Fully responsible government was granted to Canada in 1840, and gradually extended to the other colonies. In 1854 a separate secretary of state for the colonies was appointed at home, and the colonial office was established on its present footing. In India, as in the colonies, there came with the growing needs of empire a recognition of the true relations of the parts to each other and of the whole to the crown. In 1858, on the complete transference of the territories of the East India Company to the crown, the board of control was abolished, and the India Council, under the presidency of a secretary of state for India, was created. It was especially provided that the members of the council may not sit in parliament.
Thus, although it has not been found practicable in the working of the British constitution to carry out the full theory of the direct and exclusive dependence of colonial possessions on the crown, the theory is recognized as far as possible. It is understood that the principal sections of the empire enjoy equal rights under the crown, and that none is subordinate to another. The intervention of the imperial parliament in colonial affairs is only admitted theoretically in so far as the support of parliament is required by the constitutional advisers of the crown. To bring the practice of the empire into complete harmony with the theory it would be necessary to constitute, for the purpose of advising the crown on imperial affairs, a council in which all important parts of the empire should be represented.
The gradual recognition of the constitutional theory of the British empire, and the assumption by the principal Imperialism. colonies of full self-governing responsibilities, has cleared the way for a movement in favour of a further development which should bring the supreme headship of the empire more into accord with modern ideas.
It was during the period of domination of the "Manchester school," of which the most effective influence in public affairs was exerted for about thirty years, extending from 1845 to 1875, that the fullest development of colonial self-government was attained, the view being generally accepted at that time that self-governing institutions were to be regarded as the preliminary to inevitable separation. A general inclination to withdraw from the acceptance of imperial responsibilities throughout the world gave to foreign nations at the same time an opportunity by which they were not slow to profit, and contributed to the force of a reaction of which the part played by Great Britain in the scramble for Africa marked the culmination. Under the increasing pressure of foreign enterprise, the value of a federation of the empire for purposes of common interest began to be discussed. Imperial federation was openly spoken of in New Zealand as early as 1852. A similar suggestion was officially put forward by the general association of the Australian colonies in London in 1857. The Royal Colonial Institution, of which the motto "United Empire" illustrates its aims, was founded in 1868. First among leading British statesmen to repudiate the old interpretation of colonial self-government as a preliminary to separation, Lord Beaconsfield, in 1872, spoke of the constitutions accorded to the colonies as "part of a great policy of imperial consolidation." In 1875 W. E. Forster, afterwards a member of the Liberal government, made a speech in which he advocated imperial federation as a means by which it might become practicable to "replace dependence by association." The foundation of the Imperial Federation League—in 1884, with Forster for its first president, shortly to be succeeded by Lord Rosebery—marked a distinct step forward. The Colonial Conferences of 1887 and subsequent years (the title being changed to Imperial Conference in 1907), in which colonial opinion was sought and accepted in respect of important questions of imperial organization and defence, and the enthusiastic loyalty displayed by the colonies towards the crown on the occasion of the jubilee manifestations of Queen Victoria's reign, were further indications of progress in the same direction. Coincidently with this development, the achievements of Sir George Goldie and Cecil Rhodes, who, the one in West Africa and the other in South Africa, added between them to the empire in a space of less than twenty years a dominion of greater extent than the whole of British
India, followed by the action of a host of distinguished disciples in other parts of the world, effectually stemmed the movement initiated by Cobden and Bright. A tendency which had seemed temporarily to point towards a complacent dissolution of the empire was arrested, and the closing years of the 19th century were marked by a growing disposition to appreciate the value and importance of the unique position which the British empire has created for itself in the world. No stronger demonstration of the reality of imperial union could be needed than that which was afforded by the support given to the imperial forces by the colonies and India in the South African War. It remained only to be seen by what process of evolution the further consolidation of the empire would find expression in the machinery of government. A step in this direction was taken in 1907, when at the Colonial Conference held in London that year it was decided to form a permanent secretariat to deal with the common interests of the self-governing colonies and the mother-country. It was further decided that conferences, to be called in future Imperial Conferences, between the home government and the governments of the self-governing dominions, should be held every four years, and that the prime minister of Great Britain should be ex officio president of the conference. No executive power was, however, conferred upon the conference.
The movement in favour of tariff reform initiated by Mr Chamberlain (q.v.) in 1903 with the double object of giving a preference to colonial goods and of protecting imperial trade by the imposition in certain cases of retaliative duties on foreign goods, was a natural evolution of the imperialist idea, and of the fact that by this time the trade-statistics of the United Kingdom had proved that trade with the colonies was forming an increasingly large proportion of the whole. In spite of the defeat of the Unionist party in England in 1906, and the accession to power of a Liberal government opposed to anything which appeared to be inconsistent with free trade, the movement for colonial preference, based on tariff reform, continued to make headway in the United Kingdom, and was definitely adopted by the Unionist party. And at the Imperial Conference of 1907 it was advocated by all the colonial premiers, who could point to the progress made in their own states towards giving a tariff preference to British goods and to those of one another.
