Produced by James McCormick

IMPERIAL FEDERATION

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This Edition is intended for circulation only in India and the
British Colonies

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Macmillan's Colonial Library

IMPERIAL FEDERATION

THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL UNITY

BY

GEORGE R. PARKIN, M.A.

WITH MAP

London

MACMILLAN AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

1892

No. 143

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'I tell you that when you study English history you study not the past of England only, but her future. It is the welfare of your country, it is your whole interest as citizens that is in question while you study history. How it is so I illustrate by putting before you this subject of the Expansion of England. I show you that there is a vast question ripening for decision, upon which almost the whole future of our country depends. In magnitude this question far surpasses all other questions which you can ever have to discuss in political life.'

PROFESSOR J. R. SEELEY.

OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

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PREFACE

THIS book has been written at the request of many friends who think that a useful purpose will be served by putting the facts and arguments which it embodies into a connected form, where they will be easily accessible to the ordinary reader, and where either their fallacies may be exposed or their truth find a wider recognition. In most of the chief centres of the British world both at home and abroad I have found men of all classes, and not seldom large masses of men, who agreed on the whole with the line of thought which I here try to follow; agreed, too, with an intensity of belief and a warmth of enthusiasm which are, I think, rarely found except in connection with great and true causes. This concurrence of other minds has deepened the profound conviction which I have long felt that the completion of a closer and permanent political unity between the British communities scattered throughout the world should be a first aim of national statesmanship, and might {vi} become, if its advantages were clearly understood, a supreme object of popular desire.

It is essentially a subject for full and free discussion. Permanent national unity for British people can only be based on an agreement of opinion among at least the larger self-governing communities that the union is for the common good. That there should be an absolute unanimity of consenting opinion among the populations of the communities concerned we have no reason to hope. It has never occurred in any large national consolidation hitherto, and it is not likely to do so now. The continued unity of the Empire is a political question involving immense issues, and divergent opinions may be assumed from the start. Indeed, it becomes more evident from day to day, to those who watch carefully the current of events, that the end can only be gained—as great ends have ever been gained—after a severe struggle between contending forms of thought. The provincialism which has uniformly resisted large national organization; the pessimism which sees danger in every new form of political evolution; the repugnance to change in an old country with forms of government more or less fixed; the crudeness of political thought and want of national perspective in young communities; the ignorance which begets inertia: all these exist and must be combated. In this struggle the better cause, the strongest arguments, the deepest convictions, the most {vii} strenuous moulders of public opinion, will win. Mere circumstances will never shape themselves for the required solution. A policy of drift will never result in united strength. Growth may be an unconscious process—organization can only be the result of a conscious effort. No thinking man today would wish to see the American Republic resolved into its original sovereign states, Germany into its kingdoms, small principalities, and duchies; Canada into its distinct provinces; Italy into its cities. Yet none of these would now be what they are had their fortunes been left to the drift of circumstances alone. Their history proves that the ideals of the clearest minds, backed up by intense convictions and resolute effort, are essential to the attainment of the highest political organization. Circumstances or the course of events may thwart human effort or favour it, but they can never take its place as a complete substitute.

The further consolidation of the Empire depends in great measure upon the answer given to two questions. Is it for the advantage of the different communities that they should remain together? and, granting an affirmative answer to this, does the problem of further unification on a mutually satisfactory basis present difficulties which transcend the resources of British statesmanship?

These questions roughly indicate the line of enquiry which I wish to follow. Behind them lies an issue {viii} which British people throughout the world will soon be forced to recognize as infinitely surpassing in momentous significance any upon which their political thought and energy are now being spent. We may not unreasonably believe that the movements at present going on in the mother-land and the colonies are only supplying us with the political formulae required for grappling with the higher national problem.

It seems like sheer political blindness not to perceive that in different parts of the Empire forces are now actively at work which may at any moment precipitate a decision of this great question; movements in progress which, it seems safe to say, must of necessity lead up to a decision within a time measured at the very most by one or two decades.

Nations take long to grow, but there are periods when, as in the long delayed flowering of certain plants, or in the crystallization of chemical solutions, new forms are taken with extreme rapidity. There are the strongest reasons for believing that the British nation has such a period immediately before it. The necessity for the creation of a body of sound public opinion upon the relations to each other of the various parts of the Empire is therefore urgent. In stating the case for British Unity I have constantly found myself merely linking together arguments already used by thinkers in many parts of the Empire. {ix} Any apology on my part for thus making use of other men's thoughts, is unnecessary. Earnest believers in a great cause only wish that the grounds of their belief should be made known as widely as possible.

No one can be more conscious than myself of the incompleteness of the statement which I have tried to make. But even a partial study of a great subject may serve a useful purpose. If what is here said furnish to the advocates of National Unity some texts upon which they may enlarge and improve, if it provoke that honest criticism which leads to a firmer grasp of truth, I shall be more than satisfied.

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER II FEDERATION 31 CHAPTER. III DEFENCE 59 CHAPTER IV. THE UNITED KINGDOM 103 CHAPTER V. CANADA 115 CHAPTER VI. FRENCH CANADA 153 CHAPTER VII. MR. GOLDWIN SMITH 163 CHAPTER VIII. AUSTRALIA. TASMANIA. NEW ZEALAND. .192 {xii} CHAPTER IX. PAGE SOUTH AFRICA. THE WEST INDIES 232 CHAPTER X. INDIA. 243 CHAPTER XI. AN AMERICAN VIEW 253 CHAPTER XII. FINANCE 271 CHAPTER XIII. TRADE AND FISCAL POLICY 278 CHAPTER XIV. PLANS. CONCLUSION 296 MAP Commercial and Strategic Chart of the British Empire, on Mercator's Projection ..End of book.

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THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL UNITY

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

THE glory of the British political system is often said to lie in the fact that it is a growth; that it has adapted itself, and is capable of continuous adaptation, to the necessities of national development. The fact is proved and the boast is justified by British history, but behind them, no doubt, is a race characteristic. A special capacity for political organization may, without race vanity, be fairly claimed for Anglo-Saxon people.

The tests which have already been, or are now being, applied to this organizing capacity are sufficiently striking and varied. In the British Islands themselves a gradual and steady process of evolution, extending over hundreds of years, has led up from the free but weak and disjointed government of the Heptarchy period to the equally free but strong and consolidated government of the United Kingdom. In the United States, within little more than a hundred {2} years, we have seen one great branch of the race weld into organic unity a number of loosely aggregated provinces under a system which now extends over half the area of a great continent. Twenty-five years ago the process was repeated on the other half of the American continent. In the face of difficulties, by many believed to be insuperable, Canada, stretching from ocean to ocean a distance of nearly 4000 miles, has become a political unit, and already exhibits a cohesion which small European States have often only gained after long periods of internal and external conflict.

On another continent Australians, dealing with provinces larger in area than European empires, are grappling courageously with the problem of political combination, and the universal confidence felt in the ultimate success of their efforts shows what reliance is put upon the strength and efficiency of the race instinct. In South Africa and the West Indies the considerable intermixture of coloured races complicates the question, but here too the forces which make for unity are more or less actively at work.

Speaking generally we may say that in the long course of Anglo-Saxon history whenever the need of combination has arisen the political expedient has been devised to match the political necessity. This capacity for adequate organization has been the keynote of distinction between the democracy of our race and all the democracies by which it has been preceded.

There is reason to think that this organizing quality {3} is one which has given effectiveness to all others. The steadiness of the advance which the race has made in social and industrial directions has depended upon the security given by political organization at once comprehensive, flexible, and strong. No other branch of the human family has ever been so free to apply itself to the higher problems of civilization.

All the conditions of the world at the present time point to the conclusion that further progress must be safe-guarded in the same way. On the one hand, we see an extraordinary organization of military power and a widening of military combination among European nations to which the past furnishes no parallel, and which suggest hitherto unheard-of possibilities of conflict or aggression. On the other hand, the vast extension of industrial and commercial interests among British people, without any parallel in the previous history of the world, seems to demand a corresponding widening of the political combination which is required to give them security.

Meanwhile the amazing spread of the race has become the main fact of modern history—the one which assuredly will have the most decisive influence on the future of mankind. Only within the last hundred years, one might almost say within a still narrower limit of time, has this been fully realized. The tentative efforts of Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutch, and French to dominate the new continents opened up by the discoveries at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries did not {4} receive a decisive check till towards the end of the eighteenth. Then the new tide fairly began to flow. The flux of civilized population, by which new and great centres of human activity are created, has since that time been so overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon that nearly all minor currents are absorbed or assimilated by it. Teuton, Latin, Scandinavian, with one or two limited but well-defined exceptions, lose their identity and tend to disappear in the dominant mass of British population which has flowed, and continues in scarcely abated volume to flow, steadily away from the mother islands to occupy those temperate regions which are manifestly destined to become in an increasing degree centres of the world's force.

With abundant space on which to expand, increase has been rapid, and it would seem that in mere mass of numbers English-speaking people are destined at no distant date to surpass any other branch of the human stock.

That an expansion so vast should bring in its train a new set of political problems, with a range wider than any that had gone before, is only natural. That new hopes should be conceived from this wonderful change in the balance of the world's forces; that new plans should be devised to utilize it, as other expansions have been utilized, for the good of our race and of mankind, is equally natural.

It is almost needless to point out that the conditions incidental to this expansion were at first misunderstood. The ignorance of public opinion as to the true {5} relations between mother-land and colonies, seconded by the blindness and obstinacy of politicians waging a bitter party fight, produced in 1776 the great schism of the Anglo-Saxon race. Chatham, Burke, and many of the clearest minds of England, believed that the American Revolution was unnecessary—in America itself there was a large, and for a long time a preponderant party, which held that in constitutional change a way of escape could be found from Revolution. The worse counsels prevailed, and Revolution took the place of Reform and Readjustment. It is, no doubt, idle to speculate upon the results which might have followed from a different line of action; if the statesmen of that day had proved equal to the task of dealing with the political problem with which they were confronted. The idea that the separation of the United States from Great Britain was a pure gain to either country or to the world may, however, be distinctly challenged.

It may easily be imagined that the earlier ripening of public opinion in England upon the question of slavery, and the earlier solution found for it on peaceful lines, might have helped to solve the problem at an earlier stage in America as well, and thus prevented the frightful catastrophe of the War of Secession in 1865. The close and intimate political reaction upon each other of the two greatest Anglo-Saxon communities, the one with its higher standard of statesmanship and public morality, the other with its more active liberalizing tendencies, might have been in the highest {6} degree healthful for both. United with all others of their own race and language, British people might have been able, in self-sufficing strength, to withdraw almost a hundred years earlier than could otherwise be possible from the entanglements of European politics, and to be free to devote all their energies to the maintenance of peace, and the development of industry, commerce, and civilization. Qualifications to these views will, of course, present themselves to every mind, and it is not necessary to press them too far or to quarrel with the course of history. Much more important is it to observe its results and learn the lessons which it teaches.

We now see that the bifurcation of Anglo-Saxon national life which took place in 1776 was of all other events in modern history the one most pregnant with great consequences. The war of the Revolution led primarily to the foundation of the Republic of the United States. Its significance, however, is not exhausted by this fact, great though it is. The reflex action upon the thought and policy of Britain involved consequences as important and far-reaching. Revolution for once in our development had taken the place of Evolution, but in the end enabled the latter to resume its steady course. The revolt of the American colonies led to the closer study of the principles which must control national expansion. Britain strove, and not in vain, to acquire the art of bringing colonies into friendly relation with the national system. The nation-building energy of her people remained unimpaired, {7} and though one group of colonies had been lost, others, extending over areas far more extensive, were soon gained. Under new principles of government these were acquired, not to be lost, but retained as they have been up to the present time. Is that retention to be permanent? Is it desirable? Can the colonies be brought, and ought they to be brought, not merely into friendly relations, but into organic harmony with the national system? Has our capacity for political organization reached its utmost limit? For British people this is the question of questions. In the whole range of possible political variation in the future there is no issue of such far-reaching significance, not merely for our own people but for the world at large, as the question whether the British Empire shall remain a political unit for all national purposes, or, yielding to disintegrating forces, shall allow the stream of the national life to be parted into many separate channels.

Twenty-five years ago it seemed as if English people, and it certainly was true that the majority of English statesmen, had made up their minds definitely as to the only possible and desirable solution to this great national problem. The old American colonies had gone, and had remained none the less good customers of the mother-country for having become independent. Very soon, it was sincerely believed, the whole world would be converted to Free Trade, and with universal free trade and the universal peace which was to follow, nothing was to be gained from retaining the colonies, {8} while the colonies themselves were expected to look eagerly forward to complete political emancipation as the goal of their development. A few brilliant writers in the press, a few eloquent speakers on the platform, gave much vogue to these views. The correspondence of prominent public men which has since come to light, the recollections of men still living, furnish convincing proof that this opinion was widely accepted in official circles. A governor, leaving to take charge of an Australian colony, was told even from the Colonial Office that he would probably be the last representative of the Crown sent out from Britain. This tendency of official thought found its culmination when, in 1866, a great journal frankly warned Canada, the greatest of all the colonies, that it was time to prepare for the separation from the mother-land that must needs come. The shock which this outspoken declaration gave to Canadian sentiment, built up as it had been on a century of loyalty to the idea of a United Empire, was very great. That statesman and journalist alike had misconceived the temper of the British as well as of the colonial mind was soon made manifest. This was shown by the almost universal applause which greeted the passionately indignant protest of Tennyson, when, in the final dedication to the Queen of his Idylls, he wrote:—

'And that true North[1], whereof we lately heard
A strain to shame us—keep you to yourselves: {9}
So loyal is too costly! friends, your love
Is but a burden: break the bonds and go!
Is this the tone of Empire! Here the faith
That made us rulers! This indeed her voice
And meaning, whom the roar of Hougoumont
Left mightiest of all nations under heaven!
What shock has fooled her since that she should speak
So feebly?'

At once it became clear that here the real heart of Britain spoke—that poet rather than politician grasped with greater accuracy the true drift of British thought.

It is not too much to say that from that day to this the policy of separation, as the true theoretical outcome of {10} national evolution, has been slowly but steadily dying. John Bright held the theory in England almost up to the end of his great career. Goldwin Smith advocates it in Canada still. Of their views I shall have more to say later. But among conspicuous names theirs have stood practically alone. Politicians in Britain do not wish, and if they wished, would scarcely dare, to advocate it on public platforms. Separation may come under the compulsion of necessity, from the incapacity of statesmen to work out an effective plan of union, or as the result of national apathy and ignorance—not because it is desired, or from any theoretical belief in its advantage to the people concerned.

If we lay aside, however, the question of national feeling, or national interest, and look upon the matter as simply one of constitutional growth and change, it is little wonder that the statesmen of that earlier period took the view they did.

I have in my possession a document which seems to me of much historical interest in this connection as furnishing concrete evidence of the direction of political thought at the period to which I have referred. It is the printed draft of a Bill prepared with great care more than twenty-five years ago by Lord Thring, whose long service as Parliamentary counsel to successive Cabinets has given him an experience in the practical forms of English legislation quite unrivalled. The Bill was intended to be a logical sequel to those measures of Imperial legislation by which responsible government was {11} granted to the Canadian and Australian colonies. The new constitutions had then been in operation for some time in several of the great colonies, and already no slight friction had occurred in the endeavour to adjust Imperial and Colonial rights and responsibilities upon a clear and well-understood basis. Moreover, the continued formation of new colonies and the desire of certain Crown colonies to attain to responsible government suggested a fundamental treatment of the whole question of colonial relations. The Bill therefore embodies an attempt to put upon a just basis the relations between Britain and her colonies at each period of their growth, and to state clearly their mutual obligations and mutual duties.

It naturally provides in the first place for the government of settlements in their earlier stages of growth under the absolute jurisdiction of the Crown.

In the next place, the transition of such a Crown settlement into the rank and status of a colony with responsible government is not left to be decided by agitation within the colonies or by irregular pressure in other directions, such as lately took place in the case of Western Australia; but it is made to depend on a definite increase of European population and other conditions equally applicable to all colonies alike. With the grant of responsible government, however, comes a clear division between imperial and local powers, and an equally definite distribution of burdens; the guarantee to the colony of protection from foreign aggression being contingent upon the contribution by {12} the colony of the revenue or money required for defence in fair proportion to its wealth and population.

Lastly, 'as the natural termination of a connection in itself of a temporary character' (to use the words of the preface to the Bill), provision is made for the formal separation of a colony and its erection into an independent state when its people feel equal to under-taking the full range of national responsibility. Direct provision is made for independence only at the colony's own request, but it is suggested that separation might be brought about by coercive proclamation on the part of the mother-country in case the colony fails to perform the national duties which it accepted with responsible government.

