Personally, we have always desired that this should be so.
While it has always appeared that the first and most pressing care of the far-seeing and balanced South African statesman must lie in seeking to maintain the integrity and cultivate the individuality and strengthen the internal organization of each of the separate states, in order that each might have an individuality and an internal organization strong enough to make local self-government a sufficient counterpoise to the central power whenever federation was attempted; while, on the other hand, the hardly, if at all, secondary obligation upon the far-seeing South African statesman must lie in the direction of labouring to produce such co-operation and friendliness between the different South African states as might, at the end of another forty or sixty years, find them in a position naturally and spontaneously to federate upon equal terms: to federate, as in the case of the Swiss cantons, where the different divisions are not necessarily of one language or even race, but their geographical position and their interest make them, as regards the outer world, essentially one people.
The federation we desired to see would then have been of a nature not strong enough to produce the incalculable evils of an over-centralized and universal government extending over a vast and diverse territory and over large numbers of diverse peoples, while yet it would have been strong enough to have united the different South Africa states against external aggression, to preserve internal peace, and to have formed a powerful central court for arbitration on all interstatal differences: a national structure which would combine as largely as possible the advantages of large and small states.
All nations, all those organized bodies of men which have contributed greatly to the advance of humanity, have been organized in comparatively small numbers, and have occupied geographically small spaces. To this rule there appears to have been no exception in the past; and its cause is to be found deep in the psychologic structure of the human creature.
Greece, which has probably on the whole contributed more to the fund total of the human race on earth, intellectually and spiritually than any other individual folk, was, even were all its states taken together, not so large as a minute fragment of South Africa. And even Greece was only Greece and enabled to accomplish that which she did by the intensely individual and autonomous development of minute separate parts. Athens, which territorially and in numbers was hardly larger than the Cape Peninsula, and Sparta, no larger than a small English county, have yet left the whole world immortally richer for their individual existences, in a manner which would not have been possible had they been more merged under one rule or forced into a common form of organization. The Jews, while that religion and literature were developing which has transformed Europe and reacted on the whole world, were but a small closely inter-bred tribe inhabiting a few stony valleys and plains. Holland, when she took the lead for civil and intellectual freedom, and won it, crushing to earth the unwieldy bulk of the Spanish Empire, was a tiny folk buried among a handful of sand-dunes in a remote corner of Europe, her whole territory so minute it might be carved out of Russian or Chinese Empires to-day without sensibly abridging them. England herself, when in Queen Elizabeth's reign she had already produced that noble language which is one of her greatest productions, and was developing those representative institutions and that literature which are her pride, when she had produced Chaucer, Shakespeare and Bacon, that England possessed neither an Ireland nor a Scotland nor any spot of earth beyond her own borders, and her entire population was no greater than that which to-day may be found diseased, ragged, and on the border of starvation, inhabiting the back slums of a few of her great Imperial cities.
What humanity has attained in culture, in virtue, in freedom, in knowledge, and in the fullest development of the individual, it has owed to small, close, natural and spontaneous organizations of men—small tribes, small states, and, oftenest, to mere cities organized on a natural basis, with but a few miles of territory beneath their walls, owning their sway. Great empires, which have always originally sprung from such an individual, strong and healthful, national organization, but which have finally begun extending themselves by force over alien territories and over peoples not organically and spontaneously or even geographically bound to themselves, have always spelt decay and disease, not merely to themselves as larger social organizations, but to the very individual human creatures comprised within their bulky, unwieldy and unnatural entities.
Rome, indeed, in the inflated and diseased days of her Imperial expansion, produced a Marcus Aurelius, as an unpruned and dying rose tree may produce one last gorgeous bloom; but, at the very time she held within her city walls the vastest hybrid population which had ever been gathered into one spot on earth, and her enervated limbs stretched across the world, it is doubtful whether she contained one-tenth as many individuals of civic virtue and intellectual and moral virility as were once to be found within her when her body social consisted of the small city on the seven hills and the plains and hills about it, which a man might walk across in a day.
An empire based on force and controlled from a centre may indeed best be likened to an individual, naturally healthy and virile, who at a certain stage in his existence absorbes more nutriment than he requires, and who lays on a vast mass of adipose tissue, more especially abdominally, thus weighting the centres of life, leading to disease in the extremities, and finally ending in the death of the whole organism through heart failure.
Mere size and weight, whether in the world of animal organization or social structure, is never necessarily indicative of vitality and longevity. The antediluvian creatures, whose bones alone are now left us in the earth's crust, infinitely exceeded in size any extant forms of life, but have had to give place to the more concentrated birds and beasts of our day, as the hippopotamus is to-day passing while the ant and the man remain. No madness more complete can possess a human brain than the conception that mere accretion in size and weight, whether in the individual or national organism, is necessarily an increase in strength or vitality, unless there be an increased interaction between all parts and an increase in the central vitality. One jelly-like tentacle of the deep sea octopus measures twelve feet, but the whole creature is lower in the scale of life, and probably expends less nervous force, than the bee or the humming bird. Increased size may, under certain conditions, spell increased strength; it may also spell death.
Had it been possible, for example, in the days of Charlemagne for one central power permanently to crush the diverse individual nationalities which Europe has tended to divide herself into; had England, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland and Italy been dominated over and crushed by one central power, so that their individual course of evolution along diverse lines had been stayed, and had they been forcibly bound under one rule into one large organism; the loss to the human race on earth would probably have been incalculable.