The question of self-government is closely associated with the question of self-support. Plenty of good land and the liberty to manage their own affairs were the causes assigned by Adam Smith for the marked prosperity of the British colonies towards the end of the 18th century. The same causes are still observed to produce the same effects, and it may be pointed out that, since the date of the latest of Adam Smith's writings, upwards of 6,000,000 sq. m. of virgin soil, rich with possibilities of agricultural, pastoral and mineral wealth, have been added to the empire. In the same period the white population has grown from about 12,000,000 to 53,000,000, and the developments of agricultural and industrial machinery have multiplied, almost beyond computation, the powers of productive labour.
It is scarcely possible within this article to deal with so widely varied a subject as that of the productions and industry of the The imperial factor in industry and trade. empire. For the purposes of a general statement, it is interesting to observe that concurrently with the acquisition of the vast continental areas during the 19th century, the progress of industrial science in application to means of transport and communication brought about a revolution of the most radical character in the accepted laws of economic development. Railways did away with the old law that the spread of civilization is necessarily governed by facilities for water carriage and is consequently confined to river valleys and sea-shores. Steam and electricity opened to industry the interior of continents previously regarded as unapproachable. The resources of these vast inland spaces which have lain untouched since history began became available to individual enterprise, and over a great portion of the earth's surface were brought within the possessions of the British empire. The production of raw material within the empire increased at a rate which can only be appreciated by a careful study of figures, and by a comparison of the total of these figures with the total figures of the world. The tropical and temperate possessions of the empire include every field of production which can be required for the use of man. There is no main staple of human food which is not grown; there is no material of textile industry which is not produced. The British empire gives occupation to more than one-third of the persons employed in mining and quarrying in the world. It may be interesting, as an indication of the relative position in this respect of the British empire to the world, to state that at present it produces one-third of the coal supply of the world, one-sixth of the wheat supply, and very nearly two-thirds of the gold supply. But while these figures may be taken as in themselves satisfactory, it is far more important to remember that as yet the potential resources of the new lands opened to enterprise have been barely conceived, and their wealth has been little more than scratched. Population as yet has been only very sparsely sprinkled over the surface of many of the areas most suitable for white settlement. In the wheat lands of Canada, the pastoral country of Australasia, and the mineral fields of South Africa and western Canada alone, the undeveloped resources are such as to ensure employment to the labour and satisfaction to the needs of at least as many millions as they now contain thousands of the British race. In respect of this promise of the future the position of the British empire is unique.
It is not too much to say that trade has been at once the most active cause of expansion and the most potent bond of union in the development of the empire. Trade with the tropical and settlement in the temperate regions of the world formed the basis upon which the foundations of the empire were laid. Trading companies founded most of the American and West Indian colonies; a trading company won India; a trading company colonized the north-western districts of Canada; commercial wars during the greater part of the 18th century established the British command of the sea, which rendered the settlement of Australasia possible. The same wars gave Great Britain South Africa, and chartered companies in the 19th century carried the British flag into the interior of the African continent from south and east and west. Trading companies developed Borneo and Fiji. The bonds of prosperous trade have kept the Australasian colonies within the empire. The protection of colonial commerce by the imperial navy is one of the strongest of material links which connect the crown with the outlying possessions of the empire.
The trade of the empire, like the other developments of imperial public life, has been profoundly influenced by the variety of Imperial trade policy. local conditions under which it has flourished. In the early settlement of the North American colonies their trade was left practically free; but by the famous Navigation Act of 1660 the importation and exportation of goods from British colonies were restricted to British ships, of which the master and three-fourths of the mariners were English. This act, of which the intention was to encourage British shipping and to keep the monopoly of British colonial trade for the benefit of British merchants, was followed by many others of a similar nature up to the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the introduction of free trade into Great Britain. The Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849. Thus for very nearly two hundred years British trade was subject to restrictions, of which the avowed intention was to curtail the commercial intercourse of the empire with the world. During this period the commercial or mercantile system, of which the fallacies were exposed by the economists of the latter half of the 18th century, continued to govern the principles of British trade. Under this system monopolies were common, and among them few were more important than that of the East India Company. In 1813 the trade of India was, however, thrown open to competition, and in 1846, after the introduction of free trade at home, the principal British colonies which had not yet at that date received the grant of responsible government were specially empowered to abolish differential duties upon foreign trade. A first result of the commercial emancipation of the