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44 We fervently believe that our only chance of national prosperity lies in the timely remodelling of our system, so as to put it as nearly as possible upon an equality •with the improved management of the Americans."— Richard Cobden, 1835.
r**
I he
Americanization of
the World <£ *
or
The Trend of the Twentieth Century
By > y-
WfTf S
Author of "The Truth About Russia," "The Pope and the New Era," "The United States of Europe"
With Several Interesting Maps
HORACE MARKLEY
3
NEW YORK ££££? LONDON
/
[14 i t>
Copyright, 1901
by
HORACE MARKJLEY
All Rights Reserved
Copyright, J 902
by
HORACE MARKLEY
All Rights Reserved
CONTENTS
PART I
THE UNITED STATES AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
Chapter I The English-speaking World— page 1
" II The Basis for Reunion— page 17
** HI The Americanization of Ireland— page 27
" IV Of South Africa— page 51
« V Of the West Indies and Thereabouts— page 70
" VI Of Newfoundland and Canada— page 83
44 VII Of Australia— page 123
" /HI A Crucible of Nations— page 145
PART II
THE REST OF THE WORLD
Chapter I Europe— page 161
44 II The Ottoman Empire— page 183
44 m Asia— page 199
44 IV Central and South America— page 214
44 V Ths Monroe Doctrine— page 229
44 VI On International Arbitration— page 248
Contents
PART in
HOW AMERICA AMERICANIZES Chapter I Religion— page 255
II Literature and Journalism — page 276
III Art, Science, and Music — page 304
IV Marriage and Society— page 3J8 V Sport — page 334
VI The "American Invasion"— page 342 Vn Railways, Shipping, and Trusts — page 360
PART IV
THE SUMMING-UP
Chapter I What is the Secret of American Success ?— page 38J-
U A Look Ahead!— page 396
HI Steps Towards Reunion — page 413
IV The End Thereof— page 439
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The Americanization of the World
Part One
The United States and the British Empire
Chapter First
The English-Speaking World
The Americanization of the world is a phrase which excites, quite needlessly, some resentment in Great Britain. It is even regarded as an affront to England to suggest that the world is being Americanized. Its true destiny of course is to be Anglicized. And many are quick to discern something of anti-patriotic bias in the writers who venture to call attention to the trend of the Twentieth Century.
To all such irate champions of England and the English it is sufficient to reply that, as the creation
I
Where John Bull Stands
of the Americans is the greatest achievement of our race, there is no reason to resent the part the Amer- icans are playing in fashioning the world in their image, which, after all, is substantially the image of ourselves.
If we are afflicted with national vanity we can con- sole ourselves by reflecting that the Americans are only giving to others what they inherited from our- selves. Whatever they do, all goes to the credit of the family. It is an unnatural parent who does not exult in the achievements of his son, even although they should eclipse the triumphs of his sire as much as the victories of Hannibal threw into the shade the exploits of Hamilcar.
Whatever may be the objections that are raised from one side or the other, I hope the reader, if he is a Briton, will at least be able to go so far with me as to rejoice in contemplating the achievements of the mighty nation that has sprung from our loins, and if he is an American, to tolerate the complacency with which John Bull sets down all his exploits to the credit of the family. Without that element of mutual sympathy, it is to be feared the survey of the process which I have dubbed the Americanization of the World, is not likely to tend to edification, but rather to recriminations, cavilings, and bitterness of spirit. ,
Of one thing the Briton is assured. However he may be outstripped and overshadowed by the Ameri- can, no one can deprive us of the traditional glories which encompass the cradle of the race. "The purple
2
Of British Genesis
mist of centuries and of song" will never lift from these small islands on the northern seas.
We may lose our primacy in the forging of iron and steel, but no "invasion" can deprive us of the indestruc- tible renown possessed by the land which gave birth to iVlfred and Cromwell, to Shakespeare and Milton, to Burns and Scott. And as men will ever think more highly of the City of the Violet Crown with its Groves of Academe, peopled with poets and sages, than of the geographically vast expanse of Asiatic empires, so it may well be that England may be a name worn ever nearer the great heart of mankind than that of the Continent-covering son of Anak, whose bulk overshadows the world.
At the same time — and I hasten to make this admis- sion to pacify irate American readers resentful of the. suggestion that John Bull stands to Brother Jonathan as Athens to Persia — it is possible that the American may stand to the Briton as Christianity stands to Judaism.
As it was through the Christian Church that the monotheism of the Jew conquered the world, so it may be through the Americans that the English ideals expressed in the English language may make the tour of the planet. The parallel is dangerously ex- act. For there is too much reason to fear that many Americans regard the English with the same unfilial ingratitude that many Christians regard the Jew. It is as useless to remind them that the men of the May- flower were English, as it is to remind anti-Semites that Christ and His apostles were Jews. Yet it was
3
The United States Leads
through the Christian Church, too often unmindful of its Jewish parentage, that the ethical ideals of the Jew permeated and civilized the world. The philosopher recognizes that the world-mission of the Jews was only fulfilled through the Nazarene whom they crucified ; and so in years to come the philosophical historian may record that the mission of the English fulfilled itself through the Ameri- can. The Americanization of the world is but the Anglicizing of the world at one remove.
That the United States of America have now arrived at such a pitch of power and prosperity as to have a right to claim the leading place among the English- speaking nations cannot be disputed. The census re- turns at the beginning and the end of the Nineteenth Century are conclusive. The figures stand thus : — •
The United Kingdom (1801) 15,717,287 (1901) 41,454,578
The United States (1800) 5,305,925 (1900) 76,299,529
If it be objected that the population of the United Kingdom is only a fraction of the King's subjects, let us add to the population of the United Kingdom every white-skinned person in the British Empire, and let us at the same time deduct from the population of the United States all men of color. The figures will stand thus :—
1801 1901
The British Empire 16,000,000 55,000,000
The United States 4,300,000 66,000,000
If any one objects that we have not included the my- riads of India among British citizens, the answer is
The Decree of Destiny
easy. We are comparing the English-speaking com- munities. The right of leadership does not depend upon how many millions, more or less, of colored peo- ple we have compelled to pay us taxes. It depends upon the power, the skill, the wealth, the numbers of the white citizens of the self-governing State.
It may be said that it is absurd to group together as English-speaking men millions who, like the Cana- dians of Quebec and the colonists in Mauritius, only speak French, or, like the Dutch of South Africa, only speak the Taal. This, it may be objected, unfairly swells the British ^total. But against this we must offset the millions of emigrants who have studded the United States with patches of the Old World, and who, until the next generation has been passed through the schools, cannot be described as English speakers. Roughly speaking, the figures given above may be said to represent the comparative numerical strength of the two sections of the English-speaking world. The Re- publican section has forged ahead of that which clings to the Monarchy. Nor is there any prospect that their relative positions will be reversed. As John the Bap- tist said of Jesus of Nazareth, so Britain may say to the United States, "He must increase but I must decrease." The Baptist did not repine, neither should we.
The Briton, instead of chafing against this inevitable supersession, should cheerfully acquiesce in the decree of Destiny, and stand in betimes with the conquering American. The philosophy of common sense teaches us that, seeing we can never again be the first, stand- ing alone, we should lose no time in uniting our for-
5
The Supreme Power
tunes with those who have passed us in the race. Has the time not come when we should make a resolute effort to realize the unity of the English-speaking race? What have we to gain by perpetuating the schism that we owe to the perversity of George the Third and the determination of his pig-headed advisers "to put the thing through" and chastise the insolence of these re- volted colonists by "fighting to a finish"? As an in- tegral part of the English-speaking federation, we should continue to enjoy not only undisturbed, but with enhanced prestige, our pride of place, while if we re- main outside, nursing our Imperial insularity on monar- chical lines, we are doomed to play second fiddle for the rest of our existence. Why not finally recognize the truth and act upon it? What sacrifices are there which can be regarded as too great to achieve the realization of the ideal of the unity of the English- speaking race?
Consider for a moment what at present is the dis- tribution of the surface of this planet among the va- rious races of mankind. Instead of counting Britain and the United States as two separate and rival States, let us pool the resources of the Empire and the Re- public and regard them with all their fleets, armies, and industrial resources as a political, or, if you like, an Imperial unit.
The English-speaking States, with a population of 121,000,000 self-governing white citizens, govern 353.- 000,000 of Asiatics and Africans. Under their allied flags labor one-third of the human race.
The sea, which covers three-fourths of the surface
World Conquerors
of the planet, is their domain. Excepting on the Eux- ine and the Caspian, no ship dare plough the salt seas in Eastern or Western hemisphere if they choose to for- bid it. They are supreme custodians of the waterways of the world, capable by their fiat of blockading into submission any European State contemplating an ap- peal to the arbitrament of war.
Of the dry land, they have occupied and are ruling all the richest territories in three continents. With the exception of Siberia they have seized all the best gold- mines of the world. There is hardly a region where white men can breed and live and thrive that they have not appropriated. They have picked out the eyes of every continent. They reign in the land of the Pha- raohs, they have conquered the Empire of Aurungzebe, and have seized with imperious hand the dominions of Spain. They have despoiled the Portuguese, the French, and the Dutch, and have left to the German and the Italian nothing but the scraps and knuckle- bones of a colonial dominion.
The net result works out as follows : —
|
Country. |
Square Miles. |
Population. |
|
|
White. |
Colored. |
||
|
The United States The British Empire.. . . |
3,754,000 11,894,000 |
66,000,000 55,000,000 |
20,000,000 333,000,000 |
|
Total |
15,648,000 |
121,000,000 |
353,000,000 |
Warned Off
The rest of the world cuts but a poor figure com- pared with the possessions of the English-speaking
allies.
|
Country. |
Square Miles. |
Population. |
|
|
White. |
Colored. |
||
|
Russia |
8,754,000 1,327,308 8,215,858 3,845,000 1,238,000 13,293,000 |
121,000,000 15,000,000 39,000,000 55,000,000 134,000,000 |
12,000,000 |
|
China |
400,000,000 60,000,000 46,000,000 15,000,000 |
||
|
Latin America France |
|||
|
Germany |
|||
|
All others |
129,000,000 |
||
The lion's share of the world is ours, not only in bulk, but in tid-bits also. The light land of the Sahara is not worth a centime an acre. The vast area of German South Africa would hardly provide a livelihood for the population of a middle-sized German village. With the exception of the Rhine, the Danube, the Amoor, the Volga, the Platte and the Amazon, nearly all the great navigable rivers of the world enter the sea under the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes. The valley of the Yang-tse-Kiang is earmarked as the sphere of our influence. The whole of the North American Conti- nent,' from the North Pole to the frontier of Mexico, is within the ring fence of the English-speaking race, and from the whole of Central and Southern America all trespassers have been emphatically warned off by the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine.
8
Drunkards and Pharisees
Population should be weighed as well as counted. In a census return a Hottentot counts for as much as a Cecil Rhodes ; a mean white on a southern swamp is the census equivalent for Mr. J. P. Morgan or Mr. Edison.
A nation which has no illiterates can hardly be counted off against the Russians, only three per cent, of whom can read or write. Excluding France and Germany and the highly civilized group of small states, Scandinavian, Dutch and Swiss, the English- speaking world comes out easily on top, no matter what test of civilization is employed.
We have more schools to the square mile, more col- leges to the county, more universities to the State than any of the others. We print more books, read more newspapers, run more libraries. We have more churches per hundred thousand of the population, and attend them better. Our death rate is diminishing even more rapidly than our birth rate, our pauperism is de- creasing, our criminal statistics are reassuring. Only in one respect do we fall below the average. We are the most drunken race in the whole world — the most drunken and in both our branches the most Pharisaical.
We are as piratical as the worst of our neighbors, but we alone make broad our phylacteries while we are plundering, and pray while we prey. In all the ma- terial tests of advancing civilization, railways, steam- ships, telephones, telegraphs, electric trolleys, sanitary appliances, and the like, we beat the world.
If from a comparison between the English-speaking
9
The Weight of Numbers
duality and the rest of the planet we pass to a com- parison between the two English-speaking races, some curious results come out. The United States, which has shot ahead of us in population, has comparatively only a small area. The total superficial area of the United States is only 3,603,844 square miles on the mainland. The total area of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippine Islands will not add more than 100,000 square miles to that total.
But the British Empire has 3,456,383 square miles in Canada, 3,076,763 in Australia, and 1,808,258 in India. The vast expanses of Canada and Australia are but sparsely peopled ; there is elbow room in both for a greater population than that which the United States carries to-day.
The following comparison of populations is inter- esting, excluding colored persons : —
1901 1900
United States (not >
England 31,231,684 including those I 57,422,000
below) )
Wales 1,294,032 Virginia 1,854,184
Scotland 4,471,957 Illinois 4,821,550
Ireland 4,456,546 New York 7,118,012
Canada J 5 .18 5,990 Pennsylvania 6 3Q2> , , ?
Australia 3, 726,450 Missouri 3, 106,665
New Zealand 773. 440 Connecticut 908,355
South Africa and ) 1,000,000 »,■ , , ,„
Miscellaneous., [(estimated) Nebraska 1,068,539
These figures do not pretend to be exact. No one really knows how many white citizens of the British Empire are scattered over the myriad-peopled regions JO
Comparative Wealth
where we maintain the Roman peace, how many are on the high seas, and how many are doing sentry go all round the world. A million is probably not an un- fair estimate. The comparison is interesting, and may be suggestive to some readers who have never quite realized that there are single states in the American Union with a population greater than that of the whole Dominion of Canada or the kingdom of Scotland.
When the comparison is made between finance, railways and shipping, and there is no distinction made between colored and white men, the British Empire, with its multitudinous host of dark-skinned races, is easily preponderant.
The comparison works out somewhat as follows : —
|
Country. |
Area. |
Revenue. £ |
Railways |
Shipping. Tons. |
Exports and Imports. |
|
Colonies and Depen- |
Sq. Miles. 121, OOO 11,429,000 |
Millions. 120 no |
Miles. 21,659 54,000 |
Millions. 9 1 |
Millions. 815 201 |
|
11,550,000 3,700,000 |
230 139 |
75,659 184,278 |
10 4* |
1,016 3S0 |
|
|
15,250,000 |
369 |
259,037 |
*5 |
1.396 |
Mr. Chauncey McGovern contributed to Pearson's Magazine last October a curious comparison between the English-speaking States and Russia, France, and Spain, from which I extract the following Table: —
The English-Speaking United States of the World. Russia, France and Spain.
Area 15,636,000 square miles.
Population 473,500,000
Revenue .£379,800,000
National Debts. £1,560, 705,000
Railways 267,150 miles.
Exports £325,251,600
Merchant Ships. 19,236,00010ns.
Naval (inns 13-319
12,320,000 square miles. 217,218,000 £133, 103,000 £2,281,951,000
67,260 miles. £239,920,600
3,037,000 tons. io, 993
11
A Combination
A more detailed comparison between the English- speaking States and France, Russia, and Germany, was made by Sir Richard Temple in September, 1899. I quote his figures as they stand without attempting to bring them up to date : —
English-Speaking. Russia, Germany and Spain.
Population.
White 125,000,000 White 221,000,000
Colored 353,000,000 Colored 64,000,000
475,000,000 285,000,000
A re a. 15} millions square miles. | 13I millions square miles.
Coast Line.
62,000 miles and 19 first-rate harbors. | 17,000 miles and 5 harbors.
Railways.
258,000 miles. I 79,500 miles.
Annual Trade.
.£1,600,000,000. ,£1,120,000,000.
|
English-Speaking. |
Russia, Germany and France. |
||
|
Sh ibping. |
Iron Ore. |
Shipping. |
Iron Ore. |
|
11,000,000 tons. |
25,000,000. |
3,750,000 tons. |
20,000,000 tons. |
|
Fisheries. |
Revenue. |
Fisheries. |
Revenue. |
|
320,000. |
^377,000,000. |
100,000. |
.£405,000,000. |
|
Coal Output. |
A rmies. |
Coal Output. |
A rimes. |
|
405,000,000. |
1,000,000. |
138,000,000 tons. |
7,000,000. |
|
Navies. — |
»io ships. |
Navies. — 381 |
ships. |
This represents a greater factor of organized force than has ever before been at the disposal of a single race.
The question arises whether this gigantic aggregate can be pooled. We live in the day of combinations. Is there no Morgan who will undertake to bring about the greatest combination of all — a combination of the whole English-speaking race?
The same motive which has led to the building up of the Trust in the industrial world, may bring about this great combination in the world of politics. It is not a sentimental craze. The question is prompted bv the most solid of material considerations. Why should we not combine? We should be stronger as against outside attack, and what is of far greater importance, \2
A Plea for Unity
there would be much less danger of the fierce indus- trial rivalry that is to come leading to international strain and war.
New York competes with Massachusetts and Penn- sylvania with Illinois, but no matter how severe may be the competition, its stress never strains the federal tie. States in a federal Union are as free to compete with each other as are towns in an English county, but being united in one organic whole the war of trade never endangers the public peace. Why should we not aim at the same goal in international affairs? If the English-speaking world were unified even to the ex- tent of having a central court for the settlement of all Anglo-American controversies, our respective manu- facturers would be free to compete without any risk of their trade rivalry endangering good relations between the Empire and the Republic. And that would be again worth making no small sacrifice in order to secure.
The tendency of the last half century has been all in favor of the unification of peoples who speak the same language. It is not likely to slacken in the new cen- tury. The Nineteenth Century unified Germany and Italy. Will the Twentieth Century unify the English- speaking race?
It is a momentous question. The remembrance of the via dolorosa of blood and tears by which the Ger- man race attained to unity may well deter the timid from suggesting that the English-speaking world should essay to reach the same goal. But the story of how the Germans realized their national unity is full of suggestion for us, both for encouragement and for warning. For the German race a hundred years
*3
/
The Rise of Germany
since was very much like the English-speaking race to- day. Austria then was what Great Britain is now.* She had the prestige of antiquity, the Imperial aureole was round her brow, she reigned over many races of various tongues, and she was as proud as Lucifer. Over against her were the Prussians — the Americans of their time.
They were young and enterprising; the Hohenzol- lerns were but upstart parvenus besides the Hapsburgs, but they had the genius for organization, the instinct for education, and a passionate patriotism. Between these two lay the minor German States, who corre- sponded not inaptly to the various English-speaking colonies which look to Britain as their natural head, very much as the South German States regarded Aus- tria, wTho presided over the Bund, as the pivot of the German political system. In the presence of national rivalries so intense, and political barriers so innumer-
* When I was revising the proofs of this chapter, I was considerably sur- prised to find that the London correspondent of the Novoye V'remya in Octo- ber last had already called attention to the analogy between Great "Britain and Austria. He pushed the parallel still further home. He declared that the true parallel of the present situation must be sought not in the relations that existed at the beginning of the nineteenth century between Prussia and Aus- tria, but rather in those which existed at present between the German Empire and Austria, for, in his opinion, the United States have already established over Great Britain the same kind of protectorate as the German Empire has established over the Austrian member of the Triple Alliance. He says •
"Everything proves that Great Britain is now practically dependent upon the United States, and for all international intents and purposes may be con- sidered to be under an American protectorate.
"Just as Germany has used Austria for her own purposes, while guarding her from external and internal dangers, so does America take advantage of British needs and weakness, caring for England only in so far as self-interest prompts it. The United States has but ]ust entered upon the policy of ex- ploiting the protected kingdom. . . .
"The British have lost all pride in their relation to the United States. They admit that they cannot successfully resist the republic. They no longer trust to their strength, but place their reliance on the racial, literary and social ties which attract the Americans to England. In this surrender to the Amer- icans there is a sentimental motive as well as a practical one. Losing her maritime, commercial, and even financial primacy, England can bear with more resignation the passing of this primacy lo a nation akin to her in lan- guage, civilization, and even blood."
J4 1
English-Speaking Unity
able, the idea of German unity seemed an idler dream in i So i than the idea of English-speaking unity seems in 1901.
We are all familiar with the consequence of allow- ing the German race to persist in its dual organization. As Bismarck wrote in 1856: "For a thousand years, ever since the reign of Charles V., German Dualism has regularly resettled its mutual relations once a cen- tury by a thorough-going internal war, and in this cen- tury also that will prove to be the only feasible expedi- ent for arranging matters satisfactorily."*
Ten years later Bismarck, at Sadowa, settled mat- ters to his satisfaction at least, but to this day one menace to the peace of central Europe arises from the fact that some eight million Germans were left outside the national fold.
Between the two sections of the English-speaking race there has been one war a century so far. There is too much reason to fear that the average will be kept up, unless in some way or other the mischievous work of George III. can be undone. It is, of course, manifestly impossible, even if it were desirable, for the Americans to come back within the pale of the British Empire. But if thai© impossible, there remains the other alternative. Why should not we of the older stock propose to make amends for the folly of our ancestors by recognizing that the hegemony of the race has passed from Westminster to Washington, and proposing to federate the Empire and the Repub- lic on whatever terms may be arrived at, after dis- cussion, as a possible basis for the reunion of our race.
• "Our Chancellor." Busch, vol. i., p. 323.
J5
Words of Wisdom
The suggestion will be derided as a dream. But to quote the familiar saying of Russell Lowell, "It is none the worse for that; most of the best things we now possess began by being dreams."
Mr. Balfour, six years ago, declared "that the idea of
war with the United States of America carries with it
something of the unnatural horror of civil war."
Since then many things have happened to strengthen
that sentiment. But even then he could use these
eloquent words : — ■
" I feel, so far as I can speak for my countrymen, that our pride in the race to which we belong is a pride which includes every English-speaking community in the world. We have a domestic patriotism, as Scotchmen or Englishmen or as Irish- men, or what you will, we have an Imperial patriotism as citi- zens of the British Empire ; but surely, in addition to that, we have also an Anglo-Saxon patriotism which embraces within its ample folds the whole of that great race which has done so much in every branch of human effort, and in that branch of human effort which has produced free institutions and free communities."
And he added some words of wisdom with which I
will close this chapter: —
" We may be taxed with being idealists and dreamers in this matter. I would rather be an idealist and a dreamer, and I look forward with confidence to the time when our ideals will have become real and our dreams \^1 be embodied in actual political fact. For, after all, cireu^Bances will tend in that direction in which we look."
In a subsequent chapter, I attempt to describe some
of these circumstances which already enable us to
foresee the trend of the Twentieth Century: —
'Where is a Briton's Fatherland ? A Briton's Fatherland is there.
Will no one tell me of that land ? Our glorious Anglo-Saxon race
'Tis where one meets with English Shall ever fill earth's highest place,
foli^ The sun shall never more go down
' And hears the tongue that Shake- On English temple, tower and town ;
speare spoke; And wander where a Britnn will,
Where songs of' Burns are in the air, His Fatherland shall hold him still"
\6
The Americanization of the World
&
Chapter Second
The Basis for Reunion
Let it be admitted, if only for the sake of our argu- ment, that the establishment of English-speaking unity is a matter to be desired in the interest alike of the peace of the world and the liberties of man- kind. The question next arises, how can this unity most easily and effectually be brought about? In attempting to answer this question, I disclaim in ad- vance any accusation that I am imperilling the end in view by an inconsiderate precipitance in pressing for the adoption of measures that promise to lead in that direction.
I only seek to discuss tendencies, to estimate forces, and to forecast the probable course of the natural evolution of the existing factors in the Empire and the Republic, and in the nations on their frontiers. In presence of a problem so immense, fraught with consequences so momentous for the weal or woe of mankind, it would be presumption to attempt to pro- claim solutions before the governing factors have been clearly discerned.
\7
Anglo or American
*»
Nevertheless, it may not be impossible for even the cursory observer to see the trend of events, if he keeps his attention fixed upon the salient features of the situation. If the two English-speaking States are to come together, it is obvious that there must be some approximation towards a system which may be accepted by all the world-scattered communities of English-speaking men.
This being admitted, the question immediately arises as to whether the Empire will approximate to the Republic, or the Republic to the Empire. Are we to Americanize our institutions, or may we expect to see the Americans Anglicizing their Constitution ? Or may we anticipate that the future normal system of polity for the English-speaking world will be arrived at by such an exact balance between the English and American elements, that the product will be strictly Anglo-American, and not more American than it is Anglo ?
It is not very difficult to answer there questions. In the first place, what is the fundamental difference between the British and American Constitutions? That which differentiates them much more than the fact that the head of one is hereditary and of the other elective, is the fact that we have no written Constitution of any kind, whereas the American Con- stitution is the best known type of a written Consti- tution in existence.
The Constitution of the reunited English-speaking race must of necessity be written. Not even the most uncompromising Britisher would venture to sug-
J8
The New Constitution
gest that mankind will ever again attempt to repeat the experiment which has worked for so long with such miraculous success in Great Britain. If we seek for confirmation of this, we have only to turn to the recent history of our greatest colonies. When the Dominion of Canada was constituted, the federation was embodied in a written Constitution.
Last year the same thing occurred in the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia. If Mr. Glad- stone had succeeded in carrying his Home Rule Bill, that measure would have been the written Constitu- tion or fundamental Charter of the new Government of Ireland. The adoption of some sort of written Constitution is therefore inevitable, and by its adop- tion the fundamental feature of the Re-united States would become American, not British.
After the difference of written and unwritten Con- stitutions, the Empire and the Republic differ most visibly in the way in which they appoint their heads. The Americans elect their President for four years. The British crown for life the eldest son of the de- ceased sovereign.
The comparative advantages of a Constitutional Monarchy and of a democratic Republic need not be discussed here. The Americans themselves might be the first to object to the disappearance of the Monarchy. The Crown might remain as a picturesque historical symbol, as a distinctively British institu- tion as local as, although much more ornamental than, the London fog. But not even the most perfervid Royalist in his wildest dreams can conceive the possi-
An American Mould
bility of the Americans ever consenting to become the loyal subjects of a descendant of George III. Even if they developed a taste for monarchy, they would make it the first condition of their sovereign that he should be a thorough American.
No foreign-born citizen, no matter what service he may have rendered the State, no matter how long he may have been naturalized, can occupy the presiden- tial chair, even for the space of four years. If the Head of the State were to occupy the American throne for life, and leave it to his sons and his sons' sons after him, the condition of genuine native-born Americanism would be insisted upon more passionately than ever. The conversion of the Americans to the principle of monarchy, instead of facilitating the race union, would create a new and very serious obstacle in the shape of rival dynasties.
Of that, however, there is fortunately no danger. If, therefore, race union is to be accomplished, the future head of the reunited States will be elective and republican, even if the monarchy continues to be cherished in these islands as a distinctly local institu- tion. Here also the mould of the future destinies of our race will be American and not British.
After the monarchy, the American differs from the British Constitution chiefly in the repudiation by the former of the principle of hereditary legislation and of an Established Church, and the acceptance, with all its logical consequences, of the principle of gov- ernment of the people by salaried representatives chosen by constituencies in strict proportion to their
20
Colonial Independence
numbers, as ascertained at each decennial census. These are the notes which, to the casual observer, differentiate the two Constitutions. Which of them will be the key-note of the Constitution of the Reunited Race?
In discussing this question let us assume that the Americans themselves will be passive in this matter, and that the decision to be taken will rest solely with the subjects of the King. If a plebiscite were to be taken to-morrow, and every white male adult in the Empire were to be asked to vote for or against heredi- tary legislation, an Established Church, and our pres- ent illogical system of unpaid Parliamentary repre- sentation, what would be the result? It is more than probable that even now the majority of British sub- jects would be in favor of the American view.
In England, no doubt, the majority would be in favor of the ancient time-honored institutions. But Wales and Ireland would cast heavy majorities on the other side, and it is extremely doubtful whether Scot- land would not go the same way. The most signifi- cant factor, however, remains to be noticed. We boast that we have encircled the world with self-governing colonies, but without a single exception every one of these colonies, while rejoicing in the shelter of the Union Jack, and enthusiastically loyal to the person of the Sovereign, has organized its own Constitution on American as opposed to British lines.
Not a colony has transplanted across the seas either a hereditary chamber, an Established Church, or the English system of unpaid unequal representation. The
2*
Democracy of the Colonies
descendants of George III. retained the allegi- ance of the colonies by allowing them one and all to frame their constitution on the principles of George Washington. The English segment of Great Britain may be true to the distinctive British institutions, but Greater Britain repudiates them with absolute unanim- ity.
Mr. Whitelaw Reid was the American special rep- resentative at the Jubilee of 1897. He saw London in the very heyday of British loyalty and enthusiasm. Among the thousands who thronged our capital, none were more demonstratively loyal, more impassioned in their expressions of devotion to the Old Country and its institutions than the Colonial Premiers. But Mr. Whitelaw Reid, who studied them closely, was startled to discover that one and all of these highly placed Ministers of the Crown were, to quote his own phrase, "downright Yankees. '"
I asked him to explain that dark and Delphic say- ing. He replied : 'What I mean is that these men are not in the least like British Ministers or any of your English politicians. Their point of view is American. Their political ideas are the same as ours. They are loyal to the Queen, no doubt, but that is a thing apart. In their work-a-day politics they are as Republican as ourselves. They start from the same principles, they reason in the same way, and they arrive at the same conclusions. Not one of them would tolerate a House of Lords in his own colony, or an Established Church. Even on Free Trade their ideas are more American than British. In talking to them I am never conscious
22
Tottering British Institutions
of that break of gauge which I constantly feel in talk- ing to a British statesman."
We may take it, then, as tolerably manifest that the distinctively British institutions of a hereditary legislature and an Established Church will not figure among the institutions of the Reunited Race, even though they may be left for a time in England. It is even possible that the growth of a popular desire in England itself to rid ourselves of these institutions may lead indirectly to union with the great English-speak- ing community which is freed from their evil influence.
All this means one thing and one thing only. It is we who are going to be Americanized ; the advance will have to be made on our side ; it is idle to hope, and it is not at all to be desired, that the Americans will attempt to meet us half way by saddling themselves with institutions of which many of us are longing earnestly to get rid.
Even if there were no other reason for this, suffi- cient cause would be found in the fact that while every American is an enthusiastic believer in his own Con- stitution, it is difficult to find an Englishman who does not admit that his own Constitution is in a very bad way.
I do not confine this remark to the Irish, the Welsh, and the English and Scotch Liberals. They are naturally in revolt against the permanent veto upon all Liberal legislation vested in the permanent ma- jority which their political opponents enjoy in the Upper House.
I find the bitterest complaints against the breakdown
23
Basis of American Greatness
of the constitutional machine in the Conservative Quarterly, and in the speeches of thorough-going Min- isterialists. The Parliamentary machine has broken down before our eyes. That fact there is none to dispute. Authorities differ as to the cause of the breakdown, and they differ still more widely as to the remedy to be employed. But not even the most self-satisfied advocate for things as they are speaks of the spectacle at Westminster except in accents of shame and despair.
Contrast this with the tone in which every Ameri- can habitually speaks, and what is more, actually thinks of his Constitution. Mr. Bryce, in the very first page of his admirable work on the American Common- wealth, calls attention to the immense, almost religious, respect which the Americans pay to their institutions. It is not merely, says Mr. Bryce, that they are sup- posed to form an experiment of unequalled importance on a scale unprecedentedly vast. It is because they are something more than an experiment ; "they are believed to disclose and display the type of institutions toward which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move, some with swifter, others with slower, but all with unresting feet."
When you have two parties in counsel, one of whom is heartily ashamed of his system, while the other is absolutely convinced that his system is so perfect that its ultimate universal adoption is only a matter of time, it needs no prophet to foresee which system will be adopted as the result of their consultations. Nor can we be surprised at the American's reverence for his Constitution when we read the terms in which it 24
Great Britain's Need
has been spoken of by eminent Englishmen. Was it not Mr. Gladstone who declared? —
"The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man. It has had a century of trial, under the pressure of exigencies caused by an expansion unexampled in point of rapid- ity and range ; and its exemption from formal change, though not entire, has certainly proved the sagacity of the constructors and the stubborn strength of the fabric." *
Nor is Mr. Bryce less emphatic, although not so brief. Speaking of the American Constitution, he says : —
"After all deductions, it ranks above every other written Constitution for the intrinsic excellence of its scheme, its adaptation to the circumstances of the people, the simplicity, brevity, and precision of its language, its judicious mixture of definiteness in principle with elasticity in details." \
It is a notable and significant circumstance that the one statesman who has repeatedly directed the attention of the British public to the exceeding ex- cellence of the American Constitution is none other than the Marquis of Salisbury, the Tory Prime Min- ister. It does not matter that what he admires most in it is the security which it offers against reckless innovation, and the guarantee which it gives to liberty of contract and the right of a man to do what he
* " Gleanings of Past Years," by W.E.Gladstone, vol. i., p. 212. f Bryce's "American Commonwealth," vol. i., p 27.
25
Two Things Needed
will with his own. The fact remains that more than once Lord Salisbury has cast a longing eye across the Atlantic to the American Constitution, lamenting that our own Constitution contained no such safeguards as those provided by the wisdom of the Fathers of the American Republic.
Still more remarkable is the declaration of Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who long ago set forth with his accus- tomed bluntness that for the salvation of the British Empire only two things were needed, "Home Rule and a preferential tariff, and if you ask me why I believe in Home Rule and what I mean by it, I say to you read the American Constitution."
What more need have we of witnesses?
The only consolation that can be offered to the susceptible Briton is that the American Constitution, like the American people, owes its origin to the island which was the cradle of the race. The Americans, in fashioning their Constitution, imported it from England via France, to which country they subse- quently re-exported it in spirit though not in form, with results not even yet fully worked out.
Montesquieu, by his eulogistic panegyric upon the English Constitution in his "Esprit des Loix," became the Godfather of the American Constitution. But it was the Puritan principles of free democracy which we exported in the Mayflower that fashioned and pre- pared the founders of the American Commonwealth for their famous achievement. So it may fairly be contended that in the Americanizing of the English- speaking world it is the spirit of Old England rein- carnate in the body of Uncle Sam. 26
The Americanization of the World
Chapter Third
The Americanization of Ireland
It is an interesting subject of speculation how the Americanizing of the British Empire will be brought about. Many forces are working steadily in that di- rection, the significance of which is very imperfectly revealed to our eyes. One of the chief of these is seldom realized, for its operation is silent and subtle as the law of gravitation.
It is, indeed, no other than the law of gravitation operating in the political world. Among the heavenly bodies the less revolve around the greater. The mass tells. You cannot build a solar system in which any of the planets is larger and heavier than the sun.
A hundred years ago Great Britain was the sun of the political system of the English world. Her popu- lation was 15,717,287, whereas the population of the United States was only 5,305,925. The Ameri- cans had torn themselves off from the British connec- tion, but they still felt the pull which a compact mass of 15,717,287 exercises continuously upon a body only one-third its bulk.
27
The Power of Citizenship
For three-quarters of the century that silent force of gravitation exerted its influence in a continually diminishing degree, until after a time, the two nations being equipoised, the position of the two States was reversed. The United States now began to exert the pull upon the United Kingdom. The operation of this unseen force was for a time obscured, owing to the fact that the smaller nation had taken to itself vast masses of Asiatic and African subjects. But after a time it was perceived that they had not made these men citizens, and it is only citizens who count.
The hundreds of millions of dusky subjects in Hin- dostan add nothing to the intrinsic strength of the British people. They constitute part of the "White Man's Burden." As elements in the problem of politi- cal gravitation they only count because they tend to obscure the perception of the real forces governing the situation. The real kernel and nucleus of both States is to be found in their white citizens.
The mutual influence of Britain on America and of America on England depends upon the number and the intelligence of their citizens and the intensity of their cohesion. That cohesion is not necessarily geo- graphical. It is in its essence moral, emotional, and in- tellectual. In the voluntary association of free, self- governing citizens lies the secret of the strength of the State.
Herein we touch upon another element of weakness which tells heavily against Great Britain in her com- parison with the United States. The citizens of the United States to the last man are voluntary citizens. 28
A Vulnerable Spot
They are proud of their citizenship. There are no unwilling subjects, in the whole Republic.
There are millions, literally millions, who have been born in other lands, but the foreign born vie with the natives in their exultant pride in being citizens of the United States. When we turn our eyes to the British Empire we are confronted with a very different state of things. Close at our doors lies a country as populous as any but the two largest states in the American Union, the majority of whose inhabitants are in a chronic state of latent rebellion. The major- ity of the Irish people acquiesce sullenly in the irre- sistible logic of force majeure. They are not proud of British citizenship. They loathe it. They accept representation at Westminster solely in order that they may use the vote which they are allowed to exercise as the only available substitute for the pike and the rifle the use of which is denied to them.
In this broad survey of the comparative strength of the two great sections of the English-speaking world it is impossible not to recognize in Ireland the Achilles heel of the Empire. Our failure to win the allegiance of the Irish is the most fatal element in the sum of blunders which are transferring the leader- ship of our race to our sons beyond the sea.
Less than forty years ago the United States of America were torn in twain by one of the bloodiest civil wars of our time. For nearly five years the whole na- tion was preoccupied with fratricidal strife. In the end the North conquered. The South, beaten flat, crushed, desolated and despairing, sued for peace. The sececl-
29
American Political Genius
ing States were forced back into the Union at the point of the bayonet.
But despite all waving of the "Bloody Shirt," despite a million graves of slaughtered men, and the yawn- ing chasm that lay between the victors and the van- quished, the breach was healed by the re-establishment of Home Rule. When the war broke out with Spain no recruits rallied to the defense of the Star-spangled banner more heartily than the sons of the men who, under Davis and Lee, had shed their blood in the at- tempt to destroy the Union. Uncle Sam has no un- willing subjects, not even in the former stronghold of secession.
The contrast between the complete reconciliation which has been effected between North and South in America and our utter failure to effect even a modus Vivendi between the English, and the Irish, affords a measure of the difference between the political genius of the American Republic and of the British Empire.
The secret lies in the fact that the Americans have frankly and fully recognized the principle of govern- ment by the consent of the governed, whereas only one- half of the English have ever accepted it. The old virus of absolute government, which was the curse of England in the Seventeenth Century under the Stuarts, came back after the Commonwealth at the Restoration, and was not entirely exorcised in 1688. It revived in the Eighteenth Century under George III., with the result that we lost our American colonies.
In the Nineteenth we succeeded in suppressing it everywhere excepting in Ireland. Here, thanks to the
30
The Cost of Aggression
House of Lords, we were able to indulge the fatal pro- pensity inherent in our Conservatives of trying to govern a nation without its consent, against its will, and in opposition to its ideas. As a result, we have Ireland and the Irish as an element not of strength, but of weakness. They are as salt in the mortar of Empire, whose weakening and dissolving influence is by no means confined to the United Kingdom.
The presence of unwilling subjects, of men made citizens without their consent, is ever a source of weak- ness to States. But so far are we from having learned that lesson that for the last two years we have been lavishing all the resources of the Empire in a desperate attempt to compel within the pale of our dominions the most stubborn and unwilling set of subjects the world has ever seen.
An expenditure of 20,000 lives and £200,000,000 has been incurred for the purpose of forcing the South African Dutch to submit to our dominion. We have killed thousands and devastated their land in order to make them "our subjects." If they had been willing to become our fellow-citizens they would have been a source of strength. As men forced by war to sub- mit to our yoke they will become a source of abiding weakness. We shall have two Irelands on our hands instead of one, and each affords only too tempting an opportunity for those who may use the Americanizing trend of our time for the purpose of detaching either or both from the Empire of which at present they form part.
In view of the possibilities opened up before us by
31
A World-Famous Document
the catastrophe which has destroyed our self-governed dominion in South Africa, it may not be without profit if we were carefully to read and ponder the Declaration of Independence by which, on July 4, 1776, our Ameri- can colonists formally notified to the whole world their final severance from Great Britain and their determina- tion henceforth to work out their own destinies as sovereign states.
I wonder how many of my British readers have ever perused this famous document. Its reproduc- tion here will probably cause the seizure of this book by the military censors at Cape Town. But, not- withstanding their objection, the Declaration, with its carefully specified statement of the wrongs inflicted upon the Americans by the British Government, may be very profitably read and meditated upon to-day. For here within the four corners of a well worn placard are set forth in plain terms the reasons why we lost America, and, reading between the lines, we may dis- cover without much difficulty the reasons why we shall lose South Africa and Ireland also, if so be that we do not mend our ways. It is doubtful whether one Eng- lishman in a thousand has ever read the Declaration through from end to end. Yet a more fateful docu- ment it would be hard to find in the whole of our records. It is the epitaph of our Empire.
32
The Declaration of Independence In Congress, July 4, Ml 6.
A Declaration
By the Representatives of the United States of America
In General Congress Assembled
When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the Causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happi- ness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foun- dation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers
33
The Declaration
in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience has shown, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies ; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most whole- some and necessary for the public Good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained ; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommo- dation of large Districts of People, unless those Peo- ple would relinquish the Right of Representation in the
34
Of Independence
Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formida- ble to Tyrants only.
He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the De- pository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Meas- ures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.
He has refused for a long Time after, such Disso- lutions, to cause others to be elected ; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convul- sions within.
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners ; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and rais- ing the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.
He has erected a multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their Substance.
35
The Declaration
He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our Legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unac- knowledged by our Laws ; given his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation :
For quartering large Bodies of armed Troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from pun- ishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States :
For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World :
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent :
For depriving us, in many cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury :
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pre- tended Offenses :
For abolishing the free system of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an ar- bitrary Government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same Absolute Rule into these Colonies :
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our Governments :
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declar-
36
Of Independence
ing themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection, and waging War against us.
He has plundered our Seas, ravager1 our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.
He is at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with Cir- cumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy scarcely parallelled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited Domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes, and Conditions.
In every Stage of these Oppressions we have peti- tioned for Redress, in the most humble Terms : Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by re- peated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every Act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.
Nor have we been wanting in Attention to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time
37
The Declaration
to Time of Attempts to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magna- nimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our Common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War; in Peace, Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in GENERAL CON- GRESS assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do in the Name and by the Authority of the good Peo- ple of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES ; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that as FREE AND INDE- PENDENT STATES, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which INDEPENDENT STATES may of Right do. And for the Support of this Declaration, with a firm Re- liance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we
38
Of Independence
mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our For- tunes, and our sacred Honor.
Signed by ORDER and on BEHALF of the CONGRESS,
John Hancock, President. Attest,
Charles Thompson, Secretary.
The greater part of the offenses laid at the door of George III. in his dealing with his American colo- nists, now lie at our doors in our dealing with the colonists of South Africa. Nor need we be surprised if similar causes bring about similar results. Human nature is the same in South Africa as it was in Bos- ton and Philadelphia. The Dutch are as stubborn a breed as the descendants of the men of the May- flower. If the centrifugal force is certain to make itself felt upon the British Empire, its influence will be earliest perceptible upon those portions of our Empire which adhere most loosely to the parent body. The disruption of the Empire or its gradual disin- tegration under the superior attraction of the United States will begin in those territories where there is nothing to counteract the drawing power of gravitation in the shape of national sentiment or patriotic loyalty. In other words, the United States will have most pull over Ireland and South Africa, for in both of these lands the centrifugal forces of domestic discontent will reinforce the centripetal forces outside.
The majority of the Irish in Ireland have never re- garded the British Empire with other sentiments than
39
Ireland and England
those of hostility. Under English rule, they have seen their religion proscribed, their lands confiscated, their sons driven into exile. They have been denied the right to make their own laws and mocked with a gra- cious permission to be in a perpetual minority in an alien Parliament. Again and again they have risen in revolt only to learn on the scaffold and in the felon's cell the rewards which patriotism has in store for the wational heroes of Ireland.
During the last century they have seen their num- bers dwindling in the land of their birth, not by the thousand, but by the million. At the same time a tardy confession has been wrung from the predominant partner that for the last fifty years Ireland has been overtaxed in comparison with England by more than two millions per annum. The inevitable result has followed. The majority of the Irish in Ireland re- gard the British Government not as their friend, but as the ally of their worst enemies, the vampire which preys upon their heart's blood.
To the masses of the South and West of Ireland, and to a large extent of the North, the United States is more of a fatherland than Great Britain. They are much more interested in what goes on in New York than in London, or Chicago than in Westminster. It is to England that their money goes in rent and in taxes. It is from the United States that their money comes in a Pactolean flood of remittances through, the post. In the United States there were at the census of 1890 1,870,000 persons of Irish birth. Of those born of Irish parents on American soil who can say how many
40
America and Ireland
there are ? More, it is safe to say, than are to be found in all Ireland to-day.
If the majority of the Irish race find themselves to- day under the Stars and Stripes, and if the majority of the Irish in Ireland build all their hopes of success upon the support which they can draw from their kin beyond the sea, it is not surprising if Ireland should afford a promising field for the disintegrating influence of American gravitation. It was from the Irish in America that Mr. Parnell drew the resources which made the Land League so powerful.
It is to the Irish in America that Mr. Redmond has gone to solicit support for the United Irish League. It was from the American Irish that Patrick Ford col- lected the fund for "Spreading the Light." It is in the United States that the Clan-na-Gael has its headquar- ters ; and it was from Chicago that the dynamitards set out when they undertook their campaign of ter- rorism which landed most of them in convict prisons. For the revolutionary party in Ireland America is their base, their banker, their recruiting ground, and their safe retreat. Every year Ireland becomes more and more Americanized, more and more assimilated to the ideas of the democracy of the West.
What America has given to the Irish is something much more valuable than dollars. It is only in the cities of the American Union that the Irish have had an opportunity of displaying those political gifts, the exercise of which they were denied in their own land. It is the fashion to sneer at the way in which the Irish rule New York, Chicago, and half the great cities of
4*
The Genius of Irish Control
the Union. The details of their administration may leave much to be desired, but the extraordinary fashion in which they have succeeded in establishing their au- thority over the richest, most energetic, and most independent communities in the world, is one of the most brilliant and miraculous achievements in modern politics. Everywhere in a minority, they are every- where in the ascendant. Denied the elementary right of self-government in their own country on the score of political incapacity, they have in the New World afforded mankind one of the most signal illustrations of the art and craft political that the modern world has ever seen. All that may be said in criticism of the way in which they gained or used their power only enhances the wonder of it.
Landing at Castle Garden, penniless, ignorant, and despised, they have made themselves in less than half a century the overlords of the greatest cities in the New World. The Anglo-Indian, with all the Empire at his back, has not a firmer grip upon the administra- tion of Calcutta than plain Richard Croker has en- joyed for half a lifetime over the commercial capital of America. Men who have done so much with so little, men who have created satrapies out of nothing and constrained the States that expelled the British to submit to their yoke, may be criminals, but they have in them the genius of statesmanship.
This is the more remarkable when we contrast it
with the utter failure of the British immigrant to leave
any perceptible trace on the political development of
the civic administration of the United States. In
42
The Irish Vote
1890 there were in the United States of Irish birth 1,870,000, but those of British birth were even more numerous. The figures are as follows : —
England 909,092
Wales 100,079
Scotland 242,231
1,251,402
Canada and Newfoundland 980,938
2,232,340
From the British Isles, that vagina gentium, came three million persons who in 1890 were resident in the United States. Almost another million came from the British American colonies. Four million persons born under the Union Jack were in 1890 living under the Stars and Stripes. What influence had this enormous British element upon the politics or the government of the United States, or of any one of them? The only perceptible influence was that of the Irish minority, and that influence has been from the first and still is stead- ily exerted against the Empire within whose frontiers they were born.
Every American politician recognizes the Irish vote as a powerful factor in every election. Who has ever been heard to speak of the English vote, the Welsh vote, the Scotch vote? There are no such votes. The English, the Welsh, and the Scotch are completely Americanized and lost among the mass of American born. The Irish alone remain distinct. The one race
43
Ireland an American State
immune to complete Americanization is, nevertheless, the most potent enemy of Great Britain. They only remain unassimilated in order that they may be strong enough to assist their brethren at home in throwing off the English yoke.
At present the prospects of the Irish cause are brighter than they have been since the death of Mr. Parnell. Mr. Redmond has carried to his fellow- countrymen in the United States messages of high hope of coming victory. We trust that the Irish may not experience once more that disappointment which has so often dogged their path. But what has been may be, and the confidence excited by the re-estab- lishment of discipline in the Nationalist ranks, may once more be replaced by the gloom and chill of de- spair. What then?
Is it entirely out of the pale of possible politics that a time may come, if no closer ties of a federal nature are established between the Empire and the Republic, when Ireland may gravitate from the United Kingdom to the United States? The only security against the occur- rence of such an event has disappeared. The United States, aspiring to be one of the first of naval powers, has begun to realize that it is the sea which unites, the land which divides.
It was easier for the Oregon to steam round Cape Horn than to pierce the narrow isthmus which unites the Americas. Their hold on the Philippines has fa- miliarized the Americans with the possibility of dominion over sea. Dublin is not half as far from New York as Manitoba is from San Francisco. The
44
A Precedent in the Antilles
Americans no longer rigidly confine themselves within the ring fence of the coast line of the oceans. They are spreading themselves abroad. Expansion is in the air.
Several times in the last half century relations be- tween the Empire and the Republic have been some- what painfully strained. Now that the United States is conscious of its superior strength and is venturing more to move out into the open, occasions for friction are certain to be more numerous. If ever — which heaven forbid — these points of friction should develop actual collision between the two nations, Ireland would at once become an object of supreme interest to the Americans, as formerly it was to the French.
As for the Irish, their maxim, "England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity, " has been too well engraved into their consciousness for them not to realize the im- portance of utilizing such an occasion to the uttermost. Quite apart from all other possibilities, the never-to-be- overlooked chance that some day Britain may be at war, makes it the imperative duty of every American statesman not to let slip any opportunity that might render more certain and more valuable the support of Ireland in such a quarrel.
This is assuming that the cause of dispute may be one altogether extraneous to Ireland. But we cannot overlook the possibility that Ireland itself might form the casus belli.
The only foreign war which Americans of this gen- eration have waged was fought for the liberation of Cuba. Cuba was the Spaniard's Ireland. The Pearl of the Antilles, like the Emerald Isle, had suffered for
45
A Cry from Erin
centuries from the unsympathetic rule of alien con- querors. The Cubans, like the Irish, were savagely discontented.
Like the Irish, although not nearly to the same ex- tent, they had friends and sympathizers in all the great American cities. Cuba, like Ireland, was bled to death by the rapacity of the foreigner. At last, after long hesitation, the full cup of Spain's iniquities overflowed, the Americans rose and smote down with one smash- ing blow the rule of the Dons in the West Indies. The war was brief, brilliant, and decisive As the result the islands which Weyler had wasted with sword and flame are enjoying a prosperity before unheard of. And the American people as a whole are exceedingly well pleased at the result of their first essay as a liberating Power.
All these things render it by no means improbable that a piteous appeal from the Irish after the next famine, or, more likely still, after the next abortive insurrection, will find the American ear quick to hear the cry from weeping Erin, "Come over and help us." Probably most of my readers will shrug their shoul- ders at this speculation, and dismiss it as fantastic nonsense.
To all such I will put but one question. Do they imagine for one moment that if British generals were to put in force against Irish insurgents of the Twentieth Century all the pitch cap devilries of 1798, any power on earth would be able to keep the American people from interposing between our soldiery and their vic- tims? There is not an American city which has not
46
What Ireland Might Do
among its most influential men some one who was born in the country which was desolated by our dragoons.
The cry of anguish that would rise from the fire- blasted country, in Connaught and in Munster, would reverberate through every American city. The mem- ories of the old blood feud would revive. The shade of Washington would be invoked against the descendants of the men whom he drove from the United States, and the sword of Columbia would not be returned to its scabbard before Ireland had been placed beside Cuba among the proud trophies of the humanitarian and liberating zeal of the American people.
If this is the outlook in Ireland, what can we say about that other Ireland which our rulers are, with in- credible fatality, wasting our substance in manufac- turing in South Africa? It is probable that the dis- integrating influence of the United States will be felt more speedily in Cape Town, in Kimberley, and in Johannesburg, than in Dublin, Cork, and Belfast.
This speculation may seem fantastic to those who have never reflected upon the extraordinary rapidity with which nations discover that they have a provi- dential mission to assist the oppressed when their in- terests or their passions lead them to desire a pretext for interference. But it is as well to remember that, as far back as 1896, Mr. William O'Brien declared in the pages of the Nineteenth Century the possibility of American intervention on behalf of Ireland. He even suggested that after the next general election all the
47
Irish-American Sympathy
Nationalist members returned for Irish constituencies should refuse to come to Westminster, but should pro- ceed to Washington to formally lay their appeal before the Congress of the United States.
The article was entitled, "If Ireland sent her M.P.'s to Washington." It opened with the suggestion that the first business that an Anglo-American Court of Arbitration would have to deal with would be the rela- tions between Great Britain and Ireland. The most notable passage in the article runs as follows: "Sup- posing that the Irish electors should say, 'Enough of idle babble in the English Parliament. We will elect representatives pledged not to go to Westminster, but to Washington to lay the case of Ireland before the President and Congress of the United States with all the solemnity of a nation's appeal, and to invoke the intervention which was so successful in the case of Venezuela.' Eighty-two Irish members, five-sixths of the Irish representation, transferred from the Parlia- ment of England to the Congress of the United States by deliberate national decree, would represent an in- ternational event of whose importance the most su- percilious jingo would not affect to make light."
Mr. O'Brien thought that if such a pilgrimage took place, the Irish representatives would be received with open arms. He said "the public opinion of the United States could not resist such an appeal from Ireland. I think few will doubt it who know the depth of Ameri- can sympathy with Ireland, and the interest that all Americans, and not the least, Irish Americans, have in eliminating the Irish question from their own in-
48
Stars and Stripes over Ireland
ternal politics. Enlightened Englishmen who desire at one and the same time to conciliate Ireland, and to deliver the United States and England from periodical fits of war fever, ought to be the first to welcome the intervention of the new Court of Arbitration in Irish affairs. It would turn a controversy which may easily enough be the beginning of a new and implacable quarrel between the two great English-speaking Pow- ers into a pledge of genuine amity between them. What seems to me reasonably certain," said Mr. O'Brien five years ago, "is that the centre of gravity of the Irish difficulty some time to come is about to shift from Westminster to Washington."
Mr. McHugh, who, fresh from a British dungeon, accompanied by Mr. Redmond in 1901, in his pilgrim- age to the United States, boldly proclaimed his belief that Ireland would soon take a greater step forward and would demand admittance into the Union as one of the United States. Too much importance need not be attached to such suggestions, which are often thrown out like sparks to dazzle and to expire. But in view of the widespread recognition on the part of many Eng- lish-speaking men on this side of the Atlantic, of the imminent desirability, not to say necessity, of creating a great English-speaking political interna- tional trust, these suggestions are not without their significance.
Certain persons, who form their estimate of Ameri- can public opinion solely from the utterances of the wealthy classes in New York, may scout the idea that any sane or statesmanlike American would ever enter- tain the suggestion put forward by Mr. William
49
Stars and Stripes over Ireland
O'Brien. If they look a little below the surface, or if they extend their investigations into American public opinion a little further they would modify their con- clusion.
Nine years ago this very subject was discussed by one of the sanest and most sagacious of American writers in an article published in the Contemporary Review of September, 1892. In this paper Dr. Shaw, who had been asked by the editor to set forth in plain terms what was the American view of Home Rule and Federation, referred to the possible consequences that" might result from the refusal of the predominant part- ner to concede Home Rule to Ireland.
"If England persisted in this course," said Dr. Shaw, "Ireland itself might falter in its loyalty at some time of crisis. We do not want Ireland, yet obviously we could make her very comfortable and happy as a State in our Union. And in the nature of things it is not easy to see why the American flag might not float over the Emerald Isle with as much propriety as the British flag in territories contiguous to our border. More- over, there might be much moral justification for our reception of Ireland in the fact that we should at once give that community a place in a rational system of political organization, and promote its general welfare and progress, whereas without Home Rule it must re- main in a distraught condition. Our mission in Ireland would be the same as England professes in Egypt — to pacify, restore, and bless. But we could have no object in undertaking this expensive annexation of Ireland except the welfare of humanity and the progress of the English-speaking communities of the world." 50
The Americanization of the World
Chapter Fourth
Of South Africa
No phrase has been more frequently used in the dis- cussion of the South African question than that the policy of Mr. Chamberlain is creating for us "another Ireland in South Africa." Without striking into the forbidden path of political controversy it suffices to point out that Mr. Chamberlain himself has warned us that when his war has been brought to a close we shall require to maintain for an indefinite time a standing army of 50,000 men in South Africa in order to enforce the obedience of the 300,000 unwilling subjects whom we have determined to compel to remain within the borders of the Empire.
Since that calculation has been made the British garrison in South Africa has been steadily maintained at a figure considerably above 200,000. Even now the military expert of The Times calculates that in the first six months after all fighting has ceased it will be only possible to recall 30,000 men, and that we must con- template the necessity of maintaining for a time, to
5i
The Future of South Africa
which no limit can be placed, an armed force of 170,000 men. But the number of bayonets upon which we shall find it necessary to sit in our South African dominions is a detail.
