Is it conceivable that Germany, if the real relations between Great Britain and her Colonies were understood, would undertake the costliest war of conquest in history in order to acquire an absurd and profitless position from which she could not exact even the shadow of a material advantage?
It may be pleaded that Germany might on the morrow of conquest attempt to enforce a policy which gave her a material advantage in the Colonies, such as Spain and Portugal attempted to create for themselves. But in that case, is it conceivable that Germany, without colonial experience, would be able to enforce a policy which Great Britain was obliged to abandon a hundred years ago? Is it imaginable that, if Great Britain has been utterly unable to carry out a policy by which the Colonies shall pay anything resembling tribute to the Mother Country, Germany, without experience, and at an enormous disadvantage in the matter of language, tradition, racial tie, and the rest, would be able to make such a policy a success? Surely, if the elements of this question were in the least understood in Germany, such a preposterous notion could not be entertained for a moment.
Does anyone seriously pretend that the present system of British Colony-holding is due to British philanthropy or high-mindedness? We all know, of course, that it is simply due to the fact that the older system of exploitation by monopoly broke down. It was a complete social, commercial, and political failure long before it was abolished by law. If England had persisted in the use of force to impose a disadvantageous situation on the Colonies, she would have followed in the trail of Spain, Portugal, and France, and she would have lost her Colonies, and her Empire would have broken up.
It took England anything from two to three centuries to learn the real colonial policy, but it would not take so long in our day for a conqueror to realize the only situation possible between one great community and another. European history, indeed, has recently furnished a striking illustration of how the forces which compel the relationship, which England has adopted towards her Colonies, are operative, even in the case of quite small Colonies, which could not be termed "great communities." Under the Méline régime in France, less than twenty years ago, a highly Protectionist policy, somewhat corresponding to the old English colonial monopoly system, was enforced in the case of certain French Colonies. None of these Colonies was very considerable—indeed, they were all quite small—and yet the forces which they represented in the matter of the life of France have sufficed to change radically the attitude of the French Government in the matter of the policy which less than twenty years ago was imposed on them. In Le Temps of April 5, 1911, appeared the following:
Our Colonies can consider yesterday a red-letter day. The debate in the Chamber gives hope that the stifling fiscal policy imposed on them heretofore is about to be very greatly modified. The Tariff Commission of the Chamber has hitherto been a very citadel of the blindest type of Protectionism in this matter. M. Thierry is the present President of this Commission, and yet it is from him that we learn that a new era in the Colonies is about to be inaugurated. It is a very great change, and one that may have incalculable consequences in the future development of our Colonial Empire.
The Customs Law of 1892 committed two injustices with regard to our possessions. The first was that it obliged the Colonies to receive, free of duty, goods coming from France, while it taxed colonial goods coming into France. Now, it is impossible to imagine a treaty of that kind being passed between two free countries, and if it was passed with the Colonies, it was because these Colonies were weak, and not in the position to defend themselves vis-à-vis the Mother Country.... The Minister of the Colonies himself, animated by a newer and better spirit, which we are so happy to see appear in our treatment of colonial questions, has promised to give all his efforts towards terminating the present bad system.
A further defect of the law of 1892 is that all the Colonies have been subjected to the same fiscal arrangement, as though there could be anything in common between countries separated by the width of the whole globe. Happily the policy was too outrageous ever to be put into full execution. Certain of our African Colonies[32] were tied by international treaties at the time that the law was voted, so that the Government was compelled to make exceptions. But Monsieur Méline's idea at this period was to bring all the Colonies under one fiscal arrangement imposed by the Mother Country, just as soon as the international treaty should have expired. The exceptions have thus furnished a most useful demonstration as to the results which flow from the two systems; the fiscal policy imposed by the Mother Country in view merely of its own immediate interest, and the fiscal policy framed to some extent by the Colony in view of its own special interests. Well, what is the result? It is this. That those Colonies which have been free to frame their own fiscal policy have enjoyed undeniable prosperity, while those which have been obliged to submit to the policy imposed by another country have been sinking into a condition of veritable ruin; they are faced by positive disaster! Only one conclusion is possible. Each Colony must be free to make those arrangements which in its view are suited to its local conditions. That is not at all what M. Méline desired, but it is what experience imposes.... It is not merely a matter of injustice. Our policy has been absurd. What is it that France desires in her Colonies? An addition of wealth and power to the Mother Country. But if we compel the Colonies to submit to disadvantageous fiscal arrangements, which result in their poverty, how can they possibly be a source of wealth and power to the Mother Country? A Colony which can sell nothing is a Colony which can buy nothing: it is a customer lost to French industry.
Every feature of the foregoing is significant and pregnant: this change of policy is not taking place because France is unable to impose force—she is perfectly able to do so; speaking in practical terms, the Colonies have no physical force whatever to oppose to her—but this change is taking place because the imposition of force, even when completely successful and unchallenged, is economically futile. The object at which France is striving can be obtained in one way only: by an arrangement which is mutually advantageous, arrived at by the free consent of both parties, the establishment of a relationship which places a Colony fiscally, economically, on the footing of a foreign country. France is now in process of doing exactly what England has done in the case of her Colonies: she is undoing the work of conquest, surrendering bit by bit the right to impose force, because force fails in its object.
Perhaps the most significant feature of all in the French experience is this: that it has taken less than twenty years for the old colonial system, even in the case of small and relatively powerless Colonies, to break down entirely. How long would a Power like Germany be able to impose the old policy of exploitation on great and powerful communities, a hundred times greater than the French Colonies, even supposing that she could ever "conquer" them?[33]
Yet so little is the real relationship of modern Colonies understood, that I have heard it mentioned in private conversation by an English public man, whose position was such, moreover, as to enable him to give very great effect to his opinion, that one of the motives pushing Germany to war was the projected capture of South Africa, in order to seize the gold-mines, and by means of a tax of 50 per cent. on their output, secure for herself one of the chief sources of gold in the world.
One heard a good deal at the outbreak of the South African War of the part that the gold-mines played in precipitating that conflict. Alike in England and on the Continent, it was generally assumed that Great Britain was "after the gold-mines." A long correspondence took place in the London Times as to the real value of the mines, and speculation as to the amount of money which it was worth Great Britain's while to spend in their "capture." Well, now that England has won the war, how many gold-mines has she captured? In other words, how many shares in the gold-mines does the British Government hold? How many mines have been transferred from their then owners to the British Government, as the result of British victory? How much tribute does the Government of Westminster exact as the result of investing two hundred and fifty millions in the enterprise?
The fact is, of course, that the British Government does not hold a cent's worth of the property. The mines belong to the shareholders and to no one else, and in the conditions of the modern world it is not possible for a Government to "capture" so much as a single dollar's worth of such property as the result of a war of conquest.