It is already true, it is becoming increasingly true, that the United States must have Canadian products. They leap over even the barrier of a McKinley tariff. American forests are nearly exhausted—those of Canada are not only still of immense extent, but practically inexhaustible, since nature has reserved by conditions of soil and climate, large areas exclusively for the growth of trees. Canadian waters have well nigh a monopoly of the best fish of the American continent. From Nova Scotia northward gulf and bay swarm with fish which pour downwards {148} from the cold Arctic regions in numbers that never fail, and of the best quality. The lakes and rivers of the north-west might well supply the whole of the centre of the continent with fresh-water fish. On the Pacific the Canadian monopoly is not so complete since the purchase of Alaska by the United States, but the fisheries of British Columbia have a great future. On the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the inland prairie region Canada can supply coal in abundance to regions in the United States without deposits of their own. American brewers find it necessary to have Canadian barley, and are earnestly petitioning Congress to reduce the duty from thirty to the old rate of ten cents per bushel. So too with farm produce of other kinds. American consumers now pay a higher price for the eggs and poultry once drawn from Canada but driven by the McKinley tariff to seek new, and as it turns out, fairly satisfactory markets in Great Britain. That tariff must inevitably result in a largely increased development of manufacturing industry, a closer pressure of consumption upon producing power in the matter of food in the United States, and a consequent increase in the demand, already very noticeable in New England towns, for easy access to Canadian supplies. The freedom of the markets of the continent is likely ere long to be a stronger election cry in the United States than it has been in the Dominion[2].
{149}
Something ought perhaps to be said in reference to the part which Canada seems likely to take in supplying food to the United Kingdom. The area of wheat production has shifted rapidly on the American continent, first westward from New York State to Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa, then northward to Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Dakota. Till within a few years past these northern states of the Union were supposed to mark the limit of successful wheat cultivation. Actual experience has now proved that it is several hundreds of miles further north, and that in Canadian territory is included the largest and richest undeveloped wheat area in the world. Allowance must be made for occasional early frosts, which are, {150} however, not so disastrous as Indian or Australian droughts, and may apparently be successfully combated by fall ploughing and early sowing. When this allowance is made, it seems clearly proved that in both quantity and quality the north-western provinces and territories of Canada will soon take a leading place in grain supply. The railway, which opened up the country to settlement, was completed in 1885. Yet in 1887 the districts which it reached, with but a scattered population, yielded 12,000,000 bushels of surplus wheat; in 1890, 16,000,000 bushels; and the estimate for 1891 is 21,000,000 bushels. Eight times this quantity would supply the whole British demand. At the present average of production 100,000 farmers thrown into the north-west, which {151} is capable of absorbing many hundreds of thousands, would raise all the wheat that now comes into the United Kingdom. Statisticians are already forecasting the date when the growth of population, going on side by side with the exhaustion of the more fertile prairie lands in the United States, will equalize production and consumption in that country, and leave it unable to furnish the supplies on which Britain has hitherto so largely depended. Speaking to a Yorkshire audience not long since, Sir Lyon Playfair suggested twenty years hence as the probable period to the time when England could expect to draw wheat supplies from the United States, after which she would have to depend on Canada, India, and other countries chiefly within the Empire. On the same question Mr. Bryce, in speaking of the United States, says: 'High economic authorities pronounce that the beginnings of this time of pressure lie not more than thirty years ahead. Nearly all the best arable land of the West is already occupied, so that the second and third best will soon begin to be cultivated; while the exhaustion already complained of in farms which have been under the plough for three or four decades will be increasingly felt.' Like opinions have been expressed by American writers. Whatever may be thought about the precise point of time, the tendency is manifest. Within a measurable time the Empire will, by the natural progress of events, mainly supply its own markets with wheat, and, it may be added, with its second most important article of consumption {152} meat. The argument which I have used in another place, pointing to the advantage and greater security for both producer and consumer, of having so far as possible the areas which furnish the raw material of manufacture under the protection of the national flag, applies with equal, if not greater force, to food supply.
[1] 'Mob violence and many forms of injustice, made life almost intolerable for them in their homes, and emigration to British territory took place on a scale which has been hardly paralleled since the Huguenots. It has been estimated, apparently on good authority, that in the two provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick alone, the Loyalist emigrants and their families amounted to not less than 35,000 persons, and the total number of refugees cannot have been much less than 100,000.—Jones' 'History of New York,' ii. 259, 268, 500, 509. An American authority quoted by Mr. Lecky.
[2] Since writing the above I have found the case thus put from the United States point of view in the North American Review for August, 1890:—'The exhaustion of the forests of Maine, the disappearance of the forests in the Saginaw valley, and the utter disregard for the future by which the policy of protection has stimulated the policy of destruction, will in a quarter of a century result in denuding vast areas of the United States of the timber supply available within reasonable reach of its great points of demand. All the industries dependent upon timber, if they are to grow in the next twenty years, will need new resources for the supply of the raw material. Whence can these be obtained except from the portion of the continent outside of the United States? …When one recalls the vast stretches of treeless prairies within the United States, in which shelter must be provided, the necessities and exhaustion of rainless regions resulting from the destruction of forests, and the rapid growth of vast cities on the lakes and plains, and also the fact that from the northern part of the continent above is a supply of timber certain for all future time, the necessity for the extension of commerce so as to include these areas is apparent. …
'The exhaustion of wheat lands is a consideration of the most vital importance in relation to the future supply of the food of this continent. It is a startling fact, not yet fully realized by the people of this country, that at the present rate of procedure the United States may be a large importer of breadstuffs. The growth of population is so rapid, the exhaustion of arable land so constant, that without new and cultivable territory the sources for the supply of food products will soon be below the local demand. … When it is recalled that the best wheat-producing region of the world is found just north of the Minnesota line, and that in the new provinces and territories of the Canadian north-west there is a possible wheat-supply for all time, it will be seen how important has been the provision of nature for the food of mankind.'
And again:-' Cheap food for New England is the necessity of the hour in that region. … In the Maritime Provinces are abundant sources of food supply. No other country in the world can produce potatoes, apples, oats, hay, poultry, dairy produce, and, still more important, the finest fish food, equal to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. … In the unlimited supply of cheap raw material from Canada, in the unrestricted output of fish and food products, and the constant employment of cheap labour from the north, the new hope of New England may be found. Without these her manufacturing prospects are gloomy indeed.'
{153}
CANADA has had a two-fold history: French and English. The two elements of the population have not amalgamated to any appreciable extent, the hindrance arising from religion rather than race. We have then today a French-speaking Canada and an English-speaking Canada. It is important to keep in the mind a clear idea of the proportion of the one to the other. The tendency of the French population to remain concentrated in a single province or its immediate neighbourhood, (I do not forget the Acadian French, but they cannot seriously affect the position), makes it easy to indicate this proportion, and its fluctuation. In 1759 Quebec was Canada—a Canada entirely French and Roman Catholic. In 1791 Ontario was set off as a separate province, and within fifty years was of itself equal to the French province in population and superior in wealth. Today Quebec is the only French-speaking province among the seven which make up the Confederation. An overflow into a few of the border counties of Ontario, a limited and {154} scattered migration to the north-west, mark the only further expansion of the French population over new areas in Canada. A considerable migration to New England, where the Quebec peasant becomes a factory operative, is interesting, because it shows that he resists amalgamation in the United States as steadily as in Canada. Quebec then, still represents French Canada. It has a population of 1,500,000, of whom 1,200,000 are French. It should be added that the wealth and influence of the great and growing city of Montreal are in the hands of the English minority, as were the wealth and influence of the city of Quebec in its days of greatest prosperity. A certain unprogressive spirit hampers the Frenchman, and gives a striking commercial and industrial advantage to the English population. Perhaps this contrast may in part be explained by the fact that the conquest of 1759 was followed by the return to France of a small, but intellectually and commercially important element of French Canadian society, while the English population was reinforced a few years later by an influx of loyalist energy and ability.
Roughly speaking, therefore, the French of Canada stand to the whole people as, at the most, a million and a half to five millions. The many provinces which are still to be carved out of the north-west will be English speaking. It is true that the French habitans have large families, and the natural increase of the race is somewhat greater than that of British colonists, but on the other hand the whole inflow of immigration increases {155} the weight of the English-speaking provinces; the outflow to New England lessens that of Quebec. The relative influence and numbers of the French element in Canada will never be greater than they are at present, but rather less, partly owing, as I have said, to the formation of new provinces, but even more to the hesitation of French Canadians to follow the advice of their wiser leaders like Mr. Laurier, and throw themselves more entirely than they have hitherto done into the tide of Anglo-Saxon movement on the continent. More than one historian has pointed out that the efforts of French kings and ministers to make Quebec a preserve for a single set of ideas paralyzed the energies of the colonists in early days. There seems to me to be a like danger now, arising from similar causes, that it may become the less energetic community of a strenuously progressive continent. But it can never dominate Canadian development, or permanently block the general movement of the Dominion in any given direction.
From another point of view French Canada today represents one of the most interesting triumphs of British constitutional government. When the Province of Quebec came under British dominion in 1763, it had never known what free government by the people meant. Governors and Intendants, with almost despotic power, or taking their orders even in minute detail from a French king or minister in Paris, left no room for popular control. Striking indeed was the contrast which the province presented to the {156} English colonies further south, which from their very foundation began to organize a system of local self-government. In Quebec the beginnings of self-government had still to be made after 1763, or, rather, after 1774, the date of the Quebec Act. Yet the remark of Montalembert, that the Frenchman in Canada under British institutions has attained a liberty which the Frenchman of France never knew, is in strict accord with fact. France, which seems to have wasted few regrets on a colony which had always been poor and a drain upon her resources, plunged into all the horrors of the Revolution to win a liberty which after all for more than a century has wavered between name and reality. The people of her surrendered colony, carrying on, along with the British provinces, the agitation for responsible government by methods entirely constitutional, save for the slight outbreak of 1837, have gained and continue in the secure enjoyment of a popular freedom as complete as that of any country in the world; a recognition for their religion such as that religion cannot command in France. Between the European Frenchman, moreover, and the French Canadian is the barrier raised by the Revolution. Modern France does not send emigrants to Quebec, where, indeed, they would scarcely be welcome. The typical French republican, with his atheism, his free life, and his contempt for religious forms, would be curiously out of place in the average French Canadian community, devout, moral, and conservative. He would, indeed, run no slight risk of {157} being boycotted by clerical orders. The sentimental tie with France or race and language remains, and to the honour of French Canadians be it said, is fondly cherished, though it is not sustained by that constant intercourse and hearty literary sympathy which so bind the English world together. The reasoned political allegiance of the people goes out to the British connection, which gives steadiness to their public and security to their religious life.
Once more, French Canadians have profound objections to annexation to the United States. They go in numbers to work in the mills and factories of New England, or in the forests of Michigan or Maine for a few months or a few years, forming a large proportion of the so-called exodus, but those who become naturalized American citizens have hitherto been an unimportant fraction of the whole. Many return, the movement to and fro being continuous. Those who stay form more or less distinct communities of their own, to which cohesion is given by the curé, who follows to supply the ministrations of their religion. The simple loyalty of the habitant to his Canadian home and to his religion is no slight offset to his narrowness of political outlook and his somewhat unprogressive habit of mind. It made him fight against American aggression in 1774; it added a bright page to Canadian history by the heroic part taken in the war of 1812, when 400 French Canadians under de Salaberry defeated at Chateauguay an army {158} of 3000 Americans. Happily we need not now think of like aggression, but should danger ever again threaten Canada, there are the strongest reasons to believe that the Frenchman even of the United States would soon find his place beside his compatriot in the old home, fighting for the land he loves with a passionate affection.
It is only natural that, with race, language, and religion on the one side, and on the other a heritage of free political institutions giving security to all of these, we should find fluctuations of expression among an excitable people in regard to national attachment. On the whole, however, the steadiness of French Canadian loyalty to British institutions is remarkable. Cardinal Manning told me in 1886 that French Canadian bishops and clergy had over and over again assured him that their people were practically a unit in preferring British to French, or any other connection, and since that time the pastoral addresses of the highest ecclesiastics have more than once confirmed this statement in explicit terms.
Sir George Cartier described himself as an Englishman speaking French, and he no doubt meant it as a sincere indication of the drift of French Canadian thought. When a conspicuous French politician—not a Conservative—told me in Ottawa three years since that he would not be afraid to stand on any platform in Quebec and affirm that, in the event of war between France and England, other things being equal, four French Canadians out of every five would not only {159} sympathize with, but prefer to fight for England, the energy of the statement was a surprise to me; but I have no reason to doubt the speaker's sincerity. The absolute truth of the statement cannot be questioned, if the supposed contest involved the substitution in Quebec of anti-religious French Republicanism, which the French Canadian hates, for the tolerant system of Britain. Looking back upon all that has happened in France since 1789, looking even at the condition of the Republic today and its attitude towards religion, the French Canadian may, and, it may be added, often does, sincerely echo the thought of the brilliant historian of the French occupation of America when he says that 'a happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by the British arms.'
In criticism of what has so far been said of French Canada it will no doubt be replied that Mr. Mercier, the late leader of the French Nationalist party in Quebec, has taken occasion to denounce the proposal to work out some scheme of British unity, and has pointed to independence as, in his opinion, the ideal future for Canada. No doubt Mr. Mercier was for a time able to introduce new features into the political life of Quebec, but there is no reason to suppose that he broke down even for a moment the traditional policy of his people, who have long looked upon their British connection as the chief safeguard for the rights which they most value. The exposure of Mr. Mercier's political methods and the collapse of his system make {160} it perhaps unnecessary to discuss his views on national affairs.
Mr. Laurier, the exceedingly able and fair minded leader of the opposition in the Canadian Parliament, is described in 'The Problems of Greater Britain,' as 'more or less in favour of' Imperial Federation. He has lately, probably under the pressure of political events in the Dominion, expressed the opinion that independence, rather than Federation with the Empire, was the more desirable end of Canadian development, basing his argument chiefly upon the idea that Canada would, in a federated empire, be drawn into European wars. I have dealt with this objection in another place. Mr. Laurier is devoted to the honour and the interest of Canada, and it may be taken for granted that if these can be proved to coincide with the honour and interest of the Empire, any difficulty which he sees in British unity would disappear.
It will be admitted that the experience of Sir John Macdonald in dealing with the French Canadian people, and his knowledge of French Canadian sentiment towards the Empire and the Dominion were unique. As a statesman he had every reason to consider and conciliate the French vote, by which his parliamentary majority was in part maintained throughout his career. Yet he never saw in French Canadian feeling any bar to a united Empire. In 1889, at a time when certain Quebec politicians, and even members of his own Cabinet, were declaiming {161} rather vigorously against the idea of Imperial Federation, I had an opportunity of asking his opinion as to the ultimate attitude which Quebec was likely to take towards the question. His reply, given without reserve or hesitation, was marked by a decision which was manifestly the outcome of much thought upon the question. I try to reproduce this opinion, not so much to attach to it the weight of his great name, as because it bears upon the face of it the recommendation of reason and truth. 'The relation of Quebec towards the Empire is fixed,' said he, 'by the facts of history and the aspirations of the people themselves. The controlling idea of the French Canadian is to retain his language, religion and civil institutions, necessarily held under a critical tenure on a continent in the main Anglo-Saxon. But he has in the treaty of 1763 and the Quebec Act founded upon it a Magna Charta as dear to him as is to an Englishman that won from King John. By that treaty the honour of England was pledged to France that the Frenchmen of Quebec who then became British subjects should be continued in the enjoyment of their religious and civil institutions. In annexation to the United States or in Canadian independence this guarantee would be given up. In the Great Republic the French Canadian would run the risk of being blotted out as was the Frenchman of Louisiana. In an independent Canada he would hold his own with difficulty. He must in the long run vote to follow the Empire in whatever {162} direction its development may lead. This condition is permanent; all others are temporary. The interest of the French Canadian will lie in resisting separation, whether in the direction of independence or annexation.'
{163}
No discussion of the relation of Canada to the Empire, much less any more general discussion of British unity, would be complete which omits special reference to Mr. Goldwin Smith and the views on national questions which he has for many years persistently and strenuously advocated. To these views he has challenged attention anew in his latest volume, Canada and the Canadian Question, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can be said in favour of the separation of Canada from the Empire, and generally in support of that form of national disintegration which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states or annexing themselves to other nations. Very considerable interest is given to this latest utterance of Mr. Smith from the fact that he is almost the last conspicuous representative of a school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs.
To these men the United Kingdom was, and was to be, sufficient unto itself; the outlying portions of the Empire were but incidental and temporary {164} connections; the greater colonies were to be voluntarily dropped when they had developed strength to stand alone, or as convenient opportunities to get rid of them arose.
The splendid edifice of Empire built up by the toil and statesmanship of generations was an illusion which gave nothing more than a false prestige; its dissolution was to herald the dawn of a better day.
It will be generally admitted that in England this school of thought is practically dead. In his vigorous and persistent attempt to revive it in Canada Mr. Smith has met with little success. That one of the most brilliant writers and masters of style in the English world should in a distant colony have devoted well-nigh twenty years of his life to weakening the political bond between Britain and that colony with practically no visible result, is of itself a phenomenon which indicates the true tendency of national life. But that in the pursuit of his fixed idea Mr. Smith has done much harm is, I think, scarcely open to doubt. Both in Britain and the United States he has produced false impressions on Canadian affairs. The useful efforts which he has made for the elevation of journalism and for the purification of public life in Canada, the greater service which he might have done in giving high ideals to the Young Dominion, have been neutralized or made impossible by his intellectual slavery to a set of ideas which rendered him incapable of entering into or sympathizing with the deeper motives of {165} Canadian life. A great contemporary thinker and satirist, James Russell Lowell, made the 'barbed arrows of his indignant wit' the terror of corrupt politicians, while still retaining the love of the people whom he served. This he did in virtue of his constant sympathy with national aspirations and the firm faith in his country's future which shines through every page of his bitterest criticisms. In a similar sphere of effort Goldwin Smith has failed, because he has permitted an atrabilious and pessimistic temperament, a preference of epigram to accuracy, and an impatience at the non-fulfilment of his own political prophecies to distort his studies of Canadian problems, and to take away much of their value.
For those many Canadians who welcomed his coming to Canada, as one of the happiest omens for the political and intellectual life of the country, in whom even yet admiration struggles with disappointment, the duty of pointing out his unfitness to interpret the political history and actual position of Canada, is as painful as it is imperative.
Mr. Smith's book on Canada is manifestly intended primarily for readers in England. It is to his English audience that he appeals when he says that 'he does not think that the honour or true interest of his native country can for a moment be absent from his breast.' Of this, Englishmen must judge; Canadians, who respect patriotic sentiment, only ask of Mr. Smith (and they have some reason for emphasizing the request) that they may be credited with sincerity {166} when they claim that the honour and true interests of their native country compel them to dispute his arguments and repudiate the main conclusions about Canada's destiny which he outlines for his English readers. Unfortunately they must do no more than this. Mr. Smith claims 'that he has done his best to take his readers to the heart of it (the Canadian question) by setting the whole case before them: that his opinions have not been hastily formed: that they have not, so far as he is aware, been biassed by personal motives of any kind.' This is a pledge of fairness and impartiality in discussion. It is a pledge which, in Canadian opinion, is not fulfilled. No man in Canada speaks or writes with a deeper sense of responsibility than Principal Grant, as a clergyman, as the head of an important university, and as one of the most active moral forces in the Dominion. He knows Canada, too, from end to end, better than any living man. Yet in a formal review of Canada and the Canadian Question Principal Grant endorses the opinion of another writer that Mr. Smith's book is 'so brilliant, so inaccurate, so malicious even, that it is enough to make one weep.' The criticism does not seem to me too strong. Nor must Mr. Smith think that it is only upon super-sensitive Canadian minds that this impression is left. One of the closest thinkers and most brilliant writers on political subjects in England, a man of cool judgment, who has observed Canadian institutions on the spot, said to me after perusing Canada and the Canadian Question that he considered {167} it the most unfair book he had ever read. At the high table of an Oxford college a Canadian ventured to deprecate the acceptance by English people of Mr. Smith's brilliant and epigrammatic statement of half-truths as truths upon Dominion affairs. The reply of one of the clearest thinkers in the University was not unsatisfactory to the colonist. 'We in England know Mr. Smith well, and we know that, where every sentence has to be so sharply pointed as his, a liberal allowance must be made for accuracy. Canadians need have no fear that his views are accepted without question here.'
Nor has the impression been different even at the Antipodes. We read in the Australian Critic: 'To say that the book before us is written by Mr. Goldwin Smith is to say that it is eminently readable, that its style is forcible and epigrammatic, and that its historical descriptions are clear and vivacious. But we have a right to expect something more in a book describing the history and institutions of a country. We have a right to expect fairness, and fairness in this book we do not get.'
This unfairness of statement, thus generally recognized, and evident to every reader from the moment that those phases of Canadian politics are dealt with which led up to and followed upon Confederation, accounts for the irritation so commonly manifested in Canadian criticism of Mr. Smith's views. It is an unfairness the more irritating because often so clever and subtle that it half eludes criticism, and because {168} it is closely interwoven with much vigorous thought on Canadian affairs. More than this, many to whom it gives the greatest annoyance hesitate to criticise it as they would, from a conviction that it is the offspring of temperament and literary habit, rather than deliberate insincerity[1].
Only a few of Mr. Smith's arguments can be dealt with here, and it is perhaps better first to refer to such as are conspicuous by their fallacy rather than those marked by unfairness.
I have pointed out the remarkable naval position which the Empire holds in the North Atlantic and the North Pacific through the possession of Canada. Let us see what Mr. Smith suggests in substitution for this advantage when, as he proposes, it has been voluntarily abandoned.
'Great Britain may need a coaling station on the Atlantic coast of North America, not for the purposes of blockade, which could no longer have place when all danger of war was at an end but for the general defence of her trade. Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies, are apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade now wants. Newfoundland would be a safe and uninvidious possession, and it has coal, though bituminous and not yet worked. The Americans do not covet islands, {169} for the defence of which they would have to keep up a navy. The island itself would be the gainer: there would be some chance of the development of its resources; with nothing but the fishing the condition of its people seems to be poor. Let England then keep Newfoundland. Cape Breton is rather too close to the coast, otherwise it has coal in itself, and Louisbourg might be restored.' Clearly we have here an Englishman who has learned in his new home to talk a language unfamiliar for some centuries at least to the English ear, and one who fails to grasp the fundamental conditions of England's existence as a great nation. The greatest naval power in the world, bound to defend a world-wide commerce and above all to defend that main food route across the Atlantic which would almost certainly be the first point of attack in a Great European war, because it is the one point at which a well-nigh mortal blow could be delivered, is quietly asked to hand over to another nation her well-nigh impregnable naval station at Halifax, her command of a hundred minor ports, of the St. Lawrence, and of the splendid coal fields of Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, and to relegate herself to the rock-bound, fog-encircled and sometimes ice-beset coasts of Newfoundland: to content herself with coal 'bituminous and not yet worked,' and all because the possession would be 'safe and uninvidious' and because 'the Americans do not covet islands.' In this casual redistribution of the bases of naval power it is {170} extremely characteristic and noteworthy that on the Pacific where the trade of a great ocean is to be protected, and where Russia has a great naval depot, not even an island is reserved for British people, probably because again Vancouver is 'rather too near to the coast,' to be outside the range of American covetousness, and its coal deposits too extensive for it to be considered 'uninvidious.' In reading the lines I have quoted from Mr. Smith expressing his conception of the relation of the United States to Great Britain, it is impossible not to recall the words which Shakspere puts into the mouth of Cassius;—
'Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs, and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.'
Let us not fail, however, to recognize that Mr. Smith does dimly see and admit the conditions under which Britain holds her maritime power. 'Safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge, rather than territorial dependencies are apparently what the great exporting country and the mistress of the carrying trade now wants.' The admission that British naval power rests upon safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge is fundamental. But the most superficial study of the facts or even a glance at the map makes it plain that in the Empire the command of these positions is inseparably connected with territorial possession. Britain cannot turn away her great colonies to work out an independent destiny while {171} at the same time she retains in each the best points in naval and military vantage for the creation of a series of Gibraltars such as Mr. Smith apparently has in his mind. Sir Charles Dilke has clearly pointed out that while we cannot possibly with any regard to commercial security give up the military station which we hold at the extremity of Africa, on the other hand we cannot retain it permanently without the friendship of the colonists and a maintenance of national control over the surrounding country. Still more true is this of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Let Mr. Smith try to arrange a plan by which Australia, South Africa and Canada will accept independence with its national responsibilities and at the same time hand over to England their 'safe coaling stations and harbours of refuge' which he himself admits are the very conditions of her existence, and he will find himself face to face with a problem much more difficult than any which he propounds to Imperial Federationists when he demands of them a plan.
'Surely,' says Mr. Smith, 'the appearance of a world-wide power, grasping all the waterways and all the points of maritime vantage, instead of propagating peace, would, like an alarm gun, call the nations to battle.' To this it must straightway be answered that the case is one in which as things stand no 'grasping' is required. What British people need for their great national purposes they hold already. Their possessions have been won in a long course of national {172} development and are held in most cases under the solemn confirmation of ancient or modern treaty, or at least by the tacit consent of all the nations. No title-deeds in the world are more secure according to any recognized code of international relation. Nor is her moral right to consolidate her position less strong or more likely to be questioned. Self-defence is a primary instinct and admitted necessity of nature—recognized as such by communities as well as individuals. 'In strengthening her navy, England is pursuing a policy in the strict sense defensive. We threaten nobody. We cherish no ambitious design. It is more and more the wise policy of England to keep out of engagements in matters with which neither we of the mother-country nor our sons in the colonies have any concern. The external policy of England is directed to one object, which is to secure from attack the highway of the sea[2].' To different nations the problem of self-defence comes in different forms. France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Russia, find vast military organization the necessary condition of safe national existence. To none of them would exclusion from commerce with the rest of the world be fatal: their own resources can, in emergency, supply their wants. Resistance to a flood of hostile invasion they must be prepared to make at any moment, and to this the public thought is mainly directed. No one questions their right to equip themselves for this resistance, however much the necessity may be deplored.
{173}
The United States, again, have been hitherto comparatively independent of external commerce. Even the carrying trade has been allowed to slip chiefly into foreign hands. Continental isolation and vast population give a sufficient range for national industry and sufficient security from hostile invasion. They enable the people to turn their attention mainly to internal development and the complex or even threatening problems involved in the assimilation and elevation of the confluent races which are taking possession of the soil. Very different is the position of British people. To them, whether at home or abroad, the steady flow of commerce is as the flow of blood through the veins; the safety of the waterways is practically a question of life or death. The very fact that Britain is not compelled to be a great military power, in the sense that European nations are military powers, adds millions to her armies of industry, increases indefinitely her producing forces and so makes more imperative the necessity for absolutely safe commercial intercourse. Britain, as the result of natural growth, now possesses the unquestionable right and the manifest opportunity, without a single stroke of aggression, to organize a naval power adequate to the protection of the chief waterways of the world, and of the enormous commerce which the industry of her people has created thereon. To any combination thus planned to guard the very life of the nation, what just or reasonable objection can be made? To any objection not just or reasonable {174} what answer must English people make? For a race of traders scattered over all quarters of the globe, peace is a supreme interest, and peace, as the world is now constituted, can only rest on organized power. For the first time in history we see a nation which unites under its flag all the comprehensiveness of a world-wide Empire and a wonderful relative compactness secured by that practical contraction of our planet which has taken place under the combined influences of steam and electricity. No other nation ever has had—it is well nigh impossible to believe that any other nation ever will have—so commanding a position for exercising the functions of what I have called an oceanic Empire, interested in developing and able to protect the commerce of the world. Such an Empire is probably the best guarantee of permanent peace the world has ever had or is likely to have this side of the millennium. Who shall question our right and duty to organize it for the great ends manifestly within our reach?
But Mr. Smith questions not merely our right, but our capacity.
We are told that however much steam and telegraph have annihilated distance 'they have not annihilated the parish steeple. They have not carried the thoughts of the ordinary citizen beyond the circle of his own life and work. They have not qualified a common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan to direct the politics of a world-wide state[3].' Shall we {175} then give up all large statesmanship, and adopt the parish steeple as the measure of our political ideas? The parish steeple has its place and limiting power in England as elsewhere, but it has not prevented the creation of a great Empire, its successful administration and its retention. In the end it is the strongest men and the clearest minds of a country which give direction to its destiny, and nowhere is this more the case than among Anglo-Saxon people. The common farmer, tradesman, plough man, or artizan may not be able to direct the policy of a state, but he has a marvellous instinct for discovering and supporting the man who can, be he a Cromwell or a Cecil, a rail-splitter or a Hohenzollern. When he has made up his mind, moreover, we have more to fear, apparently, from a too complete surrender of his own judgment than from ignorant interference in matters which he does not fully comprehend. That the spread of modern democracy involves no necessity of abandoning large statesmanship the history of the colonies clearly proves. Canadians may not, as Mr. Smith suggests, know much of Australian or South African politics, but they have given themselves up with singular persistence to the guidance of a statesman with an imperial range of ideas and policy. In Australia the masses, however much they may be absorbed in their labour struggles and social problems, choose, as their leaders, with occasional change, but on the whole singular steadiness, men like Sir Henry Parkes, Mr. Service, Sir Samuel Griffiths, Mr. Gillies, or {176} Sir Henry Atkinson, every one of them men who, even when most absorbed with the affairs of their own colonies, are thinking constantly on national questions, and dreaming of some great British unity in the future, as their written and spoken thoughts fully testify. Even in South Africa, with its intensified localism, we see the reins of power committed to a man who stakes his political career equally upon working out a South African unity, and upon securing that it shall be consistent with the policy of a united Empire.
I fear that it is impossible to acquit Mr. Smith of at times making statements disingenuous in themselves and especially misleading to the English reader. Perhaps the peculiar animosity with which he has always regarded those Canadian Railways whose construction has falsified his prophecy that the Dominion could not be welded together, explains, if it does not excuse, a special recklessness of statement when he describes them to English people. Mr. Smith speaks of the Intercolonial Railway as 'spanning the vast and irreclaimable wilderness which separates Halifax from Quebec.' Again he says: 'The maritime Provinces are divided from Old Canada by the wilderness of many hundred miles, through which the Intercolonial Railway runs, hardly taking up a passenger or a bale of freight by the way.' Would the ordinary reader outside of Canada believe, after reading this description, that in the course of the 688 miles of rail between Halifax and Quebec the {177} Intercolonial traverses large counties like Cumberland and Westmorland, among the most fertile and productive in Canada; that though running through forest country in the immediate rear of the settled coast line it is closely connected by a score of short branches with the coal areas and all the thickly populated districts along the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St. Lawrence, that for 100 miles it follows the still more populous shores of the River St. Lawrence, and that the comparatively short distance, scarcely more than 100 miles, between the settlements at the head of Bay Chaleur and those of the St. Lawrence is alone responsible for the epithets 'vast and irreclaimable' which Mr. Smith applies to the whole length of the road? Would the reader believe that it is a railway which carries about a million passengers and more than a million tons of freight every year? That it has conferred the enormous advantage of swift communication with the outside world on some hundreds of thousands of people to whom its construction was an object of eager desire for years before it was accomplished? It is true that, worked as a State Railway for the good of the communities through which it passes, for the avowed purpose of uniting the provinces more closely, kept at a high state of efficiency, and under some unusual expense for clearing away snow in winter, a loss is at present annually incurred, but it is doubtful if any public expenditure made in the Dominion confers so great an advantage on so many people, while subserving great national purposes. {178} Not in Canada alone, but in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, Russia and South America, railways, which do not directly pay, are for the public good, or for prospective and indirect advantage, constructed and worked to the content of those who pay for them. In Great Britain state subventions are given to steamship, postal, and cable lines which would not in themselves be at once commercially profitable. For many years a large deficit has been paid on the ordinary English telegraph system; a deficit which even last year amounted to no less than £190,000 sterling. The money has been paid cheerfully, because it gives to the mass of the people the advantages of the sixpenny telegram.
Why should all the vials of wrath, ridicule, and, we may now add, misrepresentation, be reserved for the one State Railway of Canada, because the people are willing to pay the deficiency of £50,000 or £100,000 involved in its operation, for the sake of the consolidation which it has given to the Dominion, and the unmeasured benefit which it confers on immense districts and large populations which would otherwise be singularly isolated, socially and commercially, from the rest of Canada and the rest of the world.
Once more, speaking in disparagement of the same railway as a military route, Mr. Smith says: 'At the time when the Intercolonial was projected, the two British officers of artillery, whose pamphlet has been already cited, pointed out that the line would be fatally liable to snow blocks. It would be awkward if, at a crisis {179} like that of the Great Mutiny, or that of a Russian invasion in India, the reinforcements were blockaded by snow in the wilderness between Halifax and Quebec.' What can we think of a writer who claims to be fair, and yet parades as authorities two young gentlemen whose haphazard forecast has been belied by twenty years of actual working experience? So far from being 'fatally' liable to snow block, the Intercolonial is operated during the two or three months of deep snow with less risk of delay than is incurred every day of the year by ships passing through the Suez Canal, the other most available route in an Indian Crisis. It has been my own lot to suffer a longer detention on a steamship at Ismailia, a detention accepted by the ship's officers as in the course of ordinary experience, than I can remember having met with in many years' experience of the Intercolonial.
When Mr. Smith turns from the Intercolonial, which does not pay, to the Canada Pacific, which does, we find no improvement in fairness of statement. Of the Canada Pacific he says: 'The fact is constantly overlooked in vaunting the importance of this line to the Empire, that its Eastern section passes through the State of Maine, and would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' In a note it is added: 'The Quarterly Review, for example, spoke of the Canadian Pacific Railway as running from "start to finish" over British ground, though the line was at that very moment applying for bonding privileges to the Government of {180} the United States.' This is evidently a deliberate statement. What are the facts? During the months of open navigation Montreal is the water terminus of the Canada Pacific Railway, and the only point from which transfers would be made across the continent. From Montreal to Vancouver, that is, from ocean to ocean, from 'start to finish,' the line is entirely on British soil. Connection further east with the winter ports of Halifax and St. John, has from the first been made by means of the Grand Trunk and Intercolonial lines, the route yet from 'start to finish' running over British territory alone. From the St. Lawrence there is even the alternative of a double route to the sea coast, one down the St. John valley, chiefly owned and controlled, I think, by the Canada Pacific, the other along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while a third has been projected by the Grand Trunk, the rival of the Canada Pacific, through the heart of New Brunswick. Only a year and a half ago the Canada Pacific, to save distance, built still another line from Montreal eastward to make connection with the Intercolonial, and it is on the ground that a portion of this third line passes through the State of Maine that Mr. Smith informs English people that Canada's trans-continental railway 'would, of course, be closed to troops in case of war with any power at peace with the United States.' Whether this statement, made in a very critical point of Mr. Smith's argument, is a suppressio veri or suggestio falsi, I leave others to decide. On which side is the correct statement of {181} facts I can safely leave to the adjudication of the Canadian reader, the Canadian press, or of any person who has access to a good railway map of the Dominion. So flagrant seems to me the distortion of fact that I have sometimes wondered whether Mr. Smith was not testing the limits of that English ignorance of colonial matters of which he makes much in another part of his volume.
I must quote once more: 'In opening a trade among the provinces, a natural trade at least, these inter-provincial railroads have failed, for the simple reason that the provinces have hardly any products to exchange with each other, and that means of conveyance are futile where there is nothing to be conveyed.' The answer to this may be put into a question which business men will appreciate even if an author in his study at Toronto does not. Why is it, if there is nothing to be conveyed between the provinces, that, in addition to the Intercolonial, two competing lines have already been constructed and a third projected, all on purely business principles, to unite the maritime provinces to those of the St. Lawrence?
In his excessive eagerness to make points, Mr. Smith exposes himself to no slight suspicion of a willingness to open up unnecessarily, if not maliciously, old sores between the mother-land and the colony. He says: 'That in all diplomatic questions with the United States the interest of Canada has been sacrificed to the Imperial exigency of keeping peace with {182} the Americans is the constant theme of Canadian complaint. … By the treaty of 1783, confirming the independence of the United States, England not only resigned the territory claimed by each State of the Union severally, but abandoned to the general government immense territories "unsettled, unexplored, and unknown."' After explaining that this was partly due to ignorance, he continues: 'This is the beginning of a long and uniform story, in the course of which not only great tracts of territory, but geographical unity has been lost. To understand how deeply this iron has entered into the Canadian soul, the Englishman must turn to his map and mark out how much of geographical compactness, of military security, and of commercial convenience was lost when Britain gave up Maine. … A large portion of Minnesota, Dakota, Montana, and Washington, Canada also thinks she has wrongfully lost. These are causes of discontent; discontent may one day breed disaffection; disaffection may lead to another calamitous rupture; and instead of going forth into the world when the hour of maturity has arrived with the parent's blessing, the child may turn in anger from the parental door.'
To conjure up these historic mistakes as the cause of a possible national rupture will only raise a smile in Canada; upon readers outside of Canada who do not understand the circumstances the passage leaves a false impression. That mistakes were made most people agree; that they were partly due to the ignorance {183} of English diplomatists is true; but Canadians must admit that they were due to Canadian ignorance as well. As late as 1874 a Cabinet Minister of the Dominion on a public platform described the splendid wheat areas of the North-West as a country only fitted to be the home of the wolf and the bear. Among the separate and unsympathetic provinces, prior to confederation, there were ignorance and indifference as well as among English statesmen. 'Every intelligent Canadian now knows that most of these mistakes were far more due to the want of a nexus between the Colony and the Empire which would have brought colonial knowledge and experience to the assistance of British diplomacy. He knows that since the acceptance of this assistance as a part of the public policy of Britain, such mistakes can no longer occur, as the Fishery Award at Halifax and the Fishery Treaty at Washington, when Canadian interests were represented by Canadians, sufficiently testify; as the Behring Sea negotiations testify, in which, acting upon the information supplied by the Dominion Government, and recognizing the justice of the case, Lord Salisbury did not hesitate to say the final word which made aggressive diplomacy pause and submit to impartial arbitration.
'Disintegration, surely, is on the point of being complete,' and 'the last strand of political connection is worn almost to the last thread,' Mr. Smith exclaims, using as the illustration of his point Newfoundland's claim to make a commercial treaty of her own independently {184} of Canada. He refuses to see what others see, that the invitation to Newfoundland to have her interests directly represented in the arbitration with France; the fact that Canada has been thus represented at Halifax, at Washington, in the Behring Sea difficulties; the formal introduction, in short, of colonial opinion and knowledge into national diplomacy, marks the creation of new threads of connection, new bonds of union, which promise to be permanent, because constructed on true and primary political principles.
It is, I think, a fatal flaw in Mr. Smith's discussion of the Canadian Question, a fatal comment on his claim to have 'done his best to take his readers to the heart of it by setting the whole case before them,' that he makes no mention of this decisive change in national policy, or of the consequent change in the Canadian mind, which, if not reconciled to losses in the past, has no reason to dread them in the future, and in this confidence is content. That he should treat as present and gravely irritating, grievances which have become purely historical, is unfair and misleading.
If the difficulties with the United States which have arisen on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts are not settled amicably and justly, it will not be from any want of willingness on the part of British people or Canadians. Britain and Canada agreed to a settlement of the St Lawrence Fishery Question which an American Democratic President and Cabinet accepted as fair. A Republican Senate rejected it as a move in the party {185} game, and has preferred to leave it open ever since. Any reader of the correspondence in the Behring Sea Question can judge for himself on which side was the spirit of conciliation and compromise. Only in the last resort did Lord Salisbury utter the warning words which seem to have done more than anything else to prepare the way for fair adjudication upon the points at issue.
How curiously and completely Mr. Smith is out of touch and sympathy with the organizing movements of the British world: how oddly inconsistent he can be even while pressing his own theories, one or two further illustrations will suffice to show. Apparently he looks upon Australian Federation as a step in the wrong direction. 'We cannot help once more warning the Australians that Federation under the Elective system involves not merely the union of the several states under a central government with powers superior to them all; but the creation of Federal parties with all the faction, demagogism, and corruption which party conflicts involve over a new field and on a vastly extended scale. It is surprising how little this obvious and momentous consideration appears to be present to the minds of statesmen when the question of Federation is discussed[4].' Warnings like this are repeated. Anxious as he seems to be for the unification of the American continent by the absorption of Canada into the United States, Mr. Smith would apparently urge Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland to avoid even the example of Canadian {186} confederation in gaining for themselves effective unity, although he knows, that for them confederation means the freedom of the continental market and the same breaking down of tariff walls which is the one supreme bribe he has to offer to Canadians in exchange for the surrender of their nationality. Another turn of the intellectual wheel and even American unification is forgotten in a new ideal of disintegration. 'There is no reason why Ontario should not be a nation if she were minded to be one. Her territory is compact. Her population is already as large as that of Denmark, and likely to be a good deal larger, probably as large as that of Switzerland; and it is sufficiently homogeneous if she can only repress French encroachment on her eastern border. She would have no access to the sea: no more has Switzerland, Hungary, or Servia … The same thing might have been said with regard to the maritime Provinces—supposing them to have formed a legislative union—Quebec, British Columbia, or the North West. In the North West, rating its cultivable area at the lowest, there would be room for no mean nation.' This passage may explain to English or Australian readers why Mr. Smith has no acceptance in the Dominion as the prophet of Canada's political future. One remembers with astonishment that it is the writer of these lines who, on the one hand, assures Canadians that they cannot resist absorption into the United States, and who, on the other, tells the advocates of British unity that they are impracticable dreamers.
{187}
After this it does not seem surprising to find that Mr. Smith himself proceeds to knock away the foundations on which his own argument on the Canadian question has been built? These foundations are practically two in number—the fear of war on the American continent arising from irritation at the presence of Britain there—and the necessity for Canada of commercial intercourse with her own continent. These are the reasons why the Empire is to be disintegrated, and Canada is to seek a new national connection.
Following upon this we read: 'Of conquest there is absolutely no thought. The Southern violence and the Western lawlessness which forced the Union into the war of 1812 are things of the past. The American people could not now be brought to invade the homes of an unoffending neighbour. They have no craving for more territory. They know that while a despot who annexes may govern through a viceroy with a strong hand, a republic which annexes must incorporate, and would only weaken itself by incorporating disaffection. The special reason for wishing to bring Canada at once into the Union, that she might help to balance the Slave Power, has with the Slave Power departed. So far as the Americans are concerned, Canada is absolute mistress of her own destiny.'
Canada, therefore, in Mr. Smith's later opinion, has nothing to fear from war with the United States.
Once more, discussing the McKinley tariff, we read:—,
{188}
'However, the manifest faults of the measure, combined with the enormous waste of public money incurred in baling out surplus revenue to avert a reform of the tariff, have proved too much for the superstition or the sufferance of the American people. Symptoms of a change of opinion had even before appeared. New England is now praying for free admission of raw materials. The Republican party in the United States is the war party, kept on foot for the sake of maintaining the war tariff in the interest of the protected manufactures. It has made a desperate effort to retain power and to rivet its policy on the nation by means which have estranged from it the best of its supporters; but in the late elections it has received a signal, and probably decisive overthrow. What all the preachings of economic science were powerless to effect has been brought about at last by the reduction of the public debt, and of the necessity for duties as revenue. A new commercial era has apparently dawned for the United States, and the lead of the United States will be followed in time by the rest of the world.'
This means, if words mean anything, that in Mr. Smith's opinion, the United States are soon to throw open their markets to the world, and so, without political humiliation, Canada will have the commercial freedom of her own continent. One asks why 'Canada and the Canadian Question' was ever written.
An explanation may perhaps be found. Mr. Smith quotes (page 247) Sir Henry Taylor's opinion that {189} the North American colonies are useless and dangerous possessions for Britain, and thus goes on to remark: 'It may be said that this was written in 1852 and that since that time we have had new lights. Some persons have had new lights, but those who have not are no more unpatriotic in saying that the possession and its uses are as dust in the balance compared with its evil contingencies than was Sir Henry Taylor.' That is to say, though within the last half century the relations of the empire have absolutely changed, though the safety of its enormously multiplied commerce has come to depend on steam and coaling stations in every corner of the world, though the colonies have become great self-governing and self-sustaining communities, though the world has been recreated by steam and electricity, Mr. Smith frankly admits that these facts have given him no 'new lights' on questions of empire. He is living among the memories of the past; he devotes himself to the task of maintaining a theory based upon facts which have become fossilized under the drift of half a century of extraordinary change. Even if we are prepared in such a case to admit his sincerity, we have a right from the outset to challenge any claim to adequacy of treatment or correctness of judgment.
One more criticism of British Federation may be referred to as illustrating the inconsistency in argument of which a clever writer is capable:—
'Are the negroes of the West Indies to be included? {190} Is Quashee to vote on imperial policy?' says Mr. Smith, in fine scorn of the British federationist, who doubtless has no special fear or thought about a carefully restricted and controlled coloured vote in a few scattered colonies: a vote which in the aggregate represents not more than a very minute fraction of one per cent. of the enfranchised citizenship of the Empire. Strangely out of place, however, does this scorn seem when we find the same pages embody an argument for Canadians throwing in their political lot with a Republic where the Quashee vote, unconditionally and irrevocably granted, will far outweigh their own; where it will become enormously influential as soon as the free exercise is permitted of the rights granted by constitutional law, as, one would think, must ultimately be the case in a country which claims to give exceptional political freedom. Equally inconsistent does it seem when placed beside the romantic political enterprize to which Mr. Smith would commit Canadians. He says, 'The native American element in which the tradition of self-government resides is hard-pressed by the foreign element untrained to self-government, and stands in need of the reinforcement which the entrance of Canada into the Union would bring it[5].' Nay, more, Mr. Smith wishes Canada to enter the Union for Britain's sake, that she may 'neutralize the votes of her enemies[6].' Does he reflect that if the Canadian {191} vote chanced to be barely insufficient to neutralize the votes of Britain's enemies, Canada would, as I have elsewhere pointed out, be constitutionally forced into active hostility to the mother-land? The path which he points out has on it possible natural dishonour from which Canadians will instinctively shrink. They will prefer to retain the right to neutralize the influence of Britain's enemies, if the necessity arise, by other means, such as they have found effective before.
[1] A Times' editorial has spoken of Mr. Smith's views about the relations of Canada to the Empire as 'one of those crazes that are scarcely intelligible in a man of great intellectual power.'
[2] Lord Brassey, Naval Annual, 1890
[3] Canada and the Canadian Question, p. 260.
[4] Canada and the Canadian Question, p. 232.
[5] Canada and the Canadian Question, p. 274.
[6] Idem, p. 269.
{192}
I HAVE been able to speak of Canada as a unit; as already ripe for the next stage in its political development; and of its people as practically familiar with the application of the Federal principle. The Australian colonies, which, taken together, come next to Canada in size and population, have not reached this point, but are struggling towards it. Yielding to what appears to be the general tendency of modern political development, and following the example of the United States and Canada, the Australian people are wrestling with the problems of local federation. With two great precedents to guide them the task might seem an easy one. But they meet with the old difficulty in learning the art of give and take; in overcoming the same narrow but often sincere spirit of provincialism which obstructed the adoption of a federal system in the United States and Canada, the spirit which will have to be met and overcome in working out any system of British unity. It is, however, a significant and hopeful fact that the growth of the individual colonies has inspired in all the best minds the aspiration for some larger {193} Australian patriotism than any single colony can give. The problem of federating Australia presents some features different from those met with in the United States and Canada. The whole territory of a vast continent is divided among five colonies, each of which has therefore in area the proportions of an empire or kingdom, and far exceeds in size the states of the American Union or the provinces of Canada. Each has a sea frontage of its own, and is thus independent of all others for external communication. These divisions, again, have grown up under a system of what may be called state socialism. The government of each colony takes the chief part in developing its resources, by the construction of Railways, irrigation systems and other public works, involving the creation of large public debts. Thus immense importance has been given to the functions of the individual colony, functions which the colony would be unwilling to resign, and which the Federal Government would be rash to undertake.
I mention these new features and difficulties, because in dealing with them new light will be thrown on federal problems. Each accomplished federation makes more clear the steps by which the next and higher one is to be attained, and the principles by which it is to be governed.
It will be necessary to speak of the three insular divisions of the Australasian colonies separately, but it is in regarding them as a whole that we get an adequate idea of the great place which they hold {194} and may continue to hold in the Empire. Their populations are, and will continue to be, more purely British than any countries yet occupied by Anglo-Saxon people. Ninety-five per cent. of the inhabitants, whether born in the colonies or in the mother-land, are British. There is here nothing to parallel the elimination of the Anglo-Saxon element which is taking place so rapidly in the United States. There is no French province, with its individual lines of development, as in Canada. There is no large Dutch element, as in South Africa. The coloured population which may be found necessary for the cultivation of the tropical north, will be strictly subordinated to the necessities of British development, and there will never be in Australia, as there is in the United States, an immense coloured vote to confuse national politics. As a base of maritime power the Australasian colonies manifestly furnish to the nation of which they are a part an opportunity for maintaining a supreme and indisputable control over a vast area of the southern seas. Their harbours, some of which are amongst the most capacious in the world are yet for the most part capable of secure defence. Several are already supplied with docks, spacious enough to admit for repair the largest ships afloat. The more important are already strongly fortified. Melbourne is pronounced by competent authorities to be one of the best defended ports in the Empire. In New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand, great neighbouring coal {195} deposits increase the value of the harbours as stations for either carrying on or protecting trade. Still more important, they have behind them great and increasing populations, capable of supplying adequate means of local defence. It is manifest that such colonies may be a great element of strength in any nation, and especially in one which chiefly depends for security on naval power. Along with South Africa in the Southern Hemisphere they complete what I have before called the quadrilateral of maritime position which in the Northern Hemisphere is represented by the United Kingdom itself and Canada, with the commanding outlook of the latter upon the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Australasia and South Africa, however, projected as they are far into the water hemisphere of the globe, give a far more complete monoply of naval position than do the northern angles of this quadrilateral. A great sea power enjoying the right to their exclusive use would in any conflict have an immeasurable advantage in maintaining command of the ocean.
The facts which indicate the industrial relation of Australasia to the rest of the Empire are scarcely less significant than those connected with naval position.
In the production of one great article of manufacture, wool, it easily leads the world, both in respect of quantity and quality. In its singular adaptation for pastoral pursuits it seems the natural complement of a great manufacturing country like the United Kingdom, and of a cold country like Canada. Its {196} capacity for supplying meat as well as wool to the United Kingdom has increased greatly during the last few years and appears capable of indefinite expansion.
The production of gold, amounting to more than £300,000,000 in less than fifty years; of silver, copper, tin and other metals, which in vast quantities find their chief market in Great Britain, indicate another important line of connection with British industry. In proportion to population the Australasian colonies take from Great Britain more than any other countries in the world; they are able to do so because they sell to her more than any other countries. Without precise figures to justify the assertion one is yet quite safe in saying that no two states in the American Union, even those lying most closely together, have such proportionately large trade relations with each other as have the Australasian colonies and the United Kingdom, situated at opposite sides of the globe.
Australia's apparent isolation has suggested to many the possibility and expediency of her aiming at an independent national life. A little study of her relations with the rest of the world shows that her isolation, at any rate, is purely imaginary. If the first glance leads us to think that the colonies most remote from Britain are likely to have the least connection with her, facts soon show us that they really have the closest of all. There is a very plain argument which goes to prove that distance under {197} the conditions of modern commerce, produces a greater community of interest than contiguity. In Canada I have put historical bias in the forefront of the factors determining towards national unity, a bias so strong that in the future, as in the past, it seems likely to defy any geographical considerations which oppose it, and to force even commercial relations, to some extent, if need be, into its own direction. In Australia the prior place must be given to geographical situation and its influence upon commercial relationship. In her interests and connections Australia is, in an extraordinary degree, European and Asiatic. Four-fifths at least of all her external commerce is with Britain or with European countries chiefly through Britain. This trade passes along waterways the safety of which depends upon the movements of European powers. It is an essential element in the prosperity of the people. A trade at present small but prospectively great in the Indian and China seas gives Australia a deep interest in Asiatic questions.
An able Australian writer lately said in the Times, 'Australia is one of the least self-contained countries in the world. It is a wonderful producer of raw material. But it must trade off this raw material. … A dozen big "stations" would supply wool enough to clothe every man, woman and child in Australia. How is the big remainder, almost the whole, to be disposed of? We must sell it in the other hemisphere. We have no choice. … The fact is we cannot {198} produce all we want to consume, and we cannot consume all that we can easily produce. … We must sell our surplus abroad. It would not be worth while disturbing the deposit at Broken Hill only to pack away millions of silver coins in vaults.' He goes on to say: 'England could do without Australia better than Australia could do without England. The one imaginable event would mean something like ruin; the other, only disaster. England's prosperity is rooted in many countries, in so many that she is always able to turn a brave face in any single direction.'
Leading merchants and financiers of Australia have said to me that six months stoppage of the English trade would mean the closing up of three-fourths of the commercial and financial houses of the country. The rapid expansion of this trade every day increases the importance of the Suez Canal and the Cape of Good Hope routes, the two channels along which Australian commerce chiefly flows. Another field for trade is opening up in the China seas and in India. For a people thus related to Europe, Africa, and Asia, the Eastern Question, with all that it involves, has a deep and permanent interest. The question of whether Great Britain or Russia is in India and holds command of Indian waters is vital to Australia's position in the Southern seas.
On this point the Melbourne Age not long since said: 'The growth of Australia into a nation will bring with it the burdens of a nation, among which {199} the burden of foreign relations is the worst, especially if the relationship concerns a hostile power. Australia is already concerned in the Russian advance on India. …The possession of the Indian seaboard means so much to the safety of these colonies that the mere mention of it is sufficient to awaken attention on the subject: for if the peace of Australia demands that foreign nations shall not post themselves in the Pacific, still more vital is it that Russian guns shall not point over the Indian ocean, or Russian cruisers gather in Indian harbours. Australia shares in the danger, and is interested in meeting it, whether from the Imperial or the local point of view. Even as an independent state, Australia could not afford to agree to an occupation of India by Russia; in fact, our danger would be all the greater. If the Russians reach the sea-front the menace to Australia will be intolerable, and Australia has its own interest in preventing this. The defence of Australia begins on the hills outside Herat, and there already the attack has begun.' I have preferred to quote an Australian opinion upon this point to giving my own.
But even the questions connected with the trade routes and India do not exhaust the European interests of Australia. She has Germany and France at her doors, the one in New Guinea and the other at New Caledonia and the New Hebrides. With both she has had irritating points of difference and to the presence of both in the Pacific she objects. {200} The nearness of the great Dutch colonies of Java and the neighbouring islands is not now a subject of anxiety, but should the course of European politics ever lead to the absorption of Holland by Germany, an apparently not impossible contingency, the Dutch colonies would become more serious factors in Australasian affairs, for a great European naval and military power would control a native population which numbers 20,000,000, inhabiting islands which stretch along and lie close to the uninhabited side of Australia. The present able administrator of New Guinea, Sir William McGregor, who has long made a special study of the political relations of the Pacific, expressed to me his opinion that Australasian independence, with the consequent withdrawal of Britain's protection, would almost certainly result in French and German efforts to secure positions in Australasia at the expense of the colonies.