England, Canada and the Great War

by L. G. Desjardins

CHAPTER XVIII.

Imperialism.

Mr. Bourassa is apparently so frightened by what he calls Imperialism that the horrible phantom being always present to his imagination, he shudders at it in day time, and wildly dreams of it at night. Judging by what he has said and written, he seems to have worried a great deal, for many years past, about the dire misfortunes which, he believed, were more and more threatening the future of the world by the strong movement of imperialist views he detected everywhere. It is the great hobby which saddens his life, the terrible bugbear with which he is ever trying to arouse the feelings of his French Canadian countrymen against England.

The deceased British statesman, called Joseph Chamberlain, by his efforts to promote the unity of the Empire, inspired Mr. Bourassa with a profound fear which he wanted his compatriots to share by all the means at his command:—public speeches, newspaper editorials, pamphlets. He charged him with the responsibility of the infamous crime he brought England to commit in accepting the challenge of President Kruger and the then South African Republic, and fighting for the defence of her Sovereign rights in South Africa. According to the Nationalist leader, a vigorous impulse was given by the South African war to the political evolution which he termed British Imperialism. Nothing was further from the true meaning of this important event.

In refuting Mr. Bourassa's assertion, I showed that the South African war was not the outgrowth of Imperialist ideas, and that it has in no way resulted in a dangerous advance of the kind of Imperialism which so much frightens him and all those who experience his baneful influence.

As I have previously proved, the South African campaign was imposed upon England by the then aspiration of a section only of Boer opinion, led by the unscrupulous and haughty President Kruger, imprudently relying on the support of the German Kaiser who had hastened to congratulate him for his success in the Jameson Raid. It resulted not in favor of Imperialism of the type so violently denounced by Mr. Bourassa, but in a most beneficent expansion of Political Freedom by the granting of the free British institutions to the new great South African overseas Dominion. It is only the other day that ex-Premier Asquith, on the occasion of a great public function, has declared that Premier Botha, the former most prominent Boer General, was now one of the strongest pillars of the British Empire.

It being so important to set the opinion of the French Canadians right respecting that question of Imperialism, so much discussed of late, and by many with so little political sense and historical knowledge, I would not rest satisfied with a refutation of the special Bourassist appreciation of the causes and results of the South African conflict. I summarized, in a condensed review, the divers phases of the political movement which can properly be called Imperialism, tracing its origin as far back as the organization of the first great political Powers known to History: the Persian, the Egyptian, the Greek Empires, &c. More than ever before, Imperialism was triumphant during the long Roman domination of almost all the then known world. Every student of History is impressed by the grandeur of the part played by the Roman Empire in the world's drama. Constantine struck the first blow at Roman Imperialism—unwillingly we can rest assured—in laying the foundations of Constantinople, and dividing the Roman Empire into the Western and Eastern Empires. At last, after repeated invasions, the Northern barbarians succeeded in smashing the Roman Colossus.

After many long years during which European political society passed through the incessant turmoil of rival ambitions, Charlemagne sets up anew the Western Empire, being coronated Emperor in Rome. Ever since, amidst multiplied ups and downs, Imperialism has swayed to and fro by the successive edification and overthrow of the Holy Roman Empire, the short lived Napoleonic European domination, the recently organized North German Empire.

So far as Imperialism is concerned, all those great historical facts considered, how best can it be defined? Is it not evident that from the very birth of political societies for the government of Mankind, a double current of political thoughts and aspirations has been concurrently at work, with alternate successes and retrocessions: one tending towards large political organizations, uniting a variety of ethnical groups; the other operating the reverse way to bring about their dissolution in favour of multiplied small sovereignties. Each of the two opposing political systems has had its ebb and flow tides; the waves of the one, in their flowing days, washing the shores of the other until they had to recede before the pressure caused by the exhaustion of their own strength and the increased resistance of internal opposition.