The interest of this proposed legislation seems to me to lie in the proof which it furnishes that the grant of responsible government was by no means regarded as giving finality to national relations, but only as marking a stage in colonial development. The view thus taken by Lord Thring in England was the view taken by Joseph Howe in Canada, to whose opinions I shall have occasion hereafter to refer.

The merit of the Bill lay in the fact that it placed upon a defined and easily understood footing the relations of mother-land and colony so long as they remained together; and provided a constitutional way of escape from the connection when it had ceased to give satisfaction to either party. Its peculiarity, indicative of the opinions prevailing at the time, is that no notice is taken of the possibility of a colony rising {13} to a place of greatness and power inconsistent with a strictly subordinate colonial relation, and yet desiring to perpetuate its organic connection with the nation.

The constitution of the United States provides that new settlements, though thousands of miles from the centre of government, and as truly colonies as those of Britain, shall rise from the condition of territories into that of states, under which they enjoy the full national franchise, and assume a full share of national responsibility. In a like manner Lord Thring's Bill fairly faced the fact that for communities such as those which British people were forming, the colonial stage was temporary and transitional, and it provided, in a different sense, but in accord with existing conditions and beliefs, a fixed goal for colonial aspirations, and a fixed limit to the responsibilities of the mother-land.

The framer of this Bill is now, I have reason to think, among those who believe that a very different end of colonial development is both desirable and practicable. Such a reversal of opinion is the natural outcome of the extraordinary changes which have passed over the national life. The extension of commercial and industrial relations, the growth of common interests, the increased facility for communication, above all, the retention in the colonies, under their new systems of free government, of a strong national sentiment, and the absence of the anticipated desire to break the national connection, have thrown new light upon the whole question.

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In that new light it now seems that there is an argument well nigh unanswerable, which goes to prove that so far from being a matter of indifference, the separation from the Empire of anyone of our great groups of colonies would be an event pregnant with anxieties and possible disaster alike to the colonies and to the mother-land, and so far from being the natural line of political development, that separation would be as unnatural as it is unnecessary. It is this thought that has given birth to the idea of national federation, to the conviction in many minds that the chief effort of our national statesmanship should be directed to securing the continued unity of the wide-spread British Empire, to resisting any tendency towards that disintegration which a generation ago was looked forward to with comparative unconcern. This is not the thought of mere theorists or enthusiasts. Statesmen and thinkers of the first rank both in the mother-land and the colonies, while reserving their judgment as to the lines on which complete unity can be gained, have strongly affirmed their belief that it is the true goal for our national aspirations, that the question is one of supreme concern for the whole Empire, and that the problem must soon be grappled with in practical politics.

Not the creation, but the preservation of national unity, is the task which thus confronts British people, which they must accept or refuse. Unity already exists: it is the necessary starting-point of every discussion. It will prove, if need be, an incalculable assistance {15} towards the attainment of the completer unity at which we aim. But the existing unity is crude in form, one which in its very nature is temporary and transitional, one which ignores or violates political principles ingrained in the English mind as essential to any finality in political development, and which already results in gross inequalities in the conditions of citizenship throughout the Empire.

The logic by which this position is proved seems irresistible in its appeal to the mind of the ordinary British citizen. It is well to be clear on this point.

The essence of British political thought, the very foundation upon which our freedom, political stability, and singular collective energy as a nation have been built up, may be expressed in two words—Representative Government. The loyalty of the subject and the faithfulness of the ruler spring alike from this. The willingness to bear public burdens, the deep interest in public affairs, the close study and careful application of political principles which distinguish the people of our race from all others, and the advance of the whole body politic towards greater individual freedom combined with greater collective strength, are all direct outgrowths of Representative Government. Other races may work out other systems and attain greatness in doing so; we have committed ourselves to this, so far as dealing with our own people is concerned. From the local board which settles the poor-rate or school-tax for a parish, to the Cabinet which deals with the highest concerns of the Empire and the world, {16} this principle is the central element of strength, since it is the ground on which public confidence is based. A British subject who has no voice in influencing the government of the nation throughout the whole range of its operation has not reached that condition to which the whole spirit of our political philosophy points as the state of full citizenship. We are on absolutely safe ground when we say that great English communities will not permanently consent to stop short of this citizenship, nor will they relegate to others, even to a majority of their own nationality, the uncontrolled direction of their most important interests.

With certain qualifications, introduced to mitigate the glaring anomaly of the situation, the great self-governing colonies of the Empire are in fact now compelled to allow many of their most important affairs to be managed by others. Canada, with a commercial navy which floats on every sea, holding already in this particular the fourth place among the nations of the world, has a voice in fixing international relations only by the courtesy of the mother-land, and not by the defined right of equal citizenship. Australia, occupying a continent, with vast and growing commercial interests, is in the same anomalous position. English-speaking, self-governing populations, amounting in the aggregate already to nearly a third of the population of the United Kingdom, and likely within little more than a generation to equal it, with enormous interests involved in nearly every movement of national affairs, {17} have no direct representative influence in shaping national policy or arranging international relations.

The almost perfect freedom they enjoy in the control of local affairs accentuates rather than mitigates the anomaly. By accustoming them to the exercise of political rights it makes them impatient of anything which falls short of the full dignity of national citizenship.

No one who understands the genius of Anglo-Saxon people can believe that this state of affairs will be permanent. No one who sympathizes with the spirit which has constantly urged forward British people on their career of political progress can wish it to be so. Great countries with an assured future cannot always remain colonies, as that term has hitherto been understood. The system which persists in making no other provision for them is on the point of passing away.

It is sometimes urged that freedom from national burdens should be enough to reconcile colonists to any lack of representation in national counsels; that if they have no sufficient share of Imperial Government they are at least rid of Imperial anxieties; that wise direction of affairs may, in any case, be looked for from the mother-land. But no immunity from public burdens, can compensate for the loss of a share in the higher life of the nation and the higher dignity of full citizenship: no honourable career can result from a readiness to shirk responsibility: a willingness to rely upon others to do our {18} work or protect our interests is not the spirit which has built up or will perpetuate the power of our race. Such argument may suit the infancy of colonies; applied to their adolescence it is degrading, since it implies a mean and contented dependence. If the greater British colonies are permanently content with their present political status they are unworthy of the source from which they sprang. It will not be so. The spirit of independence has developed, not degenerated, in the wider breathing space of new continents. A very little further growth, increasing the complication and aggravating the anomaly of the existing situation, will bring us to a stage where that spirit will no longer endure the restraints now put upon it by practical difficulties of political organization, and where those difficulties must be swept away by the gathering force of national instincts and necessities. About the direction of change there may be a question; about the certainty of change there can be none.

But the argument is equally strong when we reverse our attitude, and place ourselves in the position of the taxpaying citizens of the United Kingdom. There are probably few of these who are not at times filled with a glow of pride and enthusiasm when they think of the vast extent of those colonies, which, planted by British energy, held through years of conflict by British courage, and proudly inheriting British traditions, are rising to pre-eminence in every quarter of the globe.

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This pride and enthusiasm have very positive and practical issues. The citizen of the remotest colony knows that should an enemy wantonly attack his frontier—should port or city be threatened by a hostile force—almost within twenty-four hours, as soon as telegraph could summon or steam convey them, British sailors or British soldiers would be pouring thither, as ready to fight and die for that particular bit of soil as for the shores of England itself. But the sentiment which makes this possible is balanced and qualified by very different considerations. The citizen of the United Kingdom has often been compelled to regard the colonies as great dependencies which increased his responsibilities and multiplied his difficulties without returning to the mother-country, under their present organization, strength in men or resources, or even in exclusive commercial advantage. Every new colony or colonial interest was to him something new to defend, and augmented the burden of Empire.

Yearly the vast expense necessary to provide adequately for national responsibilities increased, and added itself to the weight of taxation incident to an advanced civilization and complex social system. While forced to bear the chief burden of the taxation required for national defence, the people of the British Islands could see that the mass of the colonists benefited by this protection already possessed, or were likely before long to possess a higher average of wealth and comfort than the mass of the people {20} who bestowed the benefit. Looking forward little more than a generation he could foresee a time when the colonists whose commerce was protected would equal in number the whole home population which gave the protection, when the volume of colonial commerce itself would surpass that of the mother-land.

It requires little argument to prove that the anomaly of leaving one part of a nation to bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of the whole is as inconsistent with Anglo-Saxon ideas of government as the exclusion of the colonies from a proportionate voice in the conduct of national affairs.

An effective method of illustrating this anomalous condition of the Empire and of British citizenship at the present time is to consider the immediate change which takes place in the political privileges and responsibilities of a man who shifts his residence from the mother-country to Canada, Australia, or any other great colony. He crosses the ocean, perhaps, to carry on in another part of the Empire the business of the the bank, or commercial house, or shipping firm with which he is connected here. Such of his interests as require national protection remain the same, and continue to enjoy security under the British flag. He continues to take precisely the same interest as before in the national welfare. But he loses at once the right to influence national policy by his vote, and at the same time he drops his old responsibilities of citizenship, since he no longer pays the same proportion {21} of the taxes which make the nation strong to protect him.

Take again a crucial case as applied to the working man. In Australia one finds nearly 100,000,000 of sheep. The shepherding and shearing of these sheep, the packing, carriage, and shipping of their wool, give employment to a large section of the industrial population. Nearly all this wool finds its market in England, where the manufacture of a portion of it gives employment to an immense population in centres such as the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of Scotland. The safety of this wool in passing from the Australian centre of production to the British centre of manufacture is essential to the prosperity of the people in both. To this end Australian ports are made strong at Australian expense and British ports at British expense. So far all is fair and the distribution of the burden on industry is equal. But between the two countries lie 12,000 miles of sea to be guarded, and this is effectively done at enormous naval and military expense, the burden of which, however, is almost exclusively borne at the British end of the line. The proportion paid by the Australian workman is comparatively insignificant. Yet he is the one who earns the higher wages and feels the pressure of taxation less.

I have heard a working man in a large public meeting in Australia assert that the position viewed from this aspect was unfair, and he added that he personally was far better able to bear an equal share {22} of national burdens as a working man in Australia than he had ever been as a working man in Britain. He was certainly as competent to exercise the national franchise.

The illustration thus taken from a single colony and a single department of industry has, of course, a wide application. Whether viewed, then, from a purely British or a purely colonial standpoint there are unanswerable reasons, and they are equally unanswerable from either side, which point to an early modification of the national system.

Especially is it to be noted, however, that the circumstances which have developed this great problem have not arisen, like many other political problems, from injustice or mismanagement in the past, or from any causes tending to provoke mutual recrimination. Through the simple processes of growth and change, the conditions which satisfied the demands of national life in the past have become insufficient to satisfy its necessities for the future. Nothing could possibly be more helpful for the solution of the question than this fact, that men are able to approach it entirely free from party feuds and local animosities.

Why, it may be asked, have not the inconsistency and the temporary character of the existing national system been all along obvious to every one? Why does the public attention require to be directed to facts so manifest? Perhaps the best answer is to be found in the wonderful rapidity of the changes which have been going on, and the intense {23} absorption of British people, both at home and abroad, in the actual processes of national evolution, which left no time for studying their indirect results.

Within the last century, and mainly within the last half century, the United Kingdom has passed through the most strenuous period of industrial development known in the history of nations. The social system has been revolutionized by an extraordinary increment of wealth, an immense increase of population, and its concentration in towns, with all the difficult problems which these changes involve. Political thought has had enough to do to adjust the balance between decreasing rural and increasing urban constituencies—to meet the wants of a democracy advancing in prosperity and intelligence, to maintain an equilibrium between new and conflicting forces. Moral effort has been strained to the utmost in dealing with education, sanitation, social reformation, and kindred questions, a deepening sense of public responsibility in such matters going hand in hand with an almost paralyzing increase in the masses to be dealt with. Under such circumstances it is scarcely to be wondered at that British people within the United Kingdom have been too much absorbed in what was directly before them to weigh carefully the results of what was going on abroad; that even when most active in external as well as internal affairs they seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.'

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In the colonies the preoccupation of thought and energy has with equal reason been as complete. It is scarce fifty years since the Canadian provinces obtained local self-government. The last half century has witnessed the growth of a most complete system of municipal and provincial institutions, crowned by a great act of constructive statesmanship in Confederation. The organization of half a continent on material lines has kept pace with each step in political construction. Railroads, canals, telegraphs, postal facilities, steamboat communication, all the machinery of modern civilization, have been widely applied to an immense area.

In Australia movement has been even more rapid and engrossing. Melbourne has changed in fifty years from a village of a thousand inhabitants to a city of 500,000. Australian commerce, in its infancy when the Queen came to the throne, now equals that of the United Kingdom at the same date. New Zealand, then the home of mere savages, has already a British population which exports annually £10,000,000 worth of the products of civilized labour. In South Africa half a continent is being organized under conditions of extreme difficulty.

In the rush of progress so swift as this, the mass of men are conscious chiefly of the work immediately before them. But as this work grows under their hands, the vast external interests are created, and the wide external connections grow up, which compel attention to the larger problems which they involve.

{25}

The local politician, as provinces consolidate, is, by a process of natural compulsion, changed into the statesman with a national and international range of political vision.

It seems almost superfluous to point out that in striving for closer consolidation British people would be following strictly along the lines of the most striking national movements of modern times. They would be merely keeping abreast of the spirit of the age.

For the idea of national unity the people of the United States twenty-five years ago made sacrifices of life and money without a parallel in modern history. No one now doubts that the end justified the enormous expenditure of national force. 'The Union must be preserved' was the pregnant sentence into which Lincoln condensed the national duty of the moment, and to maintain this principle he was able to concentrate the national energy for a supreme effort. The strong man who saved the great republic from disruption takes his place, without a question, among the benefactors of mankind.

Germany struggled through years of difficulty, conflict, and swaying tides of national passion towards the ideal of a united fatherland. The ideal has been realised; the men who made its attainment possible have won, not merely the gratitude of their countrymen, but the world's respect as well; even their acts of despotism are forgiven and more than half forgotten in the momentous significance of their one supreme {26} achievement. Today it seems as if their work of consolidated strength was the best guarantee of Europe's peace.

Cavour's statue stands in the squares of Italian cities—his name lingers in Italian hearts. To Tuscan, Lombard, and Neapolitan alike he is 'our great Cavour'—the man whose courageous genius found a basis in facts for the conception of Italian unity, whose patient and resolute diplomacy made possible the satisfaction of the national aspiration.

Canada has placed first on her roll of greatness the statesman, to whom she mainly owes the achievement of Federal unity. Thus beyond a doubt the men who have graven their names most deeply on the history of our time are those who have carried out in many lands and under varying conditions the work of national consolidation. American unity, German unity, Italian unity, Austro-Hungarian unity—the expansion of Russia without loss of unity—these are the accomplished facts of our time which we have to face. More than this. We do not need the philosophical historian to tell us, for the process is going on under our own eyes, that a governing tendency of the age is towards the union of many states into combinations of nearly equal strength—sometimes by fusion, sometimes by federation, sometimes by alliance. On the practical equipoise of two such great groups the equilibrium of Europe at this moment depends. Race adds its influence to the tendency. Pan-Sclavism—Pan-Latinism—Pan-Teutonism {27} are more than names. They are forces which play their part in moulding the destinies of nations and governments. The aspect of the whole world irresistibly suggests the thought that we are passing from a nation epoch to a federation epoch. That British people should fall in with this tendency is in the strict line of historical continuity. 'From clans in the north,' it has been truly said, 'and from a heptarchy in the south, England and Scotland grew into nations and thence into one nation.' In the great offshoots of the race abroad the tendency is renewed, and each step prepares the way for another and greater effort. To consolidate the empire which Chatham founded is the one manifest opportunity remaining in the British world for British statesmen to place their names in our history beside those of the greatest of the statesmen of the past.

For the mother-land an organized national unity means, not degradation from her imperial position, but a frank acceptance of the facts of national growth, and the greater dignity which would come from acknowledged leadership of the free communities which have grown up around her.

Prussia gained, instead of losing, in dignity, when many of the higher functions of her historic parliament became merged in those of the Reichstag of the German people, when she gave up her individual place as a nation in Europe to assume the leadership of the German Empire. So would it be with Great Britain.

{28}

For the colonies national unity means independence: not 'virtual' independence, as their present ill-defined condition is sometimes spoken of, but the manly and sufficient independence which comes from asserted rights and assumed responsibilities.

There are two kinds of independence. The first is that of the son grown restless under tutelage, who throws himself off, more or less recklessly, from the family connection, refuses family advice or assistance, and takes the chances of life on his own account. Given, on the one hand, overbearing and unsympathetic parents anxious to retain their control till the last moment, or, on the other, children filled with ignorant self-conceit and consequent discontent, and independence of this first type is the natural result. Sometimes it is justified, and succeeds; sometimes it is born of blind stupidity and makes lamentable shipwreck. But this is not the ideal or the only form of independence. Given reason, due consideration, mutual regard for rights on both sides, and the family tie becomes a partnership which combines the advantages of all the liberty required for full development with the unity of action and counsel which assures strength. It produces a great Rothschild firm, each head of which is free to work out his own views at his own centre of the world's finance, but each in touch with the other for counsel or action, each making use of the business machinery established by all the rest, and thus securing incomparable business advantages for all. So in a wider sphere it produces the nation—the great {29} American Republic—the Swiss, Germanic, or Canadian Confederation; each state or group of states working independently within its own well-defined sphere of influence; each taking its share as freely in the equally well-defined but wider orbit of a large national life.

