Before Disraeli had entered public life, at a time when public opinion remained stagnant regarding the reciprocal needs and splendid future of the Mother Country and her children, while it was still thought optional whether the parent supported the offspring or the offspring the parent, Disraeli had pondered on the problem, and brought imagination to bear upon it. The colonies were not merely commercial acquisitions, they were the free vents for the surplus energy of a great race, and the nursery gardens of national institutions.
In Contarini Fleming he thus muses, dreaming of things to come, in sight of Corcyra—
“... There is a great difference between ancient and modern colonies. A modern colony is a commercial enterprise, an ancient colony was a political sentiment. In the emigration of our citizens, hitherto, we have merely sought the means of acquiring wealth; the ancients, when their brethren quitted their native shores, wept and sacrificed, and were reconciled to the loss of their fellow-citizens solely by the constraint of stern necessity, and the hope that they were about to find easier subsistence, and to lead a more cheerful and commodious life. I believe that a great revolution is at hand in our system of colonisation, and that Europe will soon recur to the principles of the ancient polity.” In 1836 he thus satirises the impending King’s speech in his Runnymede Letter to Lord Melbourne—
“... It will announce to us that in our colonial empire the most important results may speedily be anticipated from the discreet selection of Lord Auckland as a successor to our Clives and our Hastings; that the progressive improvement of the French in the manufacture of beetroot may compensate for the approaching destruction of our West Indian plantations;[113] and that, although Canada is not yet independent, the final triumph of liberal principles, under the immediate patronage of the Government, may eventually console us for the loss of the glory of Chatham and the conquests of Wolfe.”
Once in the House of Commons, he never ceased to urge the claims of sentiment and the bonds of interest, while he enforced the necessity for cementing them by federation and by tariffs. In 1848, when Lord Palmerston, with his “perfumed cane,” was dictating a constitution to Narvaez, Disraeli, who on principle deprecated interference with foreign powers unless British interests were endangered, here supported him, just because he considered it a case with contingencies affecting our colonial welfare and our own prestige. It was in 1848, too, that, descanting on the narrowing aspects of the Manchester School, and their “unblushing” advocacy of the “interests of capital,” he indicted their “colonial reform with ruining the colonies.” It was in the same year that he taxed the self-righteous Peelites with “turning up their noses at East India cotton as at everything else Colonial and Imperial.”[114]
Under Governments, of which Disraeli was the leading spirit, a constitution was framed for New Zealand in 1852, and in the summer of 1858 the colony of British Columbia was established. It was not more than a few months afterwards that disturbances arose; and the Times, in its review of the year 1859, found in these elements only the “incubus” of ubiquitous colonies and commerce. To this standing snarl about “the millstone of the colonies and India” Disraeli adverted thirteen years afterwards, when he said: “... It has been shown with precise, with mathematical demonstration, that there never was a jewel in the Crown of England that was so truly costly.... How often has it been suggested that we should emancipate ourselves from this incubus!” It was Disraeli’s Government that in the ’sixties was to confederate Canada, and in the ’seventies to devise a scheme for confederating South Africa. In his earliest pamphlets Disraeli had announced that the genius of the age was one of a transition from the “feodal” to the “federal.” In his whole outlook throughout he sought to reconcile the higher spirit of the one with the material interests of the other. And yet, astounding to relate, it was stated in a speech some seven years or so ago, that Disraeli himself had endorsed such melancholy and shortsighted pettiness. The sole foundation that I have been able to find is a stray sentence in a light letter to Lord Malmesbury; just as in 1863 he made merry in Parliament over those who regarded the “colonial empire” as an “annual burden.”
