African statesman, at the
first Colonial Conference in 1887. That germ w r as
developed at the Conference of 1907 by Mr. Deakin,
who proposed the creation of a joint fund, raised by a
tax of 1 per cent, on foreign imports into the self-
governing colonies, together with a joint board to
administer the fund, the object being to promote the
maritime communications of the Empire by steamship
and cable. The one practical result of this proposal
was the laying down of the state-owned Pacific cable
from Canada to Australasia, but the movement for
developmental co-operation among the states of the
Empire made little progress until the Conference of
191 1, out of which grew that really important body,
the Dominions Royal Commission. Commissions of
86
THE LONE LANDS
this kind are usually convenient methods of smothering
awkward and intrusive questions, but this
particular Royal Commission, representing England
and all the self-governing colonies, was alive from the
start. It travelled tens of thousands of miles about the
Empire, collected a vast amount of first-hand evidence
and finally produced a Report (not to mention the
preceding interim publications), which is a quarry of
information on the economics of the great Dominions.
The tropical portions of the Empire were not included
in the Commission's Reference, nor were the members
instructed to investigate constitutional questions or
allowed to trench on fiscal controversies.
This was the first Royal Commission on which sat
representatives of all the oversea Dominions, though
unfortunately the Australian member fell out a year or
two after it was appointed. The deliberations and
conclusions of the Commissioners were, however, so
unanimous that the Australian representative would
have found little difficulty in adding his name to the
Report. We owe to the great world -war a valuable
experience relating to the supply of foodstuffs and raw
material, the control of trade and the safeguarding of
certain products which are essential to security and
defence. We shall not readily forget how a foreign
nation had acquired control of the production and
distribution of certain mineral products in Australia
and other parts of the Empire, copper, lead, zinc,
tungsten ores, etc., which were necessary to the
manufacture of munitions. It is a right of elementary
self-defence to see that no such monopoly is established
in the future. We do not wish to exclude foreign
87
THE LONE LANDS
nations from a share in the products of the Empire,
but it is scarcely fair that its resources should be
developed to our own undoing. Everybody will cheer-
fully assent to the opinion of the Commissioners that
"it is vital that the Empire should, so far as possible,
be placed in a position which would enable it to resist
any pressure which a foreign Power or group of Powers
could exercise in time of peace or during war in virtue
of a control of raw materials and commodities essential
for the safety and well-being of the Empire."
To draw out an inventory of the British Empire is
no slight task, but the Commissioners attacked it with
a refreshing courage. They provide an initial survey
of the "relation between Empire production and
Empire requirements throughout the whole range of
articles needed for the sustenance and well-being of the
people, for the maintenance of industry and for the
production of munitions of war." For the purpose of
this comprehensive enterprise they divide such com-
modities into three classes : —
(a) Materials of which the world's requirements are
mainly or wholly produced within the Empire. Perhaps
Indian jute is the most familiar of these, but Canada
produces almost the whole of the world's supply of
nickel and asbestos, and South Africa has a virtual
rnonopoty of diamonds and ostrich feathers.
In the case of articles falling within this category
the Commissioners think that no extraordinary
measures are needed to stimulate production. The
demand is sufficient in itself. The exclusive possession
of such commodities supplies a powerful weapon in
commercial negotiations which may very well be used
THE LONE LANDS
in economic self-defence. It is a curious fact, however,
that though Canada has an almost perfect monopoly
of raw asbestos, England depends largely on foreign
sources for the manufactured article, while Canada
herself imports it to the value of £70,000 a year. It
is difficult to understand why Canada should not
produce the raw material and work it up as well.
Similarly with regard to nickel. The refining of the
metal was carried out before the war almost entirely
outside the Dominion. This foreign control of the
use of nickel ores might be a source of danger and was
recognised as such at the outbreak of the war. Nickel
refining will henceforth rank among Canadian
industries. A more scientific domestic economy is
among the salutary lessons of the war.
(b) Materials of which the Empire's requirements
are approximately equalled by Empire production,
among which are wheat, meat, butter, wool and cheese.
The Commissioners suggest that the Empire should
make such arrangements within itself to secure that the
surplus (over local consumption) of such Empire
supplies should be attracted to the United Kingdom.
Many think that this could best be done by a measure
of fiscal preference, but much can be effected by
improvement in communications, by more careful
preparation of the produce in the Dominions for
English consumption and better facilities for handling
and marketing the Dominions' produce in the United
Kingdom.
Certain important metals Fall within this category.
The Empire pnxluces sufficient zinc ores for its own
consumption, but here again the reduction processes
89
THE LONE LANDS
were carried on almost entirely in Germany, Belgium
- and the United States. The United Kingdom pro-
duced only a fraction of the 200,000 tons of spelter
(smelted zinc-ore) it requires annually. This means
that the ores produced in the Empire pass out of
British control on the way from the British producer
to the British consumer — again a curious and sloppy
procedure. So also with tungsten in its various ores
such as wolfram and sheelite, a very important ingre-
dient in the manufacture of steel. During the war
the Imperial Government found it necessary to
disengage this base but precious metal from German
control by buying up the whole production of the ores
in Australia and New Zealand, as well as other parts
of the Empire, and to supervise the arrangement for
their treatment in the United Kingdom before they
could be used in the manufacture of steel. We may
hope that the tungsten manufacturing industry in this
country has come to stay. Another mineral is
monazite, from which is manufactured thorium nitrate,
essential for the production of incandescent gas
mantles. This comes mostly from Travancore 4 in
India, but the foreigner had laid his hands on it and
secured the manufacturing industry to his own country.
Henceforth England will endeavour to make her own
gas mantles.
(c) Materials of which the world's and the Empire's
requirements are mainly produced and controlled
outside the British Empire.
There are certain articles one is almost ashamed to
include in this category, for example, cotton and maize.
1 It has recently been found in large quantities in Ceylon.
90
THE LONE LANDS
The British Empire contains cotton-lands and maize-
lands fertile and wide enough to supply the entire solar
system until the day of judgment. Yet the writer
remembers being in Lancashire some years ago when
almost the entire cotton industry was arrested and
hundreds of thousands thrown into want by the
interruption of American cotton supplies owing to
certain " cornering " operations there. Seventy years
ago, at a time when England was depriving Empire-
grown products of their preferences in the home-
market, Disraeli predicted the dangers that would
result from a too great dependence on a single source
of supply. And this dependence is rendered the more
undesirable in that the world's cotton crops tend to
fall short of the demand — a deficiency which is bound
to increase. The British Cotton-growing Association
lias done praiseworthy work in stimulating to some
extent the production of this staple within the Empire,
but very much more drastic measures are required,
and it has become a question whether the governments
themselves will not have to go into the planting
business as a stimulus and supplement to individual
action." Meanwhile one can only note again with
surprise that an Empire which includes India, Egypt,
East Africa, Nigeria, Queensland, Natal, Zululand
and the West Indies should not be able to supply itself
with one-quarter of the requirements of its cotton-
spinning and weaving factories.
Similar comments apply to the case of maize, an
5 On the question of State enterprise in the development of
Kmpire resources the reader should refer to Mr. Wilson Fox's letters
to the " Times," September 28 and 29, 1916
9*
THE LONE LANDS
article whose value as a food for human beings, as well
as for pigs and poultry, we have in these later days
learned to appreciate. South Africa and Rhodesia
alone could supply the entire requirements of the
Empire, and yet the Empire is almost wholly
dependent for its maize upon outside sources, mainly
the Argentine.
In this category, therefore, are certain articles of
which the supplies can rapidly be increased by
extending the area and intensity of production. But
there are a few to which reference has already been
made, for example, nitrates and potash, in which the
Empire seems to be naturally deficient. But the
Empire is not deficient in the materials from which
adequate substitutes for these articles can be produced.
Synthetic nitrates have been produced on a large scale
in Norway by fixing the nitrogen from the air. Nitric
acid is a very important material in the manufacture
of munitions. 6 But agriculture depends largely on
nitrogenous manures, and the Commissioners suggest
the possibility of utilising the immense accumulations
of peat in Ireland, Canada and other parts of the
Empire as a source of fuel and agricultural fertilisers.
So with potash. That mineral can now be obtained
from feldspar by means of a hydro-electrical process,
and this manufacture may soon be established in
Canada. But potash, which is essential as a fertilising
agent and for the production of many fine chemicals,
6 It is announced that a factory has just been set up in
Manchester for the manufacture of nitrates from the air by an
electrical process. The United States are starting this industry on
a colossal scale. Other methods of obtaining this commodity are
also practicable.
92
THE LONE LANDS
may also be obtained from such vegetable sources as
kelp or seaweed, of which we have a good deal lying
about the coasts of our Oceanic Empire. For our
potash, so important in agriculture and other indus-
tries, we were almost entirely beholden to Germany
before the war.
As I am referring to the Empire's lack of self-
dependence for important articles, I may just allude
to timber. England depends very largely for wood-
pulp used in the manufacture of paper, for pit-props
and other such articles on Scandinavia, yet the area
of the Empire's woodlands is almost incalculable.
Canada has 250 million acres covered with payable
timber; Australia, 102 million acres of very diversified
growth, a great deal of which is of commercial value ;
New Zealand, 8 million acres of forest, including that
glorious monarch of the woods, the kauri pine, which
has a height of 150 feet and an average girth of 12
feet, and flourishes for over a thousand years. This
tree, so useful for building purposes and furniture-
making, is being rapidly wasted by bush fires and
other causes. Indeed the prevention of the waste of
Empire resources is almost as important an object as
the development of production.
One of the Commission's most useful proposals was
for a permanent " Imperial Development Board " to
continue this work of survey and suggestion, under
the supreme control of the Imperial Conference. It
was proposed that this Board should contain five
representatives of England, India and the Crown
Colonies and Protectorates together, and one each for
the self-governing Dominions. Tts functions were to
93
THE LONE LANDS
be in no way political or to involve any interference
with the self-governing powers of the Dominions. It
would be chiefly advisory and suggestive, though
certain administrative duties might be assigned to it
in the course of time. Its proposed activities afford a
useful summary of the scope of co-operative effort
among the States of the Empire. They would be : —
(a) To continue, complete and thereafter keep
up to date the survey begun by us of the relation
between the production and requirements of the
Empire in the matter of food supplies, raw
materials, and all other commodities essential to
its well-being;
(b) to watch and report upon the changing
requirements of the Empire in respect of such
materials and commodities, and to mature plans
for promoting and improving their production
within the Empire ;
(c) to investigate in collaboration with existing
institutions and committees for scientific research :
(i) The possibilities of production within the
Empire of such of these essential materials and
commodities as now are, or may in the future
be found to be, mainly produced and controlled
outside its limits, as well as the possibilities of
new supplies generally ;
(2) the best means of promoting efficiency and
preventing waste in existing methods of pro-
duction ;
(3) the possibilities of the utilisation of sub-
stitutes for essential commodities which are not
found to be available within the Empire ;
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THE LONE LANDS
(d) to consider and devise means for the direc-
tion of Empire capital towards the development of
Empire resources;
(e) to study the larger aspects of migration
within the Empire with a view to securing and
maintaining a sufficiency of population in all its
parts ;
(f) to advise on the adequacy for Imperial re-
quirements of schemes of harbour improvement in
certain of the great ports within the Empire ;
(g) to study lines of communication by steam-
ship, cable, or railway which are contributory and
necessary to Imperial development ;
(h) to study and report upon legislation affecting
the mechanism of trade in its widest sense, and
to keep in touch with development in similar
legislation throughout the world ;
(i) to prepare and publish Imperial statistics.
This Report of the Dominions Royal Commission
certainly marked an epoch in the gradual emergence
of England and the Empire from laisser faire negli-
gence and self-regarding particularism to a new
age of conscious effort and responsibility and of
co-operative action among all the communities of the
Empire.
95
CHAPTER V
COMMUNICATIONS.
" As the necessity for broadening the basis of the English nation
increases, as the conviction grows that the basis can no longer be
an island, that it must be an Empire, so the facilities for broadening
the basis increase. What was impossible in past centuries is possible
now. What seems to be but a dream now will, if we reason from
the past to the future and bear in mind that under the rule of science
the world moves at a constantly accelerated pace, become a waking
reality."
(Sir Charles Lucas: " The British Empire.")
The statesman usually bulks more largely in the
public eye than the scientist or the mechanical inven-
tor. He has his uses and we need not wholly condemn
him, with Adam Smith, as a " crafty and insidious
animal." But the services of the man of science, especi-
ally but not solely of mechanical science, have had far
more to do with the history and development, political
as well as economic, of the Empire than those of the
professed politician. Here has been one of the un-
speakable advantages of the British over the
old Roman Empire. I have often asked distinguished
classical scholars if they could suggest any reason why
the Romans, with their practical genius and their
command of metals and various mechanical devices,
failed to invent the steam-engine or even a " push-
bike " or a tramway-car, and I have never received
even an approximate answer to the question. In the
case of an Empire spread over a continuous land-
96
COMMUNICATIONS
surface the development of communications was,
though very important, not so vital a matter as it is
for a widely -dispersed system like the British. Science
has not only determined the course of political thought
and event within the British Empire, but made pos-
sible the continuous existence of that combination of
states as a single international Power.
In the eighteenth century there were many sugges-
tions for the organised Oceanic Empire and for colonial
representation in the Imperial Parliament. Adam Smith,
the founder of English Free Trade, was among those
who favoured this latter idea. I have already referred
to Burke's criticism. "Perhaps," he said, " I might
be inclined to entertain some such thought ; but a
great flood stops me in my course. Opposuit Natura.
I cannot remove the eternal barriers of creation."
Again, alluding to a supporter of the same notion, the
great orator exclaimed : "It costs him nothing to
fight with Nature and to conquer the order of Provi-
dence, which manifestly opposes itself to the possi-
bility of such a Parliamentary union." Please will
you notice the very interesting fact that the date, 1769,
in which those words were uttered, was the year in
which James Watt took out the patent for his first
steam-engine.
The steam-engine has done far more than anything
else to superannuate Burke's arguments. The modern
revival of what is known by the unsatisfactory name of
"Imperialism" was largely due to the accumulated
effects of steam and telegraphy which began to be
decisively operative in the eighties of the last century,
the decade which saw the creation of the Imperial
97
G
COMMUNICATIONS
Federation League in 1884 and the first Colonial Con-
ference in 1887.
" Ye gods, annihilate but space and time
And make two lovers happy !"
So runs the modest and celebrated apostrophe.
Mechanical science has gone far to accomplish the
miracle for the happiness of the British Empire.
Edmund Burke reckoned six weeks as the minimum
time required for an election writ to cross the Atlantic.
The reader may reckon how long it would have taken
for a prospective New England or Virginian M.P. to
receive the writ, secure his election and reach the
Imperial Parliament at Westminster. In those days
it meant a three months' journey to reach the Cape and
about a six months' to make the Eastern shores of
Australia. To-day's steamship takes about the same
to cross from our islands to Canada as was spent in
Burke's day in travelling from London to Edinburgh.
And mechanical progress is never interrupted. Every
year the steam-engine and the internal combustion
engine are improved and developed, and aviation and
wireless telegraphy cannot fail to have an immense
effect upon the politics and economies of the Britannic
Commonwealth. These developments, so far as one
can foresee, must tend towards closer union and the
neutralisation of the estranging and disintegrating
effects of the Empire's dispersion.
But the result of all this invention and discovery has
not been confined simply to the communications be-
tween portions of the Empire separated by wide sea-
spaces. It has been seen in the internal evolution of
the colonies themselves. The railway has always
98
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been a wonderful state-builder. The Dominion of
Canada was made possible by the first trans-continental
railway, of which Lord Strathcona drove in the last
spike in November, 18S5. But for that railway West
and East would have lost touch. British Columbia
could never have joined hands politically with Nova
Scotia or New Brunswick. For, let us remember, Nova
Scotia is further from British Columbia than from
Gieat Britain. The aching void of the prairies and
the mighty barrier of the Rockies were bigger
obstacles than the Billows of the North Atlantic. " T
realise better than ever," said Lord Milner in a speech
at Vancouver, " how bold was the conception of those
who first grasped the idea of moulding all Canada
from Cape Breton to Vancouver into a great confedera-
tion. They were great political architects who leaped
the intervening wilderness, as it then was, between
Ontario and British Columbia. "
British Columbia made the building of a trans-
continental line a condition of her entry into
the Dominion. To-day there are three inter-oceanic
lines completed, or nearly completed with their branch
systems. The main trend of the Canadian railways is
still East and West. This direction cuts across the
natural or physical lines of the Continent which run
rather North and South. The railway .system was one
of the two main devices which created a Canadian
nationhood from Ocean to Ocean north of an invisible
boundary, the /jQth parallel of latitude. The other was
the Canadian fiscal system which established Free
Trade East and West with a protective tariff-wall
against the South.
99
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The Canadian railways have been compared to the
sections of a fishing-rod tied together at the centre
which corresponds with the City of Winnipeg. All the
^^■■„., ■ i . ,■ ,
MAP OK THE DOMINrON OF CANADA
trunk lines run through the great grain city which is
only a hundred miles from the international frontier.
Theoretically this closeness to the frontier of the con-
necting links between East and West is a strategic
ioo
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danger, and for this and commercial reasons a new
line is being constructed from Le Pas, a station on the
Canadian northern system, to Port Nelson on Hudson
SHOWING THE RAILWAY SYSTEM.
Bay, a distance of 410 miles. The route to the
Atlantic via Hudson's vStraits is free from ice from
about July 20 to November 10, but as the area of Cana-
dian cultivation is always extending northwards, a
101
COMMUNICATIONS
substantial portion of each season's harvest might How
outwards by this route. This would relieve the con-
gestion of goods traffic, known as the ' grain
blockade," further South. And the line might be
valuable from a defensive point of view. It is unthink-
able that this country should ever be at war with the
United States. We need scarcely provide for a con-
tingency so remote and unnatural, but the Hudson's
Bay railway would lie much further from possible
attack and would enable men and munitions to be
sent from East to West in case the connection was
interrupted further South. The Le Pas-Port Nelson
line is being constructed by the Canadian Government.
Another Canadian project which may sometime be
carried out is the Georgian Bay-Montreal Canal, by
which the prairie harvests could be shipped at the
great lakes and carried wholly by water to our English
ports instead of being largely diverted southwards to
Chicago and other American emporia and carried
thence via American railways to Boston, Portland and
New York.
Like the Dominion of Canada, the Australian Com-
monwealth was made possible by railway development.
But in the absence of a West and East connection,
Western Australia has been subjected to great incon-
venience, her members of Parliament having to face
the ups and downs of a stormy sea-passage round Cape
Lee win on their way to Melbourne. Moreover, Aus-
tralia is without a North and South railway connection.
A South Australian railroad runs from Melbourne
northwards to Oodnadatta through Port Augusta.
Look far north and you will see that a line from
T02
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Darwin starts southwards and gets as far as Pine
Creek or Katherina. Now look to the West, and a
line will be seen running eastwards to what was
recently railhead at Kalgoorlie.
It is rather curious that the two gaps which had to
be bridged between Pine Creek and Oodnadatta, and
between Kalgoorlie and Port Augusta were exactly the
same length, 1,063 miles. The West and East railway
has been constructed with great rapidity, thanks to a
very efficient American track-laying machine. These
two transcontinental lines ought to give a great
stimulus to the opening up of the Australian silent
lands.
Turning to South Africa, we may ask how there
could have been any Union without that steel track
which has been dropped lightly on the rolling veld,
following its gentle gradients and spanning dry spruit
and broad but sometimes almost waterless river beds
— the long, long haul from beautiful Cape Town,
under its mountain wall, to the far golden city of
Johannesburg, and thence eastwards to Durban and
Delagoa Bay. But railways have made great strides
during the last half century throughout the
Dark Continent. In the year 1876 over the
whole of Africa there were only about 400 miles of
railway. To-day there are 30,000 miles of
fully constructed lines. Look round the seaboard in
the map and see from how many points the steel rails
have already pushed their way into the inner darkness
and mystery. I have said something about our own
line from Mombasa through our East African Protec-
torate. Germany has built a very similar line from
103
COMMUNICATIONS
\orsemang£g0G R£A i
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THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAY
104
COMMUNICATIONS
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BYSTEMS OF THE COMMONWEALTH,
105
COMMUNICATIONS
Dar-es-Salaam to Ujiji on Lake Tanganyiki, a place
known to every schoolboy as the spot where Stanley
discovered Livingstone after his long search for the
needle in the haystack. Now look across the continent
to the Atlantic coast and see how the railways are
creeping outwards from Lobito Bay, Loanda and other
points to join hands with the railway pioneers from
the East and thus complete the East and West con-
nection across the continent. This junction will be
effected before many years, and the main railway
nerve-centre of Africa will lie in the Katanga district
of the Congo State, whither lines from North, South,
East and West will converge.
Let us see how far communications have now been
opened through the African Continent. The " Cape
to Cairo line," starting from Cape Town, now runs
northwards across the Zambesi and the Congo frontier,
through Kambove and Tshilongo to present railhead
at Bukama. The significance of this last place is that
it is situated on the Congo where that river has become
a navigable waterway. Now Bukama is 2,600 mea-
sured miles from Cape Town, so that we are getting
pretty well into the heart of Africa. From Bukama
we can take a steamer belonging to a service operated
by the Chemins de Fer des Grands Lacs and steam
northwards along this great river of savageland to
Stanleyville, 600 miles down stream. The sailing is
not quite uninterrupted, as along two rather lengthy
river reaches there are impracticable rapids, these sec-
tions of the journey being traversed by rail. From
Stanleyville river communication continues West and
South-west to Leopoldville, a distance of about 1,000
106
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miles, to which point vessels of 500 tons can mount
the river. At Leopoldville we transfer to railway again
and travel for 247 miles to Matadi, whither ocean-
going steamers can ascend the mammoth stream. We
have thus accomplished without any foot-tramping or
fatigue an African tour of 4,846 miles.
From Matadi let us retrace our course by rail and
river back to Stanleyville. Thence the Cape to Cairo
route will be continued northwards by railway to a
point on Lake Albert at Mahagi — 548 miles of con-
struction. At Mahagi we find a steamer of the
Uganda Government and embark for a deeply interest-
ing journey over the lake and down the Nile, by which
route we make a tremendously long stride in our pro-
gress to Cairo, for we can sail almost without
interruption to the terminus of the Soudan railway,
which is now some distance South of Khartoum. There
is one difficult piece of navigation between Dufile and
Rejaf, but the difficulties may probably be overcome
by the building of a lock at Dufile and the transference
to a railway along this section be avoided. It will be
seen therefore that the only serious gap in the Cape to
Cairo connection is that between Stanley Falls on the
Congo and Mahagi on Lake Albert. This is a very
heavy tramp through the deep heart of savage Africa,
but it will no doubt be bridged before long by the
railway engineer. The alternations between rail and
river or lake are rather inconvenient, though perhaps
not unpleasant, and the railway is sure in time to
absorb more and more of the entire mileage between the
South and North extremities of the continent. "Given
the Channel Tunnel and a Train Ferry across the
107
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Bosporus," said Mr. Robert Williams not loug ago,
" one might certainly look forward at no distant date
to taking a through train at Victoria Station for
Cape Town." 1
So we are in sight of the long North and South con-
nection. Meantime we can now get by rail, lake and
river from East to West. The short line from Kabalo
on the River Lualaba to Albertville has completed
this chain of communications. The distance is 3,046
miles, and the journey could be accomplished under
present conditions in about forty days.
But a glance at the map will show that we have by
no means told the whole story of prospective railway
developments in the African continent. The sands of
the Sahara are not going to be allowed for ever to act
as an impervious barrier between the Mediterranean
shores of that continent and the almost untouched El
Dorado of Equatorial Africa to the South, South-west
and South-east. The Cape to Cairo route may seem a
great improvement in point of time and speed upon
the present long and rather monotonous sea-journey to
South Africa, but even that route may not be the
quickest and most convenient. For many years
various projects for a trans-Sahara railway from the
French ports on the northern littoral have been pro-
posed and discussed. Look at the number of lines or
feelers that have already been pushed southwards
from different points. Political difficulties, however,
and the hostility of the Saharan and Soudanese tribes
*" Milestones of African Civilisation," a lecture delivered to the
Royal Colonial Institute, May 8, 1917.
108
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AFRICA
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[AP OF AFRICA SHOWING THE RAILWAYS ALREADY CONSTRUCTED
VNDTHOSK PROJF.< fED, ALSO THE NAVIGABLE RIVERS.
log
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prevented any realisation of these schemes. These
obstacles have now been removed, and the projects will
be resumed, especially as these lines across the desert
present no insuperable engineering difficulties.
The ultimate objects of these lines will be to open
up the vast resources of the Belgian Congo and provide
direct communication with French Equatorial Africa ;
to link up with the great railway centre in Katanga ;
to send out branches in order to establish connection
with the British railways further West in Nigeria, the
Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone. This last would mean
a very great extension of trade and development in the
hinterland of these African colonies along the coast
and inaugurate for them a new era of prosperity.
It is not probable that a trans-Sahara line or lines
running southwards from the Mediterranean to Central
Africa would divert much of the heavy traffic of
these central regions from the railways running
to the nearer coast lines West and East and South,
but for passengers the lines might easily compete in
point of quickness and directness of transit with the
Cape to Cairo route. One particular trans-Sahara
proposition might have very important political results.
It is suggested that the main line might run from
Bizerta southwards, through Ghadames and Ghat to
Lake Tchad, and that from there branching lines
should be constructed to the Congo in the South, and
to Uganda in the South-east, together with another to
meet the line which now runs from Sennar on the
Blue Nile to El Obeid in Kordofan, but will some
day be completed as far westwards as El Fasher,
the capital of Darfur. The importance of this connec-
iio
COMMUNICATIONS
tion is that it would make England and France inde-
pendent in time of war, and even for peaceful purposes,
of the Suez Canal, as it would bring the Northern
African coast, at a point far to the West of Egypt,
into direct communication with Mombasa, Port Sudan,
and, in time, with the starting-point of the Abyssinian
railway on the Red Sea, Jibouti.
Mr. Evans Lewin has pointed out another important
prospective result of these trans-Saharan projects
which, though not affecting the British Empire very
directly, is of great international interest. 2 He
reminds us that the route across the Desert will be
the quickest and shortest avenue between South
America and the Mediterranean, and will thus provide
intercourse between Europe and the Latin States of
South America.
" This, undoubtedly," he writes, " is one of the
great world-routes of the future. The construc-
tion of the trans-Andine railway, commencing at
the great Chilean port of Valparaiso, reduced the
journey from that city to Buenos Aires from
twelve to two days, while the construction of the
line from Victoria, in Brazil, which is already
connected with the Argentine capital by rail, to
Natal, the most easterly port of the Brazilian
Republic, would make that place the western
pivot of railway travel in South America. The
construction of the African complement to that
railway from Konakry and Freetown (on the
* See Mr. Evans I.ewin's valuable papers on the Railways of
Africa in " United Empire," Jan., Feb., March, 1917.
I II
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West African coast) to the Mediterranean would
involve a saving of some days in transit and
reduce the ocean journey from South America to
Europe to 2,800 kilometres, or a distance of 1,740
miles, and reduce the sea-passage between South-
ampton and Buenos Aires by nearly 4,300 miles.
It is this great imperial work which France is
destined to perform in the not distant future."
No one can say at present whether the aeroplane or
airship is going to supersede the railway for passenger
and even goods and postal transit. 8 Swift aircraft
ought to be of service in helping to span the vast spaces
of such territories as South Africa and Australia,
where the meteorological conditions would also be
favourable as a rule to this mode of locomotion. It is
safer to assume that the rail and the flanged wheel will
long be indispensable, and there is a big work of rail-
way construction still to be carried out in such parts of
the British Empire as Uganda and British Guiana.
The reader will have formed some idea of the
political results achieved and achievable by the railway
and steam-engine. Those effects have been seen even
in so heterogeneous a country as India. " Railways,"
says Lord Bryce in his " Roman and British Em-
pires," " have had a wonderful social and political
influence in India. Bringing the numerous races that
inhabit India into a closer touch with one another than
was possible before, they are breaking down slowly
3 Lord Montagu, speaking with authority, foreshadows the time
when we shall save eleven days by travelling through the air to
India and twenty-three davs in the journey to Australia. Aeroplanes,
v ■(• arc told, will cover a regular average of 1,200 miles per day.