Our admiration is not given to the independence of the American state, or the Canadian or Australian province when holding aloof from union, where we feel that a spirit of petty provincialism is at work. Nor can it be reasonably given to the independence of the Greek state impatient of any control beyond that which is found within a city's walls. At least, in this case, if we admire, we pity still more, for the lack of the power to preserve the liberty which the city had created. We reserve our admiration for the reasoned and secured independence of a state whose members have abandoned the petty side of their individuality, and displayed that political self-restraint, sagacity, and largeness of view which is implied in wide organization for the attainment of great ends.

It is to this independence of partnership that a real national unity would lift the colonies of the British Empire. Doubtless it would at first be the partnership of junior members. More than this could not reasonably be expected. But the position need not be an irksome one.

One primary principle reason approves and experience recommends for our guidance in attempting to outline the form of union which will best be adapted {30} to the genius of the British people. For all its communities there should be the utmost freedom of individual action which is consistent with united strength. Apparently this condition will be best fulfilled under some form of Federal connection.

[1] Lord Dufferin dedicated a Canadian edition of his 'Letters from High Latitudes' in the words 'To that true North.' I cannot refrain from connecting with these lines one more association which will, I feel sure, in Canadian hearts at least, add a tender grace to the vigorous thought of the poet and the delicate compliment of the politician. I am able to do so through the accident of a conversation with the late Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, of Lincolnshire, a connexion and intimate friend of Lord Tennyson, whom I happened to meet some years since at the house of a common friend, Professor Bonamy Price, at Oxford. Introduced to him by our host as a Canadian, I was informed by him of a fact which he felt sure would interest all Canadians. The Poet Laureate, with whom he had lately been staying, had told him that when the articles referred to had appeared in the Times, Lady Franklin, who was then a guest in his house, and who felt the most intense interest in the future of Canada, had been filled with indignation at the wrong which they did to English sentiment and to Canadian loyalty, and had strongly urged upon him the duty and propriety of giving utterance to some sufficient protest. Being in the fullest sympathy with Lady Franklin's views, the poet acted upon this suggestion and the lines were written. I do not think any private confidence is violated in mentioning the facts told to me on such unquestionable authority. It seems well that Canadian people should know when reading these lines, that behind the poet's brain was the woman's heart, and that a lady whose name is held in highest honour wherever the English language is spoken, and wherever heroism and devotion touch the human heart, is thus connected by the subtle thread of sympathy and the golden verse of our greatest poet with their own loved land.

{31}

CHAPTER II.

FEDERATION.

THE central internal fact, then, which must soon bring about a decisive change in our system of national organization is the necessity that British people in all parts of the Empire should have, if they are to remain together and so far as circumstances permit, full and equal privileges of self-government and citizenship. The political instinct which works in this direction nothing can resist, for it has become innate in all that is best in our race. The colonist who is permanently content with less has lost no small part of the spirit of his ancestors.

The central external fact which points to federation rather than separation as the form which that change should take is the necessity for joint defence of great common interests, and the joint management of international relations.

It may be fairly claimed that in accepting the federal idea Anglo-Saxon peoples have reached the crown of their political achievement, inasmuch as it offers a compromise between excessively centralized systems of government, which gave strength at the {32} expense of local freedom, and those other systems which for the sake of local freedom sacrificed the strength which was necessary for their own preservation. The liberty of the small Greek Republic was in some aspects a glorious thing contrasted with the despotisms around it, yet we cannot but remember that for want of power to combine that liberty was crushed beneath the heel of the foreigner. Federalism is the device by which organized democracy, without giving up anything essential to liberty, is placed in a position to wrestle on even terms with organized despotism.

An Australian writer has lately defined very justly the true reason for the application of the Federal principle. 'It may be said,' he remarks, 'that federation becomes desirable where, on the one hand, the country is too enormous in extent and too diverse in conditions for its internal affairs to be satisfactorily managed by one central government, while, on the other hand, the communities have certain common interests best served by their coming together, or are confronted by common dangers if they keep apart.' Never in the history of the world were these conditions more completely fulfilled than in the case of the British Empire. But objections to a federal organization for the Empire are at once raised. 'The areas and communities to be dealt with are too vast, the problem too complex, and the consequent difficulty of giving an adequate organization too great for such a plan to be thought of.' To this it may be answered {33} that the growth of the United States has widened political horizons. It has proved that immense territorial extent is not incompatible, under modern conditions, with that representative system of popular government which had its birth and development in England, and its most notable adaptation in America. It has shown that the spread of a nation over vast areas, including widely-separated states with diverse interests, need not prevent it from becoming strongly bound together in a political organism which combines the advantages of national greatness and unity of purpose with jealously guarded freedom of local self-government. So that if the birth of the American Republic suggested the confident inference that the inevitable tendency of new communities was to detach themselves like ripe fruit from the parent stem, the circumstances of its growth have done much to dissipate the idea. The United States have illustrated on a great scale the advantages of national unity; their example has pointed the way to its attainment. That example has been followed in one great British community; it is being adopted in another.

But in the United States, in Canada, in Australia it is urged, we have continental contiguity. The British Empire is too large, its parts, separated by oceans, are unfitted for government under a common federal system. We can at least answer that the standard of possible size for a nation has steadily enlarged in the course of history. For a federal system the unit may be small or large, there seems {34} to be a measure by which to fix the possible size of the unit in any case. The breadth of interest is this measure. In a United British Empire each of the federated countries, as commercial communities, would have interests all over the world, and having such interests would have a justification for being units in a world-wide Oceanic Empire.

For great trading communities, moreover, we must remember that oceans do not divide. The almost instantaneous transmission of thought, the cheap transmission of goods, the speedy travel possible for man, have revolutionised pre-existing conditions in commerce and society, once more widening our horizon. The fact lies at the very basis of our national prosperity; it is recognised in the every-day transactions of commercial life. Why should it not be admitted among the ordinary considerations of political life as well?

Communities so remote from each other as those which compose the Empire, it is said again, 'cannot have those common interests which are necessary to give cohesion to a nation.' Let us consider the point.

I go into a woollen mill in Yorkshire or the south of Scotland. Its proprietor, a great organizer of industry, shows me over the vast establishment, from the warehouse where the bales of wool are being packed as they arrive after their long voyage from the antipodes, through the washing, combing, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and pressing rooms till we come to the show rooms where the completed goods are awaiting sale and shipment to the furthest {35} corners of the world. He tells me that any circumstance which checked the steady supply of the raw material even for a few weeks would leave all this extensive and complicated mass of machinery idle; would throw his employees, numbered by thousands, out of employment; would bring himself face to face with ruin and his people with want. Any circumstances which checked the steady shipment of the manufactured goods to distant markets would produce consequences scarcely less immediate or less disastrous. I find the proprietor day by day anxiously watching the reports of the wool sales in London, and through them anything that affects the wool trade in Sydney, Melbourne, or Dunedin. Clearly this man and those who work for him must look far afield, if they consider all the conditions upon which their prosperity depends. They are types which represent many millions of people in the United Kingdom.

I go to Australia or New Zealand, and find myself the guest of a squatter on his remote station. The sheep in his flocks number perhaps a hundred thousand. He shows me his station houses, his shearing sheds, his wool sheds, his vast paddocks enclosed with hundreds of miles of wire fencing, all his extensive plant, his horses, his shepherds, his band of shearers. He has to fight against drought; swarms of rabbits may threaten him with ruin; his year's clip of wool may, as the result of past disasters, be mortgaged to the Banks. But if the telegraph tells him that wool is rising in the London market, that the {36} factories at Leeds and Halifax and Huddersfield are running at their utmost capacity, that Yorkshire is prosperous, he is cheerful and faces his difficulties with a hopeful mind. A good year's sales will repay him for his risks and recoup him for the losses of the past. Cut this man off from access to the home markets for a few months, block the ports from which he ships his wool, or break the line of his communication, and his industry is paralysed, his workmen without pay; the bank which backs him and stakes much on the prosperity of him and his like may close its doors. Here manifestly is a man who, with his organized army of industry, from the shepherd who tends the sheep to the lumper who handles the bales at the docks, has interests which extend further than his immediate neighbourhood.

I go on board one of the great liners which run between Australia and England, and which may be taken to represent the third great form of British industry. Down in her hold, forming the chief part of her cargo, are several thousand bales of wool. When she returns the wool will be replaced by manufactured goods. The profits of the company which owns and manages her depend upon the prosperity of the great manufacturing communities at home and the great producing areas abroad; upon the pressure of outward and homeward trade. Upon the absolute safety from hostile attack of this vessel and her like in passing over many thousand miles of sea depends once more the industrial security of the vast multitudes of human {37} beings for whom and between whom she carries on exchange.

Can community of interest and mutual dependence be more complete than this? Of the man who produces the raw material, the man who works it up, and the man who carries between them, can we say where the interest of the one begins and the other ends? Yet what has been said of one raw material of production and manufacture may be said of a hundred. What has been said of wool may be said of wheat, for artizans must be fed while they work, and more and more English people at home will have to depend on English people abroad for their supplies of wheat. It may be said of meat, which every year, in increasing quantity, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia send to the mother-land.

No limit can be put to the range of common interest between communities of which one devotes its industry chiefly to supplying the raw material of commerce, the other to its manufacture.

This community of industrial interest is strengthened by a thousand influences which give community of thought in almost every relation of life, and must be reckoned among the forces which make for cohesion.

The population which flows into the waste places of the colonies comes chiefly from the motherland, not driven out by religious persecution or political tyranny, but impelled by the spirit of enterprize or in search of the larger breathing and working space of new countries. In almost every case the emigrant {38} makes a new bond of friendly connection. He leaves the old Britain without any feeling of bitterness, and often with friendly aid; he finds a welcome as well as a home in the new Britain beyond the seas. There the links of connection multiply and strengthen. Cheaper ocean transport, cheaper postage, cheaper telegraph rates, are constantly making it easier for him to keep in touch with the old home. His daily or weekly paper has its columns of English news, keeping him well informed about all that most closely concerns the nation's life. The best products of the best minds of the motherland furnish his chief intellectual food, and form the basis of his education. Cheaper and cheaper editions poured out by competitive publishers in the centres of cheap production bring all the master minds who have spoken or written in the English tongue within easy reach even on an Australian station or a Canadian prairie. The tick of the telegraph keeps the financial and speculative interests of the whole outlying Empire in almost instant touch with those at the centre. The philanthropic and social movements which originate in the old lands or the new find an almost immediate reflection or response in the other. Pan-Anglican Synods, Oecumenical Councils, and General Assemblies, together with the great Missionary and Bible Societies, keep in closest touch the religious thought and activities of the British world. The British Association for the Advancement of Science meets in Montreal, and finds itself as much at home there as in {39} London, Edinburgh, or Dublin. Competitions of skill in arms or in athletics add their manifold links of connection. It seems as if Pan-Britannic contests of the kind on a great scale might yet revive the memories of the old Greek world. Already corps of riflemen or artillerymen meet in friendly competition year by year at Wimbledon, Bisley, or Shoeburyness.

The young Australian or Canadian who begins to practice with the cricket-bat or oar is already in imagination measuring his skill and strength against the best that Great Britain can produce, nor has the cricketer or oarsman of the United Kingdom gained his final place in the athletic world till he has tested his powers on Australian fields or Canadian waters. The eager interest with which in either hemisphere the tour of a selected team or the performance of a champion sculler is watched from day to day is a curious proof of the intimacy of thought made possible by existing means of communication.

The great labour conflicts of the past two or three years have furnished striking examples of the vital sympathy which springs from nationality and close social and commercial connection. During the Australian strike of last year, day after day, by message and manifesto, each party to the contest strove to bring over public opinion in Great Britain to its side, while the funds raised on the one side of the world today were on the morrow giving support and encouragement to those they were intended to assist at the other. Once more there is the sense of common {40} and equal ownership of great national memories and names. The people of the great colonies have never broken with national traditions. They are able to enter without reserve into that passionate affection with which Shakespeare and Milton, Scott and Burns, loved their native land, even while pointing out her faults. The statue of a national hero, like Gordon, finds its place as naturally on a square of Melbourne as on Trafalgar Square itself. Equally in place are the memorial tablet to an Australian statesman in the crypt of St. Paul's beside the tombs of Nelson and Wellington, or the memorial service at Westminster to a statesman of the Empire who did his work in Canada.

It may be asked whether it can be supposed that the great colonies, widely separated as they are, will ever learn to think and act together politically; whether, for instance, Australians can ever be expected to take interest in Canadian fishery disputes, or Canadians sympathize in Australian excitement about New Caledonia or New Guinea. 'Canada and Australia,' says Mr. Freeman, 'care a great deal for Great Britain; we may doubt whether, apart from Great Britain, Canada and Australia care very much for one another. There may be American States which care yet less for one another; but in their case mere continuity produces a crowd of interests and relations common to all. We may doubt whether the confederation of States so distant as the existing colonies of Great Britain, whether the bringing them into closer relations with one another as well as with Great Britain, will at all {41} tend to the advance of a common national unity among them[1].'

The question thus raised is an interesting one, not to be dismissed in a word. Some force is given to it by the wide separation of the colonies from each other, and the lack of intercourse in the past. But anyone who watches colonial questions closely sees that great changes are taking place. Till a very few years ago Canada looked to Australia only eastward across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The Dominion has now become like Australia, a state upon the Pacific, with interests in that ocean which are sure to become very considerable. Lines of steamship, postal, and cable communication between the two countries are already in contemplation. The safety of such routes would of itself form a great common interest. Passing through the centre of the Pacific it would tend to create those national interests which would increase British influence in that ocean—an end very much in Australasian thought.

On the Atlantic Canada is extending her trade relations with another group of colonies, the West Indies. This trade promises to develop greatly in the future, for as one country is in the temperate zone and the other in the tropics, each seems the natural complement of the other in range of production. The opening of a Panama route would give the Australian colonies a profound interest in the strength of the British position in the West Indies.

{42}

Australia and New Zealand, again, have a substantial interest in the political fortunes of South Africa, since in that country is the most vulnerable point of their most important trade route. In the Naval Annual for 1890 Lord Brassey estimates the outward-bound Australasian trade which passes the Cape at twenty millions sterling per annum, and uses the statement to enforce his views as to the national importance of making perfectly secure our position at this great turning-point of the world's commerce.

But I do not wish to lay undue stress upon these facts, which are only intended to be illustrations of the existence and growth of common interests between different groups of colonies. They are suggestions of future possibilities rather than powerful factors in the present.

It is more pertinent to measure the strength of the forces which at the present time make effectively for national cohesion. Nobody doubts that if today either Canada or Australia were attacked by any foreign power the whole might of Great Britain would be put forth to protect them. As little doubt can there be that if Britain were wantonly attacked and engaged in a struggle for existence, each of these great colonies would be ready with such assistance as it could give. Race sentiment and national honour, to say nothing of self-interest, would combine, as things now stand, to make these results as certain as anything can be in human affairs. The common {43} bond with the mother-land seems to me a guarantee of sufficient unity between the colonies—not so close, not so instinctive, it is true as the more direct tie, but still amply sufficient to give effective national cohesion. All the colonies are parts of the same great body; all would alike suffer from the weakness of the whole. All would gain indefinitely from united strength.

'In their case,' to repeat what Mr. Freeman says of the United States, 'mere continuity produces a crowd of interest and relations common to all.' But if Mr. Freeman reflects that seventy-seven per cent. of Australia's trade, eighty per cent. of New Zealand's trade, eighty-five per cent. of South Africa's trade, fifty per cent of Canada's trade, finds its way backward and forward over the vast oceans which separate these colonies from Britain, or from each other, he will be forced to admit that mere distance of separation produces, if not a crowd of interests and relations, at least a few interests and relations common to all which are practically predominant. No states of the American Union have an interdependence of financial and commercial relations proportionally so exclusive and complete as those which exist between New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, or even Canada and Great Britain. 'It is hard to believe,' adds Mr. Freeman, 'that states which are united only by a sentiment, which have so much, both political and physical, to keep them asunder, will be kept together by a sentiment only.' Mr. Freeman has evidently not studied {44} the facts of colonial trade, or the relations of English and colonial industry[2].

Another practical aspect of the question naturally appeals strongly to many minds. We are the most strenuous working race of the world, and the problems of labour fill a large place in our thoughts of the present and the future. Not only to hold our own in the keen competition going on with the rest of the world in both manufacture and the production of raw material, but also to reach the higher ideal formed of the life possible for a working man, we seek to make as light as may be the burdens which industry must necessarily bear. In all countries no small portion of these are such as are imposed by the needs of national organization—burdens which no country has ever yet escaped, or ever will. In national unity we may have all the advantages and resources of co-operation utilized to this end on a vast scale; one diplomatic and consular service; one fleet instead of several; ports and docks defended at the common expense for the good of all. Under any well-considered scheme it is certain, so far as defence is concerned, that all parts of the Empire would secure {45} a maximum of protection at a minimum of cost, and the same would hold good in regard to other forms of necessary national expense. A nation economizing expenditure in these directions could enlarge it for objects which tended to the common good, and brought advantages within the reach of the masses, cheap postage, cheap telegraphy, cheap transit of every kind. Combinations undertaken for ends such as these could have no savour of an aggressive Imperialism.

To provide for the safety of industry is not Jingoism. Richard Cobden was not under a Jingo influence when he said that he would willingly vote £100,000,000 for the Navy rather than see it unable to fulfil its task of giving security to British commerce. His was rather the expression of strong English common sense, which faces facts and the actual conditions of life. Lord Rosebery is not a Jingo when he suggests that British people can best secure peace by 'preponderance.' The strength of a United Empire would be no more than equal to the increasing tasks which are laid upon it. The fear that Federation with the strength which it gave would make British people the bullies of the world appears absurd. If we have powerful athletic sons we do not cut their muscles or reduce their physique lest they should use their splendid strength to injury of their neighbours; rather do we train them to use it in noble ways—to be foremost in toil, to help the oppressed, to defend the defenceless, to be the strong arbiter between contentious disputants. So with the nation. Doubtless vast {46} strength, without an adequate controlling moral force, has in it a temptation and a danger. But surely the remedy lies in deepening the moral sense, not in limiting or diminishing the material strength of the nation.

To the Christian, the moralist, the philanthropist, no inspiration could be greater than that which might well spring from observing the growing strength of the Empire, and from reflection that this immense energy might be turned in directions which would make for the world's good. And strength beyond all other nations British people must have if they are to face in its fulness the work they have to do. As the outcome of that intense life which has specially characterized the last two hundred years they find themselves front to front with the whole world on every great sphere of action or field of responsibility. They have to face and boldly play their part in the large and complex problems of European politics, when the might of enormous armies stands ready to enforce the decisions of an alliance or the will of a despot. Commerce, extending to the remotest islands or penetrating to the heart of uncivilized continents, makes almost co-extensive with the globe those ordinary interests of British people which require protection. Three hundred millions of mankind, who do not share British blood, of various races and in various climes, acknowledge British sway, and look to it for guidance and protection; their hopes of civilization and social elevation depending {47} upon the justice with which it is exercised, while anarchy awaits them should that rule be removed. Through commerce and widespread territories the nation is brought into constant intercourse and often into the most delicate relations with almost every savage race on the globe, thus standing almost alone of European nations on that border-land where civilization confronts barbarism, of all positions in which a nation can be placed perhaps the one most weighted with responsibilities and most pregnant with possibilities of good and evil. To this position the world's history offers no parallel; beside it Rome's range of influence sinks into comparative insignificance.

But to understand all that it means we must remember that along with this mighty growth of power there has been a steady growth of a public conscience, which holds itself responsible not only for national acts, but for national influence; which refuses to shut its eyes to abuse of power, but rather looks upon power as a sacred trust, to be used for worthy ends. Therein lies the justification of our national greatness, and of the wish that it should be maintained.

'We sailed wherever ship can sail,
We founded many a noble state;—
Pray God our greatness may not fail
Through craven fear of being great.'

This is the poet's thought and prayer. May it not rightly be the thought and prayer of every British citizen? We have assumed vast responsibilities in the {48} government of weak and alien races, responsibilities which cannot now be thrown off without a loss of national honour, and without infinite harm to those under our rule. A nation which has leaning upon it an Indian population of nearly 300,000,000 over and above the native races of Australasia, South Africa, and many minor regions, must require, if stability and equilibrium are to be maintained, an immense weight of that trained, intelligent, and conscientious citizenship which is the backbone of national strength. It needs to concentrate its moral as well as its political strength for the work it has to do.

If we really have faith in our own social and Christian progress as a nation; if we believe that our race, on the whole, and in spite of many failures, can be trusted better than others, to use power with moderation, self-restraint, and a deep sense of moral responsibility; if we believe that the wide area of our possessions may be made a solid factor in the world's politics, which will always throw the weight of its influence on the side of a righteous peace, then it cannot be inconsistent with devotion to all the highest interests of humanity to wish and strive for a consolidation of British power. It is because I believe that in all the noblest and truest among British people there is this strong faith in our national integrity, and in the greatness of the moral work our race has yet to do, that I anticipate that the whole weight of Christian and philanthropic sentiment will ultimately be thrown on the side of national unity, as opening {49} up the widest possible career of usefulness for us in the future; inasmuch as it will give us the security which is necessary for working out our great national purposes.

The praises of the Federal system of the United States are much dwelt upon now that it has been justified by triumphing over the difficulties and dangers of a century. It seems the natural and easy outgrowth of the circumstances in which the original colonies found themselves at the close of the Revolution. The conditions under which it was created and exists are pointed out as ideally favourable for national unity on a federal basis—contiguity, common interest, sentiment based on a common history, and other facts and considerations of a parallel kind.

Far different from this did the task of framing the Federal Constitution seem to those who had it in hand. It has been described by Mr. Bryce as 'a work which seemed repeatedly on the point of breaking down, so great were the difficulties encountered from the divergent sentiments and interests of the different parts of the country, as well as of the larger and smaller states.' The same writer adds: 'The Convention had not only to create de novo, on the most slender basis of pre-existing institutions, a national government for a widely scattered people, but they had in doing so to respect the fears and jealousies and apparently irreconcileable interests of thirteen separate commonwealths, to all of whose governments it was necessary to leave a sphere of {50} action wide enough to satisfy a deep-rooted sentiment, yet not so wide as to imperil national unity.'

Yet once more we read of difficulties curiously like those which are urged as making British unity impossible now. 'Their geographical position made communication very difficult. The sea was stormy in winter, the roads were bad, it took as long to travel by land from Charleston to Boston as to cross the ocean to Europe, nor was the journey less dangerous. The wealth of some states consisted in slaves; of others in shipping; while in others there was a population of small farmers, characteristically attached to old habits. Manufactures had hardly begun to exist. The sentiment of local independence showed itself in intense suspicion of any external authority; and most parts of the country were so thinly peopled that the inhabitants had lived practically without any government, and thought that in creating one they would be forging fetters for themselves.'

Difficulties, then, are no new thing in national organization. They may be, as they have been, but the spur to the determined will of nation or individual. They are to be measured by the resources at our disposal with which to confront them.

Admitting the difficulties involved in framing a Federal system we must at the same time remember the long and peculiar training which our race has had in dealing with them. Acute minds have been turned upon the problem, systems have been framed and adopted by vast populations, and time has tested {51} the results. The experience of the United States extends over more than a century of strenuous national life and wonderful growth. In the light of that experience, and to meet her own necessities, Canada faced the question a quarter of a century ago, and framed a system which works well and gives assurance of permanence. Encouraged by these examples, Australia is taking steps to frame a similar union. Thus three great English-speaking communities have had their thoughts fixed with anxious attention upon Federal problems. In forming or in carrying on these three great English-speaking federations, fundamental principles have been so exhaustively studied and so thoroughly tested that the conditions that must control Federal organization may now be stated with a very considerable degree of accuracy. Germany, Switzerland, and Austro-Hungary all furnish data which assist in making conclusions definite. An adoption of Federalism is therefore no longer a leap in the dark. The losses and gains which it involves can be weighed and measured.

With such a range of history and experience to fall back upon it ought to be possible for a practical self-governing people to distinguish between the relations they wish to control through the smaller machinery of local government, and those they are content to submit to the larger machinery of a central government: to draw, in short, a true line of division between those interests which are peculiar to each {52} member of the Federation and those which are common to all.

In this connection Professor Ransome has stated what seems to me a striking and most suggestive view. He points out that the geographical relations of the great divisions of the Empire lend themselves naturally to Federal organization on a large scale. A primary difficulty in all federations, as I have said, is to draw a sufficiently defined line between those local questions in the settlement of which communities, and most of all Anglo-Saxon communities, will brook no interference from outsiders, and those other questions in which all have a common interest, and are content to have only a proportionate voice. Great Britain, Canada, Australia, South Africa, have each internal problems of their own to wrestle with, which each can solve only for itself, and about which it would resist dictation or resent even advice from all or any of the others. Such are the relations of French and English in Canada; of white and coloured labour in Australia; of Boer and Englishman in South Africa; of Irish Home Rulers and Unionists in the United Kingdom. But the fact that Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and South Africa lie in different quarters of the globe at once distinguishes broadly all questions of this kind, and diminishes the probability of conflict. On the other hand the very distance of separation makes it impossible, except by united action, to deal adequately with the vast interests common to all. To draw the line of {53} distinction between things purely local and such as are general in status thus widely separated would be much easier than to do the same for the contiguous sovereign states of the American Republic, or the contiguous provinces of Canada or Australia. The very diversity and peculiarity of local interest simplify the task.

It is to be noted, also, that in forming a British Federal system we should be relieved from what was the most difficult problem which presented itself to the framers of the American constitution. It was necessary to create a head for the state, and a method was devised with elaborate caution for doing this in freedom from the storms of party passion. In actual working that system has broken away from the original intention of its authors, and more than once the quadrennial selection of a party head to the American Republic has put a heavy strain upon the machinery of national government.

The British nation, on the other hand, has a head which commands reasoned and personal allegiance in all parts of the Empire. Under it the popular will reaches its end with less friction than under any other method yet devised. The system has been proved capable of easy and satisfactory application to the wants of the colonies, even under a federal organization such as that of Canada. The possession of such a starting-point will prove of enormous practical advantage in facing the problems of national organization.

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The fact that the constituent elements of the proposed federation are not at the same stage of political development naturally occurs as a difficulty. Canada, in having a fully matured internal system, is riper for federation than Australia, Australia than South Africa, South Africa than the West Indies.

The circumstance is often urged as a conclusive argument for delay: it is sometimes represented as an insuperable obstacle to any present progress towards closer unity. The condition is no new one to existing federal systems, nor has it proved an obstacle of importance to the framing of an adequate constitution. Both the United States and Canada have a carefully arranged system by which their younger communities are admitted by successive stages into fuller privileges of citizenship, each as it reaches a fixed period of maturity becoming entitled to the full franchise of state or province. As well argue that a man must not admit his eldest son into partnership until the youngest has come of age, as claim that Canada, with its constitution already consolidated by a quarter of a century's history, must still wait another quarter or half century for its rightful position in the nation to which it belongs because the West Indies and South Africa have not been able to work their way through certain stages of political evolution. Strange, indeed, would have been the political position of the United States had they waited to frame their federal system till Colorado was on a level with Massachusetts. For a nation {55} like ours, constantly expanding, and with possibilities for further extension even greater than the United States, common sense would seem to indicate the maturity of the first great colonies, the period when they might fairly be expected to desire some final decision about their national destiny, as the time when the basis of a Federal system, applicable on a fixed principle to all, should be determined. They are then free, as each advances to maturity, to choose between independence and entrance into the national system.

The concession of Responsible Government to the colonies was an important, but by no means a final step in political development. From some points of view the change seemed to superficial observers very closely akin to the concession of independence. It gave the absolute control of local affairs, the power of levying taxes, and of applying the proceeds; but the higher functions of government, it must be remembered, still remained with the central power. Not only was this so, but the responsibilities of independence were clearly not imposed in the same proportion that its privileges were granted.

In the minds of some colonists and more Englishmen I have found a belief, or rather a suspicion, that any closer union than at present exists could only be effected by taking away from the colonies some of the self-governing powers which they now possess. That this is necessary is clearly a mistake, and one which probably arises from the erroneous impression about {56} the degree of self-government which a colony enjoys. Not the resignation of old powers, but the assumption of new ones, must be the result of Federal union. A colony has now no power of making peace or war; no voice, save by the courtesy of the mother-country, in making treaties; no direct influence on the exercise of national diplomacy. Admitted to an organic union, its voice would be heard and its influence felt in the decision of these questions. To the Imperial Parliament, that is, as things now stand, to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, is reserved the right to override the legislation of a colony, just as, for example, the Parliament of the Dominion has the right to override the legislation of a Canadian Province. But as the Canadian feels in this no sense of injustice or tyranny, since he is represented in the superior as well as in the inferior Legislature, so the colonist would feel no loss of political dignity if he had his true place in the higher as well as in the lower representative body. With enlarged powers, it is true, the colony would have to accept enlarged responsibilities. In human affairs the two invariably and rightly go together[3]. If, instead {57} of federation, a colony chose independence, it would evidently be compelled at once to assume the control of all questions now reserved for Imperial treatment, and the corresponding burdens now provided for at Imperial expense. In a closer union the larger control and the larger responsibility would be assumed in partnership rather than individually. Surely this is not subtracting anything from the power of self-government. It is the means of making it complete.

Shall it, then, be separation or closer union? Shall we face the dangers which few can deny will be incident to the disintegration even by Act of Parliament and mutual consent of the greatest nation of the world; or shall we choose, as a wiser alternative, to confront, as in the past, the difficulties of such political reconstruction or adaptation as is required to meet new national needs? This is the question which not merely may arise, but certainly must arise within a very measurable time to be settled by British people in all parts of the world.

It has been said that all great movements which affect the condition of peoples are originated and carried forward by the combination of two forces: the force of conviction, which comes from reason, and the force of enthusiasm, which is born of sentiment. It is generally supposed that Anglo-Saxon people are most strongly influenced by reason, by arguments directed to their intelligence. Yet it may be doubted if in any race, sentiment plays a more decisive part in {58} moulding public action. It lives in the pages of Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Burns, Tennyson, and in distant lands loses none of its power to stir men's hearts. It has profoundly influenced Canadian history for more than a hundred years. It flames up in every colony when a crisis arises when British honour is at stake.

Millions of people in distant parts of the world glory in the right to speak of England, Scotland, or Ireland under the tender name of home. A sentiment indeed, but a mighty power. It is true that the term 'loyalty,' as it has usually been applied to British colonies and colonists in their relations to the United Kingdom, is in some ways becoming an obsolete and unmeaning term. A larger loyalty which has in it no suspicion of dependence is taking its place. It is one which implies faithfulness to the great nationality to which we belong, its heart, indeed, and its greatest traditions in Britain, but its mighty limbs and no small share of its hopes for the future on the world's circumference. It is at the bar of this loyalty that the Briton at home as well as the Briton abroad must be judged. The sentiment on which it partly rests is one we need not fear to count upon, and it has its limits only with the British world. It has been proof against the defects of an illogical system: it will prove the main element of cohesion in a true system. But we need not fear to turn away entirely from sentiment to study the dry facts of material interest which each of the greater communities of the Empire has in National Unity.

[1] Britannic Confederation, p. 54.

[2] Since the above was written we have been called upon to lament the great loss which English literature has suffered in Mr. Freeman's death. I cannot but think that the critical attitude which he took towards British unity is explained by a remark which I have lately found in his Impressions of the United States. He says, 'Greatly to my ill-luck, I am wholly ignorant of all things bearing on commerce, manufactures, or agriculture.' Are not these the questions which really dominate British national development?

[3] 'No community which is not primarily charged with the ordinary business of its own maintenance and defence is really, or can be, in the full sense of the word, a free community. The privileges of freedom and the burdens of freedom are absolutely associated together. To bear the burden is as necessary as to enjoy the privilege, in order to form that character which is the great necessity of freedom itself.'—Mr. Gladstone before the Colonial Committee, 1859.

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CHAPTER III.

DEFENCE.

IN beginning his elaborate study of the Empire and its capacity for defence, the author of 'The Problems of Greater Britain' says:—

'The danger in our path is that the enormous forces of European militarism may crush the old country and destroy the integrity of our Empire before the growth of the newer communities that it contains has made it too strong for the attack.' In closing he says: 'The result of this survey of Imperial Defence is to bring before the mind a clearer image of the stupendous potential strength of the British Empire, and of an equally stupendous carelessness in organizing its forces. … Our ambition is not for offensive strength, and not only home-staying Britons, but our more energetic colonists themselves, decline to accept such organization of our power, with the temptations that it would bring. We wish only to be safe from the ambition of others, and the first step towards safety must be the arrangement of consistent plans for supporting the whole edifice of British rule by the assistance of all the component parts of the Empire. As all have helped to raise the fabric, so may all combine {60} to secure it by the adoption of a settled plan of Imperial Defence.'