This sentence, jesting of the “millstone,” but sighing over the chance of severance, was penned in 1853—the very year after the New Zealand Constitution. It was a time of despondency, following on fourteen years of colonial crisis. During it both Canada and the Cape had rebelled. The former’s Constitution had been suspended. The repeal of the Sugar Duties had estranged mutinous Jamaica. Peel had been constrained to exclaim that in “Every one of our colonies we have another Ireland,” and Peel was an imperialist. In a raw state, and in the crudity of earlier hardships, the colonies always clash more readily with home government than when the mellowing progress of experience enables them to take a less partial view, and to accept help in working out their own salvation. Moreover, the choice still lay between pure democracy and democracy monarchical and national. The democratic idea during this period was working in absolute detachment from the ancient institutions which should have been easily transplanted. In the colonies these were all in danger. It was difficult here to find a rallying centre for them there, and that difficulty was heightened by the two new schools of Radical thought—the older, that of the philosophical Molesworth and the utilitarian Hume, who tested policy by the criterion of immediate success; the newer, that of the dry “Physical Equalitarians” of Manchester, which regarded Great Britain as a huge co-operative store. Disraeli from first to last urged the especial need in England for strong as well as good government. The faculties for government were being lessened and weakened. It was not one side only that despaired; Lord John Russell himself had no faith in the bare democracy of the colonial feeling. And yet we have seen what Disraeli wrote of Lord John in The Press at this very period. The home example then was unpropitious for the colonies. Monarchy was yet far from popular. What Disraeli feared in England—what may still be dreaded in our midst—was the possible reaction—in the face of limited employment of labour and growing tyranny of capital—from detached democracy to moneyed despotism. “Nor is there”—wrote Disraeli, with premature penetration, in The Press of March 21, 1853—“a country in the world in which the reaction from democracy to despotism would be so sudden and so complete as in England, because in no other country is there the same timidity of capital; and just in proportion as democratic progress by levelling the influences of birth elevates the influences of money, does it create a power that would at any time annihilate liberty—if liberty were brought into opposition with the three-per-cents.” The effects of this fermenting leaven both in England and among her colonies had to be weighed; and Disraeli many years afterwards avowed in a speech that for a moment he too had wavered. That moment was the one of this passing phrase. But it stood for a phase as momentary. Disraeli, like Strepsiades in the Attic burlesque, had only “mislaid his cloak, not lost it.”[115] Ten years later he could advocate our colonial empire with effect and authority. The colonies had become—as the Crown had become—a popular institution, and a requisite for the fresh air, fresh vents, and fresh health of an expanding population cramped by now overcrowded towns. They might still prove a recruiting ground for labour. Peel’s adoption of the “physical happiness” principle, which postulates unlimited employment of industry, had not settled that problem by his “liberation of commerce.” And, as Disraeli pointed out in 1873, if it were only to be settled by natural forces, the “unlimited employment” of labour made for the erasement of the national idea. To the theoretic Radical, however, the colonies, like all our institutions, were still obstacles. “... To him the colonial empire is only an annual burden. To him corporation is an equivalent term for monopoly, and endowment for privilege....”
Together with Disraeli’s name, in the mention of early colonial aspirations, that of the then Sir E. Bulwer Lytton should assuredly be commemorated. He, too, treated colonial concerns, during his brief period of secretaryship, with firmness, insight, and adroitness. Nor should it be forgotten that between the two was a link of romantic imagination as well as of long-standing friendship. Years before, they had both contributed to the New Monthly Magazine. Both were men of striking originality, untempered by a public school education; and it is amusing to note that the fantastic strain, enabling both to view the prospect spaciously, and censured as “un-English”[116] in Disraeli—often when he was really quoting from our classics[117]—was only criticised as “extravagant” in Lytton, or, at a later period, as “ornate” in Lord Leighton. Both were students and interpreters of Bolingbroke. They had each the faculty of regarding history as a whole, and from a high vantage-ground, instead of perverting their vision of progress by the paltry rancours of the moment. Such an instinct is invaluable in attaching new settlements to the nest of their nurture.
In 1863, summarising the aspirations of Conservatism, he spoke of “our colonial empire, which is the national estate, that assures to every subject, ... as it were, a freehold, and which gives to the energies and abilities of Englishmen an inexhaustible theatre.” He was swift to discern the bearing of crucial alterations in America on the colonies. In 1864, while the civil conflict was raging in the United States, he urged, regarding them: “... What is the position of the colonies and dependencies of her Majesty in that country? Four years ago, when the struggle broke out, there was very little in common between them. The tie that bound them to this country was almost one of formality; but what has been the consequence of this great change in North America? You have now a powerful federation with the element of nationality strongly evinced in it. They count their population by millions, and they are conscious that they have a district more fertile and an extent of territory equal to the unappropriated reserves of the United States. These are the elements and prognostics of new influences that have changed the character of that country. Nor is it without reason that they do not feel less of the ambition which characterises new communities than the United States, and that they may become, we will say, the ‘Russia of the New World.’... If from considerations of expense we were to quit the possessions that we now occupy in North America, it would be ultimately, as regards our resources and wealth, as fatal a step as could possibly be taken. Our prosperity would not long remain a consolation, and we might then prepare for the invasion of our country and the subjection of the people.” And he next insisted on the need of Canada’s adequate defence, saying that while we would not force our connection on any dependency, yet, finding our colonies now asserting the principle of their nationality, “... and ... foreseeing a glorious future, ... still depending on the faithful and affectionate assistance of England, it would be the most short-sighted and suicidal policy to shrink from the duty that Providence has called upon us to fulfil.” In 1866, again, he advocated colonial interests in Parliament, and, by a fine phrase, warned us to “... recollect that England is the metropolis of a colonial empire; that she is at the head of a vast number of colonies, the majority of which are yearly increasing in wealth; and that every year these colonies send back to these shores their capital and their intelligence in the persons of distinguished men, who are naturally anxious that these interests should be represented in the House of Commons.”
But it was in 1872 that Disraeli first propounded a colonial policy which was the sum of many previous pronouncements, and is even now being pondered, and not by one party alone. He recognised that a united empire implies a united nation; that, as he always maintained, Parliament represents national opinion, and that colonial opinion and sentiment at last formed part of it.