TT2
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but surely the demarcation of caste, and are tending
towards an assimilation of the jarring elements, racial
and linguistic as well as religious, which have divided
India into a number of distinct and in many cases
hostile groups."
But it was sea-power which created the British
Empire, and it is only by maintaining sea-power and
the communications based upon it that an Oceanic
Commonwealth like the British can continue to
exist. Perhaps the best method of promoting
co-operative effort among the Britannic partners, cer-
tainly the method which raises least controversial
difference, is to make the communications, locomotive,
postal, telegraphic, as swift and as cheap as possible,
to carry forward that warfare with space and time
which has won so many victories in the past.
The Dominion's Royal Commissioners have the
greatest faith in the efficacy of improved communica-
tions. In this department, too, though so much has
been done, the laisser faire spirit has not been entirety
absent. Much more might have been done by conscious
and co-operative action. Take, for example, the sub-
ject of mail contracts. There has been little idea of
making these subserve as far as possible common
Empire interests. We have stereotyped the sea-routes
of Empire traffic with quite needless rigidity. We hava
been inclined to believe, for instance, that the only
practicable route for a mail service from England to
Australia and New Zealand was via France, BrindisI,
and the Sue/ Canal. That, to begin with, is not an all-
British route and is not the safest from a military
point of view. The depth of the Suez Canal limit3
u
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the draught of vessels that can be employed on this
track, and the route serves least of all to develop
intercourse among diverse regions of the Empire.
In 1922, when the last existing mail contract
expires, an opportunity will occur of revising the
system in the general interest of all the British States.
It should then be possible to arrange for other routes
for mail conveyance between England and " down-
under," routes which will be equally speedy and con-
venient but will incidentally serve the object of
developing intercourse among the widely dispersed
parts of the Empire. The service via France and Italy
and Suez would still be continued, but it might be alter-
nated or supplemented by others going vid Western
Canada and the Pacific, via the Union of South Africa,
and vid Halifax, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Panama Canal
and Tahiti.
We are apt to get a very perverse idea of comparative
geographical distance owing to the use of flat maps
instead of globes. Most people would scarcely believe
that the distance between England and Colon (the
Caribbean terminal of the Panama Canal) via Jamaica
is only 400 miles less than vid Halifax, in Eastern
Canada and Bermuda. The sea communications
between England and Australasia badly need speeding
up. The,Brindisi-Suez route to New Zealand is not even
the shortest. It is 560 miles longer than the route
to Auckland vid the Atlantic, the Panama Canal and
the Pacific. To Australia the Brindisi route may be
shortest in point of distance, but in point of time it is
not certain that as fast a transit could not be obtained
by one of the alternative routes which afford facilities
114
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for larger vessels and consequently for a higher speed.
There is already a monthly trans-Pacifie service via
San Francisco which carries the mails between the
United Kingdom and Sydne}' in 30 days — as short a
time as that required on the route via Brindisi, Suez
and Melbourne.
Despite the experience of submarine warfare in the
great war, the typical ocean-going vessel of the future
will be one of great length and breadth, in the interests
of economy in transport. As the Dominions Royal
Commissioners tell us, it is economically impossible to
drive vessels of small length and draught at a high
speed, say, over 18 knots, unless a large additional
passenger revenue may be expected, or unless the
governments are prepared to come down handsomely
in increased subsidy. High speed can only be obtained
at reasonable cost from bigger and longer vessels, and
these attributes cannot be economically secured unless
the draught is increased with the length.
Now this means that the British and Dominion
Governments will have to provide for these vessels of
greater draught (say 38 feet as a provisional maxi-
mum) by deepening the harbours and waterways at
the great ports along the various routes. In this
country Southampton provides sufficient water both in
the approach channels and at quays or docks for these
great ocean liners, but London and Liverpool would
both have to be developed in certain respects. 4 So in
Canada, Halifax and Quebec provide depth enough,
4 Both the Port of London authority and the Mersey Docks and
Harbour Board are engaged in making provision for the largest
-hips likely t" be constructed for many years to come.
I '.S
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while Montreal is not yet available. Cape Town,
Durban, Fremantle, Adelaide, Melbourne, Wellington,
Auckland, Lyttelton and Dunedin would all have to
be taken in hand if they are to welcome the 38-foot
steamer. But most of these improvements could be
made before the new and more varied mail services are
arranged.
Locomotion, however, is only one aspect of the
subject of communications. Almost equally important
is the improvement in telegraphic intercourse. There
is an excellent passage in the second interim Report
issued by the Dominions' Commission : —
" We feel convinced from a careful study of the
problem and from personal contact with all classes
in Australia and New Zealand, that the feeling
of devotion to the Empire and of loyalty to the
Mother Country will be strengthened in propor-
tion as increased facilities are offered for keeping
in close personal touch with friends and relations
overseas. Cable communication tends to quicken
the pulse of nationality and forms an effective
supplement to the broader, though slower, inter-
change of thought and sentiment by means of
postal communication. It reinforces the feeling
of joint life in a manner not possible by correspon-
dence, when two months or more are required for
a reply to any letter."
This, of course, applies with greatest force to Austral-
asia, but the whole British Commonwealth is inter-
ested in the cheapening and simplifying of cable
charges. Here again it may be asked whether
116
COMMUNICATIONS
' wireless " is destined to supersede other methods of
telegraph}', and whether it is necessary to go to the
expense of laying submarine cables. Wireless tele-
graphy, like the air machine, is certain to be harnessed
to political and imperial service. It will link together
the British islands scattered about in ocean abysses of
the Pacific, which have long been almost without any
inter-communication of any sort. It will also greatly
assist in bringing the greater and lesser Antilles of
our West Indian possessions into closer touch across
a thousand miles of ocean. But wireless is a long way
yet from superannuating the telegraph wire. It is
admitted by the expert authorities that the submarine
cable will long continue to be the most reliable means
of telegraphic communication overseas. The advent of
wireless has not resulted in any decrease in the pace of
cable construction.
These links of Empire running along the
sea-floors need to be made far more available for
British people. Cable communication is still too much
of a luxury, as postal communication used to be before
the introduction of the penny post in 1840. It needs
to be brought down among the more habitual comforts
of life, within the reach of the poor as well as of the
rich. Plain language messages of at most sixpence a
word ought to be a preliminary ideal. Whether these
cheapenings and other reforms can be effected under a
system ot private proprietorship of the cables may be
doubted, and the Royal Commissioners recorded their
opinion that " at no distant date the nationalisation
of the private cable companies will become one of the
most urgent problems for statesmanship."
117
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COMMUNICATIONS
X&
>ec:,>r
From Liverpool to fhomA'eifJivM Bmt/l*tMkmt
I Yancouir-rrf*J>6/i (8C4- t) ■ 1+138 (60BS) M37S 04J 7)
jSTranciSO 137(3* (784.7) ■ 133.1X)(J289) 13773(40071
yo/paraiso 699a (riaj) ■ Bsaa (■*-<TS7>
\Ce'laO — J0230 &910) • 9820 (333B)
\JYeUjngton 11901 (nose) ■ 11-571 (ojoo)
RtrtRENCES
British Possessions thus '
OJd Ocean Aoutes • •
yWvr Ocean Routes \
via Panama Canal)
Distances viaPajiamaCaruiI in br&cActs,
119
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The all-red telegraphic service between England and
Australia has long been only a pious aspiration. The
great war found England without the control and
ownership of a single trans- Atlantic line. What is
required for economic and imperial purposes is that
the Empire should obtain control of one of the cables
now crossing the Atlantic, and also of a line across
Canada from the eastern landing point in Nova Scotia
to Bamfield Creek in Vancouver Island on the other
ocean-front. These, linked up with the existing
British-owned Pacific cable to Australia and New
Zealand, will give us the all-red line, about which we
have talked so long.
Before leaving this question I must allude to the
great importance of using these improved telegraphic
facilities for a much better Press service throughout
the Empire. The war has taught us the necessity of
such an improved dissemination of British news, not
only within the British Empire, but in foreign
countries. The " Department of Information " did ex-
cellent work in countering enemy propaganda, and
there is certainly scope for the activities of such a
department in the normal conditions of peace.
Here I may briefly indicate some of the effects which
the Panama Canal is likely to have on the political
economy of the British world. When the waterway is
in full working order, no British province should feel
the electric thrill of the new circuit more strongly and
swiftly than British Columbia. Most of the produce
from Western Canada, from a line drawn vertically a
little west of Saskatoon, may soon be flowing through
Vancouver and the other Columbian ports and finding
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its way through the pierced narrowlands of the isthmus
to the Eastern American coast and to England and
Europe beyond.
This quicker and cheaper transport should mean a
bigger value not only for the wheat of the prairies but
for the fruit and timber of the Pacific province.
Vancouver especially ought to go forward with great
strides and become one of the biggest shipping centres
in the world.
Then the West Indies, which have lain hitherto in
what the Americans call a " dead end," will be thrown
across and along the main sea thoroughfares between
West and East. The British world occupies in the
Caribbean a very strong strategic position. Kingston,
in Jamaica, lies alongside the direct sea route from
New York and the Eastern States of Canada, through
the windward passage between Cuba and Haiti to the
Caribbean entrance to the canal. The Virgin Islands,
Barbados and Trinidad, also British possessions, com-
mand the other routes from Colon to Liverpool,
Southampton and the old world. Think, again, what
value the great oil reservoirs of Trinidad may acquire
in this region of traffic convergence, as oil more and
more replaces coal as the fuel of steamship engines.
The opening of the Panama Canal means the beginning
of a new era for these West India islands, which are
strung like a coronet of pearls round the Caribbean
Sea, the Mediterranean of the New World. Thou-
sands of tourists will visit the greatest engineering
wonder of the world and will bring new life and wealth
to the islands. The West Indies will be brought some
00 miles nearer Australia and New Zealand, and
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thus acquire those closer trade relations with the
Australasian Dominions which they have already
obtained with Canada by reciprocal tariff arrange-
ments.
One of the most important results, however, for the
British Empire is the change in the comparative dis-
tances between England and Australia and New York
and Australia. Henceforth it will be New York, and
not Liverpool, which lies nearer to Yokohama, Sydney
and Melbourne. Sydne\ r , formerly 1,500 miles nearer
Liverpool (via Suez) than New York (vid the Cape of
Good Hope) now becomes 2,424 miles nearer New
York (vid Panama) than Liverpool (vid Suez). Welling-
ton, in New Zealand, formerly equidistant between the
two great ports, is now brought 2,739 miles nearer
New York than Liverpool.
The Eastern seaboard of Canada, of course, shares
with New York this greater proximity to Australasian
ports. Indeed this moving away, so to speak,
of Australia and New Zealand from the United King-
dom and their closer approximation to the great and
growing branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock in
America, has the effect of locating the centre of gravity
of the English-speaking races more firmly and perman-
ently in the New- World. This result suggests some
interesting thoughts on the future relations betweeu
England and her daughter Dominions and the political
position she is destined to hold in the distant future
in the great family of British states. In the old days
when the growth of the American plantations in
wealth and industry began to cause some alarm in
England, the King was advised by political writers
122
COMMUNICATIONS
that he might have to take his crown and throne where
the " more part " of his subjects dwelt. But these
speculations deal with a futurity so distant and vague
that they scarcely enter into practical politics.
CHAPTER VI
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
It is not possible, Athenians, it is not possible to found a aojid
power upon oppression, perjury and falsehood. Such an Empire
may endure for the moment or for the hour ; nay, it may perhaps
blossom with the rich promise of hope, but time finds it out and it
drops away of itself. As in a house, a vessel or any similar
structure the foundations should above all be strong, so should the
principles and groundwork of conduct rest upon truth and justice.
Demosthenes (Ol. ii., 10.)
Most people have some vague idea what is meant by
the terms " subject " aud " citizeu," but auy attempt
to define them would result at once in great confusion
of thought. The two words are often used as though
they were synonymous. We speak of Imperial or British
citizenship in the sense of membership of the British
political system. There is no harm in this use of the
word, provided we are all agreed to use it thus and do
not confuse ourselves by giving it different meanings
on different occasions. On the whole, however, it is a
pity to use as synonymous terms which correspond
with and are capable of expressing a real distinction
in ideas, and the words " subject " and ' citizen '
are a case in point. In this chapter we shall try to
effect a proper " division of labour " between the two
terms.
We define a British subject then as a person who
owes allegiance to the British Crown. A subject,
124
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
unlike a poet, is either born or made. Any person born
within His Majesty's Dominions, that is, " within
the liegeance," is a natural-born British subject. That
is the great common-law principle to which statute law
has made certain additions with which we are not at
present concerned. There is no difficulty about the
status of a natural-born subject. " Anywhere a sub-
ject, everywhere a subject," applies to every person,
regardless of race, colour or creed, or any other human
distinction, born within the limits of the British
Empire.
A subject can also be made, that is, by a process of
naturalisation, and until lately the state of the law
throughout the Empire was in the most chaotic condi-
tion. England had her own rules of naturalisation,
and each of the Dominions and colonies had its own.
For example, England required five years of residence
to qualify, Canada three, Australia two, while New
Zealand prescribed no period at all.
Another anomaly arose from the fact that the
naturalisation laws of a colony, like all other colonial
legislation, have no extra-territorial effect, that is, no
validity outside the limits of the particular colony or
possession in which they were passed. A person who
became naturalised in Canada was a British subject
there only. The moment he crossed the frontiers of
the Dominion he reverted to his original nationality.
All this sometimes led to strange results. A man, for
example, might be born in (icrmany, become natural-
ised in Canada, rise to position of a Minister of the
Crown in the Dominion, come over to this country to
take part in a coronation or an Imperial Conference,
125
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
-and yet not even be a British subject in the United
Kingdom or indeed anywhere else except in Canada.
Some uniform system of Imperial Naturalisation,
embodying the principle " British subject anywhere,
British subject everywhere," had thus become neces-
sary. An Imperial Naturalisation Bill was carried
through the 1914 session of Parliament, and concur-
rent legislation, to which extra-territorial effect was
given by the Imperial Act, was passed in all the colo-
nies. Under this Act a person will be able to qualify
for British subjecthood by five years' residence any-
where within the Empire, provided only that the last
year is spent in the country in which he applies for
naturalisation. I ought to add that the old local
naturalisation laws may still subsist, but naturalisa-
tion under these can easily be extended into the wider
Imperial and universal subjecthood. The experience
of the war, however, showed how important it is that
every government should have powers to withhold or
revoke certificates of naturalisation. No one desires
to close too jealously the doors of admission to British
privileges, but there ought to be full authority to keep
out those who are of bad character or unlikely to prove
honest and loyal subjects.
Now what are the incidents — the rights and obliga-
tions — of British subjecthood ? First for the rights.
They may be enumerated as precisely as possible
thus :
1. First and foremost, the right to invoke anywhere
the protection of the Crown against personal
oppression, especially in a foreign country.
126
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
2. Right to sue or be tried by British law in those
foreign countries where Consular Courts have
been established under the Foreign Jurisdiction
Act of 1S90.
3. Right to be married in foreign countries under
the provisions of the Foreign Marriages Act,
1892.
4. Right to have an owner's interest in a British
ship. Formerly there were restrictions on the
liberty of aliens to acquire or hold property
generally, but in the main these had long since
been removed, except as regards the ownership
of ships.
When General Botha deported the labour agitators
some years ago from South Africa, an attempt was
made by the Labour Party at Westminster to define
more closely the fundamental rights of British subject-
hood. A resolution was introduced into the House of
Commons affirming
That, in the opinion of this House, the rights
of British citizens set forth in Magna Charta, the
Petition of Right and the Habeas Corpus Act, and
declared and recognised by the Common Law of
England, should be common to the whole Empire,
and their inviolability should be assured in every
self-governing Dominion.
But Mr. Secretary Harcourt pointed out that the
Common Law of England and the British writ do not
run throughout the Empire, owing to the grant of
self-government to the Dominions. In some portions
of the Empire quite another system of law has always
127
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
prevailed. So for the words following "Habeas Corpus
Act" was substituted :
as representing the freedom of the subject, are
those which the House desires to see applied
throughout the Empire.
It should be noticed that this resolution, which was
carried without division, binds the United Kingdom
alone. The Imperial Parliament has not the power
(except in theory) even to establish these elementary
rights of subjecthood within the self-governing
Dominions. This resolution, perhaps adopted ante-
cedently by an Imperial Conference, would have to be
approved by the Dominion Parliaments if the self-
governing colonies are to be bound by it. It may come
as a surprise to many people that these primary per-
sonal rights should require any re-affirmation within
the bounds of the British Empire.
Now what are the responsibilities of British subject-
hood ? They consist of whatever may be implied in
the oath taken by an alien on naturalisation that he or
she " will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the
Sovereign." In addition there is the liability to be
sued in British consular courts in foreign countries ;
to be brought to trial in British courts for treason,
murder, bigamy and certain other offences committed
in foreign countries ; and to be extradited, if a refugee
from justice, from countries which have treaties with
Great Britain for that purpose.
It is important to notice that subjecthood, whether
by birth or by naturalisation, confers no political
rights, no rights such as are implied in the term
" citizenship." British subjecthood may be a pre-
128
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
liminary condition of enjoying such rights, but it does
not involve them. Here we begin to understand the
different meanings of the words " subject " and
" citizen " or the different meanings we may conveni-
ently ask them to convey. We may use the term
' subjecthood " to indicate the relation of allegiance
to the Crown, and those elementary rights and obliga-
tions just enumerated which are or ought to be
common to all who owe such allegiance. "Citizenship"
will then imply what we may call the political or civic
rights possessed by the lieges of the Crown according
to the place in which they are domiciled.
It will be admitted at once that there is no uniformity
of political or civic status throughout the Empire. A
vote and its significance form a fair test and symbol
of citizenship. Now according to this and all other
criteria, the elector of the United Kingdom marks the
highest grade of civic power and freedom within the
Empire. Here the voter sends his representatives to a
' sovereign " legislature whose decisions are subject to
the revision and veto of no higher body, and which,
I may add, is the ultimate arbiter of the destinies of
nearly 400 million coloured people.
One step below comes the citizen of a self-governing
colony. He stands on a lower plane because he sends
his representative to a Parliament which is strictly
subordinate — as subordinate in principle as a County
Council or a Railway Company. It acts within certain
constitutional limits; its decisions are apt to be revised
or vetoed by a governor or governor-general ; it can
pass no law which is repugnant to any enactment of
the United Kingdom, and the rmperial Parliament can
120
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
in theory legislate for the Dominions over the heads of
their legislatures.
Below the self-governing colonies, in respect of con-
stitutional freedom and independence, come the crown
colonies, ranging from those which, like the Bahamas
and Barbados, have an entirely elected House of
Assembly which, however, does not control the execu-
tive like the Parliaments of the self-governing colonies,
down to such possessions as Basutoland and St. Helena,
which have not even a nominated Legislative Council.
What is the highest common measure of civic power
and privilege between the intelligent elector of the
United Kingdom and his wiry-haired, blacklead-
coloured fellow-subject in Bechuanaland or Ashanti ?
The proud boast " Civis Britannicus sum ' has,
therefore, nothing like a precise or uniform significa-
tion. It varies through the widest possible range of
meaning. As Mr. Harcourt said in the House of
Commons in February, 1914, " British ' citizenship '
is really a misnomer. It does not in fact exist. It is
an attempt to make too literal a translation of ' Civis
Romanus sum.' What does exist is British subject-
hood, which entitles its possessor to the protection of
his Sovereign through the Executive. But it gives to
the individual no rights of entry to or licence in any
part of the Empire if he attempts to violate the laws
which it is within the competence of a Dominion to
pass and administer." One wishes it were otherwise,
that British subjecthood conferred the freedom of the
whole Empire — the right to travel and settle in it at
will — upon all its members. But this, as I have
pointed out in a previous chapter, is an impossible
130
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
ideal in a system so vast and heterogeneous as the
British Empire.
It is also important to observe that British citizen-
ship, in the sense in which we are using the term,
ought not to be, and is not, fixed and static but pro-
gressive and dynamic. Everywhere it tends, however
slowly, to advance. During the last few years we have
seen the Indian legislative councils increased by a large
elective element. In Bengal, I believe, the elected
members are in a clear majority over the official and
nominated. Of course the executive power in India
is entirely in the control of the Imperial Government.
Indeed no legislation either of the Viceroy's or any
Provincial Legislative Council can take effect until it
has been formally approved by the Secretary of State —
that is to say, the Indian Legislative Councils are all
subject to the ultimate authority of the British Parlia-
ment.
All the same, the Legislative Councils will hence-
forth, since their privileges were increased in 1909,
exercise considerable control over the executive admini-
stration. Their members can now guide or obstruct
official proceedings by asking questions and ' supple-
mentary questions ' : they can in this manner place in
the pillory any government official of whose conduct
they disapprove. They can move resolutions affecting
the policy of the State. And they are consulted in pre-
paring the annual budgets and are offered liberal
opportunities for criticising the budgets when framed
and submitted. Their deliberations are presided over
by the Head of the Executive — the Governor-General
in the case of the Imperial Legislative Council, and
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
' the Governor (or Lieutenant-( Governor) in the case of
the Provincial Councils — who has the right of refusing
to answer interpellations which he may consider to be
merely obstructive or injurious to public interests, and
of vetoing resolutions or declining to put them to the
vote. But so drastic an authority will not be lightly
exercised in the face of an attentive and outspoken
public press ; and beyond all doubt these Councils have
been endowed with powers which will, for good or evil,
weaken the autocratic temper of British authority." l
England has indeed no reason to reproach herself for
a too exclusive domination in India. Indians hold
two-thirds of the superior judicial and executive posts.
Local and municipal affairs, in rural as well as urban
districts, have been entrusted to councils or boards,
constituted largely on an elective basis. In the admini-
stration of local affairs in British India, popular
aspirations to self-government are represented by
4,898 elected members on urban and 5,216 elected
members on rural boards.
An incalculable advance was made in the status of
India within the British Empire when she was directly
represented in 1917 at the Imperial War Cabinet and
Imperial War Conference and when the latter passed
a formal resolution in favour of Indian representation
in the future Imperial Conferences. At one stride
India stepped from a position of dependency to a posi-
tion of partnership in the British Commonwealth.
This change will no doubt help towards the friendly
settlement of outstanding questions, such as those of
1 Fuller : " The Empire of India," p. 268-9.
132
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
the settlement and immigration laws, as between India
and the Dominions. But it will also generate new
problems. India in her new status of co-partnership
cannot long be excluded from the control of her own
fiscal policy, and this will at once involve the whole
question of free trade and the position of the Lanca-
shire cotton-trade in the Indian market. This is no
reason why India should not be encouraged to go for-
ward along the predestined path towards democratic
and self-governing institutions.
But here as elsewhere we must be on our guard
against forcing the pace. We may put aside at once
all the foolish talk, whether uttered in an Indian
Congress or an English Parliament, about India's
immediate readiness for responsible institutions and
England's duty to retire at the earliest moment from
that country. There are 147 distinct languages spoken
in India. Besides Parsees, Christians and Buddhists
we can count 62M million Mohammedans, and 207
million Hindoos who are split up into an infinite num-
ber of sects. " To speak of self-government for India
under conditions such as these," writes Lord Cromer,
"is as if we were to advocate self-government for a
united Europe." And as to our quitting the country
in any measurable time, let us hear what a French-
man, M. Paul Boell, writes in his book on " India and
the Indian Problem." " The question," we read, " is
not whether England has a right to keep India, but
rather whether she has a right to leave it. To abandon
India would in truth lead to most frightful anarchy.
Where is the native Power which would unite Hindoos
and Moslems, Rajputs and Marathas, Sikhs and Ben-
133
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
galis, Parsees and Christians, under one sceptre.''
England has accomplished this miracle." Even the
revolutionary talkers and writers who insist most
emphatically on immediate self-government never ven-
ture to produce anything resembling a practical policy,
or the faintest outline of a constitution embracing all
India. Here as well as elsewhere in our tropical
Empire we have to keep the door open, proceed with
the work of instruction and emancipation, cultivate
the instinct and aptitude for self-government, asso-
ciate the Indian people more and more with the control
of their own affairs — but always, as Lord Cromer says,
"with the animus manendi strong within us' -that
is, with the determination to remain in the saddle and
make no sacrifice of our ultimate control and supre-
macy endangering that British peace which is the
greatest blessing we have conferred on the country and
which is the one barrier between India and a Noah's
deluge of chaos and anarchy.
The attempts of our enemies during the great war
to represent our position in India as that of an
oppressive conqueror holding down unwilling subjects
by brute force were perhaps sufficiently discredited by
the helpful loyalty of the Indian people during the
long struggle. As a matter of fact, any such exercise
of purely despotic power would quickly react upon
political conditions at home. A real liberty-loving
democracy could not play the tyrant without stultify-
ing, corrupting and in the end destroying itself. There
is little fear that the British people will continue to
govern India after India has become capable of govern-
ing herself. We see, indeed, how democracy at home
134
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
is always fostering the desire for self-government in
India, and is indeed rather in advance of than behind
the state of Indian opinion and aspiration. J
At the risk of some repetition the reader may be
invited to study a passage from an article by Prof.
Ramsay Muir in "The New Europe," 3 which could
not be improved as a concise and accurate statement
of the spirit and objects of British rule in India :
' India provides, perhaps, the supreme illustra-
tion of the benefits that can be derived by peoples
of an ancient civilisation from the tutelage of
European government. India is the most deeply
divided region of the world, peopled by races of
everj'' grade, from the almost savage Bhil to the
Brahmin, speaking no less than thirty-eight
officially recognised languages, torn by bitter reli-
gious conflicts and cleft by the chasm of caste
Her history has been one long story of successive
partial conquests and unending wars ; she has
never, in any period of her history until the last,
known what it was to enjoy an equal and impartial
law ; even under the greatest of her ruling dynas-
ties she has never enjoyed the semblance of poli-
tical unity ; and when the political influence of
Europe began to be felt among her people in the
middle of the eighteenth century, she had fallen
into a condition of incredible and apparently incur-
able anarchy. The establishment of the British
2 Recent official pronouncements fori ihadow fur the near future
a momentous advance along the road to Indian autonomy.
3 July 5, 1917.
135
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
dominion in India lias brought several boons of
immeasurable value, in the lirst place, it has
brought a firmly organised political unity. In
the second place, it has brought peace; for sixty
years no armies arrayed in anger have been seen
within the frontiers, which are guarded by small
forces against the incursion of outlying barbarism.
In the third place, this has been achieved with the
very minimum of military force, so that the up-
keep of armies forms a relatively light burden
upon the Indian State — far lighter than in any
earlier era of her history — and the British domi-
nion in India makes no threat to any other State.
In the fourth place, India has acquired for the
first time a system of just and impartial law, based
upon her own usages. In the fifth place, she has
acquired, in the English language, a common
vehicle of communication for the educated classes
of all her peoples ; she has enjoyed a remarkable
freedom of thought, speech and writing ; she has
been enabled to create the beginning of an organ-
ised public opinion. In the sixth place, she has
been administered as a distinctly organised State,
all of whose resources are exclusively devoted to
her own interests ; she pays not a penny of tribute
to the country by which she is ruled, and does not
even contribute to the cost of the fleet by which
her shores are defended, or the consuls who look
after the interests of her travelling subjects. And
for all these reasons there is beginning to arise,
among her deeply divided peoples, a sentiment of
unity and a desire for fuller participation in the
136
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
control of their own destinies — in which already
they take no insubstantial part, as members of
the Viceroy's Council, of various provincial
councils and of municipal bodies. In short,
Europeau tutelage means for India a gradual pre-
paration for national self-government. And if
there arc some fanatics who think that British
dominion has been merely a foreign tyranny stand-
ing in the way of Indian freedom, all the best
Indian opinion recognises that it has, in f act,
been the cause of all the progress that has hitherto
been made ; recognises, also, that this progress is
only at its beginning, and that a long period must
pass ere the peoples of India have become so
united, and so permeated with the habit of loyal
obedience to the law, as to form a nation able to
stand alone. British rule secures no special
privilege for British residents or traders, not
merely as against Indians but as against the sub-
jects of other European States. Thus it may
fairly be said that while the first principle of the
British rule in India is that it must consider first
and foremost the welfare of the Indian peoples,
its second principle is that, holding its control as
a sort of trust on behalf of civilisation, it must
welcome the co-operation of all peoples in the
development of Indian resources. We have slowly
wrought out, during the development of the
British power in India, the essential principles
upon which European tutelage over any land of
ancient civilisation ought to be exercised. The
British government of India, it should be remem-
i37
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
bcred, is by much the oldest and the most impor-
tant of European experiments in the solution of
this difficult problem. And if it has its defects,
it has also achieved an almost incredible success."
Frof . Muir lays down live principles which should be
observed by a Power controlling the v destinies of any
people which, like the Indian, is the inheritor of an
ancient civilisation. These are, firstly, that the
supreme object of such a Power should be not the
enrichment of the mistress-state but the welfare of the
governed ; secondly, that the resources of the pro-
tected states ought to be devoted to their own develop-
ment ; thirdly, that the system should aim at the
gradual training of the governed towards the end of
national unity and self-government ; fourthly, that
political control must not be used to strengthen a mili-
tary power which threatens the peace of the world or
the existence of any free state ; and, fifthly, that so
long as the dependent state remains under foreign con-
trol, this control should not be used for the purpose
of securing any trade-monopoly for the ruling state or
its subjects, but that the citizens of all states should
be given equal access to its markets or its sources of
supply.
We may fairly claim to have observed these cardinal
rules, at any rate since the British Government trans-
ferred to itself the responsibility for India. The wel-
fare of India has been promoted with unremitting
effort. Railways, telegraphs, canals, reservoirs, have
been multiplied throughout the land. Famine and
disease have been combated by every device known to
science. This solicitude for human life has, in fact,
133
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
added to the problem of Indian government owing to
the growing congestion of population, no longer
relieved by the wars and famines and pestilences of
former days.
It is scarcely necessary to say that the Indian
revenues are entirely spent in India. England raises
not a penny in India for extra-Indian purposes. The only
exception I can recall is a small annual sum of ;£ioo,ooo
as a recognition of the services of the British Fleet in
defending Indian commerce and the long Indian coast-
line, and of course, that slight contribution has been
made voluntarily by the. Indian Government. Even
when India sends her forces to serve outside her own
boundaries, England pays for the excess of expendi-
ture thus incurred over the ordinary cost of maintain-
ing the troops in India.
As regards the third precept enough has been said to
show that England is gradually leading the people of
her great Dependency along the path towards ultimate
self-government. In Cabinet and Conference Indian
representatives will henceforth sit on equal terms with
the delegates of the self-governing Dominions.
Nor has England ever attempted to create a vast
army in India with the object of making herself a
great military power or of furthering ambitious de-
signs of her own. Those who talk about England
holding India by the bayonet should consider for a
moment the normal strength in peace times of the
native and British army which she finds sufficient to
maintain her rule amid this population of 315 million
souls. That army consists of 75,000 British troops
and 160,000 Indian, together with 22,000 Imperial
'3 f J
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
mlvr'c' troops 1 and 35,000 native recruits — not 300,000
in all. Compare the spirit of British administration
in India with the objects contemplated by Germany in
her domination of Turkey. As Prof. Muir truly says,
" Germany aimed at using the Turkish Empire to
increase her already formidable military power, and
this prospect was all the more alarming because of
the central strategic position which Turkey occupies.
Her supreme aim was dominion, not emancipation ;
monopoly not the open door. Aiming herself solely at
dominion for its own sake, she became the advocate
and support of the oppressor, not of the oppressed.
It has become very plain that a German control over
the Turkish Empire would make not for increased
justice and the greater security of the world's peace,
but for the very opposite." This passage speaks of
" the open door," the ideal commended in the fifth
of our golden rules. England has asked for herself no
advantages in the Indian markets. It is true she
has endeavoured, against the prevailing opinion of India,
to maintain there her own fiscal and economic system.
But it has been a system of free trade for everybody
without any semblance of privilege for the
Power which is burdened with the responsibility for
peace and order throughout that vast country. The
open door which Germany had always enjoyed in India
did not prevent that Power from tampering by every
subterranean method with the loyalty of the Indian
people. Germany might conceivably have succeeded
* These are the forces raised and maintained by 27 native states,
officered by natives but superintended in their training by British
officers.
140
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
in producing chaos in India, but there is no evidence
that she could have taken the place of England there
and continued the British task of ordered and bene-
ficent administration
The same rules apply, though with some difference
in practice, to the government of territories inhabited
by aboriginal and uncivilised peoples. Here, too, we
must avoid the spirit of selfish monopoly. The wel-
fare and happiness of the natives must not be sacri-
ficed to the greed of material gain, as has been the
case in some scandalous instances of recent times. It
is a convenient figment of international law that primi-
tive barbarians have no title to the territories they
inhabit. This may be true in the sense that " fuzzy-
wuzzy ' ' cannot be allowed to sit on the site of vast
potential wealth and do nothing to develop it for the
good of mankind. All the same the process of occupa-
tion and exploitation by the man who calls himself
civilised must be conditioned by every care for the
happiness and comfort and progress of these original
dwellers.
One of the most perplexing and momentous of our
Imperial questions is indeed this — to what destiny are
we leading those fifty millions of negro subjects who
live in Africa and the West Indies? The vast majority
of these races are still either in primitive barbarism or
just emerging from it. We may put aside the two ex-
treme views, that which regards the negro as little
better than an anthropoid ape, and that which refusi
in the old Exeter Hall spirit to make any distinctions
on the ground of colour. Both lead in different ways
to disastrous results. The worst ideal and policy is
141
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
represented by the franchise system of the Transvaal,
where there is practically white manhood suffrage
but a complete exclusion of the native. We are thus
brought right down to the colour line. No blacks are
admitted and no whites excluded. Much sounder is
the ideal held aloft by Cecil Rhodes, and more lately
by Lord Milner, and embodied in some degree in the
electoral system of the Cape — " equal rights for all
civilised men," regardless of colour. The franchise
qualification was fixed fairly high at the Cape, but
the black man who can satisfy it obtains the vote.
Thus the door is left open and a constant encourage-
ment applied to the native to improve his social and
material status.
Many wise and not illiberal people, however, hold
the view that just as white and black must be kept
apart socially and sexually, so they ought to be kept
apart politically. This view was strongly urged by one
of the ablest of South African statesmen, General
Smuts, in a speech at the Savoy Hotel, London (1917).
" We have found," he said, " that to have political
institutions for blacks and whites on an equal basis
does not lead to the best results. And so the practice
is building itself up of creating parallel institutions,
but run on different lines, and it may be that in this
way we may be able to solve a problem which other-
wise might prove entirely insoluble. We have now
legislation before the Parliament of the Union which
is trying to put into shape the idea of creating all over
South Africa, where there are considerable native
populations, independent self-governing institutions
for the natives. Instead of mixing up blacks and
T42
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
whites, as hitherto, we are trying to keep them apart
as much as possible in our political institutions. It
may take a hundred years to work out, but in the long
run it may be a solution."
This is indeed our general method of administration
in most of our tropical possessions and protectorates.
For example, in the Malay Peninsula the British
control the administration and the laws, but they do
this through the machinery which existed before the}'
came on the scene. The government is carried on
through native sultans, headmen and the rest, with
the assistance and advice of British officers. The
results are highly satisfactory. Law and order and
contentment prevail as never before. As Sir Charles
Lucas writes : " There is now government of the
people ; there is law and order where formerly there
was none. The interests of the poor, the peasantrv,
are safeguarded and fostered as never before ; their
lives, their property are safe ; they can obtain even
justice : there is government for the people unknown
in the past. But you will say, it is not government by
the people. No, it is not, if government by the people
must necessarily mean what it means in England,
popular election and a House of Commons. Such
things have never been heard of by a Malay race.
But democracy implies representation. If the Malays
could 1)'- asked how they would wish to be represented
would they not rhoose the best representatives of the
only type which their race has produced and known?
Would they nut cast their votes for sultans and head-
men, moulded by the respect for law and justice and
onal freedom which British rule has imparted '
143
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
Diversity, I repeat, is more democratic than unifor-
mity. It is more democratic to leave to alien races
their native forms, their accustomed machinery, while
leavening them with the spirit of democracy, than to
impose with a high hand from without the particular
kind of democratic machinery which suits the dominant
race. It is more democratic to train up blessings from
the soil below than to order them down ready-made
from above. That is what T mean when T say that our
Empire, even the dependent part of our Empire, is on
a democratic basis." 5
Tn dealing with this problem of tropical administra-
tion it is important to lay well and truly a foundation
of sound basic principles. When that is done — and we
seem to be in the right path — success in detail and
result will follow as a matter of course. Past experi-
ence suggests that in future the civilised Powers must
agree together to enforce some of these rules. It must
be obvious that an unscrupulous government, holding
under its sway a very large aboriginal population,
could exploit the military forces thus available for
selfish and ambitious ends and even menace the peace
and freedom of the world. General Smuts was im-
pressed with this possibility as he conducted his
campaign in East Africa. Another recognised
authority on African politics, Sir Harry Johnstone,
wrote recently to the Manchester Guardian :
" German Ministers in office have stated — indi-
rectly, it may be, and yet plainly to those who
»
5 " United Empire Journal," vol. vi., pp. 805-6.
144
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
understand — that when they are back again in
control of Tropical Africa they intend to weld it
into a huge slave state in which the millions of
black men shall simply be trained as the well-
cared-for helots of the white man, drilled to form
unconquerable armies, untiring workers, innumer-
able automata destined to make Germany mistress
of the resources of the Dark Continent. We have
been reminded what an excellent basis German
East Africa would be for attacks on the British
Empire in the Indian Ocean."
Sir Harry Johnstone's warning in this particular
regard ma}' be well-founded or not. 6 No one will
pretend that such a design is inconsistent with the
latter-day Prussian tradition. But, regarding the
question from a general point of view, we shall feel
that some machinery, perhaps in connection with the
great foreshadowed League of Nations, will be neces-
sary to defend these primitive peoples against such un-
scrupulous proceedings as are indicated in the passage
just quoted. An international authorit}' of this kind
would have to deal not only with the traffic in arms
and the militarisation of the black races, but with such
questions as the maintenance of native customary law
with regard to land ownership, labour conditions,
tropical diseases and, in connection with this last,
the sale of drink. The civilised world, if the epithet
be longer possible after the events of the last years,
cannot in future divest itself of a common responsi-
8 Fran? Kolbl ndvorates the policy of blnck rerniiting on th«
Inrpest 9cale in " Deutsche Polftik " for December 22, 1916.
r
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
bility tor those countless millions of dark skins which
are committed to its care. These tribes must be
defended at all cost against the commercial avarice of
bad men and the methods and purposes of bad govern-
ments.
The moral and religious prestige of the white man
must have declined immeasurably of late in the eyes
of the brown and black and yellow races. They cannot
be expected to locate the responsibility for these events
where it alone truly lies. They look at the Hell the
white man has raised over so large a portion of this
terraqueous globe and draw inferences which may not
facilitate in future the work of the Christian mission-
ary. The only way in which the white man can
retrieve his reputation is to exact from all who govern
or trade with the coloured races a high standard of
justice and humanity and fair dealing. For this
object, as for others, the League of Nations, in its
various departments of work and responsibility, must
be endowed with penal sanctions and a force at its
elbow which no evil-doer, whether an individual or a
government, would care to challenge and provoke.
A hopeful sign for the future progress of these negro-
peopled countries is the gradual emergence of colonial
groups, the result mainly of improved communica-
tions. As already pointed out, the Nigerias, Northern
and Southern, are now united in a single vast province,
the whole of which will gradually be thrown open to
the life and light of day. So also the British East
African Protectorate will join with Uganda to form
another great tropical province on the other side of the
continent. The same process, stimulated by the latest
146
PROBLEM OF DEPENDENCIES
triumphs of electrical and mechanical science and
above all by the " severing of the waist of the world "
at Panama, may be expected in the West Indies, where
a movement for federation has for some time been in
existence. Beginning with a union of the British pos-
sessions in the Lesser Antilles, the system should at
last cover the Bahamas, Jamaica and Honduras.
Moreover, the British jewels in the Pacific will not
always be left unstrung and isolated as at present.
The formation of these various groupings in our
tropical Empire will tend to a fuller life and a broader
outlook in these colonies, and we may look forward to
the time when these vast states will be represented by
their highest native ability in some central council of
the Empire.
Meantime, while we derive our own legitimate ad-
vantage from the possession of these El Dorados, let
us not forget that we are there in the position of
trustees. We are to give the first and foremost con-
sideration to the happiness and welfare of the peoples
who live in those territories as their homes, and we
have to keep the door open for all people who desire
to share in the trade and resources of these regions.
That is the only safe policy, the only policy worthy
of a " populus imperator " which claims to be governed
bv liberal ideas.
M7
CHAPTER VII
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
" England's sure markets will be among the colonies of English-
men in all quarters of the globe. All men trade with all men, when
mutually convenient ; and are even bound to do it by the Maker of
men. ' Hostile tariffs ' will arise to shut us out, and again
will fall, to let us in : but the sons of England, speakers of the
English language, were it nothing more, will in all times have the
ineradicable predisposition to trade with England." — (Carlyle " Past
and Present." Bk. iv., chap, iii.)
Economics are only a province in the broader domain
of politics. Politics can never be dissociated from trade
and commerce, so that commercial and tariff questions
rank among the most important in the great problem of
Empire. From the fiscal point of view, that is, the
point of view of commercial inter-relations, the disrup-
tion of the Empire down to a few years ago may be said
to have been complete. It is true no Britannic State
has yet discriminated in its markets in favour of a
foreign country as against these islands, but over half
a century the Colonies or Dominions have been erect-
ing tariff walls against the products of the home-land,
and until quite recently have gone their own way in
matters of trade and commerce.
We have long ago outlived the ideas of what is known
as the Mercantile Era of our Colonial history — that is
the system under which the colonies and plantations
were regarded as the economic dependents of the
mother-country and which lasted from the earliest days
148
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
of our first colonial empire down to the middle of the
last century. Under " Mercantilism " all the material
and industrial life of the Colonies was to centre in this
country. England was to have the first or exclusive
claim on the products of the Colonies and to enjoy a
monopoly of manufactures in their markets. The
communities which England had sent out over the sea
were to continue to be the hewers of wood and the
drawers of water for the original home-land. It is
strange that the concepts of those days occasionally
emerge in our own. Mr. G. K. Chesterton has briefly
expressed one hard-dying notion as " England the
smithy and Canada the back-garden." It is the old
unitary idea of the Empire expressed in the time-
honoured phrase, " England and her Colonies m — the
conception of the Empire as an inarticulated area with
the manufacturing industries concentrated in one part
and the rest engaged mainly in providing raw materials
for them.
Even the greatest and most imperially thinking of
our modern statesmen have occasionally lapsed into this
range of outworn ideas and run the risk of seeming to
condition the economic life of the new nations by a
' schedule of forbidden industries." The efforts which
our British statesmen of mercantile days made to
repress the manufacturing ambitions of the Colonies
were almost pathetic. The spectacle of furnace and fac-
tory daring even to raise their heads in regions which are
to-day the scene of the mightiest industrial system in
the world excited then the utmost consternation. In
1 Sec tho first ili.i^ram on the plate, p, -•5J.
149
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
/ the reign of George the Second (5 Geo. II., c. 22) a
very curious Act was passed, the object of which was
to suppress the manufacture of hats. It provided
' ' that no hats or felts whatsoever shall be shipped on
board any ship or vessel in any British plantation and
also that no hats shall be loaded upon any horse, cart
or any other carriage to the intent to be exported to
any other British possession." The Act goes on to
provide that no colonist should be a hat-maker unless
he had served seven years' apprenticeship and unless he
employed two apprentices, and that no one should teach
the industry to negroes. Whether these regulations
made the New Englander hatters madder than usual
may be doubted, for they were most of them evaded
with much ease.
We are not likely to make these mistakes to-day.
We no longer regard the Empire as a vast area with a
densely populated workshop in one place and immeas-
urable territories outside providing that industrial
centre with food and raw materials and drawing
thence their manufactured goods. That idea is no
longer adequate to the facts of the present or the
probabilities of the future. We are to think of the
Britannic commonwealth as a constellation of States,
each living its own life, developing along the whole
front, industrial and agricultural, and aspiring to the
largest possible measure of economic self-sufficiency.
Remembering the disquiet and perplexity which the
manufacturing developments of the Colonies in the
eighteenth century incited in the minds of the states-
men and economists of those days, it is interesting to
turn to the figures of manufacturing production in the
150
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
British Dominions to-day. Here is an official state-
ment issued from the office of the High Commissioner
for Australia :
" Australian manufactures, like the primary
industries of the Commonwealth, are increasing
rapidly. In 190 1 there were in Australia 11,000
factories; in 1912 there were 14,000; the hands
employed in 1901 numbered 197,000; and in 1912,
327,000. From £18,324,000 in 1901 the wages
bill of the factories has grown to £31,296,000,
while the rate of wages per head has also increased
from £77 6s. 5d. per annum to £99 15s. The
value of the plant in 1907 represented a capital of
.£49,500,000, and in 1912 £69,272,000. If the
output of the added value of the goods manu-
factured were taken it would be found that the
increase was from £27,000,000 in 1901 to
£60,000,000 in 1912; while the output of the
finished product which stood at £93,000,000 in
1907 was £146,000,000 in 1912."
I need not give the corresponding details for the other
Dominions. It suffices to mention that the Canadian
exports of manufactured goods for the fiscal year 1913
amounted in value to nearly nine million pounds
sterling, and the total exports of wholly manufactured
goods from all the Dominions for the same year to over
27 million pounds.
This manufacturing progress has been effected under
a system of tariff protection even against the goods of
the mother-county. The beginnings of this policy on
the part of the oversea States were not liked by the manu-
facturers of the home-country, and no doubt they con-
151
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
tributed to the prevailing impression that the Colonies
would justify Turgot's maxim and drop before long
from the parent-tree. The era of the granting of self-
government to the Colonies began in 1850, at a date
when British Free Traders were still fully eouvinced
that the rest of the world would likewise eschew
protectionist fallacies and accept the true doctrine in
theory and practice. This may account in some degree
for the absence from the constituting Acts of any
attempt to prevent the daughter-states from raising
tariffs against the products of the mother-country.
And this, we must remember, was also the time when
England was abolishing those kindly preferences with
which she had favoured the products of her oversea
plantations. After the secession of the American
Colonies this principle of preference had been sub-
stituted for that of monopoly which had prevailed
during the mercantile era. In 1808 a differential duty
on timber was first imposed, the duty on the Canadian
product being fixed at 10s. a load and on Baltic timber
at 45s. The tariff on raw cotton, first imposed by Pitt
during the French wars, had always discriminated in
favour of the Colonies. From 1815 the duties on cotton
fibre were gradually lowered until in 1833 they stood
at 3d. a hundredweight on plantation and 2s. nd. a
hundredweight on foreign cotton. The famous Corn
Law of 1815 fixed the price at which the importation of
wheat was permitted at 80s. for foreign and 67s. for
Colonial wheat. The same sort of favours were given
to Colonial rye, barley and oats, and the West Indian
sugar industry was effectually protected by the same
method. Imperial duties were also imposed upon
152
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
foreign goods imported into the Colonies, and these
provided the corresponding preference for the manu-
factures of the home-land in Colonial ports. Foreign
glass and silk manufactures had to pa}' 15 per cent. ;
cotton, woollen, linen, leather, paper, watches and other
articles, 7 per cent. ; meat, 3s. a hundredweight ; cheese,
5s. a hundredweight, and so forth. These Imperial
duties (" Reichszolle ") were repealed two years after
the Corn Laws were abolished. With these latter the
preferences on Colonial corn also disappeared. So also
the duty on raw cotton was wholly abolished, not a
shred of duty being left on the foreign in order to
favour the duty-free Colonial product. The preference
on sugar went in 1854 and that on timber in the
Gladstonian Budget of i860.
Many have regretted that the principle of preference
was not retained in our fiscal system. If we had
continued these favours to the Colonies, the Colonies on
their side might have been willing to abstain from
raising tariffs against English manufactures or to
include a permanent preference for such imports in
their own fiscal systems. " Self-government, in my
opinion," said Mr. Disraeli at the Crystal Palace in
1872, " ought to have been conceded, when it was con-
ceded, as part of a great policy of Imperial consolida-
tion. It ought to have been accompanied with an
Imperial tariff. . . . All this, however, was omitted,
because those who advised that policy — and I believe
their convictions were sincere — looked upon the
Colonies of England, looked even upon our connection
with India, as a burden on this country, viewing every-
thing in a financial aspect and boldly passing by those
153
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
moral and political considerations which make nations
great and by the influence of which alone men are
distinguished from animals."
It is certain that no fears with regard to the effects
of these fiscal measures upon the solidarity of the
Empire had any effect upon the economists and states-
men of those days. The economics of laisser jaire
were always associated, if not with positive antipathy
to the idea of Empire union, at any rate with consider-
able indifference to it. It was actually a part of
Cobden's case for free trade that it would " get rid of
the Colonial system with all its dazzling appeals to the
passions of the people." It was not unlikely, we may
note in passing, that the revival of a sense of Empire
citizenship during the last thirty or forty years should
have produced a movement in favour of recovering in
some degree the old fiscal and economic union of the
Empire.
But meantime the abolition of these preferences for
Colonial products in British ports had a deplorable
effect in the Colonies. The result in Canada of the
Repeal of the Corn Eaws in England and the conse-
quential disappearance of the fiscal favours to Canadian
wheat and flour have been rather overlooked in our
histories of this period. Here is a description of the
catastrophe from the Canadian Encyclopaedia :
" Then came the crash, and in a moment the
abolition of the Corn Laws had not only shattered
the whole Canadian fiscal fabric, but had crushed
the prosperity of the people. For some years the
entire financial, agricultural, and industrial
interests of Canada were paralysed. Political
154
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
troubles naturally followed ; annexation to the.
United States came to be discussed in sundry
influential business quarters, and a dark, sombre
cloud rested over the small and struggling com-
munity. In an economic sense a revolution
ensued. The entire control of the regulation,
collection and distribution of revenues was given
to all the colonies ; taxation was entirely changed
in its channels, and preferences upon British goods
were swept away ; tariffs were framed against the
other British provinces as well as against the
mother-country ; efforts were initiated for better
trade relations with the United States, and
approved of in a letter from the Colonial Secretary
on 3rd June 1846; and strenuous exertions were
commenced along the lines of railway and canal
construction. The period of fiscal pupilage had
passed awa}', never to return, although it must be
a matter of lasting regret that Imperial considera-
tions connected with a mighty but unseen future
could not have retained some principle of
preference for British products in the new tariffs
of both England and her colonies. It was a great
opportunity for genuine statecraft, but one which
was allowed by the Little Englanders to pass into
what is now the limbo of forgotten possibilities."
That this description is not greatly exaggerated is
proved by the letters and despatches of Lord Elgin,
Governor of Canada. Just after the Repeal of the Corn
Laws in England he writes :
" All the prosperity of which Canada is robbed
transplanted to the other .side of the line, as if
155
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
to make the Canadian feel more bitterly how much
kinder England is to the children who desert her
than to those who remain faithful. I believe that
the conviction that they (the Canadians) would be
better off if they were annexed (to the United
States) is almost universal among the commercial
classes."
England made an attempt to compensate Canada for
the loss of her trade advantages in England by con-
cluding in 1854 a treaty of reciprocity between Canada
and the United States. By this treaty free exchange
in food products and raw materials was established
between the two countries. The treaty lasted until
1865, when it was denounced by the United States. To
continue this story, in 1890 the imposition of the
M'Kinley tariff in the United States prompted a
movement in Canada for the revival of reciprocity with
the Republic across the border. The Liberal party in
Canada declared for a Zollverein on a basis of complete
free trade between the two countries. The question
was fought out at the Canadian elections of 1891. Sir
John Macdonald, the leader of the Conservative party,
firmly resisted a trade policy which he felt must tend
towards political and constitutional fusion between the
Dominion and the Republic. He succeeded at the polls
and the reciprocity idea was defeated, to be revived
twenty years later with a similar result.
It is on the whole not surprising that the Colonies
became protectionist even against the manufactures of
the mother-land. The anti-Empire utterances of
Cobden, Bright and British statesmen and officials of
all parties probably helped towards the same end. The
IS*
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
Colonies were always being informed that their associa-
tion with the mother-country was only .temporary and
that sooner or later they must set up as independent
states. They drew the natural inferences. They
prepared for economic as well as political independence.
Moreover, England had deliberately elected to draw
her food and raw materials from regions outside her
political control. The development of her broader
acres beyond the seas was thus checked, and the
Colonies were diverted, whether they wished or not,
from those agricultural pursuits which still represent
their chief asset. Protection against the manufactures
of Great Britain became the inevitable result. The net
effect is briefly described by Professor Fuchs in his
work, " Die Handelspolitik Englands und seiner
Kolonien." ' A marvellous spectacle," he writes,
" has thus been presented to the world. England has
not succeeded in realising even in her own Colonies
that ideal of free trade to which, in her expectation of
sixty years ago, the entire civilised world was about
to be converted."
The infatuated extreme to which in the middle years
of last century England carried her spirit of insular
self-sufficiency and her indifference to her position as
the head of a vast Empire may be gathered from a
single example. In 1862 and 1865 identical treaties
were concluded with Belgium and the Prussian
Zollverein, by which England undertook not to accept
any advantages in her own Colonial markets which
were not also extended to Belgium and the Prussian
States, and therefore, by virtue of the most-favoured-
nation principle, to almost all other Foreign countries.
157
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
These instruments, which remained in force for about
thirty-five years, made it impossible for the British
Colonies to accord any advantages in their markets to
British over foreign manufactures. It seems really
marvellous in the light of subsequent history that
England should thus have been willing to oblige by
deliberately writing off any special advantage she might
one day inherit as the home and motherland of these
mighty Dominions whose future lies all before them.
The funny thing is that we appear to have received no
quid whatever for this unconscionable quo. The
treaties passed the House of Commons almost sub
silentio. There was some debate on the provision
relating to the exportation of coal, but the articles
which concerned the Colonies were apparently not even
mentioned in 1862 or in 1865. When the treaties came
to be denounced at the request of Canada in 1897, Lord
Salisbury spoke thus in the dispatches announcing the
event :
" No record exists in the archives of this
department of the circumstances under which this
article (viz. 15) was adopted or of the reasons which
induced Her Majesty's Government at the time to
enter into an engagement of such a nature, and it
would appear probable that the insertion of these
words must have been due to oversight or to a
want of adequate consideration of the consequences
which would flow from them. . . . The provi-
sions of the articles in question constitute a barrier
to the internal fiscal arrangements of the British
Empire which is inconsistent with the close ties of
commercial intercourse which subsist and should
158
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
be consolidated between the mother-country and
the colonies."
Lord Lansdowne confessed to be similarly nonplussed.
The simple explanation seems to be that amid the
great industrial onrush of the days and the prevalence
of those cosmopolitan ideas of which the Crystal Palace
was the not inappropriate memorial, all sense of the
economic as well as the political significance of the
British Empire had perished.
But the first measures of tariff protection in the
Colonies against English manufactures did not pass
without protest. In 1859 Canada revised her fiscal
policy and among other changes placed new duties
upon imported manufactures. This action was
described in a highly indignant memorial presented to
the Colonial Secretary by the Sheffield Chamber of
Commerce as nothing less than "indecent and a
reproach," the memorialists pointing to the scandalous
spectacle of " extensive and numerous hardware
manufactories " springing up in Canada East and
West. The Secretary of State read the upstart pro-
tectionists a solemn lesson on the evil of their ways,
but only succeeded in eliciting from Sir A. Gait,
Finance Minister of Canada, a reply which has become
historic as the assertion of colonial autonomy in the
fiscal sphere :
"The Government of Canada, acting for its
Legislature and people, cannot, through those
feelings of deference which they owe to the
Imperial authorities, in any measure waive or
diminish the right of the people of Canada to
decide for themselves both as t<> tin- modi- and
159
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
extent to which taxation shall be imposed. The
Provincial Ministry are at all times ready to afford
explanations in regard to acts of the Legislature
to which they are party ; but, subject to their dutj'
and allegiance to Her Majesty, their responsibility
in all general questions of policy must be to the
Provincial Parliament, by whose confidence they
administer the affairs of the country. And in the
imposition of taxation it is so plainly necessary
that the administration and the people be in accord,
that the former cannot admit responsibility or
require approval beyond that of the local Legisla-
ture. Self-government would be utterly annihi-
lated if the views of the Imperial Government were
to be preferred to those of the people of Canada.