The defence of common interests has been, in the past, the primary bond which has held federations together. It must be put in the very forefront among the arguments for British unity. Taken by itself it seems to furnish more than sufficient reason why Great Britain and her colonies should present a united political front to the world.

Common interests so vast no nation or union of nations has ever before had in the history of the world. The foundations of British greatness rest in the creative power of industry, and that interaction of industry or exchange of products which we call commerce. Industry and commerce have combined to make our nation the richest in the world. We are a race of workers and of traders. It is in virtue of our working and trading instincts that we hold today the foremost place among the nations of the world. In following them we have won Empire; it seems capable of proof that to satisfy their necessities we must maintain Empire, for what we have been in the past such we are manifestly to be on a much larger scale in the future.

Transferred to Canada, or Australia, New Zealand, the Cape, or to foreign lands, the Briton is still the eager worker and trader, and the field for the exercise of his qualities is ever enlarging. As the standard of living rises with increasing prosperity, as the comforts and luxuries of distant lands come within reach of even {61} the labouring man, commerce is stimulated anew; its safety becomes of greater concern. In the strength of the British flag to give security to the infinite army of workers who carry on their toil under its protection, is involved the welfare and prosperity of the greatest aggregation of human beings that ever was joined together in one body politic.

It is when we consider the extent of British commerce, of what the nation constantly has staked upon the security of ocean trade, that we realize the vastness and importance of the problems involved in national defence, the supreme necessity that British people should be in a position either to command peace, or to face with confidence, so far as trade is concerned, the risks of any war that may be forced upon them.

To most minds figures perhaps convey but an inadequate idea of what they represent, but it is only by figures that the extent of the stake which British people have upon the ocean can be indicated. The rapidity of expansion is as striking as the actual extent, and they may usefully be put together. In 1837, when the Queen ascended the throne, the annual value of the sea-commerce of the United Kingdom, together with that of the colonies and dependencies, was estimated at £210,000,000. That commerce has now, in a little more than fifty years, expanded to nearly £1200,000,000. Every year British people have afloat upon the ocean wealth represented by this enormous sum. Nothing like it has ever been {62} known in the history of any nation before. The marvellous expansion still goes on. In the case of the colonies and dependencies, with their unlimited possibilities of development, it is manifest that we see but the beginning of their commercial career. For them, as for the mother-islands, the safety of trade, the security of the ocean waterways, must in the interests of industry be the supreme object of statesmanship. And I believe that there is a well-nigh unanswerable line of argument which goes to prove that statesmanship will find that security most certainly and most effectually by maintaining intact the actual unity of the Empire through such further political consolidation of its various parts as will make united action possible and most effective. On the other hand, there are the strongest reasons for thinking that the separation of even one of the great colonies might produce for the colony itself, for the United Kingdom, and for the Empire at large, a fatal flaw in the capacity for defending interests which are vital to the general prosperity and to the greatness of the nation.

The outline of this argument may be shortly stated.

The vast magnitude of the Empire, and its dispersion in the various quarters of the globe, have hitherto oppressed the imagination of those charged with its defence. Vulnerability has seemed the natural concomitant of magnitude. The impression might have been correct fifty or seventy-five years ago; it is not so today. It seems a proposition fairly capable of demonstration that under the changed conditions of {63} modern communication and naval war the vast area of the Empire and the wide dispersion of its parts, so far from being a cause of weakness, are really elements, under proper organization, of a strength greater than any nation of present or past times has ever enjoyed. It is a strength, too, which particularly recommends itself to the national mind, since it is effective for defence rather than aggression.

To understand how magnitude and diffusion may be sources of strength we must recall the fact that for all purposes of trade, intercourse, and naval power, the introduction of steam has re-created the world. Before Trafalgar was fought Nelson was able to keep the sea for months, the staying power of a ship of war depending almost entirely upon its supplies of food, water, and warlike stores. Now it has become chiefly a question of coal endurance. Removed from the means of renewing its supplies of coal, the most powerful ship afloat within a very limited number of days becomes a helpless hulk.

'The striking distance of a ship of war is now on an average two thousand miles,' are the words used by Lord Salisbury not long since to indicate the nature and extent of this change in the conditions of naval defence. What he means is, we may suppose, that when a modern ship of war has filled her bunkers with coal, she can go two thousand miles, do the work assigned her, and get safely back to her starting-place. High naval authorities have told me that Lord Salisbury's average is fixed at the outside limit.

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'Our fleet must be present in sufficient force to protect adequately the whole commerce of the Empire, wherever it is,' says the Secretary of the Admiralty in a last year's speech, and the press almost unanimously unites with Chambers of Commerce and other representative bodies in echoing the sentiment as a national resolution.

In discussing a considerable event in naval construction in the beginning of the present year the Times said: 'So far as human effort can attain its end, the country has now definitely resolved that the naval history of the future shall not be unworthy of its past.' It added: 'There is no finality to naval policy. … Its only sound basis is not the cost of the fleet in the abstract, but a rational estimate of the conditions of naval defence at sea.'

But the world is 25,000 miles round, and the commerce of the Empire is upon every sea. The striking distance of a ship of war is 2000 miles, and practically every ship of war we have operates under the limitations imposed by the use of steam. The figures certainly give us the necessary data for calculating what naval bases are necessary for adequate naval strength.

Surely Canada, resting on the North Atlantic and North Pacific; South Africa, commanding the passage around the Cape; and Australasia, in the centre of the vast breadth of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, are not merely useful, but, under the conditions which have been stated, essential. But when we have realized {65} that under modern conditions they are essential to widely extended sea power, we are in a position to understand the addition which they make to defensive strength. A nation which commands the great naval and coaling stations at these essential points could practically paralyze any enemy which sought to attack her, by simply closing the ports of coal supply to hostile ships.

Let me ask the reader to turn to the map of the world which accompanies this book. In it an attempt has been made to emphasize, though not unduly, a few of the main facts connected with our national position. The chief routes of British commerce are indicated—the arteries along which flow the life-blood of the nation. On what is now the principal route to the East, that through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, we note the fortified naval and coaling stations in a connected chain: Gibraltar, Malta, Bombay, Trincomalee, Singapore, and Hong Kong. At each of these stations British ships find themselves under the shelter of strong fortifications. Most of them are practically impregnable, and are supplied with docks for the repair of ships. All are points of storage for coal. Besides these stations of primary importance there are subsidiary ports, Kurrachi, Colombo, Calcutta, and many others.

Whether this remarkable hold on the greatest route of Eastern commerce is the outcome of a grasping militarism, or the natural result which arises from supreme commercial interest, may be judged from a {66} single fact. Of the 3800 steamships which passed through the Canal in 1891 seventy-eight out of every hundred were under the British flag, leaving only twenty-two divided among Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Austrians, Spaniards, Americans, and all the other nations of the world. Of the whole tonnage eighty-two per cent. was British.

Follow, again, the alternative route to the East and South around Africa. Here we find Sierra Leone, St. Helena, Cape Town, and Mauritius at intervals singularly adapted to the necessities of steam navigation under conditions of either peace or war. Other nations occupy parts of Africa, but none have naval stations of corresponding strength.

Terminating these two great Eastern routes we have in Australasia King George's Sound, Thursday Island, Melbourne, Sydney, and Auckland, which may be regarded as positions of primary naval importance. Some of these are already fortified, others have their defensive works in progress. Secondary, and yet important, are Hobart, Adelaide, Brisbane, Wellington, Lyttleton, Dunedin, and other ports.

Westward across the Atlantic, Halifax, Bermuda, St. Lucia, and Jamaica furnish adequate naval bases for the protection of the vast British commerce which traverses this ocean. The harbours of the Gulf and River St. Lawrence and Newfoundland, and of several West India islands, supplement these strongly fortified positions.

On the Pacific Coast Esquimalt and Vancouver {67} furnish stations from which may be protected the new route of trade and travel opened to the far East, and the projected route to Australasia.

Finally, the Falkland Islands, to which it has now been decided to give adequate fortifications, furnish a coaling place for ships in times of urgent necessity, and a point from which trade can be defended in the long voyage between Britain and Australia by the Cape Horn route. They also serve as a base of protection for our large trade with the Western coast of South America.

It will be seen that the map illustrates another group of facts which we must consider before we can fully grasp the relation of this geographical distribution of the Empire to naval power in an age of steam. On the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Canada, in New Zealand, Tasmania, New South Wales, and Queensland, in India, Borneo, and South Africa, coal is noted as among the products of these countries, and in them all, there are, in fact, great coal deposits forming in each corner of the globe, a wonderful complement to those of the mother-land.

Here, then, is the outline of a maritime position such as no people ever enjoyed before. North and South, East and West, we bold the great quadrilateral of oceanic power. It is not an undue strength of position, for it has to match the greatest commercial expansion that history has known. The security of each part of the system seems essential to the security {68} of the whole, and therefore should be guaranteed by the united strength of all. And it is clear that under modern steaming conditions it is this very diffusion of the Empire over every part of the world which constitutes its greatest advantage for giving safety to a world-wide commerce.

The conditions, however, under which this maritime position is maintained, and the vast and growing commerce of the Empire now enjoys security present some anomalies which cannot possibly have in them conditions of permanency.

Let me summarize the facts as placed before the House of Commons (March 2nd, 1891), by Sir John Colomb. The annual value of the sea-borne commerce of the United Kingdom is, roughly speaking, about £740,000,000; of the colonies and dependencies £460,000,000. As the latter has increased ninefold and the former but fivefold in a little more than fifty years, it is clear that at no very distant time the sea-borne commerce of the outlying empire will become equal to and gradually surpass in value that of the United Kingdom.

The portion of the whole colonial trade which consists of interchange with the United Kingdom, and in the safety of which presumably the United Kingdom has a close and direct interest, is £187,000,000. This leaves £273,000,000 of independent trade carried on with foreign countries, or between the colonies and dependencies themselves. Compared with the sea-borne trade of great foreign powers which support {69} large war navies, Sir John Colomb finds this independent trade to be 'about four times as much as the whole sea-borne trade of all Russia; about equal to that of Germany; about three-quarters that of France; two and a-half times that of Italy; and nearly half that of the United States.' The whole of this vast and rapidly increasing independent trade has precisely the same guarantee of protection from the naval power of the Empire as the trade of the United Kingdom itself. Yet, while the net expenditure (1890) incurred by the United Kingdom in the Naval Estimates is £14,215,100, the whole contribution of the colonies and dependencies for the same purpose only amounts to £381,546, of which India alone provides £254,776. In other words, out of every pound spent for the protection of the nation's commerce at sea, the United Kingdom contributes 19s. 53/4d., the outlying empire 6 1/4d. This comparison is made even more striking when combined with the statement that the united revenues of the colonies and dependencies amount to £105,000,000, against the £89,000,000 which represent the revenue of the United Kingdom. The vast capital sum invested in ships, armament, and naval establishments, believed to amount to more than £80,000,000, is paid wholly by the taxpayers of the United Kingdom.

Besides the protection to their commerce given by the Navy, colonists enjoy as fully as British people themselves the use and advantage of the consular and diplomatic services of the Empire. The colonial merchant, {70} sailor, or shipmaster finds in every chief port of the world a consul to whom he can apply for protection—an officer whose services are paid for by the British taxpayer alone. The Imperial treasury maintains unaided the costly diplomatic staff which carries on the long and delicate negotiations in which the colonies are often more directly concerned than the mother-land itself. If the results of diplomacy sometimes fail to satisfy colonial expectations, the experience is not new among nations, nor likely to be avoided by the agencies which a colony could independently set in motion. When the execution of treaties involves loss to the individual colonist, the example of Newfoundland and the Behring Sea indicates that it is to the Imperial treasury that he chiefly looks for compensation.

This want of proportion in the distribution of national burdens is so striking that one is impelled to ask if it may not have at least some partial or temporary justification. There is one consideration of much weight. The settlers in the outlying sections of the Empire have been compelled in their short history to face tasks of great difficulty. They have had upon their hands the organization of vast continental areas, the clearing of forests, the construction of highways and railroads, the extension of the post and telegraph over immense distances, the speedy application of the machinery of civilization to new lands. Were it quite certain that all this would become a permanent addition to the strength and resources of the nation, it {71} might well be an object of national policy to relieve them from other burdens, however fair in themselves. There would, on the other hand, be no justification for this if they are in the end to become independent powers or additions to the strength of another state.

In any case, the moment that the ordinary taxpayer of the new land is as able to pay as the ordinary taxpayer of the old, the uneven distribution of responsibility becomes a gross injustice.

Meanwhile it ought to be possible to roughly define even now some of the general principles which should be attended to in distributing this responsibility.

We are fortunate in having the clearly stated opinion of one great colonial thinker upon this point. Joseph Howe is remembered in England, no less than in Canada, as one of the ablest statesmen that the colonies have produced. 'The great orator and patriot,' is the description applied to him by Mr. Goldwin Smith. As the brilliant and triumphant champion of Responsible Government his record places him absolutely beyond the suspicion of subordinating colonial interests to any others. Yet from the very outset he 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 {72} address, since published in his collected speeches under the name of the 'Organization of the Empire,' which attracted wide attention at the time, and, indeed, 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 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.

Mr. Howe had none of the illusions which prevail in some parts of the colonies about the possibility of enjoying peace without taking the steps necessary to secure it: 'We have no security for peace,' he says, 'or if there be any, it is only to be sought in such an organization and armament of the whole Empire as will make the certainty of defeat a foregone conclusion to any foreign power that may attempt to break it.' And again, 'The question of questions for us all, far transcending in importance any other within the range of domestic or foreign politics, is not how the Empire can be most easily dismembered, not how a province {73} or two can be strengthened by a fort, or by the expenditure of a million of dollars, but how the whole Empire can be so organized and strengthened as to command peace or be impregnable in war.'

After discussing the best method of securing the representation of colonial ideas in influencing the general policy of the country, a condition which he believes necessarily precedent to joint expenditure, Mr. Howe then boldly grapples with the question of provision for defence.

'By another bill, to operate uniformly over the whole Empire (India being excepted, as she provides for her own army) the funds should be raised for the national defence. This measure, like the other, should be submitted for the sanction of the colonial governments and legislatures. This tax should be distinguished from all other imposts, that the amount collected could be seen at a glance, and that every portion of the whole people might see what they paid and what every other portion had to pay.

'This fund could either be raised as head money over the whole population, in the form of a property or income tax, or [as Mr. Howe preferred] by a certain percentage upon imports; constituting, next to existing liabilities, a first charge upon colonial revenues, and being paid into the military chest to the credit of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury.'

Two important qualifications Mr. Howe suggests as to the incidence of this national taxation upon the colonies.

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'As the great arsenals, dockyards, depots, and elaborate fortifications are in these islands; as the bulk of the naval and military expenditure for arms, munitions, and provisions occurs here, where are the great fleets and camps, the people of Great Britain and Ireland ought to be prepared to pay, and I have no doubt would, a much larger proportion towards this fund than it would be fair to exact from the outlying provinces, where, in time of peace, there is but little of naval or military expenditure.

'In another respect a wise discrimination should be exercised. Within the British Islands are stored up the fruits of eighteen centuries of profitable industry. All that generations of men toiled for, and have bequeathed, is now in possession of the resident population here, including all that was created and left by the forefathers of those by whom the British colonies have been founded. Taking into view, then, the comparison which these wealthy and densely peopled islands bear to the sparsely populated countries beyond the sea, it would seem but fair that they should assume, in proportion to numbers, a much larger share of the burthens of national defence.'

He then sums up: 'If the general principle be admitted, we need not waste time with the details, which actuaries and accountants can adjust. Fair allowance being made under these two heads, I can see no reason why the colonists should not contribute in peace and war their fair quotas towards the defence of the Empire.

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'But the question may now be asked, and everything turns upon the answer that may be given to it, will the colonies consent to pay this tax, or to make any provision at all for the defence of the Empire? It must be apparent that no individual can give an answer to this question; that the Cabinet, were they to propound this policy, even after the most anxious enquiry and full deliberation, could only wait in hope and confidence for the response to be given by so many communities, so widely dispersed and affected by so many currents of thought. … That it is the duty, and would be for the interest, of all Her Majesty's subjects in the outlying provinces, fairly admitted to the enjoyment of the privileges indicated, to make this contribution, I have not the shadow of doubt. … Without efficient organization they cannot lean upon and strengthen each other or give to the mother-country that moral support which in peace makes diplomacy effective, and in war would make the contest short, sharp, and decisive. … If once organized and consolidated, under a system mutually advantageous and generally known, there would be an end to all jealousies between the taxpayers at home and abroad. We should no longer be weakened by discussions about defence or propositions for dismemberment, and the irritation now kept up by shallow thinkers and mischievous politicians would give place to a general feeling of brotherhood, of confidence, of mutual exertion, dependence, and security. The great powers of Europe and America would at once recognize {76} the wisdom and forethought out of which had sprung this national combination, and they would be slow to test its strength. We should secure peace on every side by the notoriety given to the fact that on every side we were prepared for war.'

One more quotation is necessary to place before the reader the full breadth and courage of Mr. Howe's reasoning:—

'But suppose this policy proposed and the appeal made, and that the response is a determined negative. Even in that case it would be wise to make it, because the public conscience of the mother-country would then be clear, and the hands of her statesmen free, to deal with the whole question of national defence in its broadest outlines or in its bearings on the case of any single province or group of provinces, which might then be dealt with in a more independent manner.

'But I will not for a moment do my fellow-colonists the injustice to suspect that they will decline a fair compromise of a question which involves at once their own protection and the consolidation of the Empire. At all events, if there are any communities of British origin anywhere, who desire to enjoy all the privileges and immunities of the Queen's subjects without paying for and defending them, let us ascertain who and what they are—let us measure the proportions of political expenditure now, in a season of tranquillity, when we have the leisure to gauge the extent of the evil and apply correctives, rather than wait till war finds us {77} unprepared and leaning upon presumptions in which there is no reality.'

No apology seems needed for placing before the reader at such length the views held on this crucial question of national defence by one of the great fathers of Responsible Government in the colonies, a man whose whole life was marked by absolute devotion to the principles of popular government and to colonial interests.

Joseph Howe spoke and wrote of conditions existing before that great period of Canadian development and expenditure which followed upon the confederation of the different provinces. This probably accounts in large measure for the different view of the situation taken and the different solution of the question suggested by his distinguished successor, Sir Charles Tupper. The right and duty of the colonies to contribute to the general strength of the Empire which guarantees them security is admitted as fully by Sir Charles Tupper as by Joseph Howe. Of the most expedient method for utilizing the young energy and growing resources of the colonies he takes a different view. In an article recently published in a leading magazine[1] he says:—

'Many persons, I am aware, both in the colonies and here, have looked upon the question of the defence of the Empire as best promoted and secured by a direct contribution to the support of the army and navy of this country. That I regard as a very {78} mistaken opinion; and I believe that there is a much more effective way of promoting the object in view. In my opinion, no contribution to the support of the army and navy of England on the part of Canada would have contributed to the defence of the Empire in a greater degree than the mode in which the public money in Canada has been expended for that purpose. We have expended, in addition to an enormous grant of land, over a million pounds sterling per annum, from the first hour that we became a united country down to the present day, in constructing a great Imperial highway across Canada from ocean to ocean; not only furnishing the means for the expansion of the trade and the development of Canada, but providing the means of intercommunication at all seasons between different parts of the country,'

After pointing out that the construction of the Transcontinental Railway enabled Canada in 1885 to put down without England's help the half-breed rebellion, while the previous outbreak in 1870 had required the services of General Wolseley and the Imperial troops for several months, Sir Charles Tupper goes on to say:—

'We have, therefore, not only provided the means of intercommunication, the means of carrying on our trade and business, but have also established a great Imperial highway which England might to-morrow find almost essential for the maintenance of her power in the East. Not only has Canada furnished {79} a highway across the continent, but it has brought Yokahama three weeks nearer to London than it is by the Suez Canal. I give that as an illustration that there are other means which, in my judgment, may contribute much more to the increased strength and the greatness of the Empire than any contribution that could be levied upon any of the colonies. … The expenditure by the Government of Canada that has successfully opened up these enormous tracts of country in the great North West of the Dominion, which promise to be the granary of the world, is of itself the best means of making England strong and prosperous, as it will attract a large British population thither.'

Sir Charles Tupper can also speak of more direct contributions which the Dominion makes to the national strength.

'Canada has in addition expended since confederation over forty millions of dollars upon her militia and mounted police, and in the establishment of a military college, which, I am proud to know from one of the highest authorities, is second to no military school in the world, and of nine other military schools and batteries in the various provinces, of which the Dominion is composed. In 1889 Canada expended no less than two millions of dollars on the militia and North West mounted police, which anyone who knows the country will admit is a most effective means of defence. It is true we have a comparatively small permanent force, but {80} we have established military schools, and we have such a nucleus of a further force as in case of need would enable us to develop the militia in the most effective manner, consisting of 37,000 volunteers who are trained annually, and a reserve of 1,000,000 men, liable to be called upon should necessity arise.'

Once more: 'One of the most effective means adopted by the Imperial Parliament for the defence of the Empire is by subsidizing fast steamers built under Admiralty supervision, with armament which can be made available at a moment's notice. These steamers could maintain their position and keep up mail communication in time of war or be used for the transport of troops. Canada has contributed £15,000 a year to a splendid line of steamers, such as I have described, now plying between Canada, Japan, and China, and has offered no less than £165,000 per annum to put a service like the Teutonic between England and Canada, and a fast service between Canada and Australia. All these splendid steamers would be effective as cruisers if required for the protection of British commerce, and the transport of troops and thousands of volunteers to any point that the protection of the Empire demanded.'

It is on grounds thus stated that Sir Charles Tupper concludes that, 'Instead of adding to its defence, the strength of a colony would be impaired by taking away the means which it requires for its development and for increasing its defensive power, {81} if it were asked for a contribution to the army and navy.'

The argument, which may be applied to all the colonies, amounts to this, that it would be true national economy to leave free at present all the energies and resources of these young countries for local defence and for carrying on the mere processes of growth. Obviously the fairness of this arrangement, for which there is much to be said, depends entirely on the assurance that the colony is to remain permanently a part of the Empire. There is no reason why Britain or any other mother-country should bear any part of the natural burdens of a colony if the colony is, nevertheless, left free to mark its adolescence by declaring itself independent, or by annexing itself to another and perhaps rival state. It is equally obvious that such an arrangement could in no sense be final; and that it only shifts the question of more normal adjustment of national burdens to a time not very far remote. It could therefore in any case only be looked upon as a temporary compromise. For instance, the whole volume of colonial trade (including India) is to that of the United Kingdom now in about the proportion of four to seven: judging from the relative rate of increase before referred to the day is not far distant when they will be equal. The proportion of population is also changing rapidly. The anomaly of one half of the national trade and one half of the population bearing the direct naval expenditure of the {82} whole would be very great indeed. This method, too, would seem to conflict rather seriously with a principle which has become a very fundamental idea in the British mind, viz. that a bearing of burdens in some very direct form must go hand in hand with representation. Till direct responsibility in general defence is undertaken, direct representation in determining general policy can scarcely be conceded. To fix the point at which any colony should become a direct instead of an indirect contributor to the nation's defensive strength would be a manifest necessity. To these criticisms Sir Charles Tupper can fairly answer that he deals in his proposition only with actual and not with prospective conditions. In fixing new and permanent relations, however, for an empire which is changing as rapidly as ours, the future must be kept in view as much as the present. Doubtless the true settlement of the question lies in a compromise between the present and the future.

Not long since one of the most prominent of English statesmen put the matter to me in this way: 'We in Great Britain know very well that while you in the colonies are engaged in organizing great continents and furnishing them with the machinery of civilization we cannot expect you to contribute for common purposes in proportion to us, who start with the stored up resources and appliances of centuries. But we know that as you complete your docks, harbours and lighthouses, your railroads and canals, your schoolhouses and churches, as society becomes {83} settled and the needs of civilization supplied, then you will gradually become ready and willing to bear your full proportion of those burdens which are the token of full and equal citizenship.' With him, as with Joseph Howe, the settlement of the central principle of national unity was the main point; the determination of the details of expenditure was a matter for friendly negotiation—for actuaries and accountants.

We may now ask, as did Joseph Howe, whether the great colonies would be willing to accept, either immediately or by gradual and progressive steps, any further share in the responsibilities of the nation. It may be assumed that this decision will be based on the facts and arguments of the case.

'Reason shows and experience proves that no commercial prosperity can be durable if it cannot be united, in case of need, to naval force.' This remark of De Tocqueville is so fully proved by the facts of history that its truth may be accepted as axiomatic. It is a truth for the colonies to consider. Highly commercial already, their desire and manifest destiny are to be still more so. Canada's commercial navy, as has been said, already ranks fourth in the world. She is a first-class shipping power. Australia's trade is perhaps greater in proportion to population than that of any other country. Alone among all the people of the past or present, British colonists have not had to accept the full responsibilities of increasing commercial greatness. The {84} little republic of Chili, with a trade of £26,000,000, and a population of about 3,000,000 maintains 40,000 tons of armed shipping, at a large annual expense. The other republics of South America bear like burdens. Australia, with its much larger volume of sea trade and far greater of revenue, pays only £126,000 for naval defence, strictly confined to its own shores. Canada, with its remarkable tonnage of ocean shipping, its great interests at stake on its eastern and western coasts, leans almost entirely for defence of commerce and fisheries upon British ironclads paid for exclusively by the people of the United Kingdom.

The deceptive argument, drawn from the example of the United States at some periods of their history, that a degree of isolation gives immunity from such burdens, has now lost its force. The policy of the Great Republic has been sharply reversed, and the creation of a powerful navy has become an object of national ambition, and is apparently the outcome of national necessities developed by the widening of commercial relations.

Judged, then, by all historical precedent, the great colonies must in the natural course of events accept naval defence as a part of their ordinary burdens. That they have escaped this form of expense hitherto is manifestly due almost entirely to the fact that as parts of the empire they have been so fortunate as to enjoy without cost the protection of a supreme naval power. Will they secure the most effective defence, the best return for the money they spend, within the {85} Empire or without? Within the Empire they would have the advantage of naval bases in every important corner of the world. The portion of force contributed by themselves would have the prestige of the whole to make it most effective. They would have the advantage of all the stored-up skill and experience of the greatest school of naval training that the world has ever known. They would have the direction of naval experience absolutely unique. They would be able at once in spending their money to avail themselves of the best results of naval experiments carried on by the United Kingdom at enormous cost. Alike in cheapness and efficiency they would enjoy the advantages which come from co-operation on a great scale.

There is, of course, an opposing view. Stated in its extreme form it was put thus, three or four years ago, to the Legislature of Quebec by Mr. Mercier:—

'Up to the present time we have lived a colonial life, but today they wish us to assume, in spite of ourselves, the responsibilities and dangers of a sovereign state, which will not be ours. They seek to expose us to vicissitudes of peace and war against the great powers of the world; to rigorous exigencies of military service as practised in Europe; to disperse our sons from the freezing regions of the North Pole to the burning sands on the desert of Sahara; an odious regime which will condemn us to the forced impost of blood and money, and wrest from our arms out sons, who are the hope of our country and {86} the consolation of our old days, and send them off to bloody and distant wars, which we shall not be able to stop or prevent.'

Probably Mr. Mercier's auditors were well enough acquainted with history to detect at once the obvious fallacy of his argument.

Still, it is worth while to remind colonial writers and speakers when they assert, as they sometimes do, that a union of defence with Britain means the dragging away of Canadians or Australians to fight in Europe or Asia, that Britain is the one country in the world that has never, in modern times, been compelled to resort to conscription; that no one is asked to fight in the ranks of her army or in her fleet except those who wish to, and that on these terms she has been able to put into the field and on the sea all the soldiers and sailors she requires. This is as true of her large native Indian armies as it is of her English, Scotch, Welsh, or Irish regiments. Britain knows nothing of the conscription which prevails in Germany, France, and Russia, which even the United States found necessary in the War of Secession. The men whom Australia sent to the Soudan she sent of her own accord, and not at Britain's request, much less her command; the numerous Canadian officers now holding commissions and in the active service of the Empire are there by their own individual choice. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that the British system of a purely voluntary service would be changed under any new political conditions imposed {87} by closer union. The career of a soldier is one which has for many minds a great attraction. With the progress of military science, it now offers in many of its departments, as never before, a field for the highest intellectual qualities and scientific attainments. To say the very least, to be a defender of one's country is a not unworthy ambition. It is therefore extremely likely that into the great career offered by an Imperial service many colonists with military predilections would be drawn. Even if their sole object were to prepare themselves for the service of the particular part of the Empire to which they belonged, the wider training to be obtained in the highly organized system of a great state would be invaluable. But once more I repeat that the service would be purely voluntary. If Mr. Mercier and those of his compatriots who think with him have lost what was once supposed to be an instinct of their race, they have the opportunity within the British Empire, which they could not depend upon having in France, of following their inclination. Mr. Goldwin Smith states, though I think incorrectly, that colonists are essentially non-military. If his view is true, then the task of defending the Empire will naturally gravitate into the hands of those in whom the military instinct is strong, of whom the Empire has always as yet found enough for all its needs.

Again, in a somewhat similar connection Mr. Smith speaks of 'the heavy weight of a constant liability to entanglements in the quarrels of England all over the {88} world, with which Canada has nothing to do, and about which nothing is known by her people. Her commerce may any day be cut up and want brought into her homes by a war about the frontier of Afghanistan, about the treatment of Armenia or Crete by the Turks, about the relation of the Danubian Principalities to Russia, or about the balance of power in Europe.' Let us put against this flight of imagination the solid facts of history and see if Canada has had any reason to feel this pressure of dread from her connection with Britain. In 1812 British troops assisted Canadians in repelling what Mr. Smith himself describes as 'unprincipled aggression.' Since that time under the British flag Canada has known a continuance of peace absolutely without parallel for a corresponding' period among all the nations of the world. The last European war in which England took part was that with Russia, closed in 1856. The effect upon Canada of that war was a stimulus given to her timber and provision trade by the closing of Baltic and Black Sea ports. One of Canada's own sons, General Williams, the hero of Kars, won in that war a fame of which every Canadian is proud. Since 1856 there has been an Austro-Italian war, an Austro-Prussian war, a Franco-Prussian war, a Russo-Turkish war. No British sword was drawn, no Canadian interest touched in all of these. The gigantic civil war of secession shook the American union to its foundations; Britain took no part, and Canadians along with her lived in peace. In India {89} Britain was compelled in 1856-7 to go through a strain of agony and effort to maintain her place of power. Canada's sole part was to weep at the fate, to glory in the heroism of those who suffered or who won at Lucknow, Cawnpore, Delhi, and a hundred other scenes of conflict. With England's numerous petty wars with barbarian tribes on the fringe of advancing civilization, mostly undertaken in behalf of colonists, Canada has had nothing to do[2]. When she had her first half-breed rebellion British troops were promptly sent to put it down. So far, then, Canada has not had 'want brought into her homes' through her connection with Britain, but on the contrary has enjoyed a peace and security that might well be the envy of the world. Like the United States, Canada enjoys the advantage of isolation from European strife, together with the further advantage of connection {90} with a power whose flag gives to Canadian ships and commerce on every ocean the surest guarantee of safety at present existing in the world; a guarantee the importance and significance of which will increase with the growth of Canadian commerce; a guarantee which she could not possibly find under an independent flag, nor yet under the flag of the United States, whose one weakness, by the admission of American authorities themselves, lies in the want of those naval bases which are everywhere the necessary adjuncts of extended maritime security.

But even when the extraordinary immunity from the risks of war which the colonies have enjoyed under the British flag has been demonstrated it seems well to give due weight to any honest objection which exists to committing themselves entirely to the military policy of the Empire at large, until, at least, the sense of national unity has had time to become fully developed. That the colonies will refuse to contribute to Imperial defence, as is sometimes asserted, I do not believe, and facts are themselves now beginning to disprove the statement. That they may contribute enormously to the national strength without offending the prejudices of even the most sensitive may also be shown. Lord Thring has made a suggestion upon this point which seems to me exceedingly interesting and helpful. After pointing out the overwhelming common interest which all parts of the Empire have in resisting attack from without, he proposes that in each of the great colonies willing {91} to enter into the arrangement defensive forces should be created which would be recognized parts of the Imperial army and navy. These forces should not primarily be under a compulsory obligation to serve out of their own countries, or beyond their own limits, but when called out for Imperial purposes within their limits they should form a part of the Imperial army and navy, and be under the same general control. But the colonial forces should be empowered to volunteer for the common national service out of their own limits, and on so doing they should be regarded as an integral part of the nation's defensive force.

A national military and naval organization such as that here suggested would appeal directly to that local patriotism, instinctive in all, which considers no sacrifice too great if it is made for the defence of men's own homes and firesides; it furnishes the opportunity for that wider national patriotism which knows that the safety of the parts depends upon the safety of the whole; and it meets the objection which has been mentioned before, and is often made, to young communities being compelled against their will to take an active part outside their own borders in wars in which their concern is only indirect. The actual defensive force of the Empire would be immensely increased by the effective organization of each part under a common direction, a necessity so often and strenuously insisted upon by Sir Charles Dilke and others who have thought and written upon national defence; its contingent force would be still {92} more increased in the event of a war which appeals to the reason and sympathy of the several great communities.

