[INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER]
A UNITED EMPIRE
The idea of a great United British Empire seems to have originated on the North American Continent. When Canada was conquered and the power of France disappeared from North America, Great Britain then possessed the thirteen States or Colonies, as well as the Provinces of Quebec and Nova Scotia.
The thirteen colonies had increased in population and wealth, and the British statesmen burdened with the heavy expenses of the French wars, which had been waged mainly for the protection of the American States, felt it only just that these Colonies should contribute something towards defraying the cost incurred in defending them. This raised the whole question of taxation without representation, and for ten years the discussion was waged vigorously between the Mother Country and the Colonists.
A large number of the Colonists felt the justice of the claim of the Mother Country for some assistance, but foresaw the danger of violent and arbitrary action in enforcing taxation without the taxed having any voice in the matter. These men, the Loyalists, were afterwards known by the name United Empire Loyalists, because they advocated and struggled for the organisation of a consolidated Empire banded together for the common interest. Thomas Hutchinson, the last loyalist Governor of Massachusetts, and one of the ablest of the loyalist leaders, believed in the magnificent dream of a great Empire, to be realised by the process of natural and legal development, in full peace and amity with the Motherland, in short, by evolution.
Joseph Galloway, who shared with Thomas Hutchinson the supreme place among the American statesmen opposed to the Revolution, worked incessantly in the cause of a United Empire, and has been characterised as “The giant corypheus of the pamphleteers.” He was a member of the first continental Congress and introduced into that body, on the 28th September, 1774, his famous “Plan of a proposed union between Great Britain and the Colonies.”
In introducing this plan Galloway made some most interesting remarks, which bear their lesson through all the years to the present day. He said: