Looking forward, then, towards the prospect which now confronts the British Empire, one may best begin with something like an appraisement of the wealth and the potential wealth, the territory, resources and the development of the resources possessed by its people. In doing this the central point of interest for this present essay lies in the question of the expansion of the white race, of the occupation of “white man’s territory” and the outlook for what is called western civilization. It is no part of the present work to discuss the future industrial development of the tropical dependencies of the Empire. Great as is their importance as a source of wealth, they can never be a part of the British commonwealth in the higher sense. In such areas the white race can find no home. They ought in the one course of time to be handed over to races fitted for the climate. Still less is it the present purpose to discuss the future, either economic or political, of the 325,000,000 mixed Asiatics who live in British India. It is quite possible that with advancing industrial technique and with better organization even this huge population may expand in number and increase in prosperity. But this is a problem shared by all crowded industrial countries, whether Asiatics or European, and has little or nothing to do with the theme of this book. The present purpose is to examine the co-ordination of empty fertile spaces and unused national resources with the growth and movement of the white population under the British Crown.

  It is proper to begin with a few generalities