Those who argue for separation in the colonies, as well as men like the late Mr. Bright at home, rest their case largely upon the view that the mother-country carries permanently along with her the entanglements of a traditional foreign policy which is chiefly European, and with which it is unfair to involve young communities in parts of the world remote from Europe[3]. This view seems based on past history more than on the facts of the present. More and more every day Britain tends to become a world power, and it is this fact rather than her European position which dominates her policy. She faces Europe much more in the interest of her colonies than in the support of ancient traditions. We have only to read the news from day to day, or the summary of national policy for a year as it is presented in a Queen's Speech, to see that Lord Salisbury was within the strict limit of fact when he told a deputation but a few months since that his work in the Foreign Office had made him {93} deeply sensible of 'the large portion of our foreign negotiations, our foreign difficulties, and the danger of foreign complications which arise entirely from our colonial connections; and the effect is that from time to time we have to exercise great vigilance lest we should incur dangers which do not arise from any interest of our own, but arise entirely from the interests of the important and interesting communities to which we are linked.'

The difficulty with the United States in the Behring Sea and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and with the French in Newfoundland; the complicated negotiations with Germany, Portugal, and other powers, European and native, in Africa, chiefly entered into in behalf of colonies or colonizing companies, are, to take the very latest illustrations, quite sufficient to give definiteness to Lord Salisbury's statement[4].

To some sincere thinkers in the colonies the value of British protection seems slight compared with the risks entailed by the Imperial connection. They believe that the true and evident policy for these young countries is to break off this connection and so free {94} themselves from its dangers. Having no reason to quarrel with anybody they anticipate with independence not only the immunity which they have enjoyed from war, but the further relief from the fear of war. Commerce carried on without naval protection; internal safety secured without expense on military organization; a neutral flag respected by all belligerents; the settlement of all differences by friendly arbitration, seem to them not unreasonable expectations.

The dread of some Englishmen, on the other hand, is that they may be drawn into wars in which they have no direct interest by the action of individual colonies.

Each of these opinions has some superficial ground of justification; each process of reasoning has, if pushed to its final conclusions, fatal defects. But is there not reason to believe that the growth of the Empire is bringing us to a point when the policy of England and her colonies may be entirely coincident on the great questions of peace or war?

In the desperate struggle for existence which England in past centuries has often had to carry on, in those contests which have toughened the fibre of her children and fitted them to be of the ruling races of the world, she has often had to make combinations or enter into agreements with the European nations around her from which she would gladly have kept herself free. But with the spread of the Empire abroad England is every day becoming more able {95} to look away from Europe, to stand aloof from purely European disputes, and to secure all the strength she requires from combination with communities which are her own offspring.

Such an outcome of the nation's life would be the best justification for all that England has suffered and spent in building up the Empire. But it is not for colonists to forget that she has spent and suffered much.

At Melbourne two years ago, in a lecture intended to refute the arguments for British unity, and to point out the danger to Australia of remaining connected with the Empire, Sir Archibald Michie, with great apparent deliberation, said: 'As the miserable result of her (England's) past foreign policy, as ineffectual to any good purpose as it has proved expensive, she is indebted to the amount of some £700,000,000 to the public creditor, the National Debt. To what an extent does not this one miserable fact, so disgusting to all Chancellors of the Exchequer, cripple the strength and movements of the mother-country, and weaken her influence with the world at large.' Were this the thought of a single man it would be scarce worth while to recall it. But in some of the colonies similar reference to the National Debt is found not infrequently in journals which must be taken seriously, and in the mouths of men who influence public opinion. Often it is emphasized by a triumphant allusion to the different application of colonial borrowings, represented as they are by assets in the form of railways, canals, harbour improvements, {96} telegraph systems, and public works of many kinds. The criticism and comparison seem misleading in the last degree.

We may make a liberal allowance for mistakes in British foreign policy. We may criticise things done in the heat of national passion, or at times when Britain was carrying on a struggle for existence. We may leave out of our reckoning the glory of having saved the liberties of Europe when other nations were yielding in despair, when British subsidies alone brought their armies into the field, and British resolution inspired them with new courage. Yet, when all this allowance has been made, we may say that a colonist is perhaps the last man in the world to sneer at the public debt of England. She came out of the prolonged and tremendous struggle which piled up her debt possessing as an asset to show for it about one-fifth of the known world. Professor Seeley has proved conclusively that England's great continental wars, the chief causes of her vast expenditures, were in large measure contests for colonial supremacy. From those wars she gained the power to give Canada to the Canadians, Australia to the Australians, vast areas and limitless resources in many lands to those of her people who have gone to inhabit them, and so to complete by industry the conquest begun by arms. From those wars she emerged with a command of the sea which has enabled her to supplement her gift of territory with a guarantee of safety which has secured it from attack during the early stages of settlement until the {97} present time. The National Debt would seem to be a natural mortgage upon the territories acquired by war expenditure, yet the gift of Crown lands which was made to the colonies acquiring responsible government was made absolutely free from this mortgage. These Crown lands in all the colonies are sold and used entirely for local benefit, while the whole incidence of taxation for what may fairly be called the interest of the purchase-money falls upon the United Kingdom alone.

The expense of the great expeditions which culminated in the victory on the Plains of Abraham is a considerable item in the National Debt, but half a continent now held by Canadians is no insignificant item to set against it. If the expenditure for the American War be put down as a mistake, it must be remembered that the United States themselves, no less than Canada, reaped the advantage from the previous expenditure which set the Anglo-Saxon on the American continent free from French rivalry[5].

Fifty years ago the French Government asked the British Foreign Office how much of the vast unoccupied {98} areas of Australia it claimed. 'The whole of it,' was the prompt reply. No doubt the recollection of the Plains of Abraham, of Trafalgar, of Waterloo, had something to do with the acceptance of that reply as conclusive.

If the colonies are able to expend their borrowings on reproductive works alone, this advantage is not entirely due to their own superior prudence, but in part at least to the circumstance that they have been protected by a great Imperial power not afraid to go into debt for national ends. Gibraltar and Malta, Aden, Singapore, and Hong Kong, the Cape and St. Helena, stations in every corner of the world for the protection of the commerce of the colonies as much as that of the United Kingdom, are the best answers to those who sneer at the National Debt of Great Britain.

The United States incurred a war debt of more than 2000,000,000 dollars, not indeed in carrying out a foreign policy, right or wrong, but in remedying mistakes of internal policy. The war brought no vast addition of territory; it simply saved the state from disruption. No one doubts that the expenditure has been more than repaid by the national unity and greatness which it secured. But the very people who were crushed by that vast outlay have been obliged, since they remain within the nation, to contribute to the payment of the debt incurred.

They are obliged to contribute their share of the vast pension roll, amounting to much more than 100,000,000 dollars per annum, paid to the soldiers of the Union {99} who crushed them. Compared with this, the magnanimity of the mother-land in handing over to her younger communities, absolutely free from incumbrance either of mortgage, of military responsibility, or of commercial restraint, the major part of those vast assets which she had to show for her national debt, seems to me amazing. A colonist, reproaching England with her foreign policy and the debt which it led to, cuts a sorry figure in the face of these facts. And if we put the £30,000,000 added to the debt of England in order to extinguish slavery beside the price paid by the United States for the same national purification, we shall discover reasons for thinking that there may be national mistakes worse than those to be discovered in the foreign policy of Britain.

Sir Charles Dilke says[6]: 'It is a remarkable instance of past Imperial carelessness that the very principles upon which the burden of defence should be divided between ourselves and colonies, and the proportions in which it should be borne, have never been settled.'

And again[7]: 'It is not the United Kingdom only but the whole British Empire which needs consistent and united organization for defence. The colonies should be represented on our great General Staff, and the principle of self-preservation, applied to the Empire, should be disentangled from the petty {100} political questions by which the relations between the mother-country and her children are often hampered and sometimes embittered. … Unfortunately, considerations of Imperial defence, which should be regarded from the point of view of common self-interest, are apt to become mixed up with the individual and fleeting interests of various portions of the Empire. If, as I hope, we are to continue to stand together as a confederacy holding the future of the greater portion of the world in its hands, the inhabitants of the home islands and of the colonies must come to an understanding for mutual support during the crisis of civilization in which we may find ourselves at any moment.'

I have often had occasion to quote Sir Charles Dilke's opinions on questions which have come within the range of this discussion. The luminous and exhaustive statement of the condition and resources of the Empire contained in the two volumes of the 'Problems of Greater Britain,' though somewhat weighted by detail, and in my opinion weakened by an imperfect balancing of the primary and secondary forces at work in the colonies, is still by far the most valuable contribution yet made to the study of our national position. The line of argument by which the author proves the necessity for closer defensive organization of the different parts of the Empire seems to me overwhelming in its conclusiveness. His demand that the colonies should be represented on the General Staff which is to constitute the {101} brain of the nation in military questions, his impressive warnings that the mother-land and colonies must stand side by side in protecting the commerce and civilization which both have borne a part in building up, make it very difficult to understand the hesitating and irresolute attitude which he takes in his chapter (vol. ii. part vii.) on 'Future Relations' to the question of Federation, or any defined system of political union. Military combination, even for defensive purposes alone, must certainly mean a common foreign policy and the joint expenditure which is necessary to make it effective; a common foreign policy and expenditure imply some means of giving adequate expression to the will of all the communities concerned; and to most minds that, I think, will point directly and inevitably to some form of common representation. Military authorities may plan and advise, but under any British system of government political authorities who derive their mandate directly from the citizens can alone make the plan effective. Mere alliance could never accomplish all that the author of the 'Problems of Greater Britain' believes essential to the safety of the Empire. Alliance is temporary and easily revocable, and therefore by no means a settlement of permanent national questions. The moment that an attempt is made to remedy the carelessness complained of, to settle the principles upon which the burden of defence is to be divided between the mother-land and colonies, 'to come to an understanding for mutual support,' it will be found {102} that immediately behind the military problem is the political problem[8].

[1] Nineteenth Century, Oct. 1891.

[2] While these pages are going through the press there comes, as if to qualify what is here said, the news that a young Canadian, Captain William H. Robinson, of the Royal Engineers, has met a soldier's death while leading, with conspicuous courage, an attack on Tambi in Sierra Leone. Trained in Canadian schools, and graduated with the highest honours from the Canadian Military College at Kingston, he had steadily pushed his way forward in the Imperial service and had for some time been in charge of the important fortifications in course of construction at Sierra Leone. In the ardent pursuit of his profession he had specially volunteered for the service on which he was engaged when he met his end. As his teacher I had occasion to watch over the early development of his very exceptional powers. Britain has, first and last, sacrificed many precious lives on Canadian soil, but in Captain Robinson Canada has begun to repay the debt to the mother-land with one of the most promising of the sons she has yet produced.

[3] 'I should like to ask the friends of federation whether the colonies of this country—Canada, and the great colonies which cluster in the South Pacific and in Australia—whether these colonies would be willing to bind themselves to the stupid and regrettable foreign policy of the Government of this country? Will they take the responsibility of entering into wars which will be 10,000 miles away, and in which they can have no possible interest or influence, and in which they could have been in no degree consulted as to the cost? My opinion is that the colonies will never stand a policy of that kind.'—John Bright at Birmingham, March 28th, 1888.

[4] A Liberal Foreign Minister has lately expressed the same thought in other words. 'Our great Empire has pulled us, so to speak, by the coat-tails out of the European system; and though with our great predominance, our great moral influence, and our great fleet, with our traditions in Europe and our aspirations to preserve the peace of Europe, we can never remove ourselves altogether from the European system, we must recognise that our foreign policy has become a colonial policy, and is in reality at this moment much more dictated from the extremities of the empire than it is from London itself.'—Lord Rosebery to the City Liberal Club, March 23rd, 1892.

[5] American writers admit this, 'The Seven Years' War made England what she is. It crippled the commerce of her rival, ruined France in two continents, and blighted her as a colonial power. It gave England the control of the seas, and the mastery of North America and India, made her the first of commercial nations, and prepared the vast colonial system that has planted New Englands in every part of the globe. And while it made England what she is it supplied to the United States the indispensable condition of their greatness, if not of their national existence:—Introduction to Montcalm and Wolfe (Parkman).

[6] Problems of Greater Britain, vol. ii. 522.

[7] United Service Magazine, April, 1890.

[8] Since the above was written a very distinct advance of thought on the question of British unity has been indicated in the work on 'Imperial Defence,' just published by Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Spencer Wilkinson. The authors say (p. 54): 'It is enough to say, that the great question, perhaps the greatest question, which has to be answered by the present generation of Englishmen, is whether the British Empire is to become a series of independent, though, perhaps, friendly states, or to make a reality of the military unity which at the present time is rather a sentiment than a practical institution. It is evidently impossible to organise the defences of the Empire until this prior question has been settled, and it is quite impossible until it has been faced to determine properly the policy of Great Britain. If the principle of the unity of the Empire and the unity of its defences is maintained the greatest conceivable degree of security would have been gained for the whole and for every part, and the British Empire could afford, as against the attack, of any single power, to steer clear of all alliances and to pursue a policy solely to the immediate welfare of its subjects. … Before, then, the defence of the British Empire can be placed throughout on a permanently satisfactory footing, it seems necessary that the great political question of the century should be settled, and that Englishmen all over the world should make up their minds as to the real nature of Greater Britain.' The most ardent Federationist could not wish for a more succinct statement of the national position than this.

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CHAPTER IV.

THE UNITED KINGDOM.

To understand the relation of the United Kingdom to the question of national unity we must try to grasp the main features of the astonishing and unparalleled change which in the last half or three quarters of a century has come over the industrial condition of the British Islands. This change has left them in a position absolutely unique among the nations of the present day, a position, moreover, to which history furnishes no parallel.

It has been estimated that when the Queen came to the throne, of the working population of the country one-third were agricultural labourers, and one-third were artizans. There has since been an addition of from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 to the whole population, and at the end of this period of remarkable growth we find ourselves face to face with the overwhelming fact that of all the working classes of Great Britain only an eighth are agricultural labourers while three-fourths are artizans. What this means is in no way more tersely described than when we say that Britain has become the workshop of the {104} world. What it involves is the conclusion that never in the history of the human race has any great nation lived under such artificial conditions as do British people at the end of this period of extraordinary industrial development, a period which has its limit well within the century. All the circumstances of national existence have been revolutionized.

After the application to the soil of intense culture, of scientific skill, of abundant capital, of cheap labour, only about 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 quarters of wheat are produced out of the 28,000,000 quarters which now represent the annual consumption. The rest comes from the far distant prairies of the United States and Canada, from India, South Australia, New Zealand, the Black Sea and the Baltic. With other cereals it is the same, the demand for those which cannot be produced at all in Great Britain, such as rice and maize, being immense.

Cheap ocean freights, which make it possible to transfer a bushel of wheat by sea from Montreal or New York to London at a lower price than it can be carried by rail from some English counties to London, handicap the English producer still more. It seems as if the dependence upon the outside world for grain supplies were likely to increase, not merely with the rapid increase of population which is still going on, but with the necessity of applying the land to more profitable forms of production as ocean transit is still further cheapened, and as increasing prosperity leads to a greater consumption of animal food.

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As with grain foods so with meat. Hundreds of thousands of live cattle, many hundred thousand tons of meat, chilled, frozen, salted, or tinned, pour into the country every year from across the sea. Canada alone last year sent 123,000 head of cattle; New Zealand nearly 1,500,000 frozen carcasses of sheep. It has been estimated that the quantity of meat food in the United Kingdom at any time is only sufficient to supply the market for three months; beyond that all must come from without.

So also with cheese, fruit, and other staple articles of consumption. Still more striking is the dependence on distant lands for a wide range of articles once esteemed luxuries, but now reckoned among the comforts, if not the necessities, of daily life, such as sugar, tea, and coffee. If the massing of facts into figures best conveys to some minds the nature of the situation it may be put in the statement that every year the United Kingdom pays for articles used for food brought from abroad the sum of £153,000,000 sterling. Or it may be better illustrated by a comparison. Draw around almost any other nation or country of modern times—Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia—a barrier preventing the ingress of any food supply from the outer world. There will be inconvenience, some measure of restriction of consumption in a few particulars, but the condition is one which could be endured not merely for months but for years. Place a like barrier around the British Islands and {106} in six weeks the pressure of want will begin to be felt; in six months starvation will be the prevalent condition of the population.

Such a picture is, of course, imaginary—the fact which lies behind it is stern reality.

The illustration emphasizes, but does not exaggerate, the absolutely unique nature of the national position.

For the first time in the course of human history we have had in the last half century presented to us in the British Islands the spectacle of a great people depending for its existence upon the safe and continuous transport from the most remote corners of the globe of about two-thirds of the chief articles of daily consumption.

That the outlook of such a people upon the world should differ fundamentally from that of any other people of past times or of the present day is manifest. What has been said is not meant to prove that the situation is one which should necessarily induce extraordinary anxiety. Difficulties are to be measured by the resources at hand to grapple with them. Danger only comes when the sense of proportion between the two is lost.