It is, therefore, the duty of the present Govern-
ment distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian
Legislature to adjust the taxation of the people
in the way they deem best — even if it should
unfortunately happen to meet with the disapproval
of the Imperial Ministry. Her Majesty cannot be
advised to disallow such Acts, unless her advisers
are prepared to assume the administration of the
affairs of the Colony, irrespective of the views of
its inhabitants."
Such arguments as these were very unlikely to be
resisted by the authorities at home. By the British
North America Act (30 & 31 Vic, c. 3) the " regulation
of trade and commerce " was expressly conferred as a
power upon the new Federal Parliament. The only
restriction remaining was that all legislation giving
the foreign trader commercial advantage over the
160
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
English was to be reserved for Imperial consideration.
In 1878 even this restriction was removed, the Imperial
power relying thenceforth on the general prerogative
of the veto.
The struggle for fiscal freedom in Australia has
many points of interest. The Act conferring self-
government on the Australian colonies made no
stipulation against protective duties being imposed on
British goods, but it did attempt to keep the Colonies in
the narrow way of free trade orthodoxy towards the
outer world in general. This attempt w y as made in a
rather curious way. The several Colonies were for-
bidden to impose duties that discriminated even between
their own colonial neighbours and foreign countries.
As it seemed improbable that any colony would care
to impose a heavy duty on articles imported from such
a neighbour, this provision, it was shrewdly hoped,
might effectually prevent the Colonies from adopting a
protectionist policy. Thus their economic salvation
would be secured. As an example, the exact words
of the Australian Act may be quoted (13 & 14 Vic,
c. 59, sect. 27) :
" It shall be lawful for the Governor and
Legislative Council of New South Wales, Victoria,
Van Diemen's Land, South Australia and West
Australia, to impose and levy such duties of
custom as may seem fit on importation into such
respective colonies of any goods, etc., whether the
produce or the manufacture of or imported from
the United Kingdom or an}' colony or any foreign
country : provided also that no new duty shall be
so imposed upon the importation into any of the
' 161
h
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
said colonies of any article the product or manu-
facture of or imported from any particular country
or place which shall not be equally imposed on
the importation into the same colony of the like
article the product or manufacture of or imported
from all other countries or places whatsoever."
The Australian colonies soon began to demand the
freedom in fiscal affairs obtained by Canada. About
the year 1870 a movement arose in Australia for a
Zollverein or customs union among the various states.
The provision just mentioned which prevented any
colony giving preferential treatment to goods imported
from a neighbouring colony was an insuperable obstacle
to such a union. If the Australian colonies established
inter-colonial free trade they would be compelled to
extend that policy to all foreign countries as well as to
Great Britain. In 1871, at an inter-colonial conference
held at Melbourne, resolutions were passed demanding
the removal of all such restrictions. Mr. Duffy, the
Premier of Victoria, went so far as to assert that
" obstinacy on the part of the Imperial Government
would weaken and ought to weaken the allegiance of
the Colonies." To these demands Lord Kimberley
objected that they tended to diminish the right of the
Crown to conclude treaties binding upon the Colonies.
It should be noticed that there was no strong force of
colonial opinion at the back of this agitation. It
were brought forward at the instance of Messrs. Duffy
and Berry, who represented Victoria at the conference,
and was deprecated by the representatives of the
other colonies on the ground that it tended to
Imperial disintegration. Mr. Duffy himself was the
162 »
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
author in 1870 of the remarkable proposal that in ease
of war between England and any foreign country the
Colonies should remain neutral. If she had been so
minded, England might have secured at this time the
same advantages as were to be accorded to the colonies
inter se, or at least a considerable measure of preference
over the imports from foreign countries. In 1873,
however, another conference was held by the Austra-
lian colonies, and at the instance of the same not very
Imperially-minded colonial statesmen the same
demands were made. Thereupon Lord Kimberley
yielded and introduced the Australian Colonial Duties
Act. This measure completed the economic, as distinct
from the political, disintegration of the Empire, the
only restriction still imposed by the mother-country on
the Colonies being that they were not permitted to
differentiate in favour of the foreigner against English
imports. The debate on this Bill was significant as
showing that there was still a body of opinion in
England not prepared to surrender the last relics of
the economic solidarity of the Empire. It is true the
opponents of the Bill were intent rather upon keeping
the Colonies in line with England's ideal of cosmopoli-
tan free trade than upon obtaining any special
advantages for England in the markets of the Empire.
Still the speech of Earl Grey, who represented the older
school of Imperial statesmen, is interesting as showing
that the rapidly growing process of disintegration in
the Empire was not universally approved and that the
ideas of the mercantile era were not wholly extinct.
Karl On-v said :
' Tf the colonies and the United Kingdom are
163
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
in any true sense to form one Empire, it is obvious
that there must exist some single and permanent
authority to ensure that, on subjects of general and
common interest, all the separate communities that
form the Empire shall act in concert and shall
co-operate with each other. Each distinct com-
munity may be free to act for itself in its own
internal administration, but unless all are
subordinated to the Imperial authority where the
general interest is concerned, there is no Empire.
But, among the subjects which are most clearly
of common concern, next to their joint defence
against aggression, comes that of a common com-
mercial policy. This, till of late years, has been
universally held to be so obviously true as to be
beyond dispute. In the early days, indeed, of our
colonies, the opinion held both here and through-
out Europe was that colonies were only valuable
for the commercial advantages to be derived from
them. The mother-country insisted on a mono-
poly of supply to the colonies, and they in return
were allowed either a monopoly or the privilege of
supplying on better terms than other countries
certain articles of produce to the parent state, the
right of regulating the manner in which this inter-
course was carried on being exercised without
dispute by Parliament. . . . And when at length
there came a change of opinion as to the wisdom
of the old system of colonial trade, and when it
was swept away and the system of free trade was
established, it was not even imagined that the
Imperial Parliament and Government were to
164
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
forego their old authority of settling what was to
be the commercial policy of the whole Empire. On
the contrary, it was considered that the policy of
free trade would be deprived of much of its
advantage if it were not consistently followed
throughout the Empire."
To Lord Kimberley's representations Earl Grey
replied : —
" I cannot concur in this view of the subject,
and, if it is to be acted on, I should wish to know
in what manner the Queen's authority is to be
maintained at all. If that authority is not to be
upheld by requiring the colonies to conform to
the general commercial policy of the Empire; if
the Imperial Government is to have no voice in
determining upon the commercial measures of the
colonies, and we are even to allow them to impose
protective duties more hostile to British interests
than the duties of most foreign nations, it seems
to me that it will become a very serious question
whether it will be well to maintain the connection.
.... Is it not probable that the people of this
country may say, ' If we are to exercise no power
over the colonies, nor to derive any advantage from
them, we decline to incur the responsibility of
protecting them'?"
The Bill was, however, passed in deference to Lord
Kimberley's dictum that " to impose a veto was a very
serious matter indeed." Section 3 of the Act (36 Vic,
c. 22) runs as follows : —
"The legislature of any one of the Australian
colonies shall, for the purpose of carrying Into
jA-
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
effect auy agreement between any two or more of
the said colonies or one or more in New Zealand,
have lull power to remit or impose duties of impor-
tation from any other said colony : provided always
no duty shall be imposed or remitted as to impor-
tation from any particular country which shall not
be equally imposed or remitted upon the importa-
tion of the like articles from any other country."
Henceforth the Colonies were at liberty to impose any
duties they pleased upon imported goods, British and
foreign, the incidence of the duties being the same.
By the eventual denunciation of the Belgian and Ger-
man treaties they were enabled if they pleased to give
preferential advantages to British over foreign impor-
tations.
We need not trouble to speculate what would have
been the history of the Empire during the last half
century if this country had made greater efforts to pre-
scribe a trade policy to the Dominions and had acted
on the assumption that the Empire as a political unit
had a long future and a great destiny before it. It was
perhaps necessary that the Dominions should establish
their own autonomy and develop a sense of respon-
sibility and the self-respecting consciousness of
individual communities before they could come together
again, as they are doing to-day, on terms of equal
partnership. In view of the ever-memorable gathering
of the Britannic clans during the Great War, can we
think and say that the home-country has greatly erred
in the past in her policy towards these over-sea
societies? If she had thought more " Imperially "in
the days when political and fiscal freedom was being
i66
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
secured to the young daughter-states, she might have
delayed the gift and repeated some of the mistakes
which led to the secession of the American colonies.
It is enough to remind ourselves briefly of the
subsequent events in the Empire's fiscal history. The
renaissance of what we call for want of a better word
Imperial sentiment, which has been by far the most
important political movement of the last thirty years,
led very quickly to a desire for closer economic union.
The Colonies, having asserted their fiscal freedom, now
desired to use it in order to give England advantages in
their markets and to establish a real Britannic trade-
partnership. As early as 1881 Canada began to
protest against those absurd treaties with Belgium and
Prussia, which effectually prevented the Colonies from
favouring the mother-country's products in their ports.
In 1886 the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and an
important Congress of Chambers of Commerce of the
Empire brought into prominence the idea of a trade
partnership embracing the whole British world. At
the Colonial Conference in Jubilee year 1887, Sir
Samuel Griffith, Premier of Queensland, moved the
question " whether it should not be recognised as part
of the duty of the governing bodies of the Empire to
sec that their own subjects have preference over foreign
countries in matters of trade." Then also Mr.
Hofmeyr, leader of the Afrikander party at the Cape,
moved " to discuss the feasibility of promoting closer
union between the various parts of the British Empire
by means of an Imperial tariff of customs to he levied
independently of the duties payable under existing
tariffs on goods entering the Empire from abroad, the
167
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
revenue derived from such tariffs to be devoted to the
general defence of the Empire." This was an original
and striking proposal. The Imperial toll was to be 2
per cent, ad valorem, raised throughout the whole
Empire on foreign importations alone. In these days
one recalls with a surprised impatience the outcry
raised by free traders and " Little Englanders "
against this very sensible and statesmanlike scheme,
which, indeed, in its essence we may yet see realised.
In 1890 what is remembered as the " Dunraven
Debate " on the subject took place in the House of
Lords. As in duty bound, the responsible leaders of
the day had to indicate the difficulties in the way of
these schemes of fiscal co-operation. Lord Salisbury
warned and encouraged in the same breath. In the
debate he said —
" Whenever such a modification of English
opinion takes place — if ever it does take place — so
that this idea of discrimination of duty in favour
of colonial produce shall be a fiscal possibility,
I at all events shall not oppose the wish of my
noble friend to have the matter thoroughly dis-
cussed between us and the colonies."
In the same spirit the Conservative leader addressed
a deputation of the United Empire Trade League in
1891 : —
" On this matter public opinion must be framed
or formed before any Government can act. No
Government can impose its own opinion on the
people of this country in these matters. You are
invited, and it is the duty of those who feel them-
selves to be the leaders of such a movement and
168
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
the apostles of such a doctrine to go forth and
fight for it, and when they have convinced the
people of this country their battle will be won."
As far back as 1885 Lord Salisbury had spoken as
follows on the subject, which was then just emerging :
" There is another similar question — I will not
now go into it, but I want to touch upon it merely
to indicate a similar confusion of matters that have
nothing to do with free trade as if they had some-
thing to do with free trade — viz., the question of
altering our duties in favour of our colonies —
that is to say, drawing our, colonies nearer to our-
selves by abolishing, so far as may be, the
customs houses that separate the two. I do not
put it before you as a matter that is free from
difficulty. I do not deny that in many points
you will find every obstacle hard to overcome. But
what I demur to is that you should be forbidden
from entertaining the idea of differential duties in
favour of the colonies as though it were an econo-
mical heresy."
In 1891 the Canadian Government laid on the table
of the Federal House in Ottawa an address to the
Queen praying for the abrogation of the two obnoxious
and obstructive treaties. A courteous refusal was the
result, but the movement here and elsewhere continued.
Even in the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, sup-
posed to be the stronghold of fiscal orthodoxy, a
resolution bad been passed about this time (May 20,
1890) in favour of preferential trading within the
Empire. Mr. E. Burgis moved :
" That in the opinion of this chamber no treaties
i6g
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
of commerce shall in future be concluded unless a
clause be therein inserted to the effect that prefer-
ential treatment of its colonies by any Power shall
not be considered action of a nature to justify any
claims by the other contracting party or parties
under the most-favoured-nation clause."
Strange to say, this resolution was carried unani-
mously, though twenty years later Manchester was to
right vigorously against precisely the same idea. But
the question had then got hopelessly entangled in our
British party -politics.
In Chambers of Commerce and Parliament Houses
of the Empire the new ideas found utterance and made
progress. The dissolution in 1893 of the Imperial
Federation League, which for ten years had fought for
an Empire union on constitutional lines, may have
discouraged the Federation idea and concentrated hope
and attention upon the schemes for closer commercial
union. It was in these days that Mr. Chamberlain,
anticipating his future policy and campaign, declared :
" There is a universal desire for closer union. It is
essential to the existence of the Empire. It can be
most hopefully approached from the commercial side."
In 1894 the Colonial Conference met on the invitation
of the Dominion Government at Ottawa and concerned
itself especially with these trade questions. The
Dominions committed themselves to the belief in " a
Customs arrangement between Great Britain and the
Colonies, by which trade within the Empire might be
placed on a more favourable footing than that which
is carried on with foreign countries."
In 1897 occurred the Diamond Jubilee festival, with
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TRADE AND INDUSTRY
its glittering pageants and its fervent manifestations
of the new Imperial sentiment. At the conference held
this year Mr. Chamberlain had much to say on a
subject to which he was destined ultimately to sacrifice
party allegiance and in the end health and life itself.
In his opening speech he pointed out how generally
commercial and fiscal had preceded political union,
mentioning the German Zollverein which had " finally
made possible and encouraged the ultimate union of the
Empire." He admitted, however, that the " fiscal
arrangements of the different colonies differed so much
among themselves, and all differ so much from those
of the mother-country, that it would be a matter of the
greatest complication and difficulty to arrive at any
conclusion which would unite us commercially in the
same sense in which the Zollverein united the Empire
of Germany."
But the Colonies were not to be denied. Canada was
already beginning to modify her tariff arrangements
so as to embody the idea of preference, and the demand
for the striking-off of the treaty fetters that hampered
these filial efforts became irresistible. In deference to
a very strong resolution passed at the conference, the
silly treaties were at last abolished and Canada at
once proceeded to accord preferential advantages to
the mother-country.
In 1902 the Coronation Conference met. Mr. Cham-
berlain was still not definitely committed to the cause.
Though he again encouraged, he again harped on
lets and hindrances. He also expressed some disap-
pointments with the effects of the Canadian preference,
which, however, subsequent experience has not justi-
r7i
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
lied. The following resolutions on this subject were
' passed at this memorable Empire indaba : —
Preferen t ial Trade.
i. " That this Conference recognises that the
principle of preferential trade between the United
Kingdom and His Majesty's Dominions beyond
the seas would stimulate and facilitate mutual com-
mercial intercourse, and would, by promoting the
development of the resources and industries of the
several parts, strengthen the Empire."
Free Trade not Practicable.
2. " That this Conference recognises that, in
the present circumstances of the colonies, it is not
practicable to adopt a general system of free trade
as between the mother-country and the British
Dominions beyond the seas."
A Preference in the Colonies for British Goods.
3. " That with a view, however, to promoting
the increase of trade within the Empire, it is
desirable that those colonies which have not
already adopted such a policy should, as far as
their circumstances permit, give substantial pre-
ferential treatment to the products and manufac-
tures of the United Kingdom."
A Preference in the Mother-Country for Colonial
Products.
4. " That the Prime Ministers of the colonies
respectfully urge on His Majesty's Government
172
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
the expediency of granting in the United Kingdom
preferential treatment to the products and manu-
factures of the colonies either by exemption from,
or reduction of the duties now or hereafter im-
posed."
Action by the Colonies.
5. " That the Prime Ministers present at the
Conference undertake to submit to their respective
Governments at the earliest opportunity the prin-
ciple of the third resolution above given, and to
request them to take such measures as may be
necessary to give effect to it."
Definite schemes of preference were also adopted by
the representatives of the Dominions, subsequently
recommended to the respective Parliaments and carried
ultimately into effect.
But England made no sign of reciprocating these
favours. She had an opportunity when she imposed
a duty of one shilling a quarter on all imported wheat
in the War Budget of 1902. In 1903 this duty was
repealed, and great was the disappointment among
the friends of preference at home and over the seas
when Mr. Ritchie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
removed that duty entirely, refusing to leave it on
foreign corn only so as to give the advantage of the
shilling to the Dominions and India. This was re-
garded as a fanatical sacrifice on the altars of rigid
free trade orthodoxy.
Meanwhile events were happening which threw some
light upon the fiscal disunion of the Empire. In 1898
the Canadian preferences had been definitely granted to
the United Kingdom and to those British colonies
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
" whose customs tariff was on the whole as favourable
to Canada as the British preferential tariff (in
Canada) was to such colony or possession."
The ordinary Canadian tariff applied, of course,
without difference to all foreign countries. All
those countries acquiesced in what was simply
a domestic arrangement within the British Em-
pire except Germany, who insisted on enjoying
in Canadian markets exactly the same terms as
were accorded to England. She proposed to sit at
the British table like any member of the family, and
when this was not allowed she retaliated by excluding
Canada from the " most-favoured-nation " treatment,
which however she continued to Great Britain and
the other Colonies. Protests and negotiations took
place, but as Germany was immovable, Canada retali-
ated in turn by providing (Act 15 of 1903) that when
any foreign country treated imports from Canada less
favourably than imports from other countries, a sur-
tax, amounting to one-third of the duty under the
general tariff, should be imposed. This applied only
' to Germany.
About the same time Baron von Richthoven in-
formed our Ambassador in Berlin that as the South
African colonies were granting England a similar pre-
ference and other colonies might follow suit, it was
becoming a question whether Germany should exclude
not only these filially-minded colonies from most-
favoured-nation treatment but England herself.
Thereupon the Marquis of Lansdowne sent a dispatch
to Germany which concluded thus :
" Should the German Government persist in
J 74
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
the attitude which they have taken up in this
matter and extend to the products of other British
colonies and even to those of the United Kingdom,
whose tariff is at the present moment based upon
the most liberal principles, the discrimination
which they have enforced against Canada, a very
wide and serious issue must inevitably be raised,
involving the fiscal relations of this country and
the German Empire."
It was indeed a little strong that Germany, who
placed a duty of 25 per cent, on imports from the
United Kingdom, should threaten England, to whose
ports she had free entrance, with punishment if the
British Dominions ventured to treat the Briton a little
more favourably than the foreigner in their ports.
But Germany's whole action throws into relief that
economic disintegration of the British Empire whose
course we have been following. There was some
reason in Baron von Richthoven's rejoinder to Lord
Lansdowne, that " if the English colonies are to be in
a position to follow out their own customs policy, other
countries must be allowed to treat them as separate-
customs territories." If the whole Empire had been
acting together, Germany would never have dared
either to interfere or to threaten.
These events made a great impression on the public
mind and also, it seems probable, on the mind of Mr.
Chamberlain, who in 1903 started his campaign for
fiscal revision and Imperial preferences. His practical
scheme was to levy a tax of two shillings a quarter on
foreign corn (except maize), a coresponding duty on
flour, a 5 ]>er cent, duty on foreign dairy produce,
175
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
and a 5 per cent, duty on foreign meat (except bacon).
In order to make up to the consumer for any rise in the
prices of these commodities, there were to be remis-
sions of duty on tea, sugar, coffee and cocoa. A
preference was also to be granted to colonial wines and
fruits, and a 10 per cent, duty to be laid on competitive
foreign manufactures.
It is not necessary to repeat the story how the ques-
tion of preference became a heat-generating issue in
our party politics, how the " cheap loaf " appeal pre-
vailed with the electorate, and how the Liberal Party
came in mainly on the strength of that appeal with a
majority which lasted them for a decade. A good
many speakers and writers at that time seemed to
regard the British democracy as little better than
those decadent Alexandrians of whom Dion Chrysos-
tom wrote that the3^ cared for nothing but the games
and the big loaf (tov ttoKvv aerov) Even the Colonial
Conference of 1907, with its forcible expositions of the
policy by the Dominions Premiers, seemed to have
little effect on public opinion. Mr. Deakin's contribu-
tions to the debates were especially illuminating. On
behalf of his own country he appealed for a larger
share in the custom of the United Kingdom for certain
prime necessaries of life. He pointed to the tendency
of the imports into Australia from the United King-
dom to decline in comparison with the imports from
the foreigner. He reminded the Conference that out
of 2,000 million acres of Australian territory less than
9^2 millions were under cultivation :
" Preferential trade would enable Australia to
secure a large portion of the British trade, many
176
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
lines of which are now largely or exclusively in
foreign hands, with the result that there would be
a more rapid development of the territory of the
Commonwealth, an increase in its population and
wealth, and a large increase in its home-market
for manufactures, to the manifest advantage of
those engaged in various forms of productive in-
dustry. Upon the enormous gain to the Empire
as a whole from the settlement, population and
development of its immense territories, it is
unnecessary to dwell. There are no such oppor-
tunities elsewhere, and there is urgent need of
their immediate utilisation. We are, and shall
continue to be, by far your best customers."
The conclusion of the Australian Premier's speech
conveyed a concise summary of the advantages for the
great British household of the preferential policy :
' For the last time I repeat our realisation that
preference begins as a business operation to be
conducted for business ends. That is the prelimi-
nary of all. We firmly believe that the very best
possible business open to us is that which builds
up the Empire and maintains its independence,
securing its political and social heritages of
freedom and culture and enlarging its beneficial
influence. To us it seems certain that these great
ends can only be accomplished by joint action and
effective action, which shall embrace the centre
and all its parts. We live in the hope that \u-
shall be economically, industrially and produc
tivelv raised to the highest power of which eaeh
portion, and therefore the Empire as a whole, is
177
Id
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
capable. We wish to see British people of
British stock as far as possible kept to our own
vast territories, living under civilised conditions
enabling them to multiply, prosper and advance.
Such conditions, we believe, can be found to the
same degree nowhere else in the world. We hope
that our preferences will affect population as well
as trade, and that in the diffusion of population
the outer parts of the Empire will get the full
advantage of it, so far as it can be controlled
without impairing individual freedom. Preferen-
tial trade appeals to us as a potent influence to
aid this growth."
There was one expression of appreciation and sym-
pathy, cautious and temperate though it w r as, which
seemed the more gratifying as it came from a man who
was fighting the cause most relentlessly in the arena
of party politics. Mr. Lloyd George said :
" We heartily concur in the view which has
been presented by the Colonial Ministers, that the
Empire would be a great gainer if much of the
products now purchased from foreign countries
could be produced and purchased within the
Empire. In Britain we have the greatest market
in the world. We are the greatest purchasers of
produce raised or manufactured outside our own
boundaries. A very large proportion of this
produce could very well be raised in the colonies,
and any reasonable and workable plan that would
tend to increase the proportion of the produce
which is bought by us from the colonies, and by
the colonies from us and from each other, must
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TRADE AND INDUSTRY
necessarily enhance the resources of the Empire
as a whole. A considerable part of the surplus
population of the United Kingdom which now
goes to foreign lands in search of a livelihood
might then find it to its profit to pitch its tents
somewhere under the Flag, and the Empire would
gain in riches of material and of men. We agree
with our colonial comrades that all this is worth
concerted effort, even if that effort at the outset
costs us something. The federation of free com-
monwealths is worth making some sacrifice for.
One never knows when its strength may be
essential to the great cause of human freedom,
and that is priceless."
It is a little bewildering for an army thus to find a
general of the opposing forces fighting suddenly and
temporarily, but efficiently, in its own ranks.
The Dominions soon set up an extensive system ol
trade preference among themselves and with the
mother-country. Without describing this in detail, we
may note that in Australia and South Africa preference
is granted by means of a reduction on the ordinary
rates of duty, whilst in New Zealand a similar effect is
attained by imposing a surtax on certain classes of
goods when they are of foreign manufacture. A third
tern prevails in Canada : the Customs Acts provide
For three tariffs, viz. : — the British Preferential Tariff,
the Intermediate Tariff and the General Tariff.
•l Powers, prepared to give reciprocal advan-
tages, may be placed OH this intermediate scale, which
ranges about io per cent, below the general tariff. In
the Canadian scheme British goods had a [2 per cent.
179
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
pull over countries on the general and 8% per cent, on
those which had qualified for the intermediate scale. In
addition to all this, the Dominions have arranged a
system of preferential duties among themselves. These
latter arrangements are all made on the basis of
reciprocity. No Dominion grants such concessions to
another except in return for some corresponding ad-
vantage. Only the arrangements between the
Dominions and the United Kingdom are one-sided, as
England as yet has declined to reciprocate.
There is no denying that these preferences have had
their natural and intended effect in developing Eng-
land's export trade with the Dominions. Previously
the tendency had been to decline. For the seven years
before the preference (1890-1897) the figures of British
exports to Canada as given in the Statistical Abstract
(1905) fell from £6,827,023 to £5,171,851 ; for the
seven years after the preference (1898-1904) the figures
rose from £5,838,000 to £10,624,221. Of the total
imports into the United Kingdom in 1913 the self-
governing Dominions contributed 17 per cent., whilst
of the total exports they took 15.8 per cent. In 1901
the corresponding figures were 12.2 per cent and 14.3
per cent. 1 Between 1885 and 1913 the percentage
increase in manufactured articles (excluding ships)
exported from the United Kingdom to foreign coun-
tries was 99 ; to British possessions the increase was
115. 2 Still it remains true that the Dominions pur-
chase as large a quantity of manufactured from foreign
countries as from the United Kingdom and that their
1 Final Report Dominions Royal Commission : pp. 13 and 16.
2 " The New Empire Partnership," P. and A. Hurd : p. 230.
180
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
sales of raw materials to foreign countries (including
re-exports from the United Kingdom) are larger than
to the mother country.
The Committee on Commercial and Industrial
Policy, presided over by Lord Balfour of Burleigh,
reported in February, 1917, in favour of Imperial
Preference, though the Chairman and other members
had strong free-trade antecedents. The following
resolutions were passed :
1. In the light of experience gained during
the war we consider that special steps must be
taken to stimulate the production of foodstuffs,
raw materials and manufactured articles within
the Empire wherever the expansion of production
is possible and economically desirable for the
safety and welfare of the Empire as a whole.
2. We therefore recommend that His Majesty's
Government should now declare their adherence
to the principle that preference should be accorded
to the products and manufactures of the British
overseas dominions in respect of any Customs
duties now or hereafter to be imposed on imports
into the United Kingdom.
3. Further it will, in our opinion, be neces-
sary to take into early consideration as one of the
methods of achieving the above objects the desir-
ability of establishing a wider range of Customs
duties, which would be remitted or reduced on the
products and manufactures of the Empire, and
which would form the basis of commercial treaties
with allied and n-jutral Powers.
The fiscal question was also discussed at length ir
l8l
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
the Imperial War Cabinet, but no report of these
debates was published. The Imperial War Confer-
ence, however, passed the following resolution :
The time has arrived when all possible encourage
ment should be given to the development of Imperial
resources, and especially to making the Empire
independent of other countries in respect of food
supplies, raw materials and essential industries.
With these objects in view, this Conference express^,
itself in favour of :
i. The principle that each part of the Empire,
having due regard to the interests of our Allies,
shall give specially favourable treatment and facili-
ties to the produce and manufactures of other parts
of the Empire ;
2. Arrangements by which intending emigrants
from the United Kingdom may be induced to
settle in countries under the British flag.
