constantly more and more money and has realized that an atmosphere of credit must be preserved.
As the frontier has had nothing to say concerning its credit relationships, so it has been equally powerless in controlling the expenditures of the money borrowed and the disposition of its natural resources. The sole check upon the absolute will of the central government has been the desire to attract labor to the frontier. Few laborers, as few capitalists, seek the wild for the mere adventure of subduing it. The bids and rival bids for settlers by those controlling various sections of the world-frontier for the last three centuries have been to a large extent the basis for those more liberal institutions which have developed on the fringe of society. Their bids have been determined by the character of the settlers they desired or found available, and have in considerable measure determined the character of the communities built up. Force has played its part as well as lure, and has given incurious Africa a share in the development of the Americas that the most psychological advertiser would never have secured for it. In the nineteenth century, Russia has had more command of force to populate her waste spaces than any other country. Consequently the actual frontiersmen have had less to say about the development of their own region than elsewhere. Yet it is easily possible to exaggerate the coercive power of the central government, in popular estimation it is probably exaggerated; and the plans for the settlement of Siberia have been to no small degree influenced by consideration for the ideals of the typical Russian and the incentives which would coerce him to move his hearthstone. Yet on the whole, simplicity and the carrying out of preconceived plans have worked the opening of this great frontier. That the great release which has just occurred in Russia will reveal where these plans have bound, and that the politics of the new republic will be colored by frontier problems, is inevitable.
Australia and New Zealand have, to an even greater extent than the American frontier, secured their labor and capital from another section of the same empire. The relations between the sections, however, are quite different. The local organization of the debtor communities resembles that of the American states; in fact, the scope of their power is much broader, but they do not possess that inviolability to legal attack which sovereignty gives, and have not been represented in the central government. Credit, therefore, has been a matter of neither politics nor diplomacy, but has been as firmly controlled by the lending section, England, as that of Siberia has been by Russia. Judicial unity, which has been the only organic bond of empire, makes the sovereign, like the Crown, identical in Brisbane and in London. There is no chance of reducing debts save by a separation, which other considerations have rendered furthest from the wishes of the debtors.
General diplomacy also has been largely excluded from local consideration. The creditor-debtor relationship was almost exclusively one within the empire, and the handling of other diplomatic questions was in the hands of the British government in which the frontier sections were represented only by influence. The attempts to arouse an imperial, not to say international, mind found hard sledging during the real development period, and only partially succeeded just before the Great War.
On the other hand, the locality has been absolute master of the expenditure of its borrowings. No subordinate communities in the world, most decidedly not the states of our Union, have been left so entirely free to control their development, not only to plan their transportation and allot their natural resources, but even to regulate their tariffs. It is not surprising that these governments, with credit carefully maintained by outside and unquestionable forces, found their politics in the working out of such development, and that,
in large measure, borrowing has been done by the local governments, which have themselves spent the money borrowed. There can be no better security than that of a government incapacitated from repudiation. Creditors have lost comparatively little money to these frontiers, and so Australia and New Zealand have received their needed capital upon better terms, perhaps, than any of the other regions treated. How wisely they have spent it, is a matter of the most violent dispute.
Politics in communities barred from the great questions of credit and diplomacy yet organized on the basis of the broadest democracy and local autonomy, have naturally had their strikingly significant characteristics. Everyone knows how rich their statute books have been in laws relating to the distribution of natural resources and of all kinds of wealth, and to conditions of living. Everyone knows the sharp antagonism between labor, in the narrower sense of wage earner, and employers. That these frontiers have been experiment grounds in social legislation has not been due to their being frontier communities but because they have been frontier communities freed from some of the most characteristic frontier problems.
Rhodesia resembles Australia and New Zealand in local autonomy and lack of representation in the national government. In other respects, however, it is widely different. Here capital came first, and labor afterward. The capital, moreover, was not of the timid sort seeking small return and security, such as invested in the securities of New Zealand, Victoria, and New South Wales, nor did it entirely resemble that of the United States during the development period, which sought returns both large and immediate. The capitalists of Rhodesia could wait, in fact, are still waiting. Alone among the frontiers, Rhodesia has not been under the strain of seeking to make returns on its invested capital before development has reached the stage where returns can
properly be expected. It may well hope to be freed from those complications of individual indebtedness, which have filled our courts with business, and strewn our advance with such tragedies as are even today occurring in northern Wisconsin.
Upon the capitalists thus far-sighted and enduring rested the full burden of development. The region was autonomous in its relation to the British Empire, but its non-resident creditors mapped out its future, not its settlers as in Australia. Capital under such circumstances looks for large rewards, and in this case expects to secure them by control of the natural resources, when these have been made available by the incoming of settlers. Youngest of the frontiers, the working of the old factors in this new relationship remains a question. One would expect economy and efficiency in planning, but possible conflicts between the resident community and its creditors over the division of the proceeds. The settlers that it seeks are of the most independent type, men not with energy alone, but with some small capital of their own. It offers them not only economic opportunity but also political privileges. How such a population will react under a system which restricts politics one degree more than they are restricted in Australia, by excluding the larger lines of local development such as transportation, is one of the interesting questions of tomorrow. One might look for some clue in the history of the American colonial proprietorships, but how far the intelligent study of those experiments will have enabled the proprietors of Rhodesia to avoid their mistakes, and how far the changed conditions created by two centuries of the most rapid change the world has seen, will modify the interworking of similar forces, no one can tell.