The Albany scheme failed of adoption. The race was not ripe for Franklin's foresight.[186-2] Years afterwards he wrote: "The different and contrary reasons of dislike to my plan make me suspect that it was really the true medium; and I am still of opinion that it would have been happy for both sides if it had been adopted. The Colonies so united would have been sufficiently strong to have defended themselves. There would then have been no need of troops from England. Of course, the consequent pretext for taxing America and the bloody contest it occasioned would have been avoided. But such mistakes are not new; history is full of the errors of states and princes. Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom but forced by the occasion."[186-3]
{187}
But Franklin's idea did not die. Thomas Pownall, just out from England, a man later appointed Downing Street's Governor of Massachusetts, attended the Albany Colonial Conference. He heard the deliberations and talked with the commissioners and, as he himself wrote later, then "first conceived the idea and saw the necessity of a general British union."[187-1] The acquaintance he made there with Franklin grew into closest friendship. Both men wrote in favour of colonial representation;[187-2] and present in many ways an adequate epitome of the best thought of each branch of their civilization.
Pownall recognized that the race would outgrow its London capital. In 1766 he wrote that representatives of the colonies, if apportioned according to population, would in time outnumber those of Great Britain, and "the centre of power instead of remaining fixed as it is now in Great Britain will, as the magnitude and interest of the colonies increases, be drawn out from these islands by the same laws of nature, analogous in all cases, by which the centre of gravity, now near the face of the sun, would, by an increase of the quantity of {188} matter in the planets, be drawn out beyond that surface."[188-1] This result, he thought, might be guarded against by stipulating that the colonial members were always to come to England.[188-2] A present-day Englander makes no such stipulation. Lord Milner in Johannesburg in 1904 stated: "I am an Imperialist out-and-out—and by an Imperialist I don't mean that which is commonly supposed to be indicated by the word. It is not the domination of Great Britain over the other parts of the Empire that is in my mind when I call myself an Imperialist out-and-out. I am an Englishman, but I am an Imperialist more than an Englishman, and I am prepared to see the Federal Council of the Empire sitting in Ottawa, in Sydney, in South Africa—sitting anywhere within the Empire—if in the great future we can only all hold together."[188-3]
About another objection Pownall consulted Franklin. "He had been told that if the colonists were to pay the same taxes as people in England and, like them, to send members to Parliament, equal powers of trade must be conceded. When that was done the Atlantic commerce might afterwards centre in New York or Boston, and power be transferred there from England. 'Which consequence, however it may suit a citizen of the world, must be folly and madness to a Briton.' {189} So exclaimed the Englishman who wrote to his colonial friend for a solution of the difficulty. The American-born Franklin took quite another view. He saw no difficulty at all; he replied that the fallacy lay in supposing that gain to a British Colony was loss to Britain. He maintained that the whole Empire gained if any part of it developed a particular trade, and he predicted that without a complete union, by which full and equal rights were given, the existing system of government could not long be retained. Assuming Pownall's premises to be correct he inquired, 'which is best—to have a total separation or a change of the seat of government?'"[189-1]
Soon it was too late to answer Franklin's question. A separation took place, and two supreme governments divided the responsibility of safe-guarding the English-speaking whites. As time passed, each portion of the Pan-Angles founded colonies. The American colonies were held to the American "home" states by means of a federal government The British Isles colonies have, in some instances, federated among themselves, so that to-day the Britannic power consists of six nations. And now all seven nations are appreciating how superficial are these political separations. To-day we have seven central seats of government, and after a century of peace, a new question arises—whether we should re-form our relations.
One hundred and twenty-three years after Franklin and Pownall so discussed the migration of the seat of government of the English-speaking {190} peoples, another Colonial and another Englander corresponded on the same subject. Cecil John Rhodes wrote to William T. Stead: "What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost America, or if even now we could arrange with the present members of the United States Assembly and our House of Commons, the peace of the world is secured for all eternity! We could hold your federal parliament five years at Washington and five at London."[190-1] Stead has recorded a conversation of the same year in which Rhodes "expressed his readiness to adopt the course from which he had at first recoiled—viz. that of securing the unity of the English-speaking race by consenting to the absorption of the British Empire in the American Union if it could not be secured in any other way. In his first dream he clung passionately to the idea of British ascendancy—this was in 1877—in the English-speaking union of which he then thought John Bull was to be the predominant partner. But in 1891, abandoning in no whit his devotion to his own country, he expressed his deliberate conviction that English-speaking reunion was so great an end in itself as to justify even the sacrifice of the monarchical features and isolated existence of the British Empire . . . and from that moment the ideal of English-speaking reunion assumed its natural and final place as the centre of his political aspirations."[190-2]
As Franklin and Pownall foresaw, the race {191} centre moved out of England. Emerson in 1856 realized that in America "is the seat and centre of the British race,"[191-1] a statement strengthened since by the growth of Canada. North America is now the centre of Pan-Angle civilization, and Canada is the key of the Britannic world.
The impulse to closer union has never been long quiescent. It has been active again and again in the minds of men. A century after Franklin presented his Albany plan for the race, Joseph Howe "looked upon the attainment of complete independence of local government in the colonies as but a stepping-stone to the assertion of still higher national rights, to the acceptance of still higher responsibilities; to some form of substantial union among British people, based on considerations of equal citizenship and the defence of common interests. As far back as 1854 he delivered in the Nova Scotia Legislature an address, since published . . . under the name of the 'Organization of the Empire' which … embodies most of what has since been said by the advocates of national unity. Twelve years later, when on a visit to England, he published in pamphlet form an essay bearing the same title, and giving his more fully matured views upon the question. If the genesis and enunciation of the Imperial Federation idea in its modern form is to be credited to anyone, it must be assigned to Joseph Howe for this early and comprehensive statement of the main issues involved. The study of the utterances of this great colonist, this champion of colonial rights, may be {192} commended to those shallow critics who profess to believe that the proposal for national unity is an outcome of Imperial selfishness, and that its operation would tend to cramp colonial development."[192-1]
Franklin and Pownall wrote in the days when the race knew only the English method of integration—"absorptive, incorporative."[192-2] The various American colonies had been experimenting in effecting combinations on another principle, but their successes had hardly yet proved that the same principle in extended form could be applied to the desired union between all the governments of the English-speaking race. In 1787 was drawn up the Constitution of the United States of America, and the federal method of integration was put definitely to trial. In 1801 Ireland was united to Great Britain, but not by federation. Irish members were admitted to the Parliament of the United Kingdom much after the manner in which Franklin had suggested that American members should be admitted. In the century or more since has been proved the value of federation which means neither confederation[192-3] of groups bound by treaties whereby no adequate affirmative policy or common government would be possible, nor absorption whereby local self-government would be obscured or blotted out, but an expedient combining both local freedom and central strength. The South African Colonial writing to the {193} Englander who shared his vision takes for granted a "federal parliament."