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of tropical heat. The trader and the trading company, the missionary, the coloniser and colonist were all to the fore. The railway engineer was active everywhere, linking up territories and creating larger units, in South Africa, in East Africa, in Nigeria.

The older settlements were increasingly important, especially Australia. Between 1880 and 1885 Australians protested in no measured terms against the failure of the Home Government to forestall German annexation in the Pacific and almost at the very same time they sent, as a free-will offering, a contingent to serve on the Red Sea coast of the Sudan after the fall of Khartum. Not only were they determined not to leave the Empire, they were as resolved to claim and earn the right to have a voice in directing it, and time was on their side, bringing with it increase in population and larger units. Their great distance from the mother country had especially influenced the colonies of the Pacific. It had made them self-dependent and independent in a high degree; on the other hand, inasmuch as they were all-British peoples, it had added strength to the instinct of race and clearness to the call of the Old Country. The year 1887 saw the beginning of Empire gatherings to discuss common problems and needs. The meetings developed gradually in British fashion, especially after the South African War had given occasion for the employment on a considerable scale of oversea contingents side by side with the regular forces of the Crown. Active participation in an Empire war by the self-governing units of the Empire meant active partnership in the Empire, together with growing recognition of that partnership and of the nationhood and the individuality of the separate parts.

By the side of the self-governing Dominions, in the dependent provinces of the tropics, experience and modern reasoning had long been suggesting the wisdom and humanity of indirect as compared with direct control, of governing or guiding through the human machinery indigenous to the soil, adapted and progressively improved, in preference to supplanting native laws, customs and methods by alien British institutions. It is very largely on these lines that Great Britain has been carrying out her part as trustee of native races. In India direct and indirect control have been conjointly in operation; but in British India, which has been the scene of direct British control, selfgovernment, which is the negation of control from without, has now been definitely declared to be the goal. This was an outcome of the Great War, the full results of which are still in the future. The war provided a wonderful demonstration of the strength and endurance of the Empire, of its unity amid and in consequence of its many diversities. On the other hand, it applied a hothouse process to movements and tendencies which were working out their own salvation in the slow and sure characteristically British way, and this must be counted a possible source of danger, for not by haste will the commonwealth stand.

CHBE I

2

What is the conclusion of the whole matter? What is the thread, if any, running through a story which has contradicted all logic and perpetually falsified reasoned and reasonable expectation? To the present writer the answer seems to be that the Empire or commonwealth has not been made, it has grown; that it is the product of an island in which there has never been complete fusion; that it is the product of distance; and finally the product of evolution on family lines.

The study of what might have been is sometimes attractive, though rarely of any practical usefulness. If the British Empire is the outcome of natural growth, the question of what would have happened to Great Britain and its people or peoples if there had been no Empire is answered at once; the case would have been that of a child not allowed to grow up, of life abnormally stunted. But, it may be asked, can this general statement be supplemented? Is it possible to indicate in what specific ways, if any, and to what extent the Empire has reacted on the mother island? In answer it would perhaps be true to say that the Empire has reacted on Great Britain and its inhabitants more by increasing its size than by changing its character, which after all is no more than a restatement of the cardinal fact that the Empire has been a growth. Without the Empire the island, too large and well-populated to be conquered, would doubtless have retained its independence, would have developed a strong navy, would have exploited its mineral wealth and built great cities. The attitude of Great Britain towards free trade does not seem to have been affected one way or the other by consciousness of possessing an Empire which might in the coming time be selfsufficing. The strongest free-traders were the most antagonistic to the Empire, and obviously without the Empire free trade would have been very much more necessary to the islanders than it has been with it. Apart from this matter of free trade, what the island bred and taught the Empire went on breeding and teaching on a constantly widening scale. What Great Britain was before the Empire came to pass, it was more so afterwards; but with the growth of the Empire the difference in degree became almost exalted into difference in kind. Insularity, independence, aloofness, whatever best describes the British type of character, went over the water with the pioneers of the Empire, with the first settlers in Virginia, New England or Barbados. Unlike those of the Latin stock who crossed the seas, our forefathers in the lands to which they went did not mix appreciably with other breeds, whether white or coloured. With little alloy, the type brought out from home gained strength in new surroundings with ample elbowroom, in unlimited freedom except for trade restrictions imperfectly enforced. As the generations went on, in spite of distance, the colonists made themselves felt in the mother country, and the climax was reached in the American Revolution with its lasting effect upon political life and thought in Great Britain.