There is no problem more momentous and
delicate than this of the future fiscal and trade rela-
tions among the States of the Empire. The war has
in some degree shifted the venue of the question, be-
cause we have fought through it side by side with
trusty and well-beloved allies which for many years
can never be such foreign countries to us as they were
in the past. The British States have to consider the
interests of these countries as well as their own, and
this is bound to affect the arrangements which are
made for preferential trading. But we may lay down
one or two principles as a broad guide for future
policy. A primary obligation which we owe to our-
selves and indirectly to the world in general if, to
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TRADE AND INDUSTRY
develop the resources and increase the population of
the Britannic realms. The consuming power of the
United Kingdom must be made to subserve in the
highest possible degree these great objects. The
failures to do this in the past may have had its com-
pensations in many forms, such as a closer commercial
and social relationship to many foreign nations. But
one cannot help reflecting that if our policy had been
framed to serve political objects, we might have had
a hundred million white people in the Empire when
the war broke out, with the corresponding military
advantage. " In the past sixty years," Capt. L. S.
Amery has told us, " England has created, through
her markets, a population numbering now at the least
fifty or sixty million souls ; and she has created them
almost entirely in foreign countries. The middle West
of the United States, the Argentine, great industrial
regions of Germany and France, to give but a few
instances, are peopled by millions who would never
have come into existence but for the British market.
An intelligent direction of the creative power of that
market for national and Imperial ends would have
created and supported the bulk of that vast population
under the British flag." Tariff changes, including a
preference for the Dominions, and some measures of
protection for our home agriculture and manufactures,
may well be necessary for these ends, but, as has been
already pointed out, very much can be done by im-
provements in communications and in the mechanism
oi trade.
The figures already given slmw how impossible and
undesirable it would be to attempt to convert thr
i«3
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
Empire into a " geschlossener Staat " or closed econo-
mic area. Our manufactures cannot yet subsist on the
custom of the Empire, and foreign peoples must have
the means of paying us for their importations of
our products. But we can gradually promote the self-
dependence of the Empire and secure a larger and
continuously increasing share in the supply of the
Dominions and Dependencies with products of the loom
and forge without upsetting the delicate balance of
trade and exchange. We must avoid, however, all
purely selfish exploitation such as brought the Spanish
and other empires in the past to discredit and destruc-
tion. Our inheritance is so vast, our world-position
so favoured, that we cannot in our own interests go
back upon that sense of trusteeship and responsibility
which has determined our policy for so many years.
If we develop the production of raw cotton within the
Empire, we must do so in the general interest as well
as in our own. Proposals have been made to divert by
actual tariff arrangements the supply of certain raw
materials produced in the Empire to the factories of
this country. Such devices may be necessary in time
of war, and there are certain products indispensable
for defensive purposes upon which we shall have in
future to keep a firm hold. But in general all attempts
to secure entirely to ourselves the wealth of our vast
tropical estates, for whose fiscal policies we are imme-
diately responsible, are to be severely condemned.
On this subject we may recall the warnings of one
of the wisest of our Imperial statesmen — warnings to
which our fiscal reformers perhaps failed to give their
184
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
due weight. In his Political and Literary Essays,
Lord Cromer wrote : —
" I entertain a strong opinion that an imperial
nation should seek to fortify its position and tc
provide guarantees for the durability of its
Empire, not merely by rendering itself, so far as
is possible, impregnable, but also b}^ using its
vast world-power in such a manner as to secure
in some degree the moral acquiescence of other
nations in its imperium, and thus provide an
antidote — albeit it may only be a partial antidote
— against the jealousy and emulation which its
extensive Dominions are calculated to create."
Again we read : —
' Free trade mitigates, though it is powerless
to remove, international animosities. Exclusive
trade stimulates and aggravates those animosities.
I do not by any means maintain that this argu-
ment is by itself conclusive against the adoption
of a policy of protection, if, on other grounds, the
adoption of such a policy is deemed desirable ;
but it is one aspect of the question which, when
the whole issue is under consideration, should not
be left out of account."
Less than twenty years ago the British flag was
hoisted side by side with the Egyptian in the Soudan,
and never a dog barked in Europe. Why was this?
Partly because in the Anglo-Egyptian Convention of
1899 it was expressly stated that no trade preference
was to be accorded to any nation. The British flag
implied British responsibility, but it implied no track-
advantages for the protecting Power. The fruits of
i85
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
the Pax Britannica over that million of square miles
were ensured on equal terms to all who desired to share
them. Exclusive and sellish exploitation is to be
avoided, not only because it constitutes a danger and
a challenge, but because it sins against the broadcr
eonccption of human society and against those liberal
ideas which the British Empire is supposed to
embody.
The fiscal future of India is a problem of itself. In
1S94 the Indian Government imposed a slight import
duty for revenue purposes on manufactured goods im-
ported into the Dependency. Now, cotton piece goods
are made in Lancashire as well as India, and this
slight duty would have had a pro tanlo protective effect
on the Indian product. So Lancashire insisted on an
excise duty of corresponding amount being laid on
India-manufactured cotton piece goods, ostensibly out
of regard for India and the free trade orthodoxy but,
really and truly, in her own selfish interest. During
the war, in connection with an Indian contribution to
the war, these Indian duties were raised but no cor-
responding increase was made in the hated excise on
cotton goods. Thus the Indian product got at last a
protection and there were tears and protests in Lan-
cashire. The whole question is one of the utmost diffi-
culty. Lancashire is largely dependent on her Indian
trade, while India is protectionist to the core and
determined to develop her native industries. More-
over, India will inevitably obtain before long control of
her own fiscal policy.
Another momentous question is concerned with the
dependence of the United Kingdom for its elementary
186
TRADE AND INDUSTRY
food supplies on oversea importations. The war has
shown us that this dependence is a danger to England
and the whole Empire. The Empire for many years
must depend on the strength of its heart and centre,
and any successful blow at England would shatter the
whole Imperial fabric. The revival of our English
agriculture and country life seems to be essential, not
only for immediate English reasons, social and other-
wise,' but in the wider interests of the whole British
Commonwealth. England cannot face the future in
her present dependence on oversea supplies, 1 even
though these supplies should be wholly furnished by
her daughter-states. The development of the sub-
marine has made the lines of sea communication far
more precarious than formerly. If, therefore, we have
to diminish our importations of wheat, meat and other
such commodities, there is the more reason why we
should draw them as far as possible from Britannic
sources.
We may trust that these fiscal and economic ques-
tions will in the future be discussed on their merits
and without that unfortunate implication on party
politics which has so obscured the issue and obstructed
any settlement in the past.
'Our position in England is ominously like that of Italy (A.D.
50), as described by Tacitus: At hercule olim Italia lepionibus
longinquafl in provindas commeatus portabat ; nee nunc infecundi-
tate laboratui ; sed Africam potius et Aegyptum exercemus, navi-
busque et casibus vita Populi Romani permissa est (Ann. xii., 43).
In pasl 'lis Italy used to send her supplies for the legions into
distant provinces " (as Kngland used to send her wheat to her penin-
sular armies in the Napoleonic wars). " Even now the trouble is
that Italy i, a b;irr«'ii country, but we prefer to cultivate Africa
'"I I ■■: ypt, and we risk the very life of the Roman people on the
chances of *ca and ships."
I8 7
CHAPTER VI II
DEFENCE
Imperium facile his artibus retinetur, quibus initio partum est.
(Sallust: Cat. ii.J
Empire is easily maintained by those qualities by which it was
acquired.
The conflicting theories that used to exist on the
subject of Imperial defence, of the methods by which
the Dominion and Dependencies can best contribute
to the naval and military resources of the Empire,
have been put to a test during the European conflict as
searching and conclusive as could be imagined. Every
weakness in our Empire panoply has been searched
and probed. Many questions which once excited con-
troversy will never raise dust again. Whole libraries
of literature on principles of defence, food supply in
time of war and so forth have been deposited in
limbo. If we have not learnt clear and decisive
lessons from this unexampled experience we are in-
capable of instruction.
The palmary truth which would seem to have
been exalted above all future question or debate is that
which used to be expressed in the phrase " the oneness
of the sea." No one will ever doubt again that the
British Commonwealth depends upon sea-power, that
sea-power saved it, and that the essential conditions of
British sea-power are concentration, co-operation and
1 88
DEFENCE
unity of control. One looks back with wonder to the
pre-war movement for establishing " baby-navies "in
the Dominions which were to be not only manned and
officered locally but trained in local waters, and were
to defend each Dominion in time of war against all
attack. If some of us never knew before, we all know
now that the safety of the Empire was assured by
concentrated and overwhelming sea-supremacy in the
decisive theatre of war. If British sea-power had been
stricken there, the turn of the local fleet-units off the
shores of the Dominions would quickly have come.
There is no creek or strait or fjord in the world where
they could have eluded their fate. The sea is one,
and the Nav3^ that is master of it at one decisive point
is master of it everywhere.
At the beginning of the war Australia had a fleet-
unit consisting of one battle cruiser (the "Australia "),
three second-class cruisers (the " Sydney," the " Mel-
bourne ' and the "Brisbane"), and flotillas of
destroyers and submarines. This force was loyally
placed at the disposal of the Admiralty when war broke
out. No one wishes to detract from the splendid work
done by these vessels in convoying Dominion troops
and taking over some " unconsidered trifles " belonging
to the Germans in the Pacific Ocean. To all intents
and purposes this fleet-unit merged in the Imperial
Navy. It was as a unit in a greater Japanese and
British force that the " Sydney " cornered and bat-
tered the elusive " Kraden." The idea which certain
people had cherished in those pre-war clays, which now
seem almost prehistoric, that in the day of tribulation
Australia could be defended by an Australian, Canada
189
DEFENCE
by a Canadian, and South Africa by a South African
fleet had vanished " into air, into thin air." The
Dominion and Dependencies set themselves at the out-
break of the war to strengthen the Grand Fleet in the
North Sea, because it was that fleet, and that alone,
which defended and could defend British shores twelve
thousand miles away and made it possible for the
oversea States to send their hundreds of thousands to
the battle-fields of Europe.
It has been said in a previous chapter that if the
Empire is to remain a single and indivisible State
there must be a single foreign policy determining its
relations as a whole with the rest of the world. Unity
in naval power and control is just as important from a
defensive point of view. In both cases the control
ought to be as widely-shared and as representative as
possible. The two great departments for which some
central council of the Empire, deliberative and adminis-
trative, is presently required are just these of foreign
relations and naval defence.
If any mind needs to be further edified into the
belief that the existence of the Empire and the safety
of the overseas Dominions rest primarily upon the
British fleet, and that sea-power, as ensuring the trade
routes and the lines of communication between the
far severed British States, is the vital principle of the
British Commonwealth, it cannot do better than study
with much care that historic memorandum prepared
by the Admiralty for the Conference of Empire repre-
sentatives in 1902 : —
The importance which attaches to the command
ot the sea lies in the control which it gives over sea-
190
DEFENCE
communications. The weaker sea-power is absolutely
unable to carry to success any large military expedition
oversea. The truth of this is shown by reference to
the history of the past.
" In ancient times the Greek victory of Salamis
threatened the Persian communications across the
Dardanelles, and doubtless this danger contributed to
bring about their retreat into Asia.
' ' The failure of the famous Syracusan expedition
was due to the defeat of the Athenian fleet, and had its
modern counterpart in the failure of Admiral Graves
off the entrance to Chesapeake Bay in 1781. In both
cases the army had to surrender because its communi-
cations were cut. The defeat of Nikias dealt a heavy
blow to the supremacy of Athens, and may, perhaps,
be said to have been one of the principal events which
led to her downfall. The surrender of Cornwallis, at
Yorktown, was the prelude to the independence of the
United States.
" The main cause of the failure of the expedition of
Napoleon to Egypt was the defeat of the French Fleet
at the Nile, which was the first step towards cutting
his communications with France, and the subsequent
surrender of the French Army.
" On the other hand, the advantages which accrue to
the stronger sea-power, after it has won the command
of the sea, are equally illustrated by historical example,
" The fall of Quebec and the conquest of French
Canada was mainly due to the fact that our superior
sea-power closed the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the
French and opened it to us. In any similar struggle
in the future, this mute will be as vital as in the past.
[91
DEFENCE
" The expedition to Egypt under Abercroinby in
1801, the Peninsular war, the expedition to the Crimea,
the South African war, are all instances of great
military enterprises which could only have been carried
out by a nation holding the command of the sea.
"The command of the sea is determined by the
result of great battles at sea, such as Salamis, Actium,
Lepanto, those which led up to the defeat of the
Armada, and those between the Dutch and English in
the seventeenth century, in which each side concen-
trated his whole available force for the decisive
struggle.
" To any naval Power the destruction of the fleet of
the enemy must always be the great object aimed at.
It is immaterial where the great battle is fought, but
wherever it may take place the result will be felt
throughout the world, because the victor will after-
wards be in a position to spread his force with a view
to capturing or destroying any detached forces of the
enemy, and generally to gather the fruits of victory, in
the shape of such outlying positions as the New
Hebrides, Fijis, Singapore, Samoa, Cuba, Jamaica,
Martinique, Malta or Aden, which may be in posses-
sion of the enemy, his shipping and commerce, or even
to prosecute such oversea campaigns as those in the
Peninsula or South Africa.
" Stress is laid on the importance of the battle
for supremacy, because the great development of the
Navies of France, Germany, the United States and
Russia indicate the possibility that such battles may
have to be fought in the future. It is the battleships
chiefly which will have to be concentrated for the
192
DEFENCE
decisive battle, and arrangements with this object must
be made during peace.
"The geographical conditions and the varied inter-
ests of the maritime Powers prevent such complete con-
centration in modern times as was practicable in the
past. Thus Russia divides her battleships between the
Baltic and Pacific ; the United States between the
Atlantic and Pacific ; both Germany and France have
concentrated in European waters, where also the
greater part of the British battleships are massed.
" Our possible enemies are fully aware of the neces-
sity of concentrating on the decisive points. They will
endeavour to prevent this by threatening our detached
squadrons and trade in different quarters, and thus
obliging us to make further detachments from the main
fleets. All these operations will be of secondary import-
ance, but it will be necessary that we should have
sufficient power available to carry on a vigorous offen-
sive against the hostile outlying squadrons without
unduly weakening the force concentrated for the deci-
sive battle, whether in Europe or elsewhere.
" The immense importance of the principle of concen-
tration and the facility^ with which ships and squadrons
can be moved from one part of the world to another —
it is more easy to move a fleet from Spithcad to the
Cape or Halifax than it is to move a large army, with
its equipment, from Cape Town to Pretoria — points to
the necessity of a single Navy, under one control, by.
which alone conic, rted action between the several {nuts
can be assured.
"In the foregoing remarks the word defence does not
appear. It is omitted advisedly, because the primary
[93
N
DEFENCE
object of the British Navy is not to defend anything,
but to attack the fleets of the enemy, and, by defeating
them, to afford protection to British Dominions, ship-
ping and commerce. This is the ultimate aim.
" To use the word defence would be misleading, be-
cause the word carries with it the idea of a thing to be
defended, which would divert attention to local defence
instead of fixing it on the force from which attack is
to be expected.
* ' The traditional role of the British Navy is not to
act on the defensive, but to prepare to attack the force
which threatens — in other words, to assume the offen-
sive. On one occasion England departed from her
traditional policy, and acting on the defensive, kept
her ships in harbour unrigged and unarmed, with the
result that the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and
burnt the ships-of-war at their moorings."
It is remarkable that an argument so fortified by
precedent and established by age-long experience
should not have universally discouraged the local fleet
heresy. But unquestionably it had its effect. For
example, New Zealand, instead of establishing a minia-
ture navy of her own, continued the sounder policy of
contributing to the Empire Fleet, presenting thereto
a powerful battle-cruiser. In a speech of March 17,
1914, a few months before Armageddon, Mr. Churchill,
then First Lord of the Admiralty, referred as follows
to this action of New Zealand :
"No greater insight into political and strategical
points has ever been shown by a community
hitherto unversed in military matters. The situa-
tion in the Pacific will be absolutely regulated by
194
DEFENCE
the decision in European waters. Two or three
Australian and New Zealand Dreadnoughts, if
brought into line in the decisive theatre, might
turn the scale and make victory not merely cer-
tain, but complete. The same two or more Dread-
noughts in Australian waters would be useless the
day after the defeat of the British Navy in Home
waters. Their existence would only serve to pro-
long the agony without altering the course of
events. Their effectiveness would have been
destroyed by events which had taken place on the
other side of the globe, just as surely as if they
had been sunk in battle. The Admiralty are
bound to uphold and proclaim broad principles of
unity in command and in strategic conceptions,
and of concentration in the decisive theatre and
for the decisive event. That is our duty, and we
are bound to give that advice in a military and
strategic sense. The Dominions are perfectly
free."
After living through the war it is not probable that
any of the Dominions will push " national " feeling
and local amour-propre to such an illegitimate
extreme as to stand aloof from the system of mari-
time power which is as essential to their own as to the
common security of all the peoples of the Empire.
Assuming that these postulates arc generally
accepted, there ought to be no difficulty in formulating
a practical .scheme of naval defence in which the whole
Empire could participate. Messrs. P. and A Hurd '
l" The New Umpire Partnership ": p. 133.
105
DEFENCE
lay down briefly the ground-plan of such a scheme :
"The more the problem of Imperial naval
defence is studied, the clearer it will become to us
iu the Mother-country and to the peoples of the
Dominions that there is only one solution. Each
section of the Empire must develop its own defen-
sive machinery against raids and incidental inter-
ference with commerce by isolated cruisers — a
matter of relatively small expense. But more
important than such localised effort is the absolute
necessity of combining to build up battle-fleets to
command the sea. The command of the sea — the
ability to control the communications of the
Empire — must be placed within our grasp."
In the above-quoted speech Mr. Churchill fore-
shadowed the formation of an Imperial squadron as a
sort of intermediate naval force between the local
defensive forces and the British Grand Fleet. The
share of the Dominions in the duty of naval defence
would fall into three parts. Firstly, there would be
developed in Canadian, Australian and South African
waters a naval establishment with docks, defences and
repairing plant, enabling large detachments of British
war-vessels to operate in each theatre for a long period.
Secondly, the Dominions would supply themselves
with destroyers and submarine flotillas, with perhaps
a light cruiser or two for local defence against raids
and highwaymen of the sea like the "Eniden." This
would be the genuine local fleet intended for local pur-
poses in local waters. The third obligation of the
Dominions would be to contribute a certain number
of battle-cruisers and scout-cruisers to the proposed
196
DEFENCE
Imperial Squadron. The main object of the Latter
would be to police the Empire in time of peace, and to
provide a very mobile force which could be swiftly
brought to bear on any threatened point or any point of
attack and would maintain sea-communications in time
of war.
The Dominions would own and man the vessels they
contributed to this squadron, and there is no reason
why it should not be controlled by an Empire naval
board containing representatives of England and the
Dominions in proportion to their contributions to the
force. Mr. Hurd assumes that Canada would con-
tribute two fleet-units of the size above described,
Australia two, New Zealand one and South Africa
one, the mother-country providing two battle-cruisers
and four scout-cruisers. This would give a force of
eight battle-cruisers and sixteen scout-cruisers, a real
Empire fleet excellently adapted to its purposes. It
would not always remain concentrated but would be
so from time to time, and it might take part with the
Grand Fleet in manoeuvres on the largest scale.
That some such mobile force is necessary to " show
the flag " off the remotest Empire shores has been
clearly shown by past experience. When the terrible
earthquake occurred at Kingston, in Jamaica, in 1907,
there was no English ship-of-war anywhere near to
render help and maintain order, and this duty had to
be generously performed by the American fleet. Four
days after the disaster, a correspondent of the Times
wrote : " It is difficult to describe the sense of humilia-
tion with which an Englishman surveys Kingston
harbour this evening — two American battleships, three
197
DEFENCE
German steamers, a Cuban steamer and one British
ship ; she leaves to-night, and the white and red ensign
will be as absent from Kingston harbour as from the
military basins of Kiel and Cherburg." Later in the
same year disturbances broke out at St. Lucia, once
an important naval base. It was a long time before an
English cruiser arrived, though a Dutch man-of-war,
the " Gelderland," was anchored in the spacious har-
bour of Castries, St. Lucia's capital town. Such a
powerful British patrol, as Mr. Churchill suggested,
would, as a whole or in detachments, be able to bring
help or support to any part of the Empire where it
was needed.
The initial cost of these local and Imperial squadron
vessels and their annual upkeep would certainly not be
excessive, and the home-country would continue to
bear the burden of the main Imperial fleet.
The question of the military defence of the Empire
depends upon a wholly different set of principles. Our
British armies, however necessary as a supplement to
naval power, are in the strictest sense our second line
of defence. If England's Navy were decisively
defeated, no concentration of British land -power would
be possible or, if effected, could be maintained. Another
important difference is that standardisation, uniformity
of training and equipment are not nearly so essential
in the composition of an army as in the composition
of a fleet. There is no such objection in principle to
the creation of local land forces as there is to the crea-
tion of local fleets. Those who insist most strongly
on undivided control of the Empire's naval forces
198
DEFENCE
and the need for an Empire Council dealing among
other functions with naval defence, insist on the inde-
pendence and autonomy of the Dominions in the
recruiting and management of their own internal mili-
tary resources. Sir Joseph Ward, Minister of Finance
in New Zealand, one of the most advanced supporters
of Empire federalisation, spoke very strongly on this
subject at the Imperial War Conference in April, 1917.
Having alluded to the vital questions of foreign policy
and defence as the chief subjects in the purview of a
piospective Empire Council, he continued : ,
I would oppose with all the power I possess in
our portion of the Empire any interference what-
ever with our right to raise and to control our own
system of internal defence. I do not look upon it
as essential for the future government of the
British Empire that any overriding authority
created constitutionally should either have the
right or be given the power to interfere with a
local army or armies that may, either now or in
the future, be required to be raised in any portion
of the self-governing Dominions, either for their
own internal defence or for that part of external
defence by co-operation in times of Empire trouble
or Empire requirements with the British army
abroad. ... If there were a proposal carried
at a succeeding Conference to include local land
defence and to put the power of framing a concrete
army for Empire purposes under an Empire Par-
liament, I personally would strongly oppose it in
our country, and would do everything in my power
to prevent it coming into operation, because 1
199
DEFENCE
believe it would be a very undesirable thing to do.
\\ Idle all belong to one common Empire, there
are different races ; there are different ideals per-
meating the minds of the people in the different
portions of the Empire. If the feeling were im-
planted in the minds of even the coloured races in
some of the oversea countries that the power of
dealing with the army was going to be transferred
in some way to a central authority, however neces-
sary it may be to have a central authority created,
then, in my opinion, we would commence to have
a backward wave set in against any proposal in the
direction of doing what is otherwise essential for
the future preservation and for the future soli-
darity of the Empire as a whole."
Another very striking difference between the naval
and the military problem is that armies can be swiftly
improvised whereas fleets cannot. England fought
through the great war with substantially the same
fleet as that with which she entered it. Compare this
with the comparative sizes of the army she possessed
when the war began and the legions she wielded before
the struggle had lasted a year. It takes three years
to build a Dreadnought and six years to train its
crew, and a single Dreadnought is regarded as the
equivalent of an army corps. But while this constitutes
a capital distinction between armies and fleets we need
not rely too much on the power of improvisation in the
military sphere. The Dominions, as they grow in
population, will become even greater reservoirs of
militia and volunteer forces available for home defence.
It might be well that a certain number should be
200
DEFENCE
trained for Imperial service abroad, so that, when the
need arises, there may be a nucleus of troops ready for
expeditionary purposes.
And, in general, the antithesis we have noted be-
tween naval and military principle need not rule out a
large measure of co-operation and uniformity in the
training and organisation of the military forces of the
Empire. The foundation of such a common system
has been laid in the Imperial General Staff, though the
local staff-colleges and other educational agencies in
connection with it have yet to be realised. The great
and growing Dominions must contemplate taking a
larger share in future in the defence of those outer
marches of the Empire on which they neighbour more
closely than the mother-country. During the war the
forces of South Africa have fought out the South
African phase of the struggle without any great inter-
ference or assistance from without. So Australia and
New Zealand, as well as South Africa, might very well
and quickly reinforce India or the garrisons of de-
fended ports in Asiatic waters when it might be unsafe
to despatch forces from England through the Suez
Canal. The obligations of Empire military defence
are being better distributed over the whole Imperial
field, and this implies, not centralisation of control as
in the case of the Navy, but a large measure of
uniformity in drill and training, in organisation,
supplies, equipment and the rest, as well as such unify-
ing devices as the interchange between officers for
General Staff duties in different parts of the Empire.
Nothing has been said on the possible developments
ot" the submarine and the aeroplaue. These are likely
20 1
DEFENCE
enough to affect comparative values and may introduce
great changes in the types of naval construction and
in the character of general armament and munitions.
But they will not repeal the great truth that the British
is an oceanic Empire and, unlike the great continental
blocks of territor}' of which other empires consist and
have consisted in the past, depends for its existence
and coherence upon uninterrupted and unthreatened
sea-communications. These fundamental facts and the
naval and military policies that correspond with them
cannot be altered by any new contrivances for warfare
by land, air or sea.
All these remarks on future naval and military
arrangements are "without prejudice" to the idea of an
International League of Peace fortified with such sanc-
tions and affording such a guarantee of security for all
peace-loving nations that the competition in armaments
will end and swords and spears be everywhere beaten
into ploughshares and pruning-hooks. A war-
exhausted and debt-laden world has certainly every
motive to reduce by some common agreement its
expenditure on engines of destruction. We may hope
that some day the armed resources of a civilised state
will be, not the panoply of fear or hatred or aggressive
ambition, but simply a part of that international
force which shall be ready to concentrate at any time
against any Power that threatens the peace of the world
and harbours a spirit and contemplates a policy incon-
sistent with the new and wider society of nations. If
the well-disposed among the nations of the world will
take their courage and sanity in their own hands, these
things may yet be. But until they are in sight the
202
DEFENCE
nations must continue to act on the old barbarous and
cynical maxim that preparation for war is the best
security for peace.
203
CHAPTER IX
LABOUR AND THE LAND
The country supplies the town with the means of subsistence and
the materials of manufacture. The town repays this supply by
sending back a part of the manufactured produce to the inhabitants
of the country. Defence is of much more importance than
opulence. — Adam Smith.
AFTER the incalculable devastation of the great war
our great object must be to create new wealth, and
there is no way of doing this but by applying labour
to the land. In the past the British world has been
sadly without any guiding principles or any idea of
internal co-operation in this important sphere of
economic development. This applies especially to the
homeland, where results arid conditions have been
attained which were certainly never willed or con-
templated by the people of these islands. We are
sometimes apt to forget that the United Kingdom is
only a part — true, the most powerful and influential
— but yet a part or province of a vast Common-
wealth of States whose history is only just in its
beginnings. So when we talk about the problems of
the Empire we are apt to assume that the
special problems of the United Kingdom do not
fall under that title. Yet this is a great
mistake. As I have already pointed out, the
welfare and strength of these islands must for
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
many years be a matter of the utmost importance
to the Empire as a whole. If England were defeated
and lost her command of the sea it would be all over
with any such political organisation as a British
Empire. The entire fabric would fall to pieces as an
arch when the centre stone is removed.
It is certain that the people of this country never
intended to throw their lands out of beneficial cultiva-
tion and to become dependent for three-quarters of
their elementary articles of food upon seaborne
supplies. Cobden assured the nation that free-trade
would not throw a single acre of British land out of
cultivation. It may be well to recall the assurances of
the great Repealer. At Manchester, in October 1S43,
he said : —
' I have never been one who believed that the
repeal of the Corn Laws would throw an acre of
land out of cultivation. . . . Our object is not
to diminish the demand for labour in the agricul-
tural districts, but I verily believe, if the prin-
ciples of free trade were fairly carried out, the}-
would give just as much stimulus to the demand
for labour in the agricultural as in the manu-
facturing districts."
sin, in London, February 1844, he spoke as follows :
1 So far from throwing land out of use or
injuring the cultivation of poorer soils, free trade
in corn is the very way to increase the production
at home and stimulate the cultivation of its poorer
soils by compelling the application of more capital
and labour to them. We do not contemplate
deriving one quarter less corn from the soil of
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
this country; we do not anticipate having one
pound less of butter or cheese, or one head less of
cattle or sheep ! We expect to have a great
increase in production and consumption at home."