Food is not all. Britain the workshop of the world, and three-fourths of its working population artizans! Upon what do these vast armies of industry, these millions of working men and women, spend their toil to earn the wages that buy the food thus brought to them from such great distances and at {107} such expense? Once more we find the ends of the earth scoured to furnish them with the raw material upon which they work. Wool from Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, South America; cotton from the Southern States, India, Egypt; timber from Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Honduras; precious metals, ores, jute, hemp and other fibres, oils, gums, ivory, shells, hides, furs, precious stones—everything that can be moulded for use or beauty, all productions of land and sea, are poured forth day by day from the holds of a thousand ships in the greater ports of the United Kingdom to be transferred to the centres of British industry.

The critical character of this dependence for a perfectly steady supply of raw material is under modern conditions as striking as the extent of the dependence. The great Yorkshire woollen spinners tell us that to be cut off even for three or four weeks from the supplies of Australian wool would mean the closing of hundreds or thousands of factories and a widespread paralysis of industry. They point out that when the regularity of sea transport depended upon wind and weather, or when the home market supplied a larger share of the material, common prudence made it necessary to lay in heavy stocks to provide against contingencies for many months. So fixed has now become the habit of depending upon the regular arrival of ocean steam-ships from week to week, the regular sequence of great wool sales at frequent stated periods, that it is possible {108} in manufacturing to live as it were from hand to mouth; that, as a matter of fact, a large proportion of manufacturers do so live, purchasing only enough for their immediate wants, and renewing their stock at very short intervals. Thus the effect of any stoppage of sea-transport would be disastrously felt at once, reaching in its influence alike the manufacturing capitalist and the workman in his cottage.

A group of manufacturers at Galashiels, one of the important Scottish centres of the wool trade, told me that nine out of every ten pounds of wool they used was Australian. The proportion can scarcely be less in the Bradford district and other large areas of Yorkshire. Nor are such illustrations of the completeness of dependence on supplies abroad exceptional or confined to wool. Cut off Dundee from its importations of Indian jute and the collapse of its main industry would be sudden and general. Lancashire is not likely to forget what it means to lose control of her ordinary markets for obtaining raw cotton. We may put together once more the figures which express this marvellous relation to British industry to the remoter parts of the world.

For wool last year Britain paid £26,000,000; for raw cotton £40,000,000; wood £14,000,000; metals £23,000,000; flax, hemp, and jute £10,000,000; and so on.

But even what has been said of food and raw material of manufacture exhibits but one side of the national position. To be the workshop of the world {109} implies access to the markets of the world. I say nothing of the vast centres of commerce abroad which serve as the main points of distribution. But go to the loneliest Australian or New Zealand bush; to the backwoods and remote prairies of Canada; to distant South African gold and diamond diggings, and we find the shelves of the humblest shop filled with the products of the looms of Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Paisley, of the factories everywhere scattered throughout the United Kingdom where the vast inflow of raw material is worked up. To foreign countries, as well as to those inhabited by British people, to every civilized or uncivilized continent, district, or island, however remote, these manufactures penetrate, and must continue to penetrate, if the vast fabric of British industry is to be maintained.

Once more, the figures which represent the annual aggregate of export trade are immense: cotton goods £70,000,000; woollen goods £26,000,000; iron and steel £28,000,000; machinery £ 13,000,000.

Between this great inflow of raw material and food, and the equally great output of manufactured goods, has sprung up yet another prime factor in Britain's industrial position, her shipping interests. She has become by far the greatest of ocean carriers. It is not merely that scores of millions of capital are invested in ships alone; that 60 per cent. of all the steam tonnage of the world and a large proportion of its sailing tonnage are under the British flag; that tens of thousands of men find employment {110} upon the seas, and tens of thousands more in the immediate handling of ships and their cargoes around British harbours and docks. The mere construction of ships and their equipment for this vast carrying trade gives an impulse to almost every form of British industry. The shipyards of the Clyde alone turn out at times a thousand tons or more of iron or steel shipping for every working day of the year. The vast aggregate for the whole country forms a large element in the industrial life of the nation.

Here, then, in roughest outline, is a picture of the unique position which the British Islands hold in the world today. Let us remind ourselves once more that the extreme singularity of this situation has been created well within the span of an ordinary life, for the sea-borne commerce of the United Kingdom, which today has an annual value of more than £740,000,000, was, when the Queen came to the throne in 1837, only £155,000,000. The difference between these figures fairly measures the increased dependence of the country upon its imports, exports, and the carrying trade.

Now for a nation existing under conditions such as have been described, where the work and wages and food of the masses of the people depend on easy and constant access to the remotest corners of the globe, it seems possible to indicate what must be the end and aim of national policy—the supreme objects of statesmanship. Surely the first object must be to {111} secure the absolute safety for trading purposes of the water-ways of the world.

Maritime security Britain is bound to maintain, if she is to retain manufacturing superiority. The only manufacturing rival which seriously threatens her is the United States. It is a friendly rivalry, and should remain such. But each country, with what advantages it has, will play relentlessly for its own hand, and for the welfare, real or supposed, of its own people. Britain carries on the contest by means of Free Trade, thereby cheapening production, and winning the market of the world. The United States use for their weapon Protection, stimulating production till it becomes cheap. Britain also, under this opposing condition, depends for food and material on the outside world—the United States have the food and most of the material within themselves. The first serious break in Britain's power to hold the waterways of the world would place her at a fatal disadvantage. Safe in a continental isolation the United States could supply the customers who came to her for manufactured goods with what they wanted. To be on even terms Britain must have maritime security, and this she could not have if by the successive cutting away of her great outlying offshoots she should lose control of those points of vantage which now are the secret of her supremacy quite as much as the ships which she sends forth from her dockyards.

Second only to maritime security seems to me the necessity for a country in the position of Great Britain {112} to keep as far as possible the sources from which she draws her food and raw material within the national domain.

Great Britain has had at least one sharp reminder of the advantage which would accrue to a country so dependent as she is on the outside world of having the areas of production under the national flag. This reminder was one which gave a rough shock to the generally accepted theory that if the consumer wants to buy and the producer wants to sell, all the conditions for satisfactory commercial intercourse between countries are fulfilled without reference to national relationship. In 1865 the War of Secession broke out in America, and the ports of the cotton-producing states were blockaded. Millions of bales of cotton were wasting on the wharves and in the warehouses at New Orleans, Charleston, and other Southern towns. On the other hand, in Lancashire millions of spindles were idle, and vast bodies of people were reduced to extreme need or thrown for a long period upon the charity of the benevolent from want of the raw material of their industry. The producers certainly wished to sell, the consumers to purchase. English manufacturers had money with which to buy—English shippers had the vessels to carry—the English Government had the men-of-war which could easily have forced a way to the supplies which were needed. Between was the barrier of international law and national honour, which forbid a neutral nation to interfere with belligerents. The barrier was respected, {113} and England passed triumphantly through the moral strain involved in resisting the temptation to go to war for an industrial end alone. The lesson to be learned from such an example appears manifest. The retention of the national right to keep open the communication between the centre of consumption and the areas of supply is alike desirable for the industry of the one and of the other. To give an obvious illustration. The vast woollen industries of Yorkshire are supplied almost exclusively from regions now within the Empire—New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. So long as these countries remain under a common British flag the working man who produces the wool and the working man who spins it retain the national right to keep their industries in touch with each other: the moment they pass out from under the flag that right is given up. Great Britain would have no more right to force her way into the ports of an independent Australia or New Zealand, blockaded by a German, French, or Chinese fleet, than she had to force her way into the harbours of Louisiana or South Carolina. The neutral flag may furnish a way of escape for Britain's industry when she is herself in direct conflict with another power; it gives no assistance when a nation with which she is at peace chooses to close the ports of a country from which she draws her food or the material of her industry. The reader will find that the illustration is a far-reaching one if he extends it to the whole range of Britain's wants either for supply or for markets for her manufactured {114} goods; and to the whole range of colonial necessity for a market for their staple products, and a supply of what they do not produce.

Still more significant is the illustration if he remember that as regards food supply the Empire might, in an emergency, soon become entirely independent of foreign countries, while, with the single exception of cotton, we could tide over an indefinite period even in the matter of raw material for manufacture.

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CHAPTER V.

CANADA.

WHEN we come to regard our question from the colonial point of view the first place in any consideration must obviously be given to Canada. The national problem is there presented to us in a crucial form. The growth and consolidation of the Dominion have done more than anything else to make manifest the anomalous condition of the Empire. In it we have a colony with a population twice as large as the United States had when they became independent, larger than that of England in Elizabeth's time, or than that of some considerable European States at the present day. It is a population which has proved itself equal to the highest duties of citizenship. The slowness of earlier growth has not been without advantage, since it has unquestionably given steadiness and maturity to political thought. With comparative suddenness Canada has now caught the inspiration of a large national life. Vast undertakings in the direction of material progress are entered upon with confidence and executed with success. On political lines her people have been the first to prove by actual experiment {116} on a large scale the adaptability of a federal system to British methods of representative and responsible government. Since confederation was entered into nearly twenty-five years ago self-reliance has become the keynote of Canadian life and has produced its legitimate and ordinary results. In material development, in political organization, in the spirit of the people, the Dominion has reached the stage looked forward to by early thinkers on colonial problems as the one at which it might reasonably be expected to assume an independent national existence. It must therefore soon bring to the test the theories of these thinkers as to the results of national expansion.

The position of Canada is made unique among British colonies by another condition. She is so placed geographically that annexation to another kindred state is a manifestly possible alternative to either independence or continued British connection. Whether independence, annexation to the United States, or a closer and permanent union with the Empire is most consistent with the honour and interest of the Canadian people, and whether the separation of Canada from the Empire is a matter of indifference to the British nation at large, are questions to be here discussed.

Facts of geography, facts of history, and questions of trade relations, must enter chiefly into the consideration.

There is an advantage in giving the first place to geography.

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A glance at the map shows the relation of Canada to the Oceanic Empire of which it now forms a part. It fronts towards Europe on the Atlantic and towards Asia on the Pacific. On both oceans it gives the finest naval positions that a great maritime power could desire, and the only positions possible for British people on the American continent. A wonderful system of waterways penetrates, from the Atlantic frontage, unto the very heart of the continent, to prairies which are the greatest undeveloped wheat area in the world, lands capable of supporting a large population and of proved capacity to yield a vast surplus of food products. The trend of the Great Lakes and of the St. Lawrence towards the point which gives the shortest sea connection with Europe indicates the natural direction in which this food surplus will chiefly flow. Should the still open question of the summer navigation of Hudson's Bay by grain vessels be settled in the affirmative, even the facilities offered by the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence for cheap transit would be eclipsed, and western wheat placed on English markets at a rate hitherto unknown. But this is a contingency, and it is perhaps better to confine the attention to settled facts.

The significance of Canada's geographical position, facing and commanding the two great northern oceans at the points nearest to the opposite continents of Europe and Asia, is supplemented by geological facts of extreme national interest. At the very point where the Dominion stretches out furthest towards Europe, {118} and where the maritime provinces furnish open harbours all the year round, we find in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton inexhaustible supplies of excellent coal. The coal areas of this region are the only sources: of supply in Eastern America northward of Pennsylvania, and the only sources directly upon the eastern coast of the continent, where they seem to give a singular advantage for both transatlantic and transcontinental trade. Crossing now the 3800 miles which measure the breadth of the continent, we come to the Pacific coast, and the excellent harbours with which it also is everywhere indented. The importance to the Empire of these harbours is manifest, since they are the only ports under the British flag on the whole Pacific coast of America from Cape Horn to the Behring Sea, the only base of naval supply, the only means the Empire has of matching the Russian depot, Vladivostock (soon to be in direct connection with St. Petersburg itself), over which they have the great advantage of being open all the year round. They furnish the base from which the trade of the North Pacific is, and must be, protected. For the defence and prosecution of trade, still more important than the harbours themselves is the fact that in the Island of Vancouver, where Canada stretches out so as to give the shortest route to Japan and China, we have again an abundance of coal. The importance of these deposits is enhanced by the circumstance that all other coal found on the Pacific coast from Cape Horn northward to Puget Sound is of an inferior quality, {119} and limited in quantity. San Francisco itself obtains a large part of its coal from Vancouver Island in the north, or from the British colony of New South Wales on the other side of the Pacific.

Looking East and West, then, the Dominion has its maritime position confirmed by its supplies of coal. This is not all. Deposits extending over thousands of square miles have been discovered midway in the great prairie region, at once solving the fuel problem for a treeless country and supplying the force that carries trade and population across the continent. Later discoveries in the Rocky Mountains indicate the presence there of an anthracite coal peculiarly adapted to naval use, and likely to supply our ships in the Pacific with fuel of a quality equal to any that British mines can furnish.

The facts of Canada's maritime position thus broadly stated will, I think, leave on most minds the impression that should the country pass under a foreign flag, so that British ships could claim only the rights of aliens in the harbours of the Atlantic and Pacific, or even under an independent flag, when they could enjoy only the rights of neutrals, the change would mean a complete revolution in the conditions under which British commerce is protected, and the influence of the nation maintained on the two oceans.

There is, again, a military as well as a naval aspect from which to regard Canada's geographical relation to the Empire.

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The energy of the Canadian people has within a few years linked together the Pacific and Atlantic frontages of the Dominion by a great railway system. The new line has the advantage of being shorter than any other transcontinental route, and crosses the Rocky Mountains at a level 1500 feet below any line further south. The anticipated obstacle of snow blockade in the mountain district has been effectually overcome; in the Eastern or Intercolonial section, where alone this difficulty recurs from drifting snow, it is being reduced to a minimum. Practically it now amounts to the possibility of one or two days' delay twice or thrice during the winter months, and apparently even this might be obviated by the more liberal use of snow-sheds. A winter often passes without any obstruction worth mentioning. The line is unquestionably the most effective among those which cross the American continent. It has enabled English letters to reach Japan in twenty-one days instead of the forty required by the old routes. Military authorities pronounce it a valuable addition to the Empire's means of communication with the East. Its climatic advantage over the Cape of Good Hope and Suez Canal routes at some seasons of the year may yet add strength to its other recommendations. Compared with these routes it is also the safest, since furthest removed from the possibility of European attack. Of its military efficiency there can be no reasonable doubt. The manager of the Canada Pacific Railway told me that his company had made representations {121} to the Imperial Government that it would undertake to transport men in blocks of 5000 from troop-ships at Halifax to troop-ships at Vancouver within seven days. His statement is justified by the fact that a single train has already carried 600 marines and blue-jackets with their officers from the Pacific to the Atlantic within that time. Such trains can be indefinitely multiplied. Thus a squadron at Vancouver could be reinforced from Portsmouth in about a fortnight by this route, a squadron in the China Seas in a little more than three weeks. A fifty days' voyage in the first case by Cape Horn, a forty days' voyage in the latter by the Suez Canal, has hitherto been the rule. Such facts illustrate the greatness of the changes which are taking place in the conditions of our naval defence. The swift steamships which complete the Eastern connection are constructed for immediate transformation in case of necessity into armed cruisers for the transport of troops and for the protection of the commerce which they are themselves creating. Supplemented by ships of a corresponding character on the Atlantic, such a route might in a national emergency prove an immense addition to the military resources of the Empire, and especially for the defence of India. The mere fact of its existence adds to the nation's military prestige, and the consequent hesitation of any other power in making attack.

A word should be added about Canada's geographical relation to the telegraphic system of the {122} Empire. The existing lines of communication between the United Kingdom and the Australasian colonies and India have never yet been tested by the chances of a European war. In all cases they pass over foreign countries or through shallow seas whence they could be easily fished up and cut. What an entire break of this connection would mean in the commercial world may be judged from the fact that even now more than a thousand pounds a day are spent on cablegrams between Britain and the Australasian colonies alone.

What it would mean in the emergencies of war may be left to the imagination. The panic caused in Australia a few years since by an accidental break in the line at a time when war with Russia seemed imminent clearly proved the importance of the question.

These considerations sufficiently indicate the immense advantage and greater security which would come from an alternative route across Canada. The case was clearly stated by Mr. Sandford Fleming, the distinguished Canadian engineer, in an address to the Colonial Conference of 1887, to which he was a delegate: 'The western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway—Vancouver—is in telegraphic communication with London. Communications have passed between London and Vancouver, and replies returned within a few minutes. From Vancouver cables may be laid to Australasia by way of Hawaii or they may be laid from one British island to {123} another, and thus bring New Zealand and all the Australasian colonies directly into telegraphic connection with Great Britain, without passing over any soil which is not British, and by passing only through seas as remote as possible from any difficulties which may arise in Europe.

'Again, India can be reached from Australasia by the lines of the Eastern Telegraphic Company; South Africa can be reached through the medium of the Eastern and South African Company: and thus, by supplying the one link wanting, the Home Government will have the means provided to telegraph to every important British colony and dependency around the circumference of the globe, without approaching Europe at any point.'