To-day, there is no necessity for us to covet the territories of other nations. We possess ten million square miles of sparsely-populated land in which Englishmen will not be lost to the Empire. To-day, we see this problem mentioned in every paper, but writers will persist in thinking in terms of the unemployed. It is the employed we must shift, not only because at home room will thus be made for the unemployed,[[4]] but because it is the skilled man or the small capitalist who can thrive in the Dominions and Colonies and the unemployed normally cannot.
[4]. It may be considered by some that this will mean that we in England shall be left with the unworkable dregs of society. Such a view is a gross libel on the bulk of the unemployed. Before the War, seventy per cent. of the recruits for the army enlisted because they were unemployed. During the War these men were universally proclaimed heroes, and such they were. I can personally testify, after twenty-seven years of service in the army, that less than five per cent. of the men in any unit of regular soldiers would make undesirable citizens if vocational training were fully established. If, however, men are kept unemployed for years they will eventually become unemployable.
THE PROBLEM OF POWER
To move we must not only possess the means of movement, but the will to move; for, without this will, all the means in the world are but scrap iron and dead timber. The men who first tamed the camel and the horse must have had ideas in their heads—visions which impelled them to do what they did. It may have been sympathy for his wife as she carried his load which induced men to jump on a horse’s back, but much more likely was it her low carrying power and possibly also to get away from her restless tongue.
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the will to move is stimulated by material gain. To possess something easily, cheaply, and, if possible, for nothing, is the urge of both commerce and robbery, twins of Fear and Greed, forces of vice as well as of virtue, the forces of the growth of the human world, and forces not to be set aside lightly.
The nomadic hordes surged out of Asia in the search after food. It was the desire to fill their stomachs which moved them. They trickled over Europe until they met the sea, and then, as years passed by, they conquered the ocean and swept into the New World. What will happen when the Americans begin to swarm, it is difficult to say. Will they once again set out to pursue the setting sun? Who knows?
So also with the wars of the world, as with these slow but steady human inundations, it has nearly always been a material goal, however shadowy in form, which has provided the urge. Security, what is this? The shield of Prosperity and Liberty—a desert, a river, a range of mountains, or a feeble neighbour; in one word, a secure frontier to shield a people, so that they may enjoy the fruits of peace; this has been the urge of war.
Then, from war, which so often is but robbery on a national scale, to turn to barter, amicable warfare; and from barter to turn to commerce, amicable war on a national scale, what has been the urge? A gold field, oil wells, land where corn will grow or cattle will breed; in one word, the possibilities of wealth, which is the loadstone of movement.
The potential wealth of the Empire is stupendous, and potential wealth is power asleep, power awaiting to be roused from its slumbers, the power of coal, of oil, and water, of the air and the sun’s rays, of the tides and of the atoms themselves. The whole world is a gigantic battery of power, and our Empire covers a quarter of this world, and all that is needed is to detonate it, and it can only be detonated by the will of man.
The Romans conquered by building roads, the modern world, by building railways. Yet both are but a one-dimensional means of movement, and, in type, so near related, that even to-day the gauge of our railway lines is the gauge of the Roman chariots. Suppose now that these roads and railways could suddenly expand laterally, so that from a few feet broad they could expand to a few yards in breadth, then to hundreds of yards, miles, and hundreds of miles, until it is as easy to move over the surface of the earth as over the surface of the sea. A second dimension would be given to movement; a new world would be born, since a stupendous sleeping power would be awakened. Stephenson improved the chariot. In place of taking three weeks to go from London to Edinburgh we can now travel there in eight hours. He conquered Time rather than Space. The storming of the Bastions of Space, this is the problem of the future, and one of our engines of conquest is the cross-country machine.