Again and again throughout the great struggle for the
repeal of the Corn Laws Cobden assured the agricul-
turists that advancing industrial prosperity, as the
result of Repeal, would increase the consuming power
of the towns and that the English farmer would always
have his geographical advantage over the foreigner in
the supply of this new demand. Cobden could not
foresee the great development in communications
which was destined to whittle down this " natural
protection " almost to vanishing point. He defined
what he meant by this phrase in a speech in the House
of Commons of March, 1844 :
" As far as I can obtain information from the
books of merchants, the cost of transit from
Dantzig, during an average of ten years, may be
put down at 10s. 6d. a quarter, including in this
freight, landing, loading, insurance and other
items of every kind. This is the natural pro-
tection enjoyed by the farmers of this country."
In October of that year at Manchester he repeated his
assurances in the most unmistakable of terms :
" I speak my unfeigned conviction, when I say
I believe there is no interest in this country that
would receive so much benefit from the repeal of
the Corn Laws as the farmer-tenant interest in
this country. And, I believe, when the future
historian comes to write the history of agriculture,
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
he will have to state : ' In such a year there was
a stringent Corn Law passed for the protection of
agriculture. From that time agriculture slum-
bered in England, and it was not until, by the aid
of the Anti-Corn-Law League, the Corn Law was
utterly abolished, that agriculture sprang up to
the full vigour of existence in England, to become
what it now is, like her manufactures, unrivalled
in the world.' "
It is common knowledge how these prophecies were
fulfilled. The decline in acreage under wheat in these
islands during the last forty or fifty years was almost
as great as our entire area under the crop down to the
days of the great war. The population of our rural
districts has declined by fifty per cent. To give some
idea of our unconscionable dependence upon oversea
supplies it may be recalled that in 1915, amid all the
dangers to our sea communications, we imported 200
million pounds worth of wheat and meat. Even yet
we have perhaps not fully realised the peril of those
days, when our liberties and our very existence
depended on the safe arrival of these indispensable
commodities.
Here is a brief diagram showing how the freight
charges from Chicago to Liverpool diminished during
forty years, a reduction never dreamed of by the
original supporters of our policy of free importation.
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
Chicago to New York to Total
New York Liverpool per
Average. per quarter. per quarter. quarter.
5. d. s. d. s. d.
1866-1870 - - 13 5 3 11 J 7 4
1S76-1880 - - 6 1 4 7% 10 S x / 2
[886-1890 - - 5 1 1 11 7 u
1896-1900 - - 3 10 20^ 5 io^<
1901-1905 - - 3 7 ° TI 4 °
1906-1908 - - 3 9 * * 4 10
Thus the natural protection which was promised in
perpetuity to our farmers by Adam Smith, McCulloch,
Cobden and all the supporters of the policy of free-
trade, was reduced in forty years by 12s. a quarter.
I am trying to deal here with established facts and
not with speculative or controversial questions. It will
be remembered that the Free Trade movement went
in company with a strong anti-Empire or anti-Colonial
sentiment. The statesman of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century regarded our national power and
prosperity as resting on three main pillars — ships,
trade, and colonies. Manchester politicians of the last
century thought we were in a position to dispense with
one of these supports. They thought we could do
without colonies. What was the use of keeping Canada,
or even India, when we could do as much trade with
them as independent communities? There was un-
doubtedly some excuse for this sense of insular self-
sufficiency. In the first half of last century we had
an almost exclusive command of capital and the new
mechanical inventions, and a practical monopoly of
the world's supply of manufactured goods. It looked
208
LABOUR AND THE LAND
as if other countries would be permanently content to
supply us with food and raw materials in exchange
for our products of forge and factory. There was
little sign in those days of any serious competition
abroad. Germany and the United States only began
their industrial careers about 1850, and scarcely
counted in the field of trade rivalry until the seventies
of last century. In 1845 our exports had reached a
total of sixty-eight millions. Our best policy
in these circumstances seemed to be to have no
policy at all, to let things go their own way, to " take
care of the imports and let the exports take care of
themselves." We seemed to be entering upon the
thousand years of peace. The age of war and inter-
national rivalries was coming to an end, the spirit ol
nationalism yielding to the sentiment of world-
citizenship. This being so, the maintenance of a
colonial empire was regarded by many as an absurd
and wasteful infatuation.
We need not on these accounts attack or denounce
the great men, Bright, Villiers, Cobden, Peel, who
advocated or carried out the Repeal of the Corn Laws.
The nation has been led by a strange and devious path,
but things are turning out all right in the end. At
the least we must say that our liberal trade-policy has
brought us many political and moral as well as
material advantages to set off against the damage and
danger we have incurred, [f it produced a develop-
ment too one-sided, if we sacrificed our county dis-
tricts to our towns, we attained a material wealth and
power which amazed the world during the great war.
Let us all be very careful before we denounce an\
209
O
LABOUR AND THE LAND
great national movement or the leaders of any such
movement in the past.
But these considerations do not absolve us from
taking thought for the future and improving the
ascertained lessons of these last appalling years of
storm and strife. We may recall a few more facts on
the subject of our British agriculture. The United
Kingdom has a population of only eight millions living
in the rural as distinct from the urban districts, while
France has eighteen and Germany twenty-two millions.
Germany has 60 per cent, more land under cultivation
than ourselves and produces three times as much food-
stuff. The following table, published a few years ago
and giving percentages of population employed in
manufacturing and mining industries and agriculture
in those countries, shows the position to which we had
relegated the latter in our own national economy : —
Agriculture. Manufactures
and Mining.
England and Wales - - 8 58-3
Germany - - - - - 375 37-4
United States - - - - 35-9 24-1
When we consider further that a country-bred stock is
the backbone of every nation, the best recruiting-field
for armies and navies, and for many social and political
reasons an indispensable element in any people, we
may form some idea of the injury we have inflicted on
the real wealth and welfare of this country.
But these results are by no means irretrievable.
Our English soil is as fertile as it used to be when we
not only fed our own people but had a large surplus
for export. Some may be surprised to hear that in
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
the years 1841-45, that is just before the Repeal of the
Com Laws, we were feeding from home-grown wheat
no fewer than 24 million persons out of a population
of 26,800,000. So rapid was the process of decultiva-
tion in the last half of the nineteenth century that in
1901-05 we were feeding only 4,500,000 out of a total
of 42,400,000. Yet England might still support her
own people. If we were determined to make the United
Kingdom self-supplying in the great food-staples we
could do so. Consider the figures for wheat. In 19 14
we had under that crop 1,904,930 acres. We produced
in that year some eight million quarters and our im-
portation was well over twenty-four million quarters.
Is there any compelling reason why we should not
have five or six million acres under wheat in these
islands, with an average production of five quarters to
the acre? That would deliver us from our perilous
dependence on seaborne supplies in the most indispen-
sable article of human food. In oats and barley we
are in a much better position. Oats are grown largely
for the sake of the straw and they have never suffered
as the bread staple from the effects of importation.
England grows more oats to-day than forty years ago.
In 1914 our home production was roughly 21 million
quarters, our importation rather more than 5 million
quarters.
In rattle, sheep and pigs our development has fallen
far short of the growth in population and consuming
power. In 1914 we imported over 62 million pounds
worth of meat. This is a little surprising when we
remember how much of our former arable land is now
used for pasture. Germany has developed tiei agri-
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
j culture aud her stock pari passu, while we have been
tailing back or remaining stationary during these
wonderful years of industrial progress. Down to
recent years there was one important article of food,
fresh milk, in which for obvious reasons we were
supposed to be self-supplying. It was therefore rather
diverting to hear before the war that importations of
milk from Holland had set in in our south-eastern
counties. With the increase in our small holdings
there should be a great addition to our stock, especially
our pigs, and this would contribute still further to our
safety and independence. With an unfailing supply
of wheat, oats, barley, milk and bacon, we could laugh
at any attempts to reduce these islands by a process
of siege.
1 can only just allude here to the great need of more
scientific and intensive cultivation. It is quite as
important to increase the productivity of our existing
ploughed lands as to bring more acres under the
coulter. There are also many crops, such as sugar-
beet, which we could cultivate with complete success
and with immense advantage to our economic and
social interests. 1
There is no reason in Nature, therefore, why we
should not vastly increase the productivity of our
English land. It may seem a strange thing to say
after these days of war and scarcity, but I hope that
food will not again touch the lowest prices recorded
1 The author helped to conduct some experiments in this culture
some years ago in Herefordshire, the results of which were sur-
prisingly satisfactory. Indeed the suitability of the soil and climate
of this country for sugar-beet is now established beyond question.
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
during recent years. We want abundant food at stead}'
prices, but not food as cheap as dirt. 3 This cheapness
of the past has cost us dear in our present dangerous
dependence on over-sea supplies, and also in the loss
of that economic inter-relation which used to exist
between the town and the count^side of Old England
when the shires and villages exchanged their corn and
beef and mutton for the manufactured products of the
towns. The country districts ought to be the surest,
as they are the nearest, market for the urban factories
and forges, and every small-holder settled in good
conditions on the land and every ton of increased
country produce should mean a permanent addition to
the prosperity of our urban centres. This wholesome
and kindly relationship should be restored and
developed.
Another great object in reviving the country life of
Old England and the United Kingdom is to have an
abundant rural population experienced in all sorts of
farming pursuits from which the excess may be avail-
able for oversea colonisation. Town dwellers, unless
the^ are caught very young and trained to agricultural
life, are not wanted in the Dominions, where, as in
England, the towns grow too rapidly and at the
otain Charles BatHurst, M.P., at a meeting of the Farmers'
Club, said : " At man/ periorls during the last twenty years the
nation has not paid sufficient for its food. IT the nation paid more
for its food in normal times its security would bo greater and its
impoverishment by war would lie less; its agricultural labour would
be infinitely better paid anil its manufactures would have, as they
should have, the !»• t and safest outlets for their products, not
overseas, but in their own country." It is not i;i\en to ovorv!>od\
o much meaning, many would Ba) " much sense, into
'• few word
21.1
LABOUR AND THE LAND
expense of the rural districts. It may sound strange,
hut one of our great tasks in the years to come is to
re-colonise England.
Some persons may think that the Small Holdings
Act of 1908 has done all that is necessary for land-
reform. So far from that, the measure was not a land
settlement Act at all. The County Councils which
administered it have done very little in the way of
increasing our country population, and one may almost
say nothing at all in the direction of scientific settle-
ment. That able and ardent land reformer, Mr.
Christopher Turnor, told us recently that only 774
new houses had been built for small-holders under the
Act and that there was not a single example in England
of scientific settlement with the indispensable access to
capital and co-operative assistance. The meaning of
land settlement, as it is understood in foreign countries
and in our own Dominions, has until lately never
swum into our ken in relation to our own land-problem.
Mr. Turnor has made a useful enumeration of the
axioms or postulates of successful colonisation, which
are just as applicable to our own acres as to the virgin
lands of West and South. The first only can be said
to be in any way controversial :
t. Ownership rather than tenancy.
2. Settlement in colonies.
3. Access to capital.
4. Creation of co-operative centres.
5. Provision of expert guidance.
6. The settlers' initial years made as easy as
possible financially.
Until quite recentlv there has been no attempt to
214
LABOUR AND THE LAND
apply these rules to land-settlement in England. The
small-holder has received his plot of land, often ill-
chosen and unsuitable, and then been left to fend for
himself. These five or six postulates form the foun-
dation on which must rest any scheme that is to deal
efficiently with this great problem. I believe we have
to-day something less than half a million occupiers of
the soil out of a population of nearly 47 millions. We
shall need in the future no such unscientific and rather
perfunctory concessions to an embarrassing public
movement as the Small Holdings Act, but a definite
scheme of colonisation based on the teachings of the
widest experience on the Continent and in the
Dominions and offering a certainty of success and
livelihood to every industrious man who takes advan-
tage of it.
These ideas seem now to have entered the sphere
of practical politics. They were fully adopted in the
' Verney " Report issued by the Committee appointed
by the Board of Agriculture and in the Act based
upon it. The recognition of the futility of the Small
Holdings Act and the Scottish Small Landowners Act
of 1910 is the beginning of wisdom on this big question
and the Report of Lord Selborne's Committee satisfied
that condition. It recommended a considerable State
acquisition of land by compulsory purchase, the
establishment on a large scale of colonies of small-
holders, the development of co-operative buying and
marketing and of agricultural credit banks, and a
large State grant, beginning with 2 million pounds, to
put the proposals into operation. A practical start
was made in Yorkshire and elsewhere with three
215
LABOUR AND THE LAND
experimental colonies. This was the first genuine
application of co-operative methods by State action.
But this practical effort takes us only a little way
towards the provision of opportunities for land settle-
ment in this country on a scale proportionate to the
importance of the objects to be attained.
Land settlement in the United Kingdom and the
Dominions compose one big problem. The great object
is to get more Britons employed on British land. We
have now owned our immense estates in temperate
regions for a good deal more than a century. The
British Empire, as we have seen, covers a quarter of
the land surface of the globe, including most of the
temperate areas still available for white settlement.
Yet our total white population, men, women and
children, living on and by the land amounts to only
13,400,000, distributed thus :
The United Kingdom - - 8,000,000
Canada .... 4,000,000
South Africa ... 300,000
New Zealand ... 300,000
Australia .... 800,000
The agricultural population of Germany in Europe
alone numbers over 20 millions.
As one of the results of the war the Empire abounds
in practical and well-thought-out schemes for planting
new settlers on the soil. Homes and livelihoods for
Britons are being provided in almost every province
of the Empire and nobody need complain that he has
not a sufficient diversity of choice. It is a pity that
the word " emigration " has still such a dismal sound.
It suggests a pathetic picture of the home " failure "
216
LABOUR AND THE LAND
leaving all that is near and dear to him for some lonely
shack in a distant and intractable wilderness. We
think of Lady Dufferin's sad elegy about the " Irish
Emigrant." All this, in view of the new conditions,
is quite silly. It might be well to drop the word
"emigrant" altogether from our dictionaries and
speak of the person who moves from one part of His
Majesty's Dominions to another as a " migrant." We
do not call a person who removes from the North to
the South of England an "emigrant," and the time
may be coming when a removal from England to
Canada or even to Australia will not seem a much more
serious or formidable enterprise.
It is impossible here even to enumerate the land
settlement propositions made by the various provinces
of the Empire. Even little Tasmania, old Van
Diemen's Land, charming in scenery and delicious in
climate, offers homes to three hundred happy Britons.
Let us take, as an example, one of the nearest pro-
vinces to our own shores, where, we may note, the
Briton is much nearer the centre of gravity of the
English-speaking peoples than in the homeland of the
breed. I mean New Brunswick, one of the smallest of
the provinces of the Dominion of Canada, just across
the Atlantic Ocean. Its climate is healthy and
bracing. It has never parted with the ownership of
its Crown lands and has thus large territories avail-
able for settlement. Several areas have been specially
chosen for this purpose, and Mr. Murray, the Minister
of Agriculture, thus describes the project :
" The scheme, briefly, is the establishing of
community settlements, each community to
217
LABOUR AND THE LAND
accommodate from oue hundred to two hundred
and fifty families, depending on the size of the
area of suitable land that is available in each
locality. Each of these communities will radiate
from a central farm, operated by the Government
for the purpose of supplying instruction, employ-
ment, necessary implements and teams for the
new settlers — a system which we believe will, in a
large measure, do away with the necessity of each
settler having to purchase a full equipment of his
own for the first few years."
On this central farm area there will be a school, a
church, a butter and cheese factory, a blacksmith's
shop, post office, club house and other co-operative
and social institutions. The size of the holdings
available for each settler will range from 10 to ioo
acres. Part of each lot will be cleared and. cultivated,
and a cheap but comfortable set of buildings erected,
sufficient for the needs of the settler for a number of
years, until he is in a position to build a large and more
permanent home. Fences will also be erected, and a
water supply provided. As regards produce, there is
an ample choice. Apples and potatoes do splendidly
in New Brunswick. There are no better potatoes in
the world, and the West Indies furnish an ever-growing
market for these and other products. But mixed
farming, dairying, wheat growing, sheep rearing and
other occupations can be profitably taken up by the
settler.
But what about finance? How is the settler who
has little or no capital going to acquire one of these
holdings? Well, the price of the holdings, including
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LABOUR AND THE LAND
cost of buildings, etc., will, vary from about ^150 to
^300. One proposal is that the settler should pay
down 5 per cent, at once and the balance in, say,
twenty annual instalments. So that if a man has
saved £zo y he can enter on his land and begin to
obtain some produce from it at once. As Mr. Murra}'
says, he will be assisted and advised in every way by
the Government without expense to himself. In
twenty years, or less if he is industrious and thrifty,
he will become the absolute owner of a good-sized and
productive farm, providing him with the most assured
of all possible livelihoods. Any capital over and above
the amount he may immediately require the Govern-
ment of New Brunswick will be ready to administer as
trustee for him, allowing him 3 per cent, interest on
his unexpended money and advising him as to its best
application.
But suppose a man is quite moneyless. Employment
at good wages will be provided for him in clearing
land for new settlers or on established farms. He will
thus be in a position to save money, until he has
enough to pay down the first purchase instalment and
to 'enable him to enter upon a holding of his own.
These schemes for settlement, therefore, ought to be
within the reach of any industrious ex-service men.
Previous farm experience is, of course, an advantage.
Bui it is not indispensable, because expert advice will
always be available at the central illustration farm, or
experience can be gained by getting farm employment
for a time.
Here let us guard against a possible misrepresenta-
tion. There must Ik- no such thing as migration
219
LABOUR AND THE LAND
under pressure. The activities of the "emigration
tout " must be severely repressed or regulated.
England has the first call on her children. We have
our own land-settlement problem, and for many
reasons, defensive and otherwise, we cannot afford any
excessive contingents of the British stock even for
British Dominions. But when a man wishes to try
his fortunes in other climes, the inducements to settle
under the Flag ought to be so great for many years to
come that there will be no temptation for him to pitch
his tent elsewhere.
But, someone may ask, is there not a lurking
inconsistency between this policy of making England
less dependent on oversea supplies for certain necessary
food commodities and the policy of settling more and
more Britons upon the soil of the Dominions? Shall
we not be restricting the imports into this country
from the Dominions and damaging the economic
relations between England and the oversea Empire?
This question, I fear, springs from the old hard-dying
notion that the chief function of the Dominions and
Dependencies is to produce primary materials for
England and to buy English manufactures. We can-
not confine the future trade of the Dominions to them-
selves and the home-country, though we in the old
land shall buy as much as possible of what we need
from them, and we hope they will buy as much as
possible from us.
After we have done all we can in the way of
improving our self-dependence there will always be a
vast residue of supplies we must import from over
the seas. The object must be to transfer to the
220
LABOUR AND THE LAND
Dominions and tropical Dependencies as much as
possible oi the import trade we are now doing with the
ioreigner. The proportion of our imports drawn from
the Empire has been happily increasing during recent
years without the stimulus of any preferential tariff at
home. The United Kingdom at tne beginning of the
war produced about 22 per cent, of its requirement 111
wheat. In 1901-5 the Dominions and India contributed
237 per cent., but this had grown in 1911-13 to 39-5
per cent. But we have considered this question of
Empire resources in a previous chapter and need not
repeat what has been said there.
To sum up briefly, we are compelled in the interests
of the whole Empire to increase the security and
welfare of this country by reviving its agriculture.
But at the same time the whole British race is
responsible for the development of those vast terri-
tories which have been committed to its charge — a
development in the behoof not simply of the owners
but of the whole family of men. We cannot afford to
waste or sacrifice any man-power which is available for
this immense task. We have to make such arrange-
ments as will ensure that the great consuming market
of this country contributes to the same object. By
their preferential tariffs the Dominions are making
their demand for imported manufactures contribute to
the wealth and power of the metropolitan centre of
the Empire. Whether England shall reciprocate those
preferences is a question of method and policy. It
has already been shown that there are other means
outside tariff regulations by which the Empire's
internal trade may l>e stimulated and its resources
steadily developed.
221
CHAPTER X
CLOSER UNION
Ultima Cymaei venit jam carminia aetas;
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascttur ordo.
Verg. Eel. iv. 4.
The Sibyl's latest age begins,
The great world-cycle starts anew.
The history of the British Empire, during the last
half century, surveyed generally, suggests a con-
tinuous conflict between two sets of opposing forces,
those that make for union and those making for
disintegration. Certainly there has been a long and
persistent process of decentralisation, leaving to the
Colonies and Dominions more and more completely the
control of their own destinies. The grant of respon-
sible government to the colonies was the decisive event
which gives the British Empire its distinguishing
character and broadly determined all future develop-
ments. Only those who have lived under such a con-
stitution can realise how fully the Imperial power is
put out of the doors of such a state as regards any
practical control or interference. Theoretically the
Sovereign Parliament could legislate for the colonies
over the heads of these local governments or could
veto their legislation on any subject. But such powers
are very seldom exercised, and the Imperial Govern-
ment has always scrupulously regarded the spirit as
222
CLOSER UNION
well as the letter of these constitutions. Still the
constitutional powers mentioned are in reserve. The
legislatures of the self-governing Dominions are
strictly subordinate bodies, the Dominions are not
kingdoms, and the Governors and Governor-General
are not Viceroys or constitutional sovereigns, but
officers appointed by the Imperial Government to act
as intermediaries between the local government and
the Secretary of State, and to express and enforce, if
necessary, the views of the Imperial authorities.
The Dominions are not international states, and
the Empire as a whole, despite this determined process
of decentralisation and dispersion, is still a " simple
international person," with a single and undivided
Sovereign Head and pursuing a common or single
policy in its relations with foreign states. As already
pointed out, the essential unity of the Empire was
strikingly manifested at the outbreak of the great
European struggle, when every portion of the Empire
to the loneliest islet in the remotest sea went to war
when the King of England went to war. We may
speak about the self-governing Dominions as
1 nations," but such terms must not disguise the fact
that the Empire is a single state just in the sense that
Spain and Japan are single states.
It is true we have pushed the grant of independence
to the oversea Dominions to the utmost point consistent
with this unity of the Empire as a whole. The reader
knows how the colonies obtained the right to determine
their own fiscal relations with the outer world, and h<>\\
Germany acted on the logic of this by penalizing
Canada separately for her grant of preference to the
223
CLOSER UNION
inother-couutry. A still nearer approach to the position
of sovereign states was recently made when the colo-
nies obtained the right to negotiate their own commer-
cial treaties, and to be relieved from the operation of
certain treaties concluded in the past by the Home
Government. But here, too, the unity of the Empire
has been safeguarded. The Dominions have not
received the right of negotiating, signing and ratify-
ing treaties independently of the Imperial Government.
That would be at once to confer on them the position
of separate and sovereign states, and the Empire would
cease to exist as an international unit. Such was in-
deed the proposal made in 1874 in the Report of a
Royal Commission appointed by the colony of Victoria. 1
Happily this proposal was not approved by the public-
opinion of the colony, but it has been renewed
from time to time in other parts of the Empire,
especially in Canada, where the Liberal Party formerly
held the view that the Dominions should have the
treaty power.
The Empire has, however, weathered this dangerous
promontory. It is true that colonial statesmen have
conducted negotiations with foreign countries for com-
mercial treaties. Sir Charles Tupper negotiated such
treaties on behalf of Canada with Spain and France.
But in all such cases it is provided that His Majesty's
Minister at the Foreign Court shall be a plenipoten-
tiary for the purpose of signing the treaty, and that
the whole negotiation shall be carried on under the
1 See Chapter I.
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supervision and with the approval of His Majesty's
Government. 2
The treaty question came up in the Imperial Con-
ference of 191 1 when the Dominions representatives
complained that they had not been consulted in the
negotiations which led up to the Declaration of Lon-
don. Sir Edward Grey was quite prepared to concede
to the Dominions the right to be consulted with regard
to political treaties — a concession which Sir Wilfred
Laurier, the Canadian Premier, regarded with some
suspicion, as the right might involve a corresponding
obligation on the part of the Dominions to put their
forces in time of war at the disposal of the mother-
country. The 191 1 Conference asserted in a resolution
the right of the Dominions to be consulted, not only in
connection with the Conventions agreed to at the Hague
Conference, but with regard to all international agree-
ments affecting the Dominions. But the right of
consultation is a very different matter from such a
demand for independent treaty-making powers as was
addressed in the Victoria Report cited above, a demand
quite inconsistent with the existence of the Empire, and
in these days not likely to be received.
The withdrawal of the Imperial garrisons from the
self-governing colonies had long ago shifted upon these
the responsibility for their local military defence, and
we have seen how in recent years Australia has
equipped herself with a navy of her own and how-
Canada contemplated the same step. But in the mean-
i Keitii . " Responsible Government in tin: Dominions": p. m0,
P
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time a new movement had arisen to cry halt to the
policy of separation, to cultivate a new-born corporate
sentiment among the peoples of the Empire and to
devise some form of closer union based upon common
interests. There has been no thought of going back
upon colonial autonomics. It was not an abrogating
and retrospective movement but one which, accepting
and insisting upon what had been achieved in the con-
stitutional, fiscal and defensive liberty of the colonies,
looked forward to a partnership on equal terms, safe-
guarding the unity of the Empire and dealing with
common concerns. This new spirit in British politics
was the product of various converging influences. We
may briefly suggest a few of these.
(i) The Manchester school of politics, with its doc-
trine of laisser faire, had fallen into discredit. It had
given way to a system of vigorous and all-pervading
regulation of industrial methods. Moreover, foreign
nations, and even British colonies, showed no sign of
emulating England's free trade example. Upon every
frontier rose tariff-walls, increasing rather than
diminishing in height and effect. It was not surprising
that the reaction against Manchester politics should
carry with it a revulsion against that anti-Imperial
sentiment which had always gone with the creed of
cosmopolitan free-trade.
(2) As already remarked, it was in the eighties of
last century that the effects of the advances in mechani-
cal science and in communication by steam and tele-
graphy began to be felt in the political world. The
" diaspora " of the Empire began to be modified.
Intercourse between the homeland and the oversea
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Dominions became easier and more constant. Space
and time no longer discouraged the idea of union and
the development of a vast oceanic commonwealth as in
the days when Burke declared that to propose these
things was to fight against nature.
(3) English people became interested in the colonies,
which were rapidly growing in wealth and population
and revealing wonderful vitality as young democratic
offsprings of the old mother-land. British money, too,
was being invested in the colonial field, and this stimu-
lated interest in the political relations of the colonies
with the old country.
(4) The colonists themselves, despite certain irrespon-
sible movements and their uncompromising insistence
on local autonomy, showed no signs of " cutting the
painter " and setting up finally as independent states.
Their asseverations of continued lo3 r alt}^ and devotion
to Crown and Empire naturally awoke a response in
the mother-country, and this was strongly fortified by
men like Carlyle, Froude, Sir George Grey, Tennyson
and others who kept the faith amid the darkest hours
of apathy and unbelief.
(5) The spectacle of vast empires increasing in power
and wealth, such as Germany and the United States,
and the beginnings of colonising ambitions on the part
of foreign peoples, suggested that the day of small
nationalities was over and that the future lay with the
vast political organisation. There is no doubt, also,
that the glamour which surrounded the august lady
who had sate for fifty years an the English throne
had its influence in strengthening the impulse of a
common loyalty. Then the Jubilee of [887 was not
227
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only a symptom of the new interest in the Empire but
a very effective stimulus to the growth of that senti-
ment.
The new notions rapidly found expression. From
1S84-1S93 the Imperial Federation League, with which
the names of Forster and Rosebery will always be
linked, worked for the great ideal which supplied its
title. The decisions and resolutions of that body are
acquiring a historic interest. After thirty years we
have not yet reached the goal, which was to be ap-
proached by stages and through experiences not antici-
pated by the members of the League. We can now
see that the fruit which the League aspired to pluck
was yet far from ripe. The Report drawn up at the
suggestion of Lord Salisbury received a chilling recep-
tion from Mr. Gladstone who was, however, only
voicing the reserve and hesitation of the general
public. That document is by no means superseded
and might serve to-day as the manifesto of an Empire
policy widely accepted at home and in the Dominions.