Whether they are 50,000 or 170,000 or 200,000, the seat will be equally uncomfortable, the only difference being one of expenditure. The funda- mental point to be kept in view is that in South Africa it may be for years or it may be for generations, we have deliberately elected to establish our dominion by reliance upon military force. Before the war our Em- pire in South Africa was one of consent. After the war it will be one of conquest maintained by an armed garrison.
The Dutch of Cape Colony, who were so loyal im- mediately before the war as to take the lead of every Colony in the Empire in voting an annual subsidy for the maintenance of the British fleet, are being con- verted into implacable enemies of our rule. But it is probable that the force which will dislodge the Afri- kander Commonwealth from the position to which we have destined it in the orbit of the British Empire, and which will convert it into one of the stars in the con- stellation of the United States of America, will not in the first instance at least be Dutch. We shall lose South Africa, not by the armed revolt of our alien- ated subjects, but because we can no longer depend upon the support and co-operation in maintaining our authority over the much more immediately dangerous and uncontrollable element which we are doing our best to bring into existence in Johannesburg.
52
The Jameson Conspiracy
In order to understand the true inwardness of this observation it is necessary to go back to the fatal mo- ment in South African history when Mr. Rhodes de- cided to enter upon that which is known in history as the Jameson Conspiracy.
So little is known of the inner springs of political action, that it is possible most of my American readers will hear for the first time in these pages that the pres- ent disastrous war in South Africa is the direct result of a jealousy of American influence. It is common ground that this war dates from the Jameson Raid. The raid begat the armaments, the armaments begat Lord Milner's intervention, and that intervention brought on the war. But what begat the raid ? Upon this point I can speak with authority, as I have fre- quently heard the whole story of that most disastrous blunder from the lips of the man who conceived the conspiracy, and risked everything in order to carry it out.
No mistake- can be greater than the vulgar error of imagining that Mr. Rhodes hatched the Jameson con- spiracy out of any animosity or fear of the Boers. Mr. Rhodes has always been very partial to the Dutch. Man for man, he knows that the Boer is a better phys- ical, virile creature than the city-bred people of Great Britain. Politically, he had always worked with them. He never would have been Premier except by their aid, and no man ever formulated more emphatically the axiom that without the support of the Dutch you can- not govern South Africa.
Why, then, did he enter into a conspiracy to over-
53
Cecil Rhodes' Mistake
throw President Kruger? Mr. Rhodes' own answer to this, which I have heard many times from his own lips, is that his object was not primarily but only incidentally to overthrow Kruger. His one supreme aim was to capture the Outlanders, to secure their allegiance to the British Empire, and to avert the one thing he dreaded most of all, the establishment of what he called an American Republic in the Transvaal, which, in his own vigorous phrase, would have been ten times more a child of the devil for us to deal with than Paul Kruger had ever been.
Mr. Rhodes was a little too previous in his calcula- tions— a fault on virtue's side, especially in these days, when our Ministers seem congenitally incapable of an intelligent anticipation of events to come. But to un- derstand a miscalculation after the event is easy. It is more difficult to foresee. What Mr. Rhodes thought he saw was the Rand filling up with a heterogeneous conglomerate of adventurous, unscrupulous, unat- tached mortals, all intent primarily upon making their fortune. These men outnumbered the adult burghers of the Transvaal by four to one. The Boers were prac- tically unarmed, without even adequate supply of cart- ridges for their rifles, except for protection against the natives. Their artillery was worthless.
Although some attempt had been made to construct a fort to overawe Johannesburg, they were utterly unprepared for a coup de main. The previous elec- tion for President had shown the existence of a very strong minority hostile to Paul Kruger. Mr. Rhodes was led to believe by his confidential informants that 54
Cecil Rhodes' Mistake
the Outlanders were not :n the mood to tolerate any longer the authority of the Boers. Their leaders were represented as being only one degree less hostile to the British Government than they were to President Kruger, the cause of their complaint being the fact that Mr. Rhodes and the High Commissioner had never given them any effective assistance in their cam- paign against Krugerism.
The Outlanders were men who had at their disposi- tion the enormous wealth of the Rand, that treasure of the Nibelungs which has drenched the veldt with hu- man blood — they were men of all nationalities and of none — and even those who came from Great Britain and the Colonies held very loosely to the Empire. Conspicuous among those were the Irish and the miners, whom Mr. Rhodes described as the "Sydney Bulletin Australians."
The Sydney Bulletin, it may here be explained, is an extremely able weekly illustrated paper, published in Sydney, which neither fears God nor reverences the King, and which makes British Imperialism the fa- vorite butt of its attacks. German Jews, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Hollanders, and Americans — it was a motley crowd that the great golden magnet had at- tracted to Johannesburg — of which one thing at least could be stated without hesitation, viz., that it had as little enthusiasm for the Union Jack or for anything more ideal than dollars and cents as any assemblage of human beings that could be collected on the planet. It was a godless crew, of whom one shrewd observer remarked, that it was too much addicted to gambling,
55
The Fatal Blunder
women, and whisky to have the proper revolutionary fibre.
But gross mammon-worshipper though it might be, Mr. Rhodes believed it was the brain as well as the pocket of Africa. He knew it was fretfully impatient of the irksome restrictions enforced by President Kruger. He underestimated the resisting force of the Boers, and believed that at any moment the news might come that a bloodless revolution had taken place in the Transvaal, that Paul Kruger had disap- peared, and that in his place he would have to deal with a President of a new Republic flushed with vic- tory, angry at being refused all help, and very much inclined to pay off old scores by being much more anti- British than the Boers had been.
"In fact," said Mr. Rhodes to me when he was ex- plaining how it was he came to make the one fatal blunder of his career, — "it seemed to me quite certain that if I did not take a hand in the game the forces on the spot would soon make short work of President Kruger. Then I should be face to face with an Amer- ican Republic — American in the sense of being intense- ly hostile to and jealous of Britain — an American Re- public largely manned by Americans and Sydney Bul- letin Australians who cared nothing for the old flag. They would have all the wealth of the Rand at their disposal. The drawing power of the Outlander Re- public would have collected round it all the other Colonies. They would have federated with it as a centre, and we should have lost South Africa. To
56
The South African Republic
avert this catastrophe, to rope in the Outlanders be- fore it was too late, I did what I did."
Repeated conversations with Mr. Rhodes, even so recently as last autumn, found him unchanged in the conviction that the danger of that American Republic in the heart of South Africa justified his conspiracy. Kruger was doomed anyhow. It was for England to stand in with the Rising Sun.
Not only will Americans be interested in knowing the true story of the genesis of the Jameson conspiracy, they will be not less surprised to know that its failure was largely due to President Cleveland's message on the Venezuelan Question. The Jameson Conspiracy, as originally planned, based its hope of success upon a revolutionary movement in Johannesburg, in which all nationalities were to take part. Conspicuous among the conspirators were the Americans, John Hays Ham- mond and Captain Mein, and round them were several other Americans whose sympathies were enlisted by the idea that they were in some way emulating the exploits of the fathers of the Revolution in overthrow- ing a new George III. in the person of President . Kruger.
When Mr. Chamberlain made it the condition of his connivance in the conspiracy that Dr. Jameson should go in under the British flag, and that the next Gov- ernor of the Transvaal should be appointed by the Colonial Office, he hamstrung the one chance of suc- cess which the conspiracy had possessed. His con- dition about the flag was suppressed for a while, but the news leaked out just about the time when the anti-
57
The Conspiracy that Failed
British sentiment among Americans everywhere was excited to fever heat by President Cleveland's message about Venezuela. The immediate result was that the American members of the Johannesburg Conspiracy flatly refused to go on with the revolution. They said they were willing to stake their lives for a bona fide revolution, to make a clean sweep of the Kruger- ites and put up a better government in its stead, but they point blank and in set terms refused to go another step in what they described as a job to "gobble up" the Transvaal for England.
Explanations and disclosures were forthcoming, but the mischief was done. The whole revolutionary movement had received its death blow when the Amer- icans discovered Mr. Chamberlain's design. The sub- sequent effort of Dr. Jameson to galvanize the revolu- tion into life need not be referred to here, excepting to say that the responsibility for this fiasco lies primarily at the door of the Colonial Minister, whose "Hurry up" messages were admittedly inspired by a desire to get the revolutoin over before the Venezuelan-Amer- ican trouble became acute.
The story how that conspiracy miscarried is ancient history. Dr. Jameson and his men, Mr. Rhodes and all their backers, fared as men usually do who sell the lion's skin before the lion is dead. But the impor- tant point is that standpoint of Mr. Rhodes, and the fact that in his opinion the danger point to the Empire in South Africa five years ago was not to be sought among the Dutch but among the Outlanders, and what Mr. Rhodes saw then is doubly true to-day. The
58
Reconstruction
real danger that threatens the Empire in South Africa is not to be found so much in the sleepless hostility of the Dutch, whose homes have been burned and whose children have been done to death, as one of the humane corollaries of the policy of devastation and farm burning. It is to be found in the cosmopolitan population whom we are summoning back to the Rand.
It is a common error to maintain that the Outlanders love us, and that even if they did not love us before the war we have purchased their affection, admiration, and loyalty by the immensity of the sacrifice in the last two years. That, however, is not the way in which the Outlander looks at it at all. He considers that British incompetence, British shortsightedness, and the insuf- ferable arrogance and ignorance of our military officers, have subjected him for two years to privations which he would never have suffered if we had shown ordinary capacity in the conduct of the war. Between the mining community and the military satraps who act upon their own prejudice and caprice, and are responsible for martial law throughout the whole of South Africa, there is a bitter feud. No Dutchman speaks with such contempt of the British military authorities as do the men on whose behalf the whole of our sacrifices have been incurred.
Two years' experience in refugee camps in Cape Town and Natal have not sweetened the temper of these quondam political helots who aroused the gush- ing sympathy of Lord Milner. They will return, and with them will return a horde of political adventurers from all parts of the world. In the next twenty
59
Difficult Element
years ^300,000,000 sterling will be extracted from the mines of the Rand, and where the carcase is there will the vultures be gathered together. It is confi- dently calculated that the white mining population that will throng to the Rand will number a minimum of a quarter of a million, and possibly there may be as many as 350,000. The population will be preponder- antly male, but it will not be anything like preponder- antly British. There will be any number of Ameri- cans, the Sydney Bulletin Australians will come once more to the front, there will be swarms of Polish Jews, and any number of adventurous Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, and Dutch.
These men will go there with one object, and that is to enrich themselves as rapidly as possible, and no community in the world will be more impatient of any restriction upon their liberty or of the imposition of any burdens which in their opinions ought not to be imposed upon them without their consent. Im- agine this cosmopolitan community of gold-seekers compelled to submit to the arbitrary restrictions of military rule, taxed without their consent, and saddled with a large share of what they regard as the alto- gether unnecessary expenditure which was caused by the blundering incompetence of the British Government and British military authorities. It is not pretended that for years to come there will be anything in the shape of free Parliamentary government established in any part of South Africa. On the contrary, we afe told every day that it may be years or it may be genera- tions before the rule of the sword is replaced. 60
An Opinion of Chamberlain
We are further told by those excellent ministers of the Gospel under whose benediction the war has been waged, that as the result of our sacrifices Down- ing Street is going to settle the native question in South Africa upon the principles of Exeter Hall. What will be the result ? Two years will not pass be- fore we have Johannesburg in a seething mass of dis- content, a charged mine to which a match may at any moment be accidentally applied. You only need to move among the leading members of the mining community either in London or in Africa to under- stand what the future has in store for us. "How long do you Outlanders" — I asked an eminent reformer who had done time in jail for his share in the Jame- son conspiracy — "how long do you think you can tolerate Crown Colony government in Johannesburg?" — "Some people," he said, "say eighteen months. So far as my people are concerned, I should think that about two days is as much as they could stand."
From him, as from another still more eminent authority, I heard the bitterest complaints concerning the ignorance and arrogance of the Colonial Secretary. "President Kruger at his worst," said one whose stake in the Rand is second to none — "President Kruger at his worst was an angel of light compared with Mr. Chamberlain. The man is as pig-headed as he is ignorant, and as unapproachable as the Mikado in old times. Does he think that we are Hottentots, that we can be governed in this fashion? We are not Hottentots, and that he will soon find out." Evidence multiplies on every hand to show that when the mines
61
New Conditions
get to work again, the Outlanders will sigh for the fleshpots of Egypt in the old days of Paul Kruger. I have already referred to the native question as that in which the interests of the mine owner and the philanthropic interests of the British public are likely to come into sharp collision.
There are many other questions. Take, for in- stance, the question of federation. It is always said that we are going to create a new federated Empire in South Africa. "If you want federation," said one of the rich men of the Rand to me quite recently, "you had better federate before we get back. You cer- tainly will never federate after we once have felt our strength. Why should we federate? What does fed- eration mean to us? It means first and foremost that you intend to tie round our neck as a millstone the railway debt of Natal and Cape Colony. It means that you are going to saddle us with a responsibility for paying interest on £45 ,000,000 invested in railways which would never earn more than 1 per cent, if it were not for us. What have we to do with the Cape lines? Delagoa Bay is our port. Leave us to our- selves and we shall double the line to Delagoa Bay, and that will supply all that we want much more cheaply and rapidly than we could bring anything from Durban or the Cape."
If any one wants to understand exactly the rela- tion that will exist between the returned Outlanders when the lines get into operation again and the mili- tary authorities who must of necessity for a long time be charged with the control of the country, he
62
Crown Colony
can see it as in a magic mirror if he will take the trouble to recall the relations which existed between Colonel Kekewich and Mr. Rhodes during the siege of Kimberley. The soldier despises the mine-owner, and the latter repays his contempt with interest. On the other hand, the war has created a genuine feeling of respect between the fighting Colonist and the fight- ing Boer.
Upon that basis of mutual respect mutual co-opera- tion could very rapidly be arranged if once a question arose in which they had a common enemy. That com- mon enemy will not be far to seek. In any collision that may arise between Downing Street and Johan- nesburg, Downing Street will be helpless, because Johannesburg can always striks up a fighting alliance with the Dutch, whereas Downing Street can never rely upon Dutch support, at least during the lifetime of this generation.
What seems probable, therefore, is that if the war should ever come to an end, and a cosmopolitan popu- lation of gold diggers should place 250,000 men on the Rand, the community will insist upon governing itself in its own way. They will form precisely that "Ameri- can Republic," although probably not under the name of a republic, which Mr. Rhodes saw afar off and endeavored to avert. Any attempt on our part to compel them to pay taxes to which they have not consented would be followed by an African imita- tion of the Tea Party in Boston harbor. And any attempt to punish such defiance of our authority would
6Z
A New Republic
immediately precipitate an alliance with the Afrikan- ders which would leave us powerless, no matter how strong our garrison, and so the British Empire will perish in South Africa, smitten down by the very Outlanders on whose behalf we are supposed to have waged this war.
This speculation may seem to many far-fetched, but the premises upon which the calculations are based are indisputable. We are going to try the experi- ment of governing an adventurous community, accus- tomed to liberty, by what — however disguised — is in reality a military despotism. We intend to impose taxes upon this community without their consent ; we are pledged to secure rights and privileges for the natives, any attempt to fulfil which would afford a common platform for Boer and Outlander. These are the difficulties which Mr. Rhodes foresaw in 1895, but at that time England at the worst could always rely upon the support of the Dutch in South Africa in maintaining her authority.
There was no danger of a revolt on the Rand against the paramountcy of Britain when all the farmers in South Africa could be relied upon to sup- port the Empire against the Rand. But to-day we have destroyed the only force upon which we could rely, in South Africa, and we shall be reduced to the humiliating alternative of allowing Johannesburg to govern South Africa according to its own sweet will and pleasure, or of precipitating a struggle which could only have the same result. If at the end of it all
64
American Influences
we are permitted to retain Simon's Bay as a coaling- station for our Navy, we may consider ourselves lucky. The Afrikander Commonwealth may split off from the British Empire. It does not exactly follow that it will array itself under the Stars and Stripes. But, on the other hand, there are several influences which may tend in that direction.
In the first place very many of the most energetic citizens in Johannesburg will be American citizens. In the second place they will, for some time at least, be in very strained relations with Great Britain. What would be more natural than for them to seek support in the sister republic across the seas?
Great Britain would not be the only Power against which the Afrikander Commonwealth might find that it needed the friendly protection of a first-class fleet. German territory marches with that which is now British South Africa, both on the east and west, and German ambition has often marked Dutch South Africa as her natural inheritance.
Nor is fear the only motive which might drive the Afrikanders under the sheltering wing of the Ameri- can Eagle. Delagoa Bay, from the point of view of international law, thanks to the unfortunate award of Marshal MacMahon, belongs by sovereign right to Portugal; but the ground around Delagoa Bay is held as real estate by the millionaires of the Rand. They will attempt in the first case to deal with Portu- gal, but if they fail, it is by no means improbable that if they were assured of the support of a strong navy,
65
Commercial Invasion
they would attempt to secure the right of ownership to what is, after all, the front door of their own house. Add to this the fact that the possibility of a native rising can never be absent from the minds of the white minority in South Africa. Australians may do as they please, their natives are too few and too weak to menace their peace. In Africa it is different. The menacing figure of the Kaffir is never absent from the South African landscape. The Afrikanders would feel much more comfortable if they knew that, should the worst come to the worst, they could always count upon reinforcements from beyond the sea in case of a native rising, and where else could they hope to secure that after the breach with England excepting from the United States?
But it will be said that the sister republic will have nothing to do with them, and as proof of this we shall be referred to the cold-blooded fashion in which Presi- dent McKinley left the South African Republics to their fate. But many circumstances combined to ren- der it difficult for President McKinley to take any other course. The United States had just emerged from a war in which they believed, rightly or wrongly, that they had been saved from a hostile European com- bination by the benevolent neutrality and veiled alli- ance of Great Britain.
They were also waging a war of their own in the Philippines which rendered it practically impossible for them to pose as the champions of a nation rightly struggling to be free. And, in the third place, there
66
Quid Pro Quo
will be a very great difference between an English- speaking republic, largely officered by Americans, ap- pealing to Washington against an attempt on the part of the British Empire to enforce the principle of taxa- tion without representation, and a similar appeal which came to the same republic from Dutch-speaking States which were popularly believed to be little better than barbarians offering a vain resistance to the onward march of civilization. Fiscal considerations are also likely to pull in the same direction.
The United States has been diligently preparing to invade the South African market as soon as the war affords them an opportunity. Mr. Roosevelt, in carrying out the policy of President McKinley, and using the tariff as a means of securing reciprocal con- cessions in the shape of reductions of tariff on Ameri- can goods, would be able to offer very tempting terms to the Afrikander Commonwealth.
The Kimberley mines export every year nearly five million pounds' worth of diamonds to all parts of the world. Upon these diamonds the American cus- toms duty is ten per cent. Here is an opportunity of making a reduction in return for a quid pro quo. The United States in 1900 exported to South Africa goods valued at twenty million dollars, not including imports for military use or American goods shipped in Eng- land. This showed an increase of three and a half million dollars over the preceding twelve months, not- withstanding the drop that was occasioned by the war, which practically extinguished the demand for agn-
67
Quid Pro Quo
cultural machinery. Supposing that Mr. Roosevelt is able to do a deal with Mr. Rhodes, cutting the duty on diamonds by fifty per cent, in return for a similar cut on duties charged on American imports into the Cape, who could complain ?
Between July ist, 1899, and January 31st, 1901, the Cape Government imported twenty American loco- motives, and since then they have been buying exten- sively in the United States. From the account given by Mr. C. Elliott, ex-General Manager of the Cape Railway Administration, the Americans not only sup- plied the engines on trust, but they returned £450 on six locomotives, stating that the cost of construction had not been so great as was anticipated. The Ameri- cans having got hold are not to be shaken off. Mr. Pingree's visit to the seat of war last year, in the joint interest of political curiosity and the promotion of the sale of American boots, was but one among many illustrations of the care and thoroughness with which the Americans are preparing to seize the South Afri- can market. They leave to us the cost, the risk, the sacrifices of the war. They reserve to themselves the profit to be made by exporting American goods to the customers who will be left alive at the close of the war.
Few things seem less improbable than that the Afrikander Commonwealth, under the leadership of Johannesburg, if constituted as an independent re- public, might very soon find itself in friendly treaty alliance with the United States.
65
Quid Pro Quo
The experiment, therefore, of attempting to enforce our dominion over unwilling subjects in South Africa is likely to terminate disastrously for the Empire. The fact that what would be a source of weakness to Great Britain would be a source of strength to the United States is due solely to the difference between willing and unwilling subjects.
69
The Americanization of the World
Chapter Fifth
Of the "West Indies and Thereabouts
We now turn from what may be regarded as the diseased members of the British Empire, who being in unwilling and enforced subjection, can be counted upon to lose no opportunity of transferring their allegiance from the King to the President of the United States, to those parts of the British Empire which are most likely to succumb to the operation of the law of political gravitation.
In the case of the United States the force of this is likely to be felt most strongly in the West Indian islands. The British flag at the present moment is flying over a series of archipelagoes of small islands lying in the Caribbean Sea immediately to the south of Florida and at the doorstep of the United States.
70
Jamaica's Decline
Of these islands by far the most important is Ja- maica, after which come Trinidad and Barbadoes. The others are islets rather than islands, but together they figure conspicuously in the list of British posses- sions in North America.
Distinct from the West Indian group, lying farther to the northeast are the Bahamas, and still farther away lie the islands of Bermuda. The Bermudas are coming more and more to hold the relation to the United States which the Channel Islands hold to France. Although lying close at her doors, they are under a foreign flag, and they attract every year an increasing number of visitors from the mainland. The West Indian islands, these "summer isles of Eden set in azure seas," which excited the enthusiasm of Charles Kingsley, and many another traveller before and since, have long been the despair of our Colonial Office. Mr. Chamberlain has been engaged, ever since his accession to office, in a desperate endeavor to restore some semblance of prosperity to our un- fortunate possessions which have been ruined by the sugar bounties.
Jamaica possesses an exceptional interest, for it was the only colony founded by Oliver Cromwell. Like many another colony, it came into existence by acci- dent rather than design. The great naval expedition which he launched to attack the power of Spain in San Domingo miscarried and picked up Jamaica as a kind of consolation prize. For nearly 200 years after its annexation Jamaica prospered. It survived the emancipation of the slaves. But it received a deadly
71
Jamaica's Decline
wound when the imposition of the sugar bounties in the interests of beet sugar ruined the cane sugar plan- tations of the West Indies.
Mr. Brooks Adams, in a remarkable and very som- bre paper on "England's Decadence in the West In- dies/' republished by Macmillan in "America's Eco- omic Supremacy," attributes the destruction of the West Indies to the policy of Germany. He says: "Taken in all its ramifications this destruction of the sugar interest may probably be reckoned the heaviest financial blow that a competitor has ever dealt Great Britain."
Towards 1880 the British West Indies made a profit calculated at about £6,500,000 per annum. Germany ruined the West Indies by adherence to Napoleon's policy of attack. For nearly three generations the chief Continental nations, with hostile intent, paid bounties on the export of sugar.
In August, 1896, Germany and Austria doubled their bounties, and the following spring France advanced hers. The English got their sugar cheaper at the cost of the taxpayers of the Continent, but the cane sugar industry was practically destroyed ; the islands of Dominica and Santa Lucia have become almost wildernesses ; the whole archipelago has been blighted. Our consumption of sugar has enormously increased. In 1869 every Englishman consumed 42 lbs. of sugar as against 35 lbs. in the United States. The other countries varied from the Italian minimum of 7 lbs. per head to a maximum of 28 lbs. in France.
72
From Bad to Worse
As the result of artificial cheapening of sugar by means of subsidies the English consumption per head rose in 1897 to 84 lbs., that is to say, while the price of sugar was reduced by one-half the consumption of sugar doubled. Our sugar bill remained the same, but every man, woman, and child of us doubled his consumption. Mr. Brooks Adams thinks that we acted unwisely in accepting the bribe offered us in the shape of cheap sugar. In his opinion we should have fought the bounties by countervailing duties, and so have warded off the blow that was levelled against the prosperity of our own colonies.
Be that as it may, there is no doubt as to what is the opinion of the West Indian planters. They main- tain that the bounty system was not fair competition, and that they have been sacrificed on the altar of a doctrinaire Free Trade. The subsequent efforts which have been made by Mr. Chamberlain to restore the prosperity of these islands have not been remarkably successful.
For a long time past they have been sinking from bad to worse until in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century it became evident that something must be done, and done at once, if our West Indian Colonies were not to go bankrupt. Mr. Chamberlain appointed a Commission, of which Sir Edward Grey was the most important member. It issued a report, and Mr. Chamberlain has ever since been more or less strenu- ously endeavoring to carry out its recommendations. So far the activity of the Colonial Secretary does not appear to have been fraught with much benefit
73
From Bad to Worse
to the Colony. The impoverished inhabitants are much more painfully conscious of the immediate in- crease in taxation which the changes have involved than the more or less remote and hypothetical advan- tages which they are promised in the future. A sub- sidy to a line of cargo steamers has not been suffi- cient to bring the up-country negro into immediate touch with Covent Garden market, and discontent seems to be rife in the island, which in some districts resembles nothing so much as a huge pauper warren.
There are some Jamaicans, indeed, who complain bitterly that Mr. Chamberlain's method of promoting the prosperity of Jamaica bears too much resemblance to the time-honored expedient of feeding a dog with a piece of his own tail.
It will be admitted even by the greatest optimist that the state of Jamaica and of the other West In- dian Colonies still leaves much to be desired, and it is equally indisputable that West Indians themselves at- tribute their disasters to the fiscal policy of the Em- pire to which they belong. Not only so, but the fact that the inhabitants did not suffer even worse things they attribute to the enterprise of a Boston man who established a flourishing trade in bananas with the United States. A writer in the Daily Telegraph of Jamaica, says: "Poor impoverished Jamaica should never be ungrateful to America for making markets for our sugars and bananas during a period when in England the policy was, 'Oh, cut the painter, and let the colonies go !' "
It is not so long since the United States admitted
74
American Encouragement
West Indian sugar free of duty, and that fact is not forgotten in Jamaica. Mr. Chamberlain has no doubt endeavored to develop trade between Jamaica and the Mother Country, but so far with singularly little suc- cess. Lord Pirbright, writing in the National Review for December, 1896, declared that Mr. Chamberlain's policy was foredoomed to failure, and that the re- fusal to adopt a policy of retaliation for the purpose of fighting the sugar bounties would inevitably result in the loss of the sugar colonies.
He wrote : "We cannot strengthen the bonds of loy- alty which hold the West Indies to the. Mother Coun- try by the promise of eleemosynary doles which are to compensate them for the loss of their flourishing in- dustry, and keep them from bankruptcy. If they were to accept this grant in aid, which must become a per- manent grant, they must inevitably degenerate. The loss of independence would certainly beget a feeling of distrust in the Mother Country to whose inaction they would attribute their dependent position.
"Geographically much nearer to America than to Great Britain, they might seek and would certainly receive from the United States not alone the commer- cial facilities which we deny them, but other induce- ments of far greater importance. Trade would follow the flag. That flag would no longer be ours, and we might have to deplore not only the ruin, but also the loss of our West Indian possessions."
When Mr. Chamberlain was beginning his experi- ments in the act of resuscitating a perishing colony by the time-honored method of increasing the import
75
Mr. Chamberlain's Attitude
duties on British goods, the United States, abandon- ing the policy of abstention from all interference in the affairs of other nations, suddenly stepped forth armed from head to heel as the avenger of the wrongs of Cuba. Spain was driven from the Western Main, Cuba was freed, and Porto Rico was annexed by the conquering Power.
The advent of the United States as a colonizing power in the midst of the West Indian Archipelago could not but thrill with excitement even the lethargic imagination of the lotus-eaters of our Colonies. For the United States is more than a political federa- tion of forty-three Sovereign Republics. It represents 76,000,000 human beings, each of whom has probably a more toothsome appetite for the delicate products of the West Indies than the men of any other race now living on the planet.
The immediate result of the annexation of Porto Rico was to give an immense stimulus to the produc- tion of sugar. When the island was wrenched from the nerveless hand of Spain, her annual export of sugar was only 40,000 tons. In 1900 she exported 100,000 tons. In 1901 it is expected that her export will reach 150,000 tons. The production of coffee is also going up with leaps and bounds. It is obvious that, if this is not a mere spurt, if annexation by the United States is proved to be like the touch of an enchanter's wand causing a flood of wealth to spring up in these West Indian Islands, there is not a sugar island now under the Union Jack that
76
The Example of Porto Rico
will not be clamoring to be transferred to the United States.
Whatever we may try to do the fact remains solid as granite, and unalterable by all that we can do, the United States, with its enormous masses of would-be purchasers of all manner of sweetstuffs and tropical fruit, is and always must be the best market for the West Indian producer. After the decision of the Supreme Court on the 27th of May, 1901, when the legality of the Foraker Act imposing special duties on goods imported from Porto Rico was af- firmed by five voices against four, there is nothing to hinder the United States taking over any number of West Indian Islands.*
It is as yet too soon to pronounce upon the net economic result of the annexation of Porto Rico. But should the first promise be realized, the economic pull towards the United States will be irresistible.
* As this case is of great historical and political importance, I quote here Mr. Wellman's lucid summary of its purport:—
" 1. The Constitution does not follow the flag ex propria vigorc — of its own force.
"2. The United States may enter upon a colonial policy- has already entered upon it — without violation of the Consti- tution.
" 3. This nation has all the powers that rightfully belong to a sovereign international state and may acquire territory without incorporating such territory as an integral part of itself.
" 4. The simple act of acquisition by treaty or otherwise does not automatically bring about such incorporation ; and incorporation is effected only by the will of the States acting consciously through Congress.
" 5. Porto Rico is not a part of the United States, but ' a territory appurtenant and belonging to' the United
77
Growth of American Trade
It would seem from the most recent statistics that Mr. Chamberlain's policy has failed to check the prog- ress of the movement which tends to place Jamaica more and more under the economic ascendency of the United States. Geographical position counts for much. Jamaica is within a few hours' steam of Cuba, which is in turn only a few hours' steam from Florida, and "nearest neighbors best customers" seems to hold good in the West Indies as elsewhere. In 1896 50 per cent, of Jamaican exports went to the United States, and only 27 per cent, to Great Britain. After four years of Mr. Chamberlain's policy the share of the United States had risen to 63 per cent., and that of the United Kingdom had shrunk to 19 per cent.
The figures are not quite so bad as far as relates to the purchases made by Jamaica in American and British markets, but even here there has been no im- provement. In 1896 41 per cent, of her imports came from the United States, and 48 per cent, from the United Kingdom. In 1900 the share of the United States had risen from 41 to 43 per cent., and that of the United Kingdom had fallen from 48 per cent, to 47 per cent. The attempt to foster a trade between
States.' Tariffs established by Congress upon goods com- ing from or going to Porto Rico are valid and collectable The Foraker Act is constitutional.
" 6. Congress has full power over the territories, may regulate and dispose of them, may at its discretion extend the Constitution to them, may admit them as states, or may hold them indefinitely as territories, colonies, or dependencies.
" 7. Porto Rico is not a ' foreign country,' and therefore the Dingley law, which levies duties upon goods imported ' from foreign countries,' does not apply to Porto Rico. Nor yet is ' Porto Rico a part of the United States.' It is a domestic territory, over which Congress has ' unrestricted control.' "
73
Growth of American Trade
Jamaica and Canada does not seem to have been very successful. Her exports to the Dominion stood at 1.6 per cent, in 1896, and at the same figure exactly in 1900. Her imports from Canada, which were 7.5 per cent, in 1896, had dropped to 7.1 per cent, in 1900. The Boston Journal, of September 6th, 1901, comment- ing on the significance of these figures, remarked : —
"We take perhaps nine-tenths of Jamaica's sugar, nearly all her fruit, much of her coffee and cocoa, a great share of her logwood, almost all her cocoanuts. The famous Jamaica rum is the only one of the island's products which is consumed chiefly by Great Britain.
"Jamaica is so near the United States and stands so closely related to our continental system, that this steady drift of her trade away from Great Britain and towards us is not strange. It is wholly natural and intelligible. But it is obvious that it makes the British connection increasingly difficult and expensive.
"With Porto Rico enjoying absolute free trade with the United States, and Cuba almost its equivalent under reciprocity, the British West India possessions in the Antilles will have either to be given up or main- tained at a cost out of all proportion to their real value to the Imperial Government."
The question whether the movement towards annex- ation to the United States will acquire an impetus which will make it irresistible depends upon the results which will follow the American annexation of Porto Rico and the American protectorate established over Cuba. If the value of all real estate in Porto Rico
79
Benefit of Annexation
goes up by leaps and bounds, and if the Colony be- comes as prosperous as Jamaica is the reverse, the sentiment of loyalty to the Union Jack will not long stand the dissolvent of such a contrast.
Cuba is not annexed to the United States — at least, not yet — but the advantage of being within the Union and so avoiding the tariff wall which at present limits the access of the products of Cuba to the American market will be certain to operate with steady pressure in favor of annexation. The United States will not annex Cuba, but Cuba will annex itself to the United States. That is to say, she will do so if the Americans convince the Cubans that annexation will put more money into their pocket and will deprive them of no essential liberty. The force of gravitation is contiguous, and the example of voluntary incorpora- tion is apt to prove contagious.
When General Gomez, the Cuban patriot, left the United States after a tour through the Union last sum- mer, he expressed his conviction that, after a period of absolute independence, Cuba would do well to throw in her lot with the United States. It is usually the case that if once a country tastes the delights of absolute in- dependence she will never seek to merge her destiny with any neighbor, no matter how great and powerful that neighbor may be. But the Americans may reverse this.
The spectacle of a well-governed and prosperous Porto Rico may prove potent enough to overcome the desire of the Cubans to fly their own flag outside the Union. General Gomez declared that not only did he
80
Benefit of Annexation
contemplate the merging of Cuba in the Republic, but that many other West Indians believed that San Domingo and Hayti would be glad to accept the pro- tectorate of the Stars and Stripes.
In discussing the probable economic forces which tend to add these outlying English-speaking colonies to the great American Republic, it should not be for- gotten that the Americans would bring to such new possessions much more than mere prestige and capital. There is a certain lethargy in these lotus-eaters' Para- dises which it would take all the Americans' energy to overcome. "If any influence and energy," said Dr. Shaw, very truly, some years ago, "can ever be ef- fectively applied to lift the West Indies out of the po- litical, social and industrial quagmire into which they have sunk, such rescue must come from the United States." It is difficult to see what answer there is to this. Sir Wemyss Reid has just told us that an Amer- ican Cabinet Minister at Washington spoke to him as if the absorption of our West Indian Colonies by the United States was a foregone conclusion.
All the arguments which apply to the West Indian Islands apply mutatis mutandis to the only two tracts of territory which we possess in South and Central America. British Guiana, the delimitation of whose frontiers nearly involved us in trouble with the United States a few years ago, is forbidden to extend its frontiers by virtue of the Monroe Doctrine. The English-speaking men who live under the Union Jack in the British Colony of Guiana are rigorously con- fined within the existing frontiers of the province.
8J
Benefit of Annexation
If they were to transfer their allegiance to the United States that interdict would immediately be repealed. They could then extend the outposts of their territory as far inland as they pleased. At present they are handicapped by the Union Jack. They are as much Americans as any of the citizens of the United States. But because they are in organic relation with the Mother Country they are denied all rights of interior expansion. They have no hinterland, and they are made to feel at every turn that, so far as the develop- ment of their colony is concerned, it would be better to be an independent republic than to belong to the vast system of the British Empire.
However much we may regret the loss of our West Indian Colonies, our regret will be tempered by satis- faction at the thought that we have had ample oppor- tunity to see what the monarchical section of the Eng- lish-speaking race can do in making these communities happy, prosperous, and contented. If we fail so com- pletely that they are anxious to try whether better re- sults would not follow if they are placed under the control of the republican half of the race we have no reason to complain. Nay, if the squalid poverty of many of our fellow-subjects could be permanently re- lieved by allowing these islands to become the colonies and dependencies of the United States, it would be our duty, not to retard, but to expedite the transfer. If Britain wishes for no unwilling subjects, neither does she wish to have any citizens in the Empire who are reminded at every turn that they are suffering in body or in estate from their connection with the Mother Country. 82
The Americanization of the World
Chapter Sixth
Of Newfoundland and Canada
It is always hazardous to prophesy, but it would not be surprising if England's oldest Colony were to be the first to desert the Empire in order to throw in her lot with the Republic.
The justification for this somewhat audacious fore- cast is the fact that Newfoundland alone, of all our Colonies, finds its vital interests sacrificed to the in- terests of the Empire. None of our other Colonies has such a grievance as that which troubles the New- foundlanders.
None of our other Colonies is subjected to the daily temptation which confronts them in the shape of the self-evident proposition that their material in- terests would be benefited by a transfer of their allegi- ance from the Union Jack to the Stars and Stripes.
The facts of the case lie in a nutshell. When New- foundland was first settled, it was not regarded as a Colony in the proper sense of the term. It was only looked upon as a kind of pier or landing-stage on
83
The Rise of Newfoundland
which the hardy fishers sent out from Bristol could land and dry their nets.
Newfoundland, in other words, was not regarded as having any existence other than that of a mere append- age to the cod fishery. For the first two centuries after its discovery no one at home seems to have dreamed of the possibility of making it the seat of a British Colony.
Colonization, indeed, was, if not actually forbidden, at least discountenanced rather than encouraged; and even so late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, the original idea that Newfoundland was little more than a coast-line which was convenient for the water- ing and refitting of the fishing fleet continued to domi- nate the minds of our statesmen. But for this, it is impossible to believe that the men who negotiated the Treaty of Ryswick would ever have made over to the French Government the exclusive use of the French shore.
This arrangement, which was subsequently con- firmed at the Treaty of Utrecht half a century later, was based upon the supposition that the only thing worth considering in Newfoundland was the use of its shores as convenient and indispensable appurtenances of the fishing banks.
Whatever may have been the explanation of this surrender to the French of a region stretching about three hundred miles from north to south on the west coast, the arrangement was solemnly ratified by a treaty which still remains in force. Hence the cause of most of the evils which afflict Newfoundland.
