Imperial Federation: The Problem of National Unity

by George R. Parkin

A group of manufacturers at Galashiels, one of the important Scottish centres of the wool trade, told me that nine out of every ten pounds of wool they used was Australian. The proportion can scarcely be less in the Bradford district and other large areas of Yorkshire. Nor are such illustrations of the completeness of dependence on supplies abroad exceptional or confined to wool. Cut off Dundee from its importations of Indian jute and the collapse of its main industry would be sudden and general. Lancashire is not likely to forget what it means to lose control of her ordinary markets for obtaining raw cotton. We may put together once more the figures which express this marvellous relation to British industry to the remoter parts of the world.

For wool last year Britain paid £26,000,000; for raw cotton £40,000,000; wood £14,000,000; metals £23,000,000; flax, hemp, and jute £10,000,000; and so on.

But even what has been said of food and raw material of manufacture exhibits but one side of the national position. To be the workshop of the world {109} implies access to the markets of the world. I say nothing of the vast centres of commerce abroad which serve as the main points of distribution. But go to the loneliest Australian or New Zealand bush; to the backwoods and remote prairies of Canada; to distant South African gold and diamond diggings, and we find the shelves of the humblest shop filled with the products of the looms of Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Paisley, of the factories everywhere scattered throughout the United Kingdom where the vast inflow of raw material is worked up. To foreign countries, as well as to those inhabited by British people, to every civilized or uncivilized continent, district, or island, however remote, these manufactures penetrate, and must continue to penetrate, if the vast fabric of British industry is to be maintained.

Once more, the figures which represent the annual aggregate of export trade are immense: cotton goods £70,000,000; woollen goods £26,000,000; iron and steel £28,000,000; machinery £ 13,000,000.

Between this great inflow of raw material and food, and the equally great output of manufactured goods, has sprung up yet another prime factor in Britain's industrial position, her shipping interests. She has become by far the greatest of ocean carriers. It is not merely that scores of millions of capital are invested in ships alone; that 60 per cent. of all the steam tonnage of the world and a large proportion of its sailing tonnage are under the British flag; that tens of thousands of men find employment {110} upon the seas, and tens of thousands more in the immediate handling of ships and their cargoes around British harbours and docks. The mere construction of ships and their equipment for this vast carrying trade gives an impulse to almost every form of British industry. The shipyards of the Clyde alone turn out at times a thousand tons or more of iron or steel shipping for every working day of the year. The vast aggregate for the whole country forms a large element in the industrial life of the nation.

Here, then, in roughest outline, is a picture of the unique position which the British Islands hold in the world today. Let us remind ourselves once more that the extreme singularity of this situation has been created well within the span of an ordinary life, for the sea-borne commerce of the United Kingdom, which today has an annual value of more than £740,000,000, was, when the Queen came to the throne in 1837, only £155,000,000. The difference between these figures fairly measures the increased dependence of the country upon its imports, exports, and the carrying trade.

Now for a nation existing under conditions such as have been described, where the work and wages and food of the masses of the people depend on easy and constant access to the remotest corners of the globe, it seems possible to indicate what must be the end and aim of national policy—the supreme objects of statesmanship. Surely the first object must be to {111} secure the absolute safety for trading purposes of the water-ways of the world.

Maritime security Britain is bound to maintain, if she is to retain manufacturing superiority. The only manufacturing rival which seriously threatens her is the United States. It is a friendly rivalry, and should remain such. But each country, with what advantages it has, will play relentlessly for its own hand, and for the welfare, real or supposed, of its own people. Britain carries on the contest by means of Free Trade, thereby cheapening production, and winning the market of the world. The United States use for their weapon Protection, stimulating production till it becomes cheap. Britain also, under this opposing condition, depends for food and material on the outside world—the United States have the food and most of the material within themselves. The first serious break in Britain's power to hold the waterways of the world would place her at a fatal disadvantage. Safe in a continental isolation the United States could supply the customers who came to her for manufactured goods with what they wanted. To be on even terms Britain must have maritime security, and this she could not have if by the successive cutting away of her great outlying offshoots she should lose control of those points of vantage which now are the secret of her supremacy quite as much as the ships which she sends forth from her dockyards.

Second only to maritime security seems to me the necessity for a country in the position of Great Britain {112} to keep as far as possible the sources from which she draws her food and raw material within the national domain.

Great Britain has had at least one sharp reminder of the advantage which would accrue to a country so dependent as she is on the outside world of having the areas of production under the national flag. This reminder was one which gave a rough shock to the generally accepted theory that if the consumer wants to buy and the producer wants to sell, all the conditions for satisfactory commercial intercourse between countries are fulfilled without reference to national relationship. In 1865 the War of Secession broke out in America, and the ports of the cotton-producing states were blockaded. Millions of bales of cotton were wasting on the wharves and in the warehouses at New Orleans, Charleston, and other Southern towns. On the other hand, in Lancashire millions of spindles were idle, and vast bodies of people were reduced to extreme need or thrown for a long period upon the charity of the benevolent from want of the raw material of their industry. The producers certainly wished to sell, the consumers to purchase. English manufacturers had money with which to buy—English shippers had the vessels to carry—the English Government had the men-of-war which could easily have forced a way to the supplies which were needed. Between was the barrier of international law and national honour, which forbid a neutral nation to interfere with belligerents. The barrier was respected, {113} and England passed triumphantly through the moral strain involved in resisting the temptation to go to war for an industrial end alone. The lesson to be learned from such an example appears manifest. The retention of the national right to keep open the communication between the centre of consumption and the areas of supply is alike desirable for the industry of the one and of the other. To give an obvious illustration. The vast woollen industries of Yorkshire are supplied almost exclusively from regions now within the Empire—New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. So long as these countries remain under a common British flag the working man who produces the wool and the working man who spins it retain the national right to keep their industries in touch with each other: the moment they pass out from under the flag that right is given up. Great Britain would have no more right to force her way into the ports of an independent Australia or New Zealand, blockaded by a German, French, or Chinese fleet, than she had to force her way into the harbours of Louisiana or South Carolina. The neutral flag may furnish a way of escape for Britain's industry when she is herself in direct conflict with another power; it gives no assistance when a nation with which she is at peace chooses to close the ports of a country from which she draws her food or the material of her industry. The reader will find that the illustration is a far-reaching one if he extends it to the whole range of Britain's wants either for supply or for markets for her manufactured {114} goods; and to the whole range of colonial necessity for a market for their staple products, and a supply of what they do not produce.