The Report briefly defines " the essentials of a United
Empire " :
(a) That the voice of the Empire in peace when
dealing with foreign Powers shall be, as far as
possible, the united voice of all its autonomous
parts.
(b) That the defence of the Empire in war shall
be the common defence of all its interests and of
all its parts by the united forces and resources of
all its members.
For these two purposes " some central body in which
all the parts of the Empire are represented was essen-
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tial," and the committee proposed the following ques-
tions :
(a) How shall a Council of the Empire be con-
stituted ?
(b) By what means can the resources of the
Empire be most effectively combined?
The Report goes on to say that this Council should be
composed of " members appointed by the United King-
dom and the self-governing colonies," India and the
Crown Colonies being represented by the two Secre-
taries of State for India and for the Colonies. One of
the Council's most important duties was to provide for
common defence, and the Report goes on to suggest
the methods of financial contribution and administra-
tion for this purpose.
As regards the second question the committee makes
certain practical proposals, such as the establishment
of penny postage, the admission of public colonial
securities as trust investments, the appointment of
colonial members to the Judicial Committee of tin-
Privy Council, all which have since been realised. The
League indeed did good service to the cause of consoli-
dation. We owe to it the calling of the first Colonial
Conference in 18S7, a new departure of immense signi-
ficance, and the institution of periodic conferences,
while the existing system of trade preference within
the Empire is largely owing to its direct and indirect
influence. But with the issue of this epoch-marking
Report the League's work was done. Much had to
happen before the time came for the practical realisa-
tion of these ideas. The end of the League was not a
defeat for the new ideas. It was only the clove of fl
220
CLOSER UNION
particular campaign in the fight for closer Empire
union. As a matter of fact, the City Branch of the
League survived under the title of " The British
Empire League," while the oversea branches continued
their operations. " The United Empire Trade
League," founded in 1891, carried forward the idea of
commercial and fiscal union, and the "Imperial
Federation (Defence) Committee " took over another
aspect of the cause. ,
Here it may be well to give some account of the
institutions which are "Imperial" in character and
have developed under the fostering influence of the
wider Britannic sympathies of the last thirty years.
We might indeed include among these common institu-
tions the Monarchy, the golden link of the great
Commonwealth, the sign and symbol of unity, lifted
high above all differences of race and colour and creed.
But to turn to the institutions of modern device to
which allusion has been made, we have
(1) The Imperial Conference, the great deliberative
indaba which meets normally every five years, over
which the Prime Minister of this country presides and
of which the Premiers of all the self-governing
Dominions are ex officio members. In fact the Premiers
are always attended by other delegates from their
governments, but each Dominion has one vote and one
only. Steps have been taken to give the Conference
a more permanent and constitutional character. It has
been made periodic and has been provided with a secre-
tarial staff under the direction of the Secretary of State
for the Colonies. This gives the Conference a local
habitation and a continuous existence. Provision is
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also made for subsidiary conferences on questions con-
cerning any two or more states. Such was that on
Defence in 1909, which had very fruitful results.
The main feature of these periodic palavers is that
they are purely consultative and advisory. The
assembled representatives have neither legislative nor
executive powers. Their resolutions are not binding
upon the legislatures represented, though, as the
assembled Premiers have each a parliamentary
majority behind them in their own countries, and as
they are supposed to be voicing the views of that
majority at least, they can generally give effect to any
resolution which has been unanimously adopted. Still
the fact remains that the Conference is only a means
of consultation among the self-governing states of the
Empire or, in the words of Mr. Lowell, of Harvard
University, " a congress of diplomats rather than an
organ of government."
(2) The Committee of Imperial Defence, consti-
tuted by Mr. Balfour in 1904. In essence it is simply
the Prime Minister's Advisory Committee on Defence.
It consists of the Prime Minister and of such persons
as he may summon to be its members. Among these
have always been the Secretaries of State for War,
Foreign Affairs, the Colonies and India, the First
Lord of the Admiralty, the Chancellor of the Exche-
quer, the First Sea Lord, the Directors of Military
Operations and of Naval Intelligence. The Premiers of
the Dominions will always be invited to attend when
the Imperial Conference is in session, and it is now
understood that a Cabinet Minister or other representa-
tive of the Dominions shall have a permanent seat on
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the Committee. It was at a meeting of this Committee
in 191 1 that the Minister for Foreign Affairs first
admitted the oversea representatives to his full confi-
dence on questions of defence and foreign policy. The
Committee, like the Imperial Conference, is purely
consultative in function. It has no power to legislate
or to enforce any of its advice. The Cabinet and Parlia-
ment of the United Kingdom continue to be solely
responsible for the foreign policy and, ultimately, for
the defence of the Empire.
(3) The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,
that august tribunal which sits so unobtrusively in an
upper room in Downing Street, to which every over-
sea subject of the King has the right to appeal from the
highest courts of every province of the Empire. It is,
however, not yet a fully Imperial Court of Appeal,
because the House of Lords in its judicial capacity is
the court of last resort for the United Kingdom, though
appeals go to the Judicial Committee from the ecclesi-
astical courts of the United Kingdom. It has been
proposed to fuse together the House of Lords as an
Appeal Court and the Judicial Committee, and thus
create a tribunal common to the whole Empire. The
admission of colonial judges to the Court, however,
gives the Committee already an Imperial character.
The Committee now consists of one or two former
Indian judges appointed for the purpose ; of the Lords
of Appeal in ordinary ; 3 of all the members of the
Privy Council who hold, or have held, high judicial
3 These are four in number. They were created in order to
strengthen the judicial intelligence of the hereditary chamber. They
are the cnlv instances of persons holding life peerages,
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office in the United Kingdom or (not exceeding five in
number) in the self-governing colonies ; of two other
members of the Privy Council if the Crown thinks fit
to appoint them. " It is amazing," writes Prof.
Lawrence Lowell, of Harvard, " that any one tribunal
should be able to deal intelligently with the manifold
systems of law that come before the Judicial Com-
mittee. Upon its docket one may find a case from
Australia involving English Common Law or Equity,
another involving French Law from Canada, a third
requiring a knowledge of the Roman Dutch Law of
Guiana or the Cape, still another that turns upon
Hindoo or Mohammedan Law in India, and so on
through the long list of British possessions over the
whole face of the earth. The capacity of the court to
deal with all those questions is the more astonishing
because its members are for the most part the same
men who sit as judges in the House of Lords." 4
(4) To these institutions we must now add the most
important and significant of all — the Imperial Cabinet
which, growing out of the Imperial War Cabinet, is
now to be summoned annually. Already before the
War Cabinet met, the British Cabinet had assumed an
Imperial character, when Sir Robert Borden, the Cana-
dian Premier, and subsequently, Mr. Hughes, the
Australian Premier, was admitted to the sanctum
sanctorum. These signs of the times were not gener-
ally noticed amid the distractions of the war. The
institution of the annual Empire Cabinet is truly,
as Mr. Lloyd George has said, " a landmark in the
* " Th^ Government of England ": vol. ii., pp. ^fis-o
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constitutional history of the Empire " and cannot fail
to have important sequels. It is to consist of
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and
such of his colleagues as deal specially with Imperial
affairs ;
The Prime Minister of each of the Dominions or
some specially accredited alternate representative of
equal authority, and
A representative of the Indian people to be
appointed by the Government of India.
The last feature is specially noteworthy. At
Imperial Conferences before the war India had been
only indirectly represented. At the Imperial War
Conference and Cabinet the great " Dependency " (a
term which is thus becoming less and less appropriate)
was directly and most ably represented by His High-
ness the Maharajah of Bikanir and Sir S. P. Sinha,
both native Indians. Henceforth the position of India
at the Imperial Conferences and at the Empire Cabinet
is assured. The War Conference, indeed, passed the
following formal resolution :
" That the Imperial War Conference desires to
place on record its view that the Resolution of the
Imperial Conference of 20th April, 1907, should
be modified to permit of India being fully repre-
sented at all future Imperial Conferences, and that
the necessary steps should be taken to secure the
assent of the various governments in order that
the next Imperial Conference may be summoned
and constituted accordingly."
The history of the British Empire during the last
thirty years is, in fact, largely a record of slow but
234
CLOSER UNION
steady advance towards closer co-operation in act and
counsel. We are still far from such a formal re-con-
stitution as was anticipated by many enthusiasts in the
days of the Federation League. We have not yet
" attained unto the prize of our high calling " but
are still reaching forwards to it. What is to be the
ultimate destiny of the Empire, so far as finality is
possible in politics ? Is our ideal to be a more or less
intimate alliance of independent states, united, it may
be, by a system of commercial reciprocity and engaging
in consultation on matters of common interest, but
without any central legislative and executive body,
and without that sovereign unity which constitutes a
single international state? Or are we to look forward
to such an Imperial federation as will add the
crown and cupola to those great federal groups which
the self-governing Dominions have formed among
themselves ? Is this consummate enterprise of political
architecture beyond hope and possibility? Are the
difficulties insuperable? Do not the great federations
or groups of Dominion, Commonwealth and Union lead
up naturally to federation on the highest plane?
The self-governing portions of the Empire, in-
cluding the United Kingdom, seem to provide the
exact conditions that make a federal union possible and
desirable. We have, on the one hand, the strong
local or particular sentiment, and on the other the
sense of common interests and the desire to stand
together as against the rest of the world. The student
should read and ponder carefully Professor Freeman's
brief but concentrated exposition of the federal prin-
235
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ciple. In his "History of Federal Government " that
great authority writes :
" The name of Federal Government may, in
this wider sense, be applied to any union of com-
ponent members where the degree of union between
the members surpasses that of mere alliance, how-
ever intimate, and where the degree of indepen-
dence possessed by each member surpasses any-
thing which can fairly come under the head of
merely Municipal Freedom. Such unions have
been common in many ages and countries, and
many of them have been far from realising the
full ideal of a Federal Government. That ideal,
in its highest and most elaborate development, is
the most finished and the most artificial produc-
tion of political ingenuity. It is hardly possible
that Federal Government can attain its perfect
form except in a highly refined age, and among a
people whose political education has already
stretched over many generations. Two requisites
seem necessary to constitute a Federal Govern-
ment in this, its most perfect form. On the one
hand, each of the members of the Union must be
wholly independent in those matters which concern
each member only. On the other hand, all must
be subject to a common power in those matters
which concern the whole body of members col-
lectively."
Have we not during a whole generation been prepar-
ing in the Britannic family precisely the requisite con-
ditions described by the great historian — the autonomy
of the parts and the sense of common citizenship
236
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and the desire of union among the whole body of mem-
bers collectively ? True, the wide dispersion of the
members of the British Empire is a special and unpre-
cedented feature of the problem in this case. But, as
we have seen, mechanical science has gone far, and
will go much further, to remove this difficulty. Even
a journey of twenty-eight days from Australia or New
Zealand, a figure which will be reduced in the years to
come, cannot be regarded as prohibitive of an annual
visit of Empire statesmen to England for the purpose
of attending the great Parliament of all the Britains.
The more serious obstacles will come into view as we
follow the movements of public opinion on the ques-
tion during recent years.
The Imperial Conference of 19^1 produced an inte-
resting example of a logical and complete federal
scheme for the self-governing Empire. It was brought
forward by Sir Joseph Ward, Premier of New Zealand.
Let us look at it briefly. It provided :
1. That Canada, Australia, South Africa, New
Zealand and Newfoundland elect to an Imperial
House of Representatives one representative for
each 200,000 of their respective populations :
Canada 37, Australia 25, South Africa 7, New
Zealand 6, Newfoundland 2 — that is, 77 in all ;
2. That the mode of electing the representa-
tives be lett to the determination of each of the
Dominions ;
3. That the United Kingdom elect representa-
tives on the same basis — that is, one for every
200,000 of the population : that is. .say, 220 mem-
bei Thus the total membership of the House of
Representatives would be 300;
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CLOSER UNION
4. That the term for which they are elected
• be live years.
5. That the United Kingdom, Canada, Aus-
tralia, South Africa, New Zealand, Newfoundland
each elect two representatives to be members of
an Imperial Council of Defence (Senate), thus
providing a Council of 12 ; (the United Kingdom,
like the rest, has 2.)
6. That there be an executive (Cabinet) to
consist of not more than 15, not more than one to
be chosen from the Senate.
This Imperial Parliament was to take over exclu-
sively the control of all matters common to the whole
Empire, that is, those in which every part of it is
alike interested ; and also those matters which can be
satisfactorily undertaken only by the Empire as a
whole. These would include (1) peace and war,
treaties and foreign relations generally ; and (2)
Imperial Defence and the providing of revenues for the
foregoing purposes.
For the first ten years this Parliament was to have
no powers of taxation, the amount payable by each of
the oversea Dominions as its contribution being raised
by each and paid into the Empire exchequer. The
amount payable for purposes of defence by all the
Dominions, estimated per capita of population, was
not to exceed one-half of the contribution, similarly
, estimated, of the United Kingdom.
This very' definite scheme was practically laughed
out of court at the Conference, rather to the surprise of
many persons who had been looking and working for-
ward to some such consummation. Sir Wilfrid
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Laurier, for Canada, especially distinguished himself
in caustic and derisive criticism. But most unexpected
was Mr. Asquith's unqualified condemnation. This
distinguished Liberal Imperialist asked :
• What does Sir Joseph Ward's proposal come
to? It would impair, if not altogether destroy,
the authority of the Government of the United
Kingdom in such grave matters as the conduct of
foreign policy, the conclusion of treaties, the de-
claration and maintenance of peace or the declara-
tion of war, and indeed all those relations with
Foreign Powers, necessarily of the most delicate
character, which are now in the hands of the
Imperial Government, subject to its responsibility
to the Imperial Parliament. That authority
cannot be shared, and the co-existence side by side
with the Cabinet of the United Kingdom of this
proposed body, clothed with the functions and
jurisdiction which Sir Joseph Ward proposed to
invest it with, would, in our judgment, be abso-
lutely fatal to our present system of government."
In other words, the very object those who desire the
closer union of the Empire have in view, the devolution
from the United Kingdom on to the Colonies of some
share in the control of foreign policy, Empire defence
and the rest, is declared by one of the wisest of British
statesmen to be impossible. The United Kingdom
enjoys, and insists on continuing to enjoy, this exclu-
sive control of interests common to the whole Empire.
But let us hear how the Chairman of the Conference
continued :
" This is from the Imperial point of view.
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Now, from the point of view of the Dominions,
this new machine would impose upon them by the
voice of a body in which they would be in a stand-
ing minority (that is part of the case), in a small
minority indeed, a policy of which they might
all disapprove, of which some of them at any rate
possibly and probably would disapprove, a policy
which would in most cases involve expenditure
and an expenditure which would have to be met
by the imposition on a dissentient community of
taxation by its own government."
To this it is easy to reply that the policy imposed
upon the Empire by the United Kingdom under pre-
sent conditions may be, and is not infrequently, dis-
approved by the Dominions, and that by their contri-
bution to the naval defence of the Empire they have
been, and are still, taxed for the support of a policy
from which they may dissent and over which they have
had no control. For example, it is unlikely that the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance would ever have been con-
cluded if Australia, New Zealand or British Columbia
could have had their way. Under Sir Joseph Ward's
federal scheme, these provinces would at least have
had a constitutional opportunity of protest and per-
suasion. Mr. Asquith, in conclusion, turned down
these proposals without any reservation :
" We cannot, with the traditions and history
of the British Empire behind us, either from the
point of view of the United Kingdom or from the
point of view of our self-governing Dominions,
assent for a moment to proposals which are so
240
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fatal to the very fundamental conditions on which
our Empire has been built up and carried on."
Mr. Asquith seemed to be enviably immune to the
feeling shared very generally by the friends of the
Empire that " the conditions on which the Empire has
been built up and carried on " no longer satisfy the
needs of to-day and to-morrow, and that the Empire
must adopt itself to changing circumstances or share
the fate of " Assyria, Rome and Carthage."
The British statesman, however, does place his finger
on the real difficulties in the way of such a re-constitu-
tion of the British famil}- of states. These are, firstly,
that on any system of representation according to heads
each individual Dominion and all the Dominions
together would be overweighted by the United
Kingdom. Or, in other words, the home-country and
the Dominions are an aggregation of states in such
different stages of development that it is impossible to
give the latter any really effective voice and any posi-
tive share of responsibility in the control of the affairs
common to the Empire. How, for example, can
Newfoundland, with her 240,000 people, be joined in
a political partnership with the United Kingdom, whose
population is 46 millions? This objection was urged
only a few years ago in the Canadian Parliament by
Sir Wilfred Laurier :
" Far be it from me," he said, "to speak with
disrespect of Imperial Federation. It is a great
idea which strongly appeals to the imagination,
but, unfortunately, to me at least, it has always
seemed to be impracticable, impracticable at all
events so long as there is not an approximation
241
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between the population of the mother-country and
the population of the new Dominions, so long as
there is not an approximation between the wealth
of the one and the wealth of the others, and so
long as there is not an approximation in the ideas
of fiscal legislation."
As a specimen of the language spoken by Milton and
Shakespeare this is not praiseworthy, but its meaning
is clear. The implication is that, though the
Dominions may be mistresses in their own houses, they
are not sufficiently grown-up to take part in the admin-
istration of family affairs as a whole. Responsibility
for foreign relations, peace and war, and in the main
for Empire defence, must be still left to the govern-
ment of the United Kingdom, which, however, may be
willing to communicate to the Dominions the fullest
information on these subjects and invite their counsel
and criticism. The French-Canadian statesman in
his political views seems to be deficient in what we
may call the federal sense. Here, for example, is a
hard saying of his in a speech to the Canadian
Parliament in 19 13 :
" I repeat that, if we are to have a voice in the
question of peace and war — and the day will come
certainly when we shall have that voice — the only
voice we can have must be under the control of
the Canadian Parliament, the Canadian govern-
ment and the Canadian people."
If we are to understand these wx>rds in their obvious
sense they mean Canadian secession and independ-
ence and the break-up of the great British Common-
wealth. Canada, it will be noticed, is not to " pool '
242
CLOSER UNION
her counsels with those of the other Dominions. She
is to have a foreign policy entirely her own. A very
different ideal was presented b} r Sir Robert Borden in
this instructive debate :
"Are you to have one Empire, one foreign
policy, one combined naval force, to resist every
peril, or are you to have five foreign policies and
five scattered navies to go down against the attack
which may come upon them at anjr time?"
However, this disparity of position and power is a real
difficulty in the way of providing the Empire with a
full "rig-out" of federal institutions. But, like the
disabilities of youth, it is a difficulty which grows
continuously smaller. "It is by no means impro-
bable," said Sir Robert Borden at the Imperial War
Conference, " that children now living will see the
population of the Dominions surpass that of the United
Kingdom." The Dominions cannot go on for ever
enjoying the irresponsibility and suffering the disabili-
ties of minors in the most important affairs of political
life. The gravamen of this objection on the ground
of constant minority is that the central body would
have the power of taxation, and the Dominions are not
inclined to be taxed by a composite body in whose
decisions they have no effectual voice.
But there is more than one via media between the
present conditions and such a formal and rigid con-
stitution as that suggested by Sir Joseph Ward. The
Imperial Cabinet, with its annual meetings, is an
appreciable, though modest, advance. This proposal
does not establish an entirely new Empire Executive
distinct from the various Cabinets of England and the
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Domiuious. The Secretaries of State for Foreign
Affairs and War and the Head of the British
Admiralty would still be British Ministers re-
sponsible to the Parliament of this country.
The change would simply be that represen-
tatives of the Dominions and India would be
admitted to the British Cabinet, or a selection from
the British Cabinet, and have an advisory share
in the framing of policy, the organisation of defence
and other subjects of Empire interest. This advance
may be as far as the Dominions and the home-country
are for the time being willing to go. A large body of
public opinion, however, at home and across the seas,
will be anxious to go further. And we may still do so
without adopting a full federal constitution for which
the Empire is apparently not yet ripe. The essence of
a federation is that the federal authority is distinct
from and above all the local governments. It has a
separate executive, and the federal Parliament, usually
consisting of two Chambers, is separately elected.
Moreover, there is a. very definite and statutory
distribution of powers between the federal authority on
the one hand and those of the component states on the
other. Assuming that a federalisation of the United
Kingdom would precede Empire federation, we may
consider for a moment the position of a qualified voter
in England. He would have to elect, firstly, his
member for the state or provincial Parliament of
England ; secondly, his member or members for the
federal Parliament of the United Kingdom, dealing
with affairs common to England, Wales, Scotland and
Ireland ; and thirdly, his members for the Chambers
244
CLOSER UNION
of the Federal Parliament of the Empire dealing with
foreign relations, peace and war, defence, naturalisa-
tion, communications and other subjects reserved to
that supreme Parliament. He would have to work up
an emotion corresponding with each of these functions
and keep the various sets of issues involved at each
of the three elections as distinct as possible in his own
mind. Unless the voter, as well as the member, were
paid, it is difficult to imagine how he could be induced
to exercise on all occasions this proud prerogative of
citizenship. Even now the voter, as every election
agent knows, needs a good deal of beating and fetching
up. Those recurrences of parliamentary general
elections might make him as anxious to divest himself
of the franchise as some persons during recent years
have been fervent to obtain it.
Moreover, the executive action and legislation of
the federal authority have binding force. The Federal
Parliament would have the right to impose taxation
for common purposes and the power to recover it.
This, as I have said, is one of the strongest objections
to the creation of any central governing body upon
which the Dominions would severally have only a
small proportional representation.
Mr. Herbert Samuel has proposed an intermediate
scheme 1 which, while effecting in a high degree the
closer constitutional union to which we aspire, would
avoid these formidable features of a full-blown federal
system. It has the merit of elasticity. It promotes
common counsels rather than common coercive action.
'" Nineteenth Century and After": March, 1917.
245
CLOSER UNION
And, above all, it makes no inroads into those local
autonomies on the maintenance of which the public
opinion of all the Dominions so emphatically insists,
but leaves the quasi-sovereign powers of the various
legislatures of the Dominions unimpaired. Mr.
Samuel writes :
" If the Constitution is to be adequate for the
purposes it is to serve there should be, not onl}-
an Imperial Executive, but also some represen-
tative legislative organ, some kind or other of
Parliamentary institutions. The situation ap-
pears, then, to require the creation of an Assembly
which
" (i) Shall be representative of the whole
Empire ;
" (2) Shall be the body to which the Imperial
Executive will present its proposals and by
which they will be criticised;
" (3) Shall be the instrument for shaping the
legislation' which should apply in all, or several,
of the States of the Empire ;
" (4) Shall be the theatre for discussion of
all matters of common interest ; but which
" (5) Shall be so limited in its powers as not
to be able to impose taxes on any self-governing
part of the Empire without its consent, or levy
armed forces without its consent, or otherwise
interfere with its full autonomy.
" The functions of such an Assembly would
therefore be to consider the proposals of the
Imperial Executive, and to endorse or reject them,
but not to enforce them by binding laws. It
246
CLOSER UNION
would share in framing the estimates of expendi-
ture on defence, and propose an allocation of the
burden among the several States, but it would not
necessarily suggest the methods of raising the
revenue, and would not in any case levy the taxes.
The sovereign power, the law-making
authority, would remain where it now resides, in
the Parliaments of the United Kingdom and the
Dominions, and in the Governments of India and
Egypt, the Crown Colonies and Dependencies.
Such a body would be a Parliament in the
etymological sense of the word ; it would be a
place for discussion, but lacking the effective,
essential powers of a legislature ; to term it a
Parliament would be a misnomer."
It will be observed that the functions of such an
Assembly would be to consider the proposals of the
Empire Cabinet or Executive and to endorse or reject
them, but not to enforce them by binding laws. The
law-making authority would remain where it now
resides, that is, in the Parliaments of the United
Kingdom and the Dominions, and in the Governments
of India, Egypt, the Crown Colonies and Dependencies.
In fact, the Assembly would be strictly a " parlia-
mentum," or, to speak irreverently, a " talking shop,"
where these important Imperial policies might receive
a preliminary investigation but without any power to
translate them into law and statute. As the reader is
no doubt anxious to get t" the heart <<f these problems
of high polities, 1 will quote ^n illuminating pas
from Mr. Samuel's articl
" Let us suppose such an rmperi.il Assembly
247
CLOSER UNION
in being, without troubling to consider by what
name it should be called, and let us imagine the
part it would play in the management of affairs.
" The Imperial Executive would present its
financial and legislative proposals. The Assembly
would consider them ; examine them perhaps
through its Committees; would debate them from
the standpoint of the several States represented ;
would shape them so as to command the best
prospect of support in the territories in which they
would apply ; would finally pass them in the form
of bills. Those bills would then be transmitted
to the Parliaments of the United Kingdom and of
the Dominions, and, if they concerned them, to
the Governments of the Dependencies and
Colonies, for their consideration. They would
come with the authority of the central Assembly
behind them. They would be the product of the
best thought of able representative men meeting
on an equal footing to promote the common
interest. It may be anticipated that as a rule the
local legislatures would accept them. But if
amendments were desired they could be proposed,
and the bill would then be reconsidered by the
Imperial Assembly. The relation between the
Assembly and the local Parliaments would
resemble indeed the relation between the two
Houses of a bicameral legislature. In federal
constitutions the central Parliament consists as a
rule of two Chambers ; the first represents the
whole nation on a uniform basis of population, the
second represents the several States or provinces
248
CLOSER UNION
as units. In the plan now suggested the first
Chamber, the Imperial Assembly, would represent
the self-governing parts of the Empire on the
basis of population ; in place of the second would
be the local Parliaments of the several States
themselves. Bills would pass for amendment
between the two. If in any particular case the
process did not end in agreement ; if, for example,
one of the Dominions declined to concur in the
financial proposals of the Imperial Assembly, and
no compromise could be effected, there would be
no deadlock. Since the sovereign power would
reside, not in the Imperial Assembly, but in the
Dominion Parliament, that body in the last resort
would pass its law in the form acceptable to itself.
Uniformity would indeed be sacrificed ; the other
States might think themselves unfairly used, but
there would be no disruption ; the Dominion would
not be limited to a choice between surrender or
secession ; it would be left to the influence of
public opinion to bring the dissentient State in
course of time into line with the rest. . . .
"The Executive would attend the meetings of
the Imperial Assembly, and there the Ministers
would propound and advocate their policy. It
would no doubt become customary to reserve
for its sittings statements of policy, nol c4 an
urgent character, dealing with Imperial affairs,
and it may Ik- anticipated that the United Kir
dom Parliament would be content 1 a gradual
transfer to an Imperial Assembly of the discussion
of matters of common interest to the whole
Empire."
249
CLOSER UNION
The^e can be no insuperable difficulty in this deve-
lopment unless it be the apathy and unfaith of
the British peoples themselves. If the requisite good-
will be available this Empire Cabinet and Assembly
may very quickly be realised. Even so we should only
be achieving in the ends of time a project of union
which dates from nearly two and a half centuries back.
Several years before the revolt of the American colonies
a man of imagination and prescient statesmanship,
Mr. Thomas Pownall, who had been Governor and
Commander-in-Chief of Massachusetts and South
Carolina and was a deep student of British politics at
home and over the seas, wrote :
" It is the duty of those who govern us to carry
forward this state of things that Great
Britain may be no more considered as the Kingdom
of this He only, with many appendages of pro-
vinces, colonies, settlements, and other extraneous
parts, but as a grand marine dominion consisting
of our possessions in the Atlantic and in America
united into one Empire, in a one centre where the
government is The taking leading
measures towards the forming of all those Atlantic
and American possessions into one Empire of
which Great Britain should be the commercial and
political centre is the precise duty of the Govern-
ment at this crisis. (Such a system) must build
up this country to a degree of glory and prosperity
beyond the example of any age that has yet
passed."
It must not be overlooked that even among the
friends of the Empire there is a wide schism in ideal
250
CLOSER UNION
and opinion. The two main schools of thought may
be designated by the words "Federation" and
'Alliance." The ideas of the former have been
sufficiently set forth. The latter, of whom Air.