84
The Rise of Newfoundland
For nearly a hundred years after the signature of the Treaty of Utrecht the arrangement which gave the west shore to the French worked fairly well ; but in the last fifty years Newfoundland, from being a mere fishing station, became a thriving Colony. It attracted emigrants from the other side of the Atlantic, notably from Ireland ; they increased and multiplied, and at last succeeded in gaining recognition as one of the hardiest and most industrious of all the Colonies under the Crown.
But no sooner was the colonization of Newfound- land begun than the colonists fell foul of the French shore. The more they increased and multiplied, the more intolerable did it seem to them that they should be deprived of the right to use three hundred miles of their own coast.
In virtue of a treaty the original terms of which had been strained to such an extent as to convert the right conceded to the French to land and dry their nets into a right of veto by them upon the erection of any fac- tories or similar buildings along the whole length of the coast, there sprang up the agitation against the French shore — an agitation which has increased in ve- hemence with years ; and although it may be for the moment lulled, it may at any time revive and rage with all the more fury because it has been quieted for a time.
Some years ago I had an opportunity of discussing the whole matter at length with the representatives sent over by the Newfoundland Government in order
85
Thoughts of Secession
to impress upon Downing Street the urgent importance of extinguishing the French rights on the west coast. They made no hesitation in declaring that, if the British Government finally refused to clear out the French, they would be compelled as a mere matter of self-preservation to look to the only other govern- ment from whom they could obtain relief. For some years the question whether Newfoundland had not better secede from the Empire and appeal for the pro- tection of the United States had been in the air, al- though it did not figure much in public debate either on platform or in the press.
It is very easy to understand how it was that the Newfoundlanders should turn a wistful and longing gaze towards Washington. A combination of economic and political motives may strain severely the allegiance of Newfoundland to the Mother Country. At present the American market is practically closed to the product of Newfoundland fishery. Of the million pounds' worth of cod caught off these banks half goes to British ports and the other half to Portugal and Brazil. But Newfoundland imports goods from the United States of the annual value of £300,000.
It is, however, less for the sake of opening the Amer- ican market than for the gain of getting rid of the French shore difficulty that annexation might come to be desired by our Colonists. The question of the French shore is very simple. France has certain un- deniable rights dating from the eighteenth century, se- cured by a formal treaty to which England was a party.
86
An Intolerable Situation
Circumstances have changed since that treaty was negotiated
A state of things has sprung up which renders the provisions of that treaty intolerably irksome to a third party which was practically not in existence when the treaty was signed, namely, the self-governing Colony of Newfoundland. The maintenance of die provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht entails hardship upon the Newfoundlanders, from which they ask our govern- ment to relieve them.
France is by no means irreconcilable upon this ques- tion. She recognizes the difficulty of our position and says, in effect, that she is quite willing to surrender her rights under the Treaty of Utrecht — for a considera- tion. The question is what that consideration shall be. For the last twenty years the matter has been discussed between London and Paris without any conclusion be- ing arrived at. Our offers have never been regarded as satisfactory by the French, and we have hitherto been unable to offer what the French would accept as an adequate equivalent for the abandonment of their rights under the treaty.
The British Government has given too many host- ages to fortune in all parts of the world to dare press too urgently for a settlement of the question. The Newfoundlanders understand perfectly well that we cannot squeeze France in Newfoundland without ex- posing ourselves to a retaliatory squeeze in Egypt. Hence they say that the local interests of Newfound- land have been and are at this moment being sacrificed
87
A Possible Interference
to the general interests of the British Empire. That is the truth, and there is no gainsaying it.
Suppose that one fine day the Union Jack was hauled down, and that the United States was suddenly invested with the complete sovereignty over New- foundland, what would happen? There would prob- ably be a Commission appointed to take evidence about the French shore question. That evidence would be presented to both Houses of Congress, when it would appear that the growth of the Colony was hampered and its permanent interests injuriously affected by the maintenance of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht. It would further be reported that, in order to give the Colony a fair chance and to relieve the United States of a constant source of irritation threatening the gen- eral peace, the rights of France must be terminated.
After that report had been received and taken into consideration, the American Secretary of State would be instructed to write to the French Government to the effect that the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht re- lating to the west coast of the recently acquired United States Territory of Newfoundland were inflicting an intolerable grievance upon the inhabitaints of New- foundland ; therefore the United States Government must formally give notice of their decision to terminate the treaty, but would be very glad to enter into nego- tiations with France as to the compensation which France might claim for the loss of her rights.
88
A Possible Interference
If the two Governments were unable to arrive at an amicable understanding as to what compensation was adequate, the United States would be willing- to refer the question for adjudication to a court of arbi- tration constituted under the rules of the Hague Con- ference. France might sulk, and a good many angry articles might be written in the French papers, but the position of the United States would be unassailable.
The Americans have given no hostages to fortune which would compel them to think twice and even thrice before incurring French resentment. Their de- mand for the removal of the restrictions which were throttling the development of an American territory would be morally sound, and their willingness to refer the question of compensation to arbitration would place their action upon an incontestably legal footing. The United States, in short, could in one day liberate the Newfoundlanders from the presence of the French on their shores without danger of war and without sac- rificing American interests in any quarter of the world.
The Newfoundlanders have for some time past been slowly and reluctantly arriving at the conclusion that this is what England cannot do. On the day when they arrive at the final decision that it is no use look- ing any longer to Downing Street for help, the move- ment in favor of American annexation may sweep ail before it.
There are two other considerations which should not be forgotten. One is that a large proportion of the colonists are either of Irish birth or Irish extraction. There are no more enthusiastic supporters of the Irish
89
Secession of Newfoundland
National cause than many of the leading Irish citizens of St. John's. Nothing would give them greater joy than in this way to avenge the wrongs of Ireland upon a Unionist Government.
That, it may be said, is but a sentimental consid- eration. It is likely to be strongly reinforced by the very material argument of an appeal to the breeches pocket. It is not so many years ago since the New- foundland local legislature negotiated a reciprocity treaty with the Government at Washington for the purpose of securing for their fish access to the Ameri- can market.
Rightly or wrongly, the British Government refused to ratify that treaty, and it fell through. If the British connection means not only the maintenance indefinitely of the French on the west coast, but also of a barrier between the Newfoundland Fisheries and the immense market of the United States, is it unreasonable to think that the drift towards the centre of gravity may be- come irresistible?
Such a secession would be serious indeed. New- foundland has hitherto refused to cast in its lot with the Dominion of Canada. It has jealously preserved its own independence. Like a great advance bastion of the American Continent it lies right across the great ocean roadway which leads from Liverpool to the St. Lawrence.
In the hands of a hostile power the harbor of St. John's would be a deadly menace to the whole of our Canadian trade. Both from a naval and commercial standpoint the loss of Newfoundland would be so
90
The Right of Secession
serious a blow to the Empire that it is probable an at- tempt would be made to prevent it by force of arms.
The right of secession which Mr. Chamberlain has publicly acknowledged is enjoyed by the "independent sister nations" of Canada and Australia, would prob- ably be denied to the smaller Colony of Newfound- land ; but, if so, it would only mean annexation at two removes, because the wit of man is unable to devise or the resources of the British Empire are inadequate to provide means whereby we could hold down unwilling subjects in all parts of the world.
When Englishmen discuss the possible pull of the gravitation of the United States upon their Empire, they usually confine their remarks to Canada. They do not realize that Canada, being by far the largest and most important of the British American posses- sions, would probably be the last to succumb to the continually increasing force of gravitation exercised by its southern neighbor.
Canada alone of ail the British Colonies in the West- ern Hemisphere is large enough and strong enough to render its independent existence thinkable even if the protecting aegis of Great Britain were withdrawn. All the other Colonies would probably drop like ripe plums into Uncle Sam's hat but for their connection with Great Britain.
The Dominion of Canada, however, has ambitions of its own, and is rather inclined to believe that, if an- nexation is to take place, it would be better for the world if the United States were annexed by Canada rather than Canada by the United States. Mr. Evans,
9i
Canada's Growth
Secretary of the Hamilton Canadian Club, maintained that the future belonged to Canada, and he quoted words said to have been uttered by the late Secretary Seward to the following effect : —
"Having its Atlantic seaport at Halifax, and its Pa- cific depot near Vancouver Island, British America would inevitably draw to it the commerce of Europe, Asia, and the United States. Thus from a mere colo- nial dependency it would assume a controlling rank in the world. To her other nations would be tributary; and in vain would the United States attempt to be her rival."*
Mr. Evans does not think the fulfillment of this prophecy at all improbable. He maintains that where- as since 1760 the population of Canada has increased eighty-fold, for then it was only 60,000, the popula- tion of the United States, which was then 3,000,000, has only increased twenty-five-fold. In his opinion the United States would have more need of Canada
* It is somewhat difficult to believe that Mr. Seward actu- ally said this, for he appears to have made a remark in a very different sense in the year i860. He said: "Standing here and looking far off into the Northwest, I see the Russian as he busily occupies himself in establishing seaports and towns and fortifications on the verge of this continent as the out- posts of St. Petersburg, and I say, ' Go on, and build up your outposts all along the coast, even to the Arctic Ocean ; they will yet become the outposts of my own country— monuments of the civilization of the United States in the Northwest.' So I look off on Prince Rupert's Land and Canada, and see there an ingenious, enterprising, and ambitious people occu- pied with bridging rivers and constructing canals, railroads, and telegraphs, to organize and preserve great British prov- inces north of the Great Lakes, the St. Lawrence, and around the shores of Hudson's Bay. and I am able to say. ' It is very well : you are building excellent States to be hereafter admit- ted into the American Union.' "
92
Canadian Independence
than Canada of the United States, for as their territo- ries are being filled up and their forests destroyed, in the not far future they would be largely dependent upon other countries for their raw material, while Canada has more undeveloped wealth than any other country in the world.
The Canadians are the Scotch of the Western Hemi- sphere, and have just as good an opinion of them- selves as our neighbors in North Britain, who to this day resent bitterly any suggestion that the union which merged Scotland and England in Great Britain was the annexation of the smaller country by the larger.
Scotland and England were united first by the golden circlet of the Crown when James I. and VI. crossed the Tweed, and founded an ill-fated dynasty in Great Britain. Such monarchical contrivances are not avail- able in the New World. It is probable that the Union, if it is to be effected, will be due, not to any golden circlets of the Crown, but to the much more prosaic but not less potent agency of the almighty dollar.
If the Canadians decide 10 throw in their lot with the United States, John Bull will not spend one red cent in thwarting their wishes. As an "independent sister nation," Mr. Chamberlain has publicly declared they have unrestricted liberty of secession from the Empire, for the British Empire is much more loosely compacted together than the American Republic, which welded its States into one organic whole by the great Civil War.
But it is also true that, though no one in the United
93
The Wall that Divides
Kingdom would raise a finger to prevent Canada acting as she thought best for her own interests, any attempt on the part of the United States to annex the Canadians against their will would be resisted by the whole force of the British Empire. This is so clearly understood on both sides that no one on the American Continent dreams of taking by force that which could only be valuable if it was tendered by consent. Hence, in discussing the future of Canada, we may dismiss altogether from our minds all question of a solution by armed force.
The frontier which divides the Dominion from the Republic is unfortified on either side, but exists by con- sent of both. Nevertheless, although it is not guarded by soldiers or protected by cannon, it is infested with custom-houses, the disappearance of which would be so great and so palpable a gain that the desire to get rid of them may be regarded as one of the influences which tend in favor of annexation.
I remember the late Mr. Bayard, just as he was leav- ing the American Embassy in London, describing to me what he regarded as the unpardonable mistake which was made by the Protectionists of the United States at the close of the Civil War.
"No one," he said, "has ever rendered adequate jus- tice to the service which the Union received from the Canadians during the whole of that tremendous strug- gle. With the exception of one or two ridiculous raids by Confederate sympathizers, we were able to leave the whole of our northern frontier without a garrison. Not only so, but we used Canada as an inexhaustible source
94
Will Canada Resist Americanization
of supplies throughout the whole war. Yet when at the close of the war a deputation from the Canadians went to Washington, to plead for free access to American markets, they were told they could not expect to have the privileges of American citizens unless they came under the American flag. Now the Canadian can be led, but he cannot be bullied. The deputation, in- stead of applying for the privileges of American citi- zenship, went home, federated the Dominion, con- structed the Canadian Pacific, and postponed for many years the inevitable union of North America under one flag. A little less selfishness and a little more states- manship would have brought them all in long ago."
Whether Mr. Bayard was right or wrong in his ac- count of the genesis of what may be called Canadian Nationalism, there can be no doubt that since that date the Canadians have resolutely turned their gaze from Washington to Westminster. There is something al- most pathetic in the anxiety of our Canadian fellow subjects to emphasize their loyalty to the Empire. No one does them the injustice to believe that they really were swept off their feet by any passionate feeling against the Boers when they sent their contingents to assist the Mother Country in South Africa. They had been waiting for their chance to demonstrate their af- fection, and they seized it, not caring very much about the merits of the quarrel in which engaged.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier, it is true, made eloquent speeches, putting the best face upon the cause in which Canadian blood had been shed, but in order to do so he found it necessary to make protestations as to the
95
Will Canada Resist Americanization
liberties and privileges to be extended to the Boers, the realization of which has been postponed to the Greek Kalends. All that they knew, or cared to know, was that England, Mother England, was calling for their help. So for England, Mother England, they poured in thousands to South Africa, where they shed their blood without stint in defence of the flag. Last autumn they gave the Heir to the Throne and his wife a welcome as enthusiastic as that which they received in Australia.
More than that it would be impossible to say. Surely then Canada is in no danger of succumbing to the Americanization which is sweeping everything into the arms of the United States. The same spirit of loyalty led the Canadian Parliament to take the initi- ative in establishing the principle of preferential terms for British goods. They could only do this by a side- wind, as it were, offering a reduction of from 25 to 30 per cent, upon imports from countries which did not tax Canadian goods — a provision which had the prac- tical result of reducing the import duty on British goods from 25 to 30 per cent, below that levied upon goods imported from the United States.
At the same time, the majority of American imports come in free, so that if an average is taken on all the goods imported from the United States and on those imported from the United Kingdom, the average tax is still somewhat higher on British goods than on American. The Canadians, however, did their best, and have borne submissively their exclusion by Ger- many from the most-favored-nation treatment as the
96
Binding Forces
penalty of their attempt to draw closer the ties which link them to Great Britain.
Down to the year 1887 there was a Secession Party in Nova Scotia ; but since then there has been no party in any province of the Dominion that has advocated annexation to the United States. Here and there there are annexationists, and those who are in favor of Canadian independence are even more numerous. But, taking it as a whole, Canadians are passionately loyal to the old flag-, and I think it is extremely probable that there is no part of the King's dominions in which this book will be read with more profound disap- proval— I might even say indignation — than in the Dominion of Canada.
Nevertheless, this loyalty, although very vehement and very sincere, can hardly be regarded as a suf- ficient barrier against the all-pervading American- ism, which will inevitably bring the Dominion and the Republic into a much closer union than that which at present exists.
The first great force which operates with increasing potency is economic. Despite all the efforts of the Laurier Cabinet to encourage British trade at the ex- pense of America, Canada remains the best market of the United States. Every Canadian, man, woman, or child, spends on an average £5 a year in the pur- chase of American goods. The German average is about a guinea a head, while the average sale of Ameri- can goods in Great Britain is below 7s. a head.
Two-thirds of the American goods purchased by Canadians consist of American manufactures. The
97
Trade with Canada
total value of American imports into Canada amounted to £22,000,000 sterling. Not only is it large in itself, but it is increasing. In 1875, of all Canada's pur- chases abroad, 50 per cent, came from Great Britain. As this percentage began to drop, the experiment of the preferential duty was tried, but failed to arrest the decrease. In 1897 the proportion of British imports had dropped to 26 per cent., and in 1900 to 25 per cent. In 1875 the United States sold to Canada 42 per cent, of her total imports; in 1897 this had risen to 55 per cent., and in 1900 to over 60 per cent. The United States, therefore, notwithstanding the prefer- ential duty, has more than taken the position which we occupied with the Canadian purchaser in 1875.
It was inevitable that this should be so. The United States is close at hand ; the Canadians are American in their tastes, and goods prepared for the American market find a ready sale across the frontier. It is a remarkable fact, in view of all that is being talked to-day about the value of the Central and South Ameri- can markets, that the Canadians, who are only 5,500,- 000 in number, buy more goods from the United States than are purchased by all the inhabitants of all the Central and South American Republics that are to be found between the Rio Grande and Cape Horn. The bulk of the Canadian exports to the United States consists of raw materials, lumber, and the like, in re- turn for which she takes the goods manufactured in American mills and factories.
The Americans are keenly alive to the importance of developing this trade, and one of the first deputa-
9Z
Canada's Attitude
tions which President Roosevelt had to receive was that organized by the Boston Chamber of Commerce in favor of reciprocity with Canada. What the Bos- ton business men fear is that unless something is done in the way of reducing American taxes on Canadian imports the Canadian will either increase the duties upon American goods, or redouble their efforts to in- duce Great Britain to adopt the principle of a prefer- ential tariff in favor of Colonial and against foreign and American goods. The only three interests in the United States that appear to be offering any serious opposition are the lumber interests of the North- west, the bituminous coal miners of Maryland and West Virginia, and the fishermen of Gloucester.
President Roosevelt returned a sympathetic but non- committal answer to the deputation.
The Canadians, apparently, have grown tired of ex- pecting any concessions from the United States. Sir Wilfrid Laurier last autumn made a definite declara- tion that the Canadian tariff was to remain as it was, and that any overtures on the subject of reciprocity would have to be made from Washington to Ottawa, and not from Ottawa to Washington. The slump in Protection, so long foreseen, is no doubt on its way. but for the moment it tarries.
It should never be forgotten that the Irish element in Canada is very strong, how strong may be inferred from two facts. In 1887, when Mr. Balfour intro- duced his Coercion Bill for Ireland, the Canadian Parliament, despite the strongest opposition from the Canadian Conservative Ministry then in power, passed LofC. 99
The Bond of Immigration
;•>'
a resolution by a majority of nearly four to one strongly condemning the Irish policy of Mr. Bal- four, and affirming their devotion to Home Rule. That the Canadians have not changed in their senti- ment may be inferred from the second fact that when Mr. John Redmond visited Canada in 1901, Sir Wil- frid Laurier and other Ministers were present at a banquet, by which the Irish Nationalist leader was welcomed into the Dominion. Sir Wilfrid's presence gave great scandal to our Unionists at home, who pro- fess to be utterly unable to reconcile his support of Mr. Redmond and of Home Rule with his devotion to the Empire. In reality if they but opened their eyes, they would see that the two things are inseparably con- nected.
The interchange of commodities between two com- munities speaking the same language, and living on either side of an imaginary line, is only one of the economic forces that would make for Union. For many years past there has been a steady stream of immigration from Canada to the United States. There are very few Canadian families who have not one or more relatives who have gone to seek their fortunes in the great American cities, or on the fertile prairies of the United States. There are more emigrants from Canada in the United States in proportion to their pop- ulation than from any other country. The richer and more developed lands to the south have an irresistible attraction for the more enterprising and ambitious Canadians.
