HE FUTURE OF THE EMPIRE J.Saxo Mills. 'SwdpTav e\a^€9* tclvtolv KO567 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 RACE 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 RACE 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 RACE 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 RACE 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 RACE 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 RACE 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 ; 94 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 ■cntfhov/0*VST**U*N BI0H1 /fadtfc/ys in operation do a uthorised for Construct/or, do projected „. I s«L£.o' Mats ': o so ioo ;oa joo 4«o ' THE GOVERNMENT RAILWAY 104 COMMUNICATIONS Vi *Q/yorman/o' J /Cr.llllli) n v Charleston Jk'f"** n Y ofdmooi'cai ^¥&"v / 5 5 " // '* I « iflonrurry UU-E E N S L A N Dqfcl%\ <• _ CJ /^{Gladstone \„*- Stackali -' W%\\\ U \ fjfofiundabrrtj iMaryfrorouc/i 111 \OocfnactatLa UajRALIA ■r>"'/t> Qcunnamu, *•• ~4bT — ity solm 7 """•—•«.% mi 1 I mil Waree £// W/// Uat/nc - /TASMANIA XHOBA/tr 8/ 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS , .« lou.sA^ FRENCH WE 5*F AP^I C A ^ r p y R - DakarV <**" r°'' Z.nd«*r..-S. Tchad ' *•- — -' CONGO K , odu .. l' -^-■JK^taombasa r .JOpoldinMe KonqcU* S\__^° ri Y 11 W *.£._.3°k>) \>EAFHICAV ^«v„,rt. leo( , <)]d „| le AFRICA EnClrec:,>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 (■*- \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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 120 COMMUNICATIONS 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 COMMUNICATIONS 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 170 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 178 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 182 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 204 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 205 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, 206 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. 207 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 210 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- 211 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. 212 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 218 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. 224 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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 226 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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- 228 CLOSER UNION 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 230 CLOSER UNION 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 2.71 CLOSER UNION 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, 232 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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; 237 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 238 CLOSER UNION 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. 239 CLOSER UNION 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 CLOSER UNION 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 Q CLOSER UNION 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 243 CLOSER UNION 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 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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. JUN7 1962 DEC 2 3 1986 Form L9-30m-ll,'58(.8268s4)444 DA _1B_ Mills - M62f The the future of empire DA 18 M62f This label must not be n figures t For use when issued :is an extra. 3 1158 01137 8386 UC SOUTHERN REGION* ITY AA 000 676 678 IVi 4