Richard Jebb is the most determined and well-equipped
champion, do not believe in the need or possibility of
a centralised authority imposing its decisions on all
the members of the Britannic family. They rely
neither upon the associative effect of what Mr. Jebb
calls " mutual aid in living," that is, on trade prefer-
ence, development of communications and so forth.
They think that such close economic relations would
ensure that all these states, no longer simply autono-
mous but independent, would pursue a common political
policy in foreign relations. One gathers, indeed, that
there is still to be a common allegiance to the Crown,
though in what forms or usages it would find ex-
pression is hard to say.
Among the many currents and cross-currents of
opinion and policy in the Empire during recent times
there are certainly a good many which seemed to be
making towards the alliance of independent nations
rather than towards a more organic constitutional
union among the States of the Empire. The " baby-
fleet ' ' policy seemed especially to be the outconi<
thinking " nationally " rather than " imperially." It
looks as though the Empire were now Faring towards
the bifurcation of these two roads, and as though a
decision between the two would have to be irrevocably
taken, with very different prospective results. The
experience of the war will have convinced most people
that we cannot afford to dispense with any practicable
25'
CLOSER UNION
Fig. I.
COLONIAL DEPENDENCE :
" Our Colonies "
Fig. II.
BRITANNIC ALLIANCE
" Five Free Nations."
j£
--fe&fe
7§rTC
V
«^Wi
Ml
<
&M
/vc.
If
t*
I
\ -oo.
<?
8
n
3
9
. Perliamon
t
[3 • Imperial Conference
© * flarEsmen* [ London
CD • Ministerial Representative Id
- Ministerial Responsibility
Reproduced by permission
These diagrams are intended to illustrate the evolution of the
Empire, with special reference to the question discussed in this
book. The discs denote governments. Where there is a parlia-
ment this is denoted by an inner circle forming the pivot of the
government. The straight lines represent the bonds of constitu-
tional authority. Black shading denotes a coloured population ;
half-shading a mixed population. The comparison intended is not
in respect of area or population, but simply in respect of consti-
tutional status ; certain governments being superior or inferior to
others. All governments in the same plane of authority are
252
CLOSER UNION
Fig. III.
IMPERIAL FEDERATION
With Subject Dependencies.
Fig. IV.
IMPERIAL FEDERATION
With Racial Equality.
of Captain Richard Jebb.
represented by equal discs in the same arc; the only exception being
Papua (or British New Guinea), which is governed by Australia,
and certain islets in the Pacific which have been annexed by New
ind. These have not such full-fledged administrations as the
great dependencies ruled by Britain ; but they have been inserted
by way of calling attention to the fact that Britain is not the only
self-governing State, among those represented in the Imperial
Conference, which exercises ; t paternal despotism ovei subject
countries. Newfoundland must be understood to be included with
Canada.
253
CLOSER UNION
links of union, and that we must have trade co-opera-
tion and the development of intercourse not in place of
but in addition to closer constitutional union.
The accompanying chart will enable the reader to
grasp visually these broad differences in political
status. The first figure represents the conditions that
substantially prevail to-day. It corresponds with the
old tag, " England and her Colonies." It will be
noticed that the whole oversea Empire, white and
black, depends on the Parliament of the United
Kingdom. The segment of the arc representing the
purview of the Colonial office should now be widened
so as to include the Protectorates which have been
transferred from the Colonial to the Foreign Office.
New Zealand and Australia, it will be seen, have sub-
dependencies of their own in the Pacific to
which the war will have made further additions. The
second figure represents the ideal of Alliance or " The
Five Nations," all swinging in the same orbit. But
India is left out in the cold, and with the Protectorates
and Crown Colonies depends upon the Parliament of
the United Kingdom. It will be seen that the five
nations are linked directly to the Crown, this being
the point of union or convergence, though provision is
made for common consultation in a " Conference."
The next figure reveals' a vast difference in political
conception. Here the five nations are in common
dependence upon a central Federal Government. It
will be noticed that India and the other Dependencies
no longer hang from the Parliament of the United
Kingdom but are administered by the central Federal
(lovernment, in which, however, they are not repre-
254
CLOSER UNION
sented. This, then, is Imperial Federation with subject
dependencies. The fourth figure pictures the
Millennium. The white man's ascendancy has dis-
appeared. India and the other tropical dependencies
swing in the same orbit with the United Kingdom and
the Dominions. It will be seen that the African
globe is shaded, which means that the coloured
races are taking part in the government there.
Also the globe of the central Federal Government
is similarly shaded, which implies that these former
Dependencies are directly represented in the sovereign
Federal authority. But it is "a long, long way to
Tipperary," though we are steadily advancing in this
direction.
We may safely anticipate that the common-sense
of the Britannic peoples will settle this question of
constitutional forms on satisfactory lines. It is true,
as General Smuts has said, that " far too much stress
is laid upon the instruments of government," but that
is not an error which the British genius is likely to
commit. The one thing necessary is to maintain the
position of the British Empire as an international unit
represented in its relations to the outer world by a
single and undivided sovereign authority. And the
next thing is to associate the various parts of the
Empire as widely as possible in the exercise of that
authority.
Surely the war has taught us among its most
emphatic lessons the interdependence of all the pro-
vinces of the Empire. England cannot stand alone,
without the material assistance <>f tin oversea
ninions and Dependencies and tip.- moral influence
255
CLOSER UNION
she owes to her position as head of a vast Common-
wealth of States. The Dominions cannot maintain
their autonomous freedom and work out their
own destinies unsupported by the naval might and the
material power of England. We may say without
undue complacency that it was the throwing of the
power and resources of a United British Empire into
the scale that saved the liberties of the world in the
fateful months and years that followed the outbreak
of the great war.
And this brings us to another less specific but no
less important lesson of this unparalleled experience.
President Wilson has declared that " this is a peoples'
war for freedom, justice and self-government among
the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe
for the peoples who live upon it." We cannot place
behind these great ideas too strong a support of moral
and material power. The British Commonwealth is
one of the most powerful guarantors of peace and
freedom on this planet, but we cannot forget that all
the British race, the race which incarnates the love
and tradition of freedom, does not live under the
British flag, that there are as many who live outside
the British Empire as within it. The root of bitterness
springing from the War of Secession at the end of the
18th century had entirely disappeared before
the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes were enfolded
together in a common belligerency against the forces
of a barbaric and despotic militarism. This common
championship of a common cause by the two branches
of the Britannic family is likely to be bigger in destiny
256
CLOSER UNION
and result than any other event in these " anni mira-
biles," not even excepting the Russian Revolution.
Many are looking forward to a " League of
Nations " after the war, which shall be strong enough
to prevent any such relapse into barbarism as these
late years have witnessed. Germany herself has found
no difficulty in at once endorsing the American Presi-
dent's suggestion. Considering the German antece-
dents, this adhesion, like Captain Absolute's deference
to his father, is extremely " sudden." The Britannic
peoples can, however, do something more than express
a pious approval. There is another passage in General
Smuts' speech, from which I have already quoted,
that bears upon this question. 6 The only regret is that
the General should have employed the sacerdotal
" you " and not the first person plural :
" Talk about the League of Nations — you are
the only league of nations that has ever existed ;
and if the line that I am sketching here is correct,
you are going to be an even greater league of
nations in the future ; and if you are true to your
old traditions of self-government and freedom and
to this vision of your future and your mission,
who knows that you may not exercise far greater
and more beneficent influence on the history 01
mankind than you have ever done before?
" In the welter of confusion which is probably
going to follow the- war in Europe you will stand
as the one system when.- liberty I '. success-
fully has kept together divers communities. You
•Parliament quet Speech, M.iy 15, 1917.
257
K
CLOSER UNION
may be sure the world such as will be surroundiug
you iu the times that are coming" will be very
likely to follow your example. You may become
the real nucleus for the world-government for the
future. There is no doubt that is the way things
will go in the future. You have made a successful
start; and if you keep on the right track your
Empire will be a solution of the whole problem."
It is true, as the General says, that the British
Empire is itself a League of Nations. But the cause
of civilisation and freedom and mercy throughout the
world needs stronger support than is afforded even by
England in union with her youthful and thriving
daughter-nations. In our regard for democratic
liberty we are at one with the great Republic of the
West, " which has never fought a war except for free-
dom." The greatest task of American and Britannic
statesmanship in the coming years is to devise between
the two main branches of the English-speaking world
something closer and more intimate than an interna-
tional alliance. This task is so paramount in its scope
and objects over all others that I must transcribe a
few passages on the subject from one of the wisest of
our Empire statesmen, Mr. Arthur Balfour. In his
historic pronouncement on the " Freedom of the Seas,"
Mr. Balfour said :
" The growth of British laws, British forms of
government, British literature and modes of
thought was the slow work of centuries ; among
the co-heirs of these age-long labours were the
great men who founded the United States, and
258
CLOSER UNION
the two branches of the English-speaking peoples,
after the political separation, developed along
parallel lines. So it has come about that whether
they be friendly or quarrelsome, whether they
rejoice in their agreements or cultivate their de-
ferences, they can no more get rid of a certain
similarity of outlook than children born of the
same parents and brought up in the same home.
Whether, therefore, you study political thought
in Great Britain or America, in Canada or in Aus-
tralia, you will find it presents the sharpest and
most irreconcilable contrast to political thought in
the Prussian Kingdom or in that German Empire
into which, with no modification of aims or spirit,
the Prussian Kingdom has developed. Holding,
as I do, that this war is essentially a struggle
between these two ideals of ancient growth, I
cannot doubt that in the result of that struggle
America is no less concerned than the British
Empire.
" Now, if this statement, which represents the
most unchanging element in my political creed,
has in it any element of truth, how does it bear
upon the narrower issues upon which I dwelt in
the earlier portions of this interview? In other
words, what are the practical conclusions to be
drawn from it? My own conclusions are these : —
If in our time any substantial efTort is to be
made towards ensuring the permanent triumph
of the Anglo-Saxon ideal, the great communities
which accept it nmst work together. And in
working together they must beat in mind thai
259
CLOSER UNION
law is not enough. Behind law there must be
power. 7
Again, on July 4, 1917, the first Independence Day
ever celebrated jointly by English and Americans in
England, when " Old Glory " and the Union Jack
were closely entwined on the flagstaff of the stateliest
tower in Westminster, Mr. Balfour said at a dinner
given by the American Society in his honour :
" We are not brought together in this colossal
struggle, we are not working together at this
identical moment — this great and unsurpassed
moment in the history of the world — aiming at
narrow or selfish objects ; or bound together partly
by antiquated traditions. We are working to-
gether in all the freedom of great hopes and with
great ideals. Those hopes and those ideals we
have not learnt from each other. We have them
in common from a common history and from a
common ancestry. We have not learnt freedom
from you, nor you from us. We both spring from
the same root. We both cultivate the same great
aims. We have both the same hopes as regards
the future of Western civilisation, and now we
find ourselves united in this great struggle against
a Power which, if it be allowed to prevail, is going
to destroy the very roots of that Western civilisa-
tion from which we all draw our strength. We
are bound together in that.
" Are we not bound together for ever? Will not
our descendants when they come to look back upon
7 From an interview with the American Press. (1916.)
260
CLOSER UNION
this unique episode in the histon- of the world
say that among the incalculable circumstances
which it produces the most beneficent and the most
permanent is, perhaps, that we are brought
together and united for one common purpose and
common understanding — the two great branches
of the English-speaking race? This is a theme
which absorbs my thoughts day and night. It is
a theme which moves me more, I think, than any-
thing connected with public affairs in all my long
experience. It is a theme which I hope you will
dwell upon; a theme which I hope and trust you
will do your best to spread abroad in all parts of
the world, so that from this date onwards for all
time we who speak the common language and
have these common ideals may feel that we are
working not merely for ourselves individually, not
even for our joint interests, but that we are
working together for the best interests of the
whole of mankind and for the civilisation not
only of the Old World but of the New."
This is the language of a man who is not addicted
to merely emotional rhetoric. The closer union, or
re-union in some degree, of the English-speaking
peoples of the world must be henceforth an object of
policy, and all our arrangements, defensive and fiscal
and commercial, must be to some extent conditioned
by that common orientation. Is it too much to hope
that a great Amphictyonic council representing the
British Empire, the United States and English-
speakers everywhere should meet annually for the
discussion of affairs on the highest plane of world-
261
CLOSER UNION
politics, or that there should be some organised co-
operation between the naval resources of the two
Powers ?
As the world develops, the United Kingdom appears
more and more as a small and detached portion of the
domains ruled by the English-speaking peoples,
holding up the ideas those peoples represent in the
old home of Western civilisation, the Continent of
Europe. For la vieille Europe is still capable of
affecting for better or worse the destinies of the whole
earth. " Hitherto," said Mr. Page, the American
Ambassador to this country, at the Balfour dinner,
" we have been concerned chiefly with the development
and the extension of liberty at home. We have now
entered upon a higher crusade to help in an extension
of liberty in this old world, since the foundations of
that liberty throughout the whole world have been
assailed." In every zone and clime of that world the
English-speaking peoples are planted in puissant and.
growing communities, to whose wealth and power every
year brings its increase. Against a fellowship of
peoples so ubiquitous, so firmly established at every
point of vantage, so immeasurably endowed with actual
and potential wealth, no other combination among the
sons of men can ever prevail. And such a League
could encite no jealousy or fear in the heart of any
free and freedom-loving man. For it would stand for
equal rights and individual liberty not only in its own
borders but throughout the world. It would attempt
no selfish or exclusive exploitation of the wealth
committed to its trusteeship, but would throw open its
resources to all who wished to come and share. Only
262
CLOSER UNION
against tyranny and aggressive ambition and any
attempt to enslave the minds and consciences and
bodies of men would the power of such a League be
relentlessly exercised. Thus secured, humanity
might go forward towards new conquests over the
forces of Nature and with the forces of Nature in a
progress in which all the tribes of men would be
blessed, and without those long and destructive inter-
ludes of strife from the worst of which the world is
now endeavouring to recuperate its strength.
263
INDEX.
Admixture of races undesirable,
64.
Africa, East, 18.
African Railways, 103.
Agricultural population, Our, 54.
Aircraft communication, 112.
American immigrants into
Canada, 47.
Amery, Capt. L. S., 183.
Anglo-Egyptian Convention, 1S5.
Anson, Sir W., 29.
Asbestos, 89.
Asquith, Mr., 239.
Assimilative powers of the Bri-
tish race, 48.
Australia: Railways, 50; immi-
gration, 51 ; Northern Terri-
tory, 58, 81 ; restrictions, 62 ;
Governor Phillip, 72 ; central-
lands, 82 ; railways, 102 ;
manufactures, 151 ; fiscal free-
dom, 161 ; her fleet, 189.
Australia, Commonwealth of,
24.
Australia, not an arid continent,
49.
Australia, Population of, 25.
Australian Colonial Duties Act,
The, 163.
Balfour, Mr., 258.
Balfour of Burleigh, Lord, 181.
Bathurst, Capt. C, 213.
Bauchi tin fields, 75.
Beira, 78.
Beit, 76.
Belgium, Transmarine posses-
sions of, 23.
Bengal, The great famine in, 60.
" Big Loaf," The, 176.
Boell, Mons. P., 133.
Bonny, Riv., 75.
Borden, Sir R., 64, 233.
Botha, Gen., 18.
British Army in India, The, 139.
British Columbia, 99.
British Cotton-growing Associa-
tion, 91.
British East Africa Protectorate,
Si-
British Empire, The : its out-
come, 15; "Robberies," 17;
extent, 19 ; temperate portions,
22 ; distinguishing features,
2 3 ; geographical dispersion,
24 ; communication, 25 ; diver-
sity, 26 ; productions, 26 ;
deficiencies, 27 ; a simple Inter-
national person, 27 ; Colonial
States, 28 ; neutrality of the
Colonies, 33 ; populations, 39 ;
emigration, 42 ; labour on the
land, 52 ; race, 57 ; Indian im-
migrants, 61 ; lone lands, 75 ;
ores, 89 ; cotton, maize, 91 ;
nitrates, 92 ; timber, 93 ; com-
munications, 96; "subject"
and "citizen," 125; India,
134 ; negro subjects, 141;
trade and commerce, 148 ;
preference, 181 ; dependence,
187; sea power, 190; land
labour, 204 ; rural population,
210; cereals, 211 ; cattle, 211 ;
agriculture, 214; constitu-
tional powers, 223 ; confer-
264
INDEX
corn
1 60 ;
Ger-
179;
ences, leagues, committees,
229.
British Empire League, 230.
British Guiana, S3.
Bryce, Lord, 112.
Bukama, 106.
Burke, 25.
Cable communication, 117.
Canada : Conquest of, 18 ; ex-
tent, 19; a Dominion, 24;
Imperial Defence Conference,
34 ; immigration, 42 ; fifty
years ago, 43 : tariff, 44 ;
restrictions on immigrants,
£3 ; wheat production, 83 ;
ores, 89; railways, 99;
laws, 154 ; taxation,
preference, 173 ; and
many, 175; preference,
New Brunswick, 218.
Cape and the Boer War, 34.
Cape to Cairo Line, The, 106.
Cattle in Rhodesia, 77.
Central table-lands of Australia,
82.
Cereals, Cultivation of, 211.
Chamberlain, Mr., 171.
Chartered Company, The, 51.
Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 149.
Citizenship, 131.
Claudian, the poet, 61.
Climate of East Africa, 79.
Coal in Rhodesia, 77.
Cobden, 206.
Colonial Conference in 1887, 86,
98.
onial State . Status nf.
Colonies," 56, 130.
Coloured Race Exclusion Act, 68.
B, Popu-
lation of, 4".
Command of the sea, 192.
Commercial Treaties, Colonial,
224.
Committee of Imperial Defence,
2 3 l -
Communications, 26.
Comparative distances. 122.
Congo, R., 106.
Constitutional powers, 223.
Cook, Capt., 49.
Corn Laws, Repeal of the, 155,
205.
Coronation Conference, The,
171.
Cotton-lands, 91.
Cromer, Lord, 134, 185.
Cultivation, Intensive, 212.
Deakin, Mr., 86, 176.
Decentralisation, 28.
Declaration of London, The, 35.
Deficiencies in productions, 27.
" Department of Information,"
120.
Dispersion of the Empire, 25.
Disraeli, 91, 153.
" Dominions," 56.
Dominions Roval Commission,
87.
Duffy, Mr., 162.
" Dunraven Debate." The, 168.
Durham, Lord, 42.
Dutchmen, South African, 41.
East Africa, Indians in,
I t Africa, Three natural divi-
sions of, 78.
" Effective occupation," -'■
Elgin, Lord, 155.
" Emden," The, 189.
Emigration, ■}-• . to Canada, 45-
migrant," 217.
•• Kr Land Robberi^.
\I..p of," .7
*5
INDEX
Expansion
Seeley's, 18.
of England,"
Federal Government, 236.
" Federation " and " Alliance,"
251-
Fiji, 16.
Fisheries of Canada, 83.
Forbidden Industries, 149.
Forests of Canada, 83.
Foster, Mr. G., 48.
France : Canada, 18 ; trans-
marine possessions, 23 ; N.
African Colonies, 23.
Free trade, 185.
Freeman's " History of Federal
Government," 236.
French-Canadians, 41.
Frobisher's Map of Australia,
49.
Fuchs, Prof., 157.
Fuller's " The Empire of India,"
133-
Gait, Sir A., 159.
Geographical dispersion, 24.
George, Mr. D. L., 178.
Germany : misrepresentations,
16; map of " England's Rob-
beries," 17; African Colonies,
18; transmarine possessions,
23 ; rural population, 52.
Germany and Canada, 175.
German plans for E. Africa, 145.
Georgian Bay — Montreal Canal,
102.
Gibbon, 19, 46.
Gilruth, Dr., 81.
Gorgas, Surg.-Gen., 58.
" Grain Blockade," The, 102,
Great War, The, 32.
Grey, F.arl, 165.
Harcourt, Mr. Seer., 130.
Hofmeyr, Mr. J., 86.
Holland, Transmarine posses-
sions of, 23.
Hudson's Bay, 102.
Hurd, P. and A., 197.
Imperial Cabinet, 233.
Imperial Conference, The, 230.
Imperial Defence Conference,
The, 34.
" Imperial Development Board,"
93-
Imperial Federation League, 98
228.
" Imperial sentiment," 86.
Imperial War Conference, 65.
India: peace and order, 16;
temperate and tropical, 22 :
British population, 58 ; emi-
grants, 61 ; Indians in Natal,
65; fiscal future, 187.
Indians in Natal, 65.
India's position, 134.
Interdependence, 255.
Italy : Transmarine possessions
of, 23.
Jameson, Sir L., 76.
Java, 50.
Jebba, 74.
Johnstone, Sir H., 144.
Kaduna, 75.
Kano, 75.
Kanaka labour, 68.
Katanga, 78.
Kauri Pine, The, 93.
Keith's " Responsible Govern-
ment in the Dominions," 225.
Kimberley, Lord, 163.
Kingston, The disaster at, 197.
266
INDEX
Labour in Australia, 81.
Lagos, 74.
Lancashire and India, 186.
Land settlement, 53, 216.
Language, Influence of, 46.
Lansdowne, Lord, 159.
Lauries, Sir W., 34, 241.
" Law and Custom of the Con-
stitution," Anson's, 29.
Lawley, Sir A., 58.
Lawrence, Dr., on Neutrality,
37-
Le Pas, 101.
" League of Nations," A, 257.
Lewin, Mr. E., m.
Life, Preservation of, Effects of
the, 60.
" Lone lands," 75.
Lowell, Prof. A. L., 28, 233.
Lucas, SirC, 17, 24, 65, 96.
Mail contracts, 1 14.
Maize, 91.
Maize-lands, 91.
Malay Peninsula, The, 143.
Manchester School of Politics,
226.
Manufacturers, Australian, 151.
Meat, Importation of, 211.
Mercantile Era, The, 149.
Mendoza, 7 1 .
Mechanical Science, Effect of,
24.
Milner, Lord, 99.
Mombasa, 78.
Monazite, 90.
Muir, Prof. R., 135.
Napier, Sir G., 62.
Natal, I
Natal, Indians in, 65.
Naturalisation, 126.
Naval power, Unity in, 192.
Ne^ro subjects, Destiny of, 141.
" Neutrality of the Colonies in
war," 33.
Neutrality, Obligations of, 36.
New Brunswick, 218.
Newfoundland, 31.
New Guinea, 16.
New Zealand, 16.
New Zealand, Population of, 25.
Nickel, 89.
Nigeria, 75.
Nitrates, Deficiency in, 27.
Nitrates and Potash, 92.
Northern Territory of Australia,
50, 58, 68, 80, 81.
Oats, Cultivation of, 211.
Oil Reservoirs of Trinidad, 121.
Oppenheim, Prof., 27,
" Opposuit Nature," 25.
Ores, 89.
Orosius, 61.
Oversea Empires, Differences in,
23-
Pacific Cable., 86.
Pacific Slope, The, 43.
Panama, 58.
Panama Canal, The, 120.
Papua, 16.
Peat, 92.
Phillip, Gov., 17, 71.
Population of the British Em-
pire, 40.
Population on the land, 216.
Port Haroourt, -$.
Port Florence, 7.;.
Port Nelson, 101.
Potash, Deficiency in, 27.
Pnwnall, T., 24.
Prairie land, I
Prefereme, 154.
267
INDEX
Preference in Australia, S. Africa
and N. Zealand, 179.
Preference in Canada, 179.
Productions, 26.
Protection, The Colonies and,
l6l.
Railways : Australian, 50, 103 ;
African, 103.
Raw materials, The control of,
S 7 .
Reindeer, 83.
Railways, Canadian, 99.
Rhodes, 76.
Rhodes Scholarships, The, 77.
Rhodesia, 51, 76.
Ritchie, Mr., 173.
Roman Empire, The, 19.
Roman Ideal, The, 61.
Rural populations, 213.
Russian Empire, 24.
St. Lucia, Disturbances at, 198.
Salamis, The battle of, 192.
Salisbury, Lord, 82, 169.
Samuel, Mr. H., 245.
Savannahs, 86.
Science and Empire, 97.
Sea communications, 114.
Sea-power, Britain's, 190.
" Simple International person,"
The State a, 27.
Small Holdings Act, 215.
Smith, Adam, 96.
Smuts, Gen., 18, 39, 63, 142, 257.
South Africa : need for popula-
tion, 51 ; restriction on immi-
grants, 63 ; Rhodesia, 76 ;
resources of Rhodesia, 77 ;
railways, 103.
South Africa, Union of, 24,
Sovereign authority, 37.
Steam engine, The, 97.
Strathcona, Lord, 99.
" Subject " and " Citizen," 125.
Submarine, The, 189.
Submarine attack on Commerce,
Effect of, 53.
Sugar beet, Cultivation of, 212.
Sugar growing, 55.
Tariff, Canadian, 44.
Tariffs, 153.
Tasmania, 217.
Tasman, 49.
Telegraphic communication, 117.
Temperate regions of the Em-
pire, 22.
Timber, 93.
Torrid Zone, Settlement in the,
58-
Torres, 49.
Trans-Andine Railway, The,
in.
Trans-Saharan Railway, A, 108.
Treaties, Power of Dominion to
make, 32.
Tropical Zone, The, 58.
Tungsten, 90.
Turnor, Mr. Chr., 214.
Udi coal-fields, 76.
Uganda, 79.
Ungava, 83.
United Empire Trade League,
230.
United States of America, 24.
Vancouver riots, The, 30.
" Verney Report," The, 215.
Vessels of large draught, 115.
Victoria, The Colony of, 33.
Victoria Falls, 78.
Victoria Nyanza, L., 79.
Wankie Colliery, The, 77.
268
INDEX
Ward, Sir J., 199, 237, 239.
Watt, James, <■)-.
West Indies, The, 121.
Wheat, The cultivation of, 211.
Wheat Production in Canada, 83.
" White Australia," A, 67.
White subject-peoples, Popula-
tion of, 40.
Williams, Mr. R., 108.
Wilson, President, 256.
Winnipeg, 100.
Wireless communication, 117,
Yoruba, 74.
Zambesi, The, 76.
Zanzibar, 16.
Zaria, 75.
Zinc, 89.
269
APPENDIX
THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA.
An interesting scheme of Indian reform has been
put forward by the distinguished Indian statesman, the
late Mr. G. K. Gokhale. The proposals are moderate
and statesmanlike. They involve, in Mr. Gokhale's
own words, " the two- fold operation of freeing the
Provincial Governments, on the one hand, from the
greater part of the control which is at present exercised
over them by the Government of India and the
Secretary of State in connection with the internal
administration of the country, and substituting, on
the other, in place of the control so removed, the
control of the representatives of taxpayers through
Provincial Legislative Councils." The scheme provides
for a distinct distribution of powers between these
enlarged and developed Provincial Assemblies and the
Central Indian authority, the latter thus approximat-
ing to the position of a Federal Government. The
Legislative Council of the Viceroy it is proposed to
convert into a sort of Federal Parliament under the
title of " The Legislative Assembly of India." The
control of the Secretary of State over the Government
of India is to be reduced and the Council of India
(i.e., the Council of the Secretary of State, which must
be distinguished from the Viceroy's Council in India)
to be abolished.
The Under-Secretary for India, Lord Islington, has
also proposed a scheme of reform not unlike that of
270
APPENDIX
Mr. Gokhale's. " Modern India," he said, " should
be treated far less as a group of uniform provinces
under a Central Government. Each province should
be allowed to work out its own redemption by itself in
accordance with its own capacity." What Lord
Islington had in mind was an India resembling,
mutatis mutandis, the Commonwealth of Australia,
' a federation of self-governing States, in which the
central authority exercises control over matters
affecting equally all component units."
The Secretary of State for India, Mr. Montagu,
speaking officially in the House of Commons (Mid-
summer, 191 7), foreshadowed " substantial steps
towards an increasing association of Indians in every
branch of the Administration, and the gradual develop-
ment of self-governing institutions, with a view to the
progressive realisation of responsible government in
India as an integral part of the British Empire."
■'., Primttri, Londond D
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