When Mr. Dryden, the Minister for Agriculture J00
Americanization of Canada
in Ontario, invested his money in farming he put it into a ranch in Dakota. Of late years a growing ten- dency has been observable for the tide of immigration to flow the other way. In the Northwest there are still vast areas of good land to be had for next to noth- ing. An American writer declares that the interna- tional line marks as sharp a distinction in land values as it does in political allegiance. Naturally as the land to the south fills up settlers will cross the frontier, and the process of colonization from the States will steadily Americanize the Northwest.
There is little or no difference in the social and po- litical conditions of the settlers, so it is as natural for them to cross and recross the frontier as it is for people in Sussex to cross into Hampshire, or vice-versa. Thus there are being woven across and across, from side to side of the invisible frontier line, ties which tend to weave the two communities into one.
In addition to the influence of commerce and of emi- gration there is another force which may be still more potent. I refer to the fact that the great American capitalists, ever on the look-out for fresh fields in which to invest their millions, have begun to develop on a great scale the immense mineral resources which are as yet practically untapped in the Canadian Dominion. American capital is pouring into the country. Few things have attracted more attention in recent indus- trial development than the extent to which American capitalists are investing their money in the exploitation of the immense and almost virgin resources of Canada.
The industrial annexation of the Dominion is in
I0J
Americanization of Canada
full swing. The Vanderbilt railway combination has taken in hand the development of the enormous coal and iron district of Nova Scotia, and is proceeding in the campaign with that combination of restless energy and methodical preparation that characterizes the great American Trusts. Further west, the Dominion Iron and Steel Company, under an American President, with a capital of over twenty million dollars, has es- tablished one of the most gigantic steel works in the world at Sault St. Marie on Lake Superior. In this exploitation of Canadian resources by American capi- tal, the Parliament of the Dominion has interested it- self actively. A land grant of over five million acres, a subsidy of £200,000 for real construction, and con- tracts for a million pounds' worth of rails to be deliv- ered in the next five years, have given the Company confidence. It is going ahead. Americans are set- ting the pace in the Dominion.
Rumors from time to time appear in the newspapers that this or the other combination of American mil- lionaires has decided to acquire a controlling inter- est in Canada's one great railway, the Canadian Pa- cific ; but although these remain rumors there is every reason to expect that the men who have engineered the great combinations which exist, in order to bar out competition, will not long abstain from an at- tempt to control the great inter-oceanic railway by which the Canadians have linked together the Atlantic and the Pacific.
But dismissing this as a mere possibility of the fu- ture, we have sufficient evidence to prove that Ameri- J02
Annexation of Canada
can capital is ever tending to acquire more and more interest in the development of Canadian resources. Commerce, emigration, and investments all tell in the same direction with an automatic and persistent force which is not materially affected by political agitation. Sir Hiram Maxim told me the other day that, when he was last in Canada, he had been approached by some owners of valuable deposits and water privileges to assist them in placing their property upon the British market. They expatiated upon the intrinsic value of the property which they had to dispose of, and, finally, by way of a crowning inducement, they said to him :
"This property is worth two hundred million dollars, but when annexation comes it will be worth two hun- dred million pounds sterling."
"What," said Sir Hiram, "I thought you were all enthusiastic loyalists."
"We are loyal to the Empire," was the reply, "but we all know that annexation will come some day, and, when it comes, it will much more than double the value of our property."
We now pass to consider the influences, partly economic and partly political, which point in the same direction. There are at least two — one at each extremity of the Dominion. The first is the long- standing and almost insoluble dispute about the fish- eries on the Atlantic seaboard. The quarrels between the fishermen of Nova Scotia and the fishermen of Massachusetts have been for many years a fertile source of friction.
The Canadians bitterly resent any poaching by
103
International Discords
American fishermen in Canadian waters. Collisions between the Canadian and New England fishermen have created so much ill-feeling' in the past that the fishery dispute has been one of the standing dishes at every Anglo-American repast. For some years now a modus vivendi has been in existence, which avoids any of the old irritating incidents of the capture and con- fiscation of American ships within the three-mile limit ; but the difficulty is not settled. It has only been post- poned.
So acute was the trouble at one time that Mr. Ed- ward Atkinson, in 1887, brought forward before the New York Chamber of Commerce a proposal that the United States should purchase from the Dominion of Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, for the sum of £ 10,000,000, which he estimated was about the share in the Canadian debt for which these provinces were responsible. The sug- gestion came to nothing, but that it was made is sig- nificant. It shows that the Americans who bought Alaska from Russia are quite capable of attempting to settle other territorial difficulties in the same com- mercial fashion.
The other difficulty resulted from the discovery of gold in the Klondyke. The Canadians naturally wished to have access to their gold-fields without pass- ing through an American Custom House. The Amer- icans, on the other hand, maintained that until gold was discovered the Canadians themselves recognized that Skaguay, which may be regarded as the ocean gate of the Klondyke, was part and parcel of the
J 04
Nation Within Nation
United States, and they resent the attempt of Canada to possess herself of an open door to the sea as an in- fraction of the Monroe doctrine, and an attempt to aggrandize the British Empire at the cost of the Amer- ican Republic.
The proposal to settle this dispute by arbitration miscarried, owing to the short-sighted objection taken by our Foreign Office to the American proposition that in such arbitration the umpire should be chosen from the New World, which means that he should be either a Central American or a South American. The pro- posal was one which told altogether against the United States, for the natural bias of the Spanish Americans is by no means in favor of the United States. The proposal, however, dropped through, and the Skaguay question remains among those unsettled questions which have small regard for the peace of nations.
In considering the probable future of Canada one salient fact can never be overlooked. Canada is not a homogeneous English-speaking community. The province of Quebec is essentially French in speech, Catholic in religion, and although loyal to the Empire this loyalty is the result of the Liberal policy adopted as the result of Lord Durham's mission, yet it jeal- ously preserves its essential French nationality. It is indeed a foreign nation within a British Dominion, and its existence materially complicates the question under consideration. As Mr. Goldwin Smith said, "When there is a solid mass of people of one race inhabiting a compact territory, with a language, religion, charac-
105
Internal Danger
ter, laws, tendencies, aspirations and sentiments of its own, there is de facto a nation."
But the curious thing is that authorities, both Cana- dian and American, differ hopelessly as to whether the existence of this French nation will tend to accelerate or retard the union of Canada and the United States. When the Duke of Argyle returned from Canada after serving his term as Governor-General, he told me that he regarded the French-Canadians as one of the great obstacles in the way of annexation. The French priests had got everything the way they wanted it in Quebec, they could not possibly improve their posi- tion, and might easily mar it if they exchanged the Union Jack for the Stars and Stripes. Further, they could not hinder a great and continuous emigration of their young people to the mills of New England, though they regarded such an exodus with profound / uneasiness. £-*_jy« "•*"*'
The French habitant once settled in New Zealand was exposed to the taint of heresy. Even if he pre- served the faith he became lax and was no longer as strict in the observance of his religious duties as he was in the old home of his childhood. They did not become Protestant so much as indifferent or freethink- ers. Thus, in the opinion of this excellent authority, the ultramontane ascendency which prevailed in Que- bec indirectly operated as a powerful bulwark of Brit- ish Dominion.
On the other hand, this very element appears to some stout Imperialists as one of the greatest dangers confronting us in the future. Mr. T. W. Russell some
J06
Quebec
eight or nine years ago visited Canada, and came back filled with horror at the state of things in Quebec. Mr. Russell is an Ulster Protestant, and it is evident from his report that he regarded the state of things which prevailed in Quebec as a disgrace to the Dominion. "Quebec," he said, "was controlled by a rich, arrogant and powerful church. Cardinal Taschereau was in- finitely more powerful than the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and the British element was being squeezed out although the Englishry paid five-sixths of the taxation."
Mr. Russell did not on that account propose to ex- pel French Canada from the Dominion, but the senti- ments which he expressed represent probably with only too much fidelity the conviction of the majority of fervent Protestants in Ontario, and reveal a snag upon which the Dominion might be wrecked. There is no doubt that the dominant idea of Lord Durham in pro- posing his scheme of settlement was that it would be possible gradually but steadily to convert French Can- ada to the universal use of the English language. His scheme produced political contentment largely because it failed utterly to realize his hope about the language. Any attempt to interfere with the French language or impose secular education upon the French Cath- olics would produce an agitation which in the opinion of many competent judges would have as its effect the annexation of French Canada to the United States.
There are some who advocate annexation on the ground that the French are too large and too compact a mass of non-English-speaking men to be assimilated
J07
A Dish for Uncle Sam
or absorbed by so small a community as that which in- habits the Canadian Dominion. If they were cast into the Continental crucible of the United States, instead of being a separate nationality the cultivation of French would be a mere local peculiarity of no more importance than the obstinacy with which some Ger- man and Norwegian colonists in Minnesota persist in refusing to use the English tongue. On the other hand, there are those who argue from a precisely op- posite point of view and maintain that the United States carries already as many foreign elements as are compatible with the maintenance of the English-speak- ing character of its people, and they object strongly to add a clotted mass of a couple of millions of French habitants to the other indigestible lumps with which the digestion of Uncle Sam has to grapple. In the midst of all this conflict and confusion of even expert opinion it seems to be tolerably clear that, whether the priests like it or not, the industrial districts of New England continue to draw like a great lodestone the more adventurous and enterprising youth of French Canada across the frontier.
Recognizing this as inevitable, the hierarchy have made more than adequate arrangements for the spir- itual supervision of their migrating flock. The net re- sult is that French Canada is no longer confined to the districts north of the St. Lawrence. If an ethnograph- ical map of the North Eastern States were to be pub- lished it would appear that Boston has almost as much claim to be considered a French city as Quebec and Montreal. JOS
Religious and Racial
The question as to the effect which the participation of Canada in the South African War is likely to have upon the loyalty of the French Canadians is a matter that has been a good deal discussed. It is a curious fact that the first time Canada sent her sons to fight in an Imperial quarrel it was the Protestants who were enthusiastic, while the Catholics hung back, although the war was one not with a Catholic but with a Prot- estant people.
Mr. J. G. Bourinot strongly opposed the war, but found himself in a small minority, owing to the as- cendancy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. He expressed a very strong conviction as to the grave peril to the Em- pire which was created by putting this new strain upon the loyalty of the French Canadians. The Boer War did not interest them on either side, but they dreaded the precedent. If Canada could be dragged into an English war with the Boers, how could they hope to escape the still more urgent appeal which would reach them if Great Britain were to be involved in a war with France? In such a case the French Canadian would find himself in exactly the same position as the Cape Dutch find themselves to-day, and it is not sur- prising that they shrank from being committed to any close co-operation with the Imperial arms. Even be- fore the Boer War arose to alarm French Canadian susceptibilities, one well-known French Canadian, M. Louis Frechette, at one time a member of the Domin- ion Parliament and a well-known Canadian poet, published an article which was almost a manifesto,
i09
The Virtue of Annexation
under the title of "The United States for French Canadians."
According to M. Frechette, French Canadians re- garded Imperial Federation with unfeigned alarm. In an Imperial Parliament the}- would find themselves in a hopeless minority, in face of a majority inevitably hostile. He continued : — "The idea of Annexation has during the last few years made rapid progress with Canadians of French origin ; the fact is that even to- day, were they consulted on the question under con- ditions of absolute freedom, without any moral pressure from either side, I am certain that a considerable ma- jority of Annexationists would result from the ballot. And this majority cannot but increase .... Al- liance with the States of the Union would with one sweep of the pen settle all those thorny questions which now embarrass us. At one stroke .... we should have no more hatred or rivalry of faith or race ; no longer conquerors ever looking upon us as the con- quered ; no longer any joint responsibility with any European nation; no longer any frontiers; no longer any possible wars; a single flag over the whole of North America, which then would be, not the hold- ing of any particular nation, but the home of Human- ity itself, the Empire of Peace, the richest and most powerful dominion of the earth, under a democratic government."
That the Canadians, French and English alike, are loyal is the fortunate result of the common sense and resolution of our Whig statesmen who, by the display of those qualities of statesmanship which have been so
no
Canada a Nation
conspicuously lacking in South Africa, converted a French-speaking Roman Catholic province, steeped in sedition and seething with rebellious discontent, into one of the most devoted Colonies of the Empire. The secret is simple. We left them alone, allowing them to do for themselves as they thought best. But even now the appointment of such a Governor-General as Lord Milner would drive the whole of Quebec wild with alarm and suspicion. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the Liberal Prime Minister of the Dominion, has never lost a chance of emphasizing the fact that Canada is not only a Colony and a Dominion ; Canada, he says, is a nation, and, as such, claims the rights of nationhood.
How sensitive and easily jarred are the nerves of our Canadian fellow-subjects may be seen from the storm of dissatisfaction which has been occasioned by the disrespect shown to the French language by the Duke of Cornwall, who, of course, acted on the advice of Lord Minto. Why the genius of discord should have been allowed to mar the loyal festivals that at- tended the Royal tour no one but the Governor-General can tell. But the refusal to allow the Heir to the Crown to reply in French to loyal French addresses seems to savor of the arrogant and intolerant spirit which has of late poisoned the atmosphere of the Colonial Office. Taken together with other incidents, some of which were perhaps unavoidable, this slight to their lan- guage has led to protests which somewhat beclouded the closing scene of the Royal tour. The Canadians are very loyal, but we cannot presume upon their loy- alty. As the Avenir du Nord, an influential organ of
\\\
Absorption Inevitable
the French at Montreal, took occasion to remind the Duke :—
" The French and English people of Canada greet in the Duke of Cornwall and York the son of their sovereign, but do not intend thereby to furnish the Imperialists with the illusion that Canada aspires to be stifled by tighter and tighter British ties. The respect that we profess in a large measure, the marks of sympathy that we manifest — even in a too exaggerated manner — for the King of England and his son, will be changed into enmity and energetic struggle if ever it is sought to erase from our Constitution the clauses that make us almost independent, with a view to replace them by Imperialistic obligations such as are dreamed of by Mr. Chamberlain and a few others."
This may be dismissed as worthy of no importance because it is only French talk. So our loyalists at the Cape ignored the protests and complaints of the Dutch. Absit omen.
It may be said that the French Canadians may be very enthusiastic to be annexed, but that the citizens of the United States would be much less eager to welcome Canada within the pale of the Union. What Americans think on the question of the future of Canada is not difficult to discern. One and all would disclaim any attempt to annex Canada against her will ; but one and all regard her absorption as her inevitable destiny, and while they would not hasten the hour when the fron- tier-line disappears they would rejoice to see the Union Jack disappear from the Western Continent.
President Roosevelt's words are worth quoting in this connection. Before he was President or even Vice-President, he wrote : — "The inhabitants of a col- ony are in a cramped and unnatural state
m
President Roosevelt's Words
As long as a Canadian remains a colonist he remains in a position inferior to that of his cousins both in England and in the United States. The Englishman at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as on one who admits his inferiority, and quite properly, too. The American regards the Canadian with the good-natured condescension felt by the freeman for a man who is not free.
"Every true patriot, every man of statesman-like habit, should look forward to the day when not a sin- gle European Power will hold a foot of American soil. At present it is not necessary to take the position that no European Power shall hold American territory ; but it certainly will become necessary if the timid and selfish peace-at-any-price men have their way, and if the United States fails to check, at the outset, Euro- pean aggrandizement on this continent."
But it will be said that Mr. Roosevelt is a repre- sentative of the extreme Expansionist school. It may, therefore, be well to quote the testimony of one who belongs to the other extreme. With the doubtful ex- ception of Mr. Atkinson, there is probably no morp thorough-going anti-Expansionist than Mr. Andrew Carnegie. No one can accuse him of animosity to the land in which he was born, and in which he spends his summers. He passed immune through the Jingo fever which laid so many of his compatriots low. But, upon the subject of Canada, Mr. Carnegie expressed sentiments even more uncompromising than those of Mr. Roosevelt.
In the year 1895, when tariff questions were to the
H3
Andrew Carnegie's Opinion
fore, Mr. Carnegie came out strongly in favor of im- posing heavy duties upon all imports from Canada without regard to the doctrine either of Free Trade or Protection, but as a matter of high politics.
The following passage is a very significant but per- fectly frank and sincere expression of the sentiments of a great number of the friendliest Americans upon the question of our position in Canada : — "I think we betray a lack of statesmanship in allowing commercial advantages to a country which owes allegiance to a foreign Power founded upon monarchical institutions, which may always be trusted at heart to detest the re- publican idea. If Canada were free and independent, and threw in her lot with this Continent, it would be another matter. So long as she remains upon our flank, a possible foe, not upon her own account, but subject to the orders of a European Power, and ready to be called by that Power to exert her forces against us even upon issues that may not concern Canada, I should let her distinctly understand that we view her as a menace to the peace and security of our country, and I should treat her accordingly. She should not be in the Union and out of the Union at the same time if I could prevent it. Therefore, I should tax highly all her products entering the United States; and this I should do, not in dislike for Canada, but for love of her, in the hope that it would cause her to realize that the nations upon this Continent are expected to be American nations, and I trust, finally, one nation, so far as the English-speaking portion is concerned. I should use the rod, not in anger, but in love ; but I
114
What Canada Offers
should use it. She should be either a member of the Republic or she should stand for her own self, re- sponsible for her conduct in peace and war, and she should not shield herself by calling to her aid a for- eign Power."
I have quoted the opinions of President Roosevelt and Mr. Carnegie. To them I would add a third, much less distinguished, but not less typical man, Mr. M. W. Hazeltine, discussing in 1897 the probable policy of President McKinley, declaring that if Mr. McKin- ley were mindful of the pledge, embodied in the plat- form to which he subscribed, he would apply his in- fluence and his ability in all lawful ways to further the movement for the voluntary incorporation of Canada with the Republic : — "He may not hold that extension of territory is desirable for its own sake, but he can- not but recognize that in the case of Canada there would be also an extension of market, and an exten- sion of the field of American investments over Cana- dian mines and enterprises. Nor can he shut his eyes to the fact — that the annexation of the Dominion of Canada would mean the final exclusion of war, with, all its burdens and horrors, from this Continent, and the secure dedication of North America to industry and peace."
Mr. Hazeltine's expectations were not fulfilled. President McKinley did nothing to promote the incor- poration of Canada with the United States, and on the whole it was probably just as well. American senti- ment was slightly, very slightly, ruffled by the out- break of Jingoism across the border, and some obser-
U5
Interests Betrayed
vations were let fall which showed that American opin- ion might take alarm if the Dominion were to be per- manently inoculated with the spirit of militant Im- perialism. Of that, however, there is little danger. At the same time it would not be wise to ignore the fact that with Canada's growing sense of nation- hood, and our sense of the obligations under which we lie to the Dominion for the help it rendered to us in the South African war, will not tend altogether to facilitate the negotiations which are about to be re- sumed for the settlement of the few outstanding ques- tions which still remain to be settled.