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Living in an island, which, as Adam Smith pointed out in the passage already quoted, has a great extent of sea coast in proportion to its total area and many fine estuaries and rivers, Britons could not but be in large numbers sea-goers and sea-traders; they could not but develop sea power, empire or no empire. But it seems reasonable to conclude that it was the existence of an infant empire which gave occasion for or, at the least, reinforced the arguments for the Navigation Laws; that those laws nursed English shipping and English carrying trade in their struggling years; and that after they had, under changed conditions, become worse than useless and positively harmful, it was still the existence of the Empire, the fact of owning colonial and Indian possessions, that made the strongest possible sea power for Great Britain at once vitally necessary for the protection of those possessions, and, in view of the naval bases, the refitting stations, and the nurseries of seamen provided by the Empire overseas, not extremely difficult of accomplishment.

If one outcome of the Navigation Laws was the strengthening of British sea power, another was the creation or furtherance of vested interests and monopolies which, as has been seen above, in the eighteenth century especially, very greatly affected political and social life in Great Britain. Such were the West African slave trade interest, the kindred West India sugar interest, and the interest of the East Indian nabobs. It is true that there was no need of an empire in order to create trade monopolies, that without any British colonies there might have been a large British carrying trade in slaves and sugar, and without any British possessions in India there might have been, as there actually was, relatively speaking, in the early days of the East India Company, a flourishing commerce between Great Britain and India. But is it conceivable that without the permanent oversea bases, the colonies, the settlements, and the factories held on freehold tenure, British trade could ever have attained to the dimensions to which it did attain or would have been so sure in foundation and growth as it actually was, or, as a consequence, that the monopolies in Great Britain would have been as powerful as they were?

The money which flowed into the mother island from the colonies and India may perhaps have been a greater curse than a blessing to British national life and character, but on the other hand the colonies and India supplied and still supply outlets for British men and women and British capital. Here again it will be said that there would have been ample use for both men and money overseas without the need of any British ownership of soil. This argument, so often used in the middle of the last century in one form of words or another, really derived whatever force or substratum of truth it had from the existence of the United States, which after all were once part of the British Empire and peopled by our own stock; and moreover those who contemplated a future for Great Britain without an empire did

not take into consideration how that future could be safeguarded if other competing European nations possessed empires while we had none. In any case without an empire Great Britain would have been very much poorer in one important respect. An unsurpassed opportunity for calling out and developing the best British qualities would have been wanting. It may be said again that, without the Empire, British engineers, the makers of railways, telegraphs, irrigation works and the like, would all the world over have been able to put forth their initiative and resourcefulness, their capacity for turning existing conditions to the best advantage for the work in hand, that, if they were found to be the fittest instruments for given purposes, they would have been employed. But the world never has been an open market, and it will not seriously be contended that the prospects of openings in foreign lands are as a whole to be compared in the case of British citizens with those which their own Empire presents. In one direction there would be no openings at all—there would be in effect, though a few special instances to the contrary might be quoted, no field for administrators. As a school for administration the British Empire stands alone. Outside the self-governing dominions, in India and the Far East, in tropical Africa including the Sudan, and to a lesser degree in other parts of the world, British genius for management and control has been developed in a wonderful way, and the Empire has reacted on the homeland by sending back a succession of highly trained men, before their time of active usefulness is past, to leaven public and private life in Great Britain. It would be interesting and instructive to have a record of the part which has been taken in home life by retired Anglo-Indian officials, and it is impossible to contend that the Empire has not given a broader outlook to the dwellers in Great Britain, by bringing among them a strain of men who have handled and taken responsibility for all sorts and conditions of race, custom and creed throughout the wide world.

If anything absolutely new can be traced to the possession of our Empire, it must be traced to the most original feature in it, the progressive development of dependencies into independent partner nations which have nevertheless remained by the mother country's side and under the same sovereign. In the report of the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee of the Imperial Conference of 1926 the members of "the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions" are defined as "autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British commonwealth of nations". To this there is no parallel in history, and perhaps it would be fair to say that, whereas the present partner nations overseas were once, but have ceased to be, dependencies of Great Britain, the life of Great

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Britain as a nation is now, as it was not formerly, conditioned by its partnership with these other nations. One result is that those citizens of Great Britain who think at all on political and constitutional questions, are compelled now to think not only imperially, as Joseph Chamberlain counselled, but internationally—in a new sense as opposed to a continent-of-Europe sense. Under the old order, as late as Palmerston's régime or even later, colonies marched infinitely far behind foreign Powers in the consideration of British statesmen. It is not so now. In our outlook on the future the British Commonwealth of Nations takes the first place.

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