The permanent factor which always occasions ir- ritation on the part of the Americans is the fact that they can neither deal with Canada alone nor with Great Britain alone. The influence of the British Gov- ernment is almost invariably exercised in favor of a compromise. The Canadians are, however, very stiff at a bargain, and are very quick to declare that their interests are being betrayed by the Mother Country if we do not back them up to the uttermost in the claims which they make upon the American Government.
Americans, it may be quite erroneously, are of opin- ion that if Great Britain were out of the way and they had to deal with Canada alone they would very soon come to terms, but they resent the Spenlow and Jor- kins arrangement by which one of the partners always shelters behind the other. Canada, however, abso- lutely refuses to be left out of the negotiations of ques- tions which primarily concern her own interests. Upon
U6
Great Britain Warned
this subject Mr. Carnegie, writing in the Contempo- rary Review, in November, 1897, said: —
" Ambassador Pauncefote and Secretary of State Blaine, years ago, agreed upon a settlement of the Behring Sea ques- tion, and Lord Salisbury telegraphed his congratulations, through Sir Julian Pauncefote, to Mr. Blaine. The two na- tions were jointly to police the seas and stop the barbarous de- struction of the female seals. Canada appeared at Washing- ton and demanded to see the President of the United States upon the subject. Audience was denied to the presumptuous colony ; nevertheless, her action forced Lord Salisbury to dis- avow the treaty. No confidence here is violated, as Presi- dent Harrison referred to the subject in a message to Con- gress. Britain was informed that if she presumed to make treaties in which Canada was interested without her consent, she would not have Canada very long. It will be remem- bered that Canada took precisely the same position in re- gard to international copyright. It is this long-desired treaty- making power which Canada has recently acquired for her- self, at least as far as concerns fiscal policy, so that she need no longer even consult her suzerain. She can now ap- pear at Washington, and insist upon being received when new tariff measures are desired, having suddenly become a ' free nation,' according to her Prime Minister. There are surprises in store here for the indulgent mother."
Our permanent difficulty, that of inducing the Cana- dians to accept what we consider a legitimate compro- mise, but what they are apt to regard as an indefensi- ble sacrifice of their vital interests, will certainly not have been diminished by recent events. The Canadians will feel and say that they did not storm Paardeberg, in order that Great Britain should give away their right to Skaguay, or their fishery monopoly, for im- perial considerations in which they have very remote interest. If we insist they will sulk, and Mr. Carne- gie's foreboding prophecy may be realized. There will be no rupture, but the silken tie will be strained,
m
Canada at a Standstill
and in proportion as it is weakened the pull of the eco- nomic forces making for union will be increased.
The Canadians are at present smarting under a se- vere disappointment. The party in power after having for some years fostered emigration and developed trade relations with the Mother Country, confidently expected that the census would reveal a great increase in the population. In 1891 the census figures were 4,823,875- In 1901 it was hoped that they would re- port a population of 6,000,000. Imagine the dismay occasioned by the return of only 5,338,833 residents in the Dominion. The whole Dominion in ten years has only added to its population about the same number of citizens as were added in the same period to the single State of Minnesota. Of the 513,000 added to the pop- ulation of Canada, 306,000 are to be found west of On- tario. The population of Ontario itself is virtually stationary, an increase of 2 per cent, being neither here nor there.
Professor Henry Davies, of Yale University, re- cently summed up his conclusions, arrived at after an interviewing tour in the Dominion, as follows : —
"Much of Canada's stagnation is due to the in- ability of her leading men to see that the great assim- ilating power on this hemisphere is American, and not English. This the people have already begun to learn. England has practically capitulated, so far as Canada is concerned, as recent futile parleyings have shown. The situation, therefore, wants nothing but better trade relations with this country to perfect conquest."
What is to be hoped for is that, when the inevitable
U8
Canadian Administration
union takes place, it will be brought about with the hearty consent and concurrence of the Mother Coun- try, even if the Mother Country herself does not set the example to Canada in taking- the initiative in pro- moting that race alliance towards which everything seems to point. Should such a union take place it is probable there would be considerable simplification of the somewhat complex arrangements now existing in the Canadian Dominion. Decentralization and Home Rule are very good things, but they may be car- ried too far ; and eight separate Parliaments with eight separate executives seem a somewhat excessive allow- ance for a population that is not much in excess of the population of Greater London.
Although both the American and Canadian consti- tutions are based upon the federal principle, there is considerable difference in the way in which this prin- ciple is applied. In the United States the federal power is strictly defined. The Congress at Washing- ton has no power to legislate but on certain specified subjects. All others not specially reserved for the cen- tral power are left to be dealt with according to the sovereign will of each of the federated states. In Canada the problem is approached from the other end. The powers of the provincial parliaments are strictly defined, while the undefined residue is left to the Par- liament of the Dominion.
The Canadian judiciary is federal throughout the whole Dominion, and the judges are not elective. In the United States the judiciary is both federal and local, and the local judges are elected by popular vote.
\\9
Canadian Administration
Laws of banking, of commerce, and of marriage are federal in the Dominion, and are left to the States in the Republic. It is extremely difficult to amend the American Constitution, whereas the Canadian Consti- tution can be amended wtihout much difficulty. When there is a dispute between the local authorities or be- tween the provincial governments and the Federal Government, there is an appeal in the last instance to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. In the United States the Supreme Court at Washing- ton is the final authority.
In many respects the Canadian administration, es- pecially that part which concerns the welfare of In- dians, compares favorably with that of the United States. The contrast between the administration of justice in mining districts in Canada and in the United States has frequently been commented upon by the Americans themselves. There is none of the free shooting in the Canadian mining camps which used to be so characteristic of California. The same men who were ready to shoot at sight in Colorado no sooner crossed the 49th parallel of latitude than they recognized that free shooting was contrary to the law of the land, and that no one had a pull which was good for anything with the Canadian justices.
These questions of detail, although interesting and important, are not vital, except in so far as they tend to show that if the Dominion and the Republic are ever to be merged in one greater union, both parties to the marriage will bring an ample dower, both moral and material to the common stock. 120
Canadian Administration
It is not impossible that the Nemesis which follows the South African war may tend to operate against the unity of the Empire. The Canadians, especially those who served in Strathcona's Horse, did not carry back with them to Canada a very high appreciation of the military genius of the British officer or the or- ganizing capacity of the British War Office.
Like all the Colonials engaged in this war, they felt themselves to be far and away better men than the Regulars whom they were sent to assist. Some of them came home convinced that the Boers were in the right, and that England had enlisted their services in a bad cause. They said nothing, but waited. They are waiting still. The spectacle which the British Army offers to the Empire to-day is not conducive to the development of Imperial pride.
The Colonists were willing enough to help the Mother Country out of a temporary scrape, it being understood that the said Mother Country was still a going concern, that dry rot had not sapped her strength, that her statesmen were not dotards, and her administrators amateur dilettanti, and that, in short, there was honor and glory in being connected with what was believed to be the greatest, the wisest, the strongest of the Empires of the world.
But with the whole British army lying foundered month after month in South Africa, what are they to think of it? Has the Mother Country then become only a toothless old granddame, whose faculties have all gone to fat, and who has neither the wit to make peace or the skill to make war ? They do not say so as
\2\
The Awakening
yet, nay, they are even preparing to send out another contingent to her assistance, but some such conviction must be forcing its way home to the Colonial mind. How much longer is it to last ? And if Britannia is in her dotage, if her people are decadent and a piano and cook-stove mobility is all that her officers are capable of, then how long will it be before the cry of "To your tents, O Israel," or its modern equivalent, "Hail Co- lumbia," is raised in the Dominion?
It is a question of considerable interest just now to many people of whom President Roosevelt is easily the most considerable.
J22
The Americanization of the World
Chapter Seventh
Of Australia
One of the great events of the past twelve months was the opening of the first Parliament of the Aus- tralian Commonwealth by the heir to the British Crown. The event was held with immense enthusiasm throughout the Empire, as a public ceremonial demon- stration of the closeness of the tie which binds the island continent of the Southern Seas with the mother- land of the race.
It may seem, therefore, singularly out of place to discuss at such a time the question whether even at the Antipodes the pull of the American Republic will be felt by the Australian Commonwealth. It must be admitted, of course, that the force of gravitation di- minishes according to the distance at which it is exer- cised, and Australia is by no means subject to the same continuous temptation to throw in her lot with the Americans to which the West India Islands and Can- ada are subject.
Nevertheless, even in this first year a good many things have happened to give us cause to think, if
J23
The Australian Tariff
not furiously, at least seriously „ as to whether the net effect of the Federation of the Australian Colonies will tend so much to the consolidation of the Empire as we all wish to believe.
To begin with, the very first result of the Consti- tution of the Australian Commonwealth has been to put up a tariff wall between Great Britain and the in- dependent sister nation at the Antipodes that is more of a barrier than a bond of union.
To take only a small illustration of this. The Aus- tralasian Review of Reviews, which was founded in the interests of the Empire, and for the purpose of pro- moting the Union of the English-speaking peoples, is an off-shoot of the parent Review of Reviews. At least half of the contents of each number is printed from proofs sent from London. The immediate ef- fect of the new tariff has been to increase the cost of the production of the Australasian Review of Reviews. A 10 per cent, duty has been imposed upon paper, and 25 per cent, upon the ink with which it is printed.
All magazines printed in the Mother Country and exported ready-made to Australia must pay a duty. It is a very small matter, but it illustrates the point that the new order of things at the Antipodes has had some results not altogether promoting the realization of the King's ideal that Australia should be regarded as much part and parcel of the United Kingdom as Kent or Sussex. In framing the Australian tariff, the Government refused absolutely to follow the example of Canada. No preference whatever has been allowed to British goods. J 24
Unfilial Jealousy
The Germans and the Americans, who bear none of the expense and undertake none of the responsibility for defending Australia, are as free to send in their goods as the British tax-payer who has to bear the whole burden of Imperial defence. I am not com- plaining of this, only mentioning it as an indication that the Australian Commonwealth has shown no sym- pathy with those Imperialists who think that the unity of the Empire can best be attained and maintained by an Imperial Zollverein.
Not only have the Australians imposed new taxes upon British goods, but their attitude on the question of the appeals to the Privy Council showed a sensi- tive jealousy in relation to the Mother Country. Mr. Chamberlain, in the very heyday of his popularity, found himself pulled up sharply by the refusal of the Australians to accept any settlement of the question of the Court of final appeal except the one which they liked. Right or wrong, they insisted upon having their own way, and, as usual, they got it.
There is now no right of appeal to the Privy Coun- cil or to any English Court for the decision of any questions as to the interpretation of the Constitution or of the merits of conflicting claims of the separate States, unless the Australian High Court itself should certify that the question should be determined by the Privy Council. At the same time any appellant can appeal from the State Court direct to the Privy Council, without going through the Federal High Court — a provision which we owe to the wisdom of Mr. Chamberlain, and which will almost certainly
J25
Australian Problems
result in conflicting decisions upon points of law. In the main, however, the Australians carried their point, and barred any appeal from the decision of their own High Court excepting by permission of that High Court itself.
A third point which is worth remembering and dis- cussing in the question of the possible merging of Australia into the greater federation of all the English- speaking peoples, is the fact that in framing the Aus- tralian Commonwealth the Australians on one vital principle elected to follow the example of the United States rather than that of the Canadian Dominion. In Canada, it has already been stated, the Canadians de- fined the powers of the Provincial Assemblies and left all other powers to the Federal Parliament. In Aus- tralia they followed the American precedent.
As Sir John Cockburn told the International Com- mercial Congress that met at Philadelphia in October, 1899, the United States Constitution for the last ten vears had been well-thumbed and well-read in the Australian Colonies. "Our problem," he said, "has been throughout almost identical with yours." And it is not surprising that he should go on to say : "In the fundamental characteristic of our constitution we have followed the example of the United States, and have placed only enumerated powers in the hands of the Federal authority, reserving all unenumerated powers for the State. Our cardinal condition is that only enumerated powers are placed in the hands of Federal authority."
These enumerated powers differ somewhat from
\26
Improving the Example
those of the United States, in that the questions of marriage and divorce are reserved for the Federal Parliament, whereas in America each State has its own law of marriage and divorce. On the other hand, they followed the American example in calling the two Houses of the Federal Legislature, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and, as is the case in the United States, each State enjoys equally inalien- able rights of representation in the Senate, no matter whether its population be large or small, and no mat- ter whether its area be extensive or limited. They have, however, departed from the American precedent by constituting the Senate by direct election, and also by making it easier to amend the Constitution.
A constitutional amendment in Australia must first be passed by an absolute majority of both Houses in the Federal Parliament, or by one House on two oc- casions if rejected by the other. The amendment has then to be referred to the people of the several States, and a double majority of States and of people is nec- essary before the amendment takes effect. It is prob- able that if a plebiscite of the citizens of the United States could be taken to-day, the majority would de- clare in favor of their modifying their own constitution. Except these three points, namely, Federal law for marriage and divorce, direct election of Senators, and greater elasticity in readjusting the provisions of the altered needs to the new time, the Australian Consti- tution does not much differ from the American.
Australia is following in the steps of the United States in other matters besides the fashioning of its
J27
A New Monroe Doctrine
constitution. The new Parliament is not yet a year old, but it has already formulated a demand pregnant with great consequences for the adoption of a Monroe doc- trine for the Pacific. The question arose in the de- bate upon a New Guinea Protectorate, and the demand that the Australian Government should press for the adoption by the Empire of a Monroe doctrine for the Pacific met with unanimous support. The Prime Min- ister undertook to carry out the wishes of representa- tives of the Commonwealth, and thus at a bound Aus- tralia has leapt into the international area, with a de- mand, avowedly fashioned upon the American prece- dent, which will be regarded as a direct challenge by all the States which have possessions in the Pacific. The policy may be right or it may be wrong; but it has at least the excellent quality of precision. It is an unmistakable proclamation on the part of the new Com- monwealth that no European or Asiatic Power is to be allowed to extend its dominions in the Pacific ocean. It does not yet appear whether the doctrine is to be ex- panded so far as to include the United States of Amer- ica. Probably not.* Neither is it quite clear from the brief telegram which is all that has yet reached this
* In this connection it is interesting to remember that Sena- tor Proctor suggested some two or three years ago that in Asia. Britain and the United States should replace the wan- ing Imperialism of old Rome by a new Imperialism destined to carry the world-wide principles of Anglo-Saxon peace and justice, liberty and law. The measures which he sug- gests as necessary to achieve this end are the following: —
(i) A Treaty of Arbitration in which all nations should be invited to .join, but which in the first case should be nego- tiated between the United States, Great Britain and Holland.
128
Probable Consequences
country, what are the limits of the area within which the Australian Monroe doctrine is to apply.
As the demand arose out of a debate on the ques- tion of New Guinea, it is probable that the area cov- ered by this new interdict includes all the islands on this side of the Straits of Malacca, even if it does not also include the great island of Sumatra, where the Dutch for many years past have been at war with the Atchinese.
Following the precedent of the Monroe doctrine, there will be no immediate demand that the powers which have already seated themselves on the islands in the seas adjacent to Australia should haul down their flags and depart, for which mercy we may well express our thanks. But as there is a tendency among the Americans to expand the Monroe doctrine so far as to convert it into a reserved notice to quit to all European Powers whose flags are temporarily toler- ated in the New World, so we may be pretty certain that the Australian Monroists, if encouraged, will in- timate pretty plainly that the presence of the Dutch in Java and Sumatra, the Germans in New Guinea and Samoa, and the French in New Caledonia and Tahiti, is only tolerated during good behavior, and that any manifestation of a desire on their part to extend the area of their territories will be held to be good and sufficient reason for bundling them out bag and bag- gage over the seas which are now earmarked and ex- clusively reserved for Australians or at least for English-speaking men.
What the European Powers will think of this, it is
J29
The Straining Point
easy to imagine. The Spectator, some time ago, inti- mated, not obscurely, that nothing was more likely than that the Australians, casting covetous eyes on Java, would endeavor to eject the Dutch ; but although there are no limits to the fantasies of the Spectator, there are some limits to the resources of the Imperial Government.
Of course, any attempt to enforce the Australian Monroe doctrine for the Pacific would be futile unless the Australians could wield, not only the small squad- ron which they maintain in Australian waters, but the war fleets of the Empire. It is easy to see what dangers the adoption of such a policy by the Empire would entail upon us in the four quarters of the world. It is equally easy to see the angry disappointment which will be occasioned in Australia if an unsympa- thetic answer is returned from Downing Street.
One thing is quite certain, and that is, that if the Empire were to attempt to put a ring-fence round the unoccupied lands of the Pacific, it would in a very short time be compelled to undertake the duty of oc- cupying and administering them all. This might not be difficult with the smaller unappropriated islands which would not pay the expense of administration, but it would be very different with the islands which lie between the straits of Malacca and the Gulf of Car- pentaria.
Sir Julius Vogel long ago proposed to proclaim a
protectorate on behalf of New Zealand over all the
Pacific islands — a bold step which, if it had been
taken then, might have averted many of the dangers
130
Australia for the White
which would have to be faced if a similar policy were adopted to-day. Since Sir Julius Vogel's time, Ger- many has entered into the Pacific, and there will be small disposition on the part of the other Powers to recognize a mere paper protectorate. For the mo- ment, however, we may dismiss the subject, merely noting the fact as one more point in which Australian policy is more in accord with that of the United States than with that of the United Kingdom.
We now approach the subject which of all others is most likely to strain to breaking point the ties be- tween the Commonwealth and the Mother Country. Australia is an undeveloped continent, the northern half of which lies within the tropics, that is to say, there is a region as large as the whole of Europe with- out Russia, which it is practically impossible to develop without colored labor. Opinion is divided on this point. The colony which lies within the tropical zone speaks with two voices. The Queensland delegates in the Federal Parliament assert that white men can do all the work that is needed in the sugar plantations, while the Queensland Government holds exactly the opposite opinion, and maintains that any interdict upon colored labor will be fatal to the Colony.
When doctors disagree, the people decide, and when Queensland herself speaks with a double voice, the uninstructed outsider must draw his own conclusions. Of one thing there is no doubt, and that is that wheth- er white men can or cannot live and thrive while per- forming arduous manual labor under a tropical sun. the white man won't. It is equally certain that the
J3J
Australia for the White
brown and the yellow man are only too anxious to have an opportunity to earn their living by converting the wilderness into a garden. There are more millions of Indian coolies, Chinese laborers, and Japanese hus- bandmen ready to open up and develop the immense agricultural and mineral resources of Northern Aus- tralia, than there are white men in the whole conti- nent. But, again, following the example of the United States, the Federal Parliament is absolutely opposed to the introduction of colored labor.
The cry of a White Australia has carried all before it, and the members have shown an almost fanatic zeal in fencing round the Island Continent with a high wall foi the exclusion of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian coolies. They have even gone the length of re- fusing to pay a subsidy for the carriage of mails to any steamship company which employ Lascars. Mr. Cham- berlain objected to any strong measure of exclusion against Asiatics. But he had no objection to their ex- clusion by means of an educational test which, as it will be administered, many members of the Federal Parliament themselves would find much difficulty in passing. In regard to the question whether colored labor should be employed, Mr. Chamberlain vetoed this on the two-fold ground that it was impossible for the Imperial Government to sanction the exclusion of the King's own subjects from a British colony, and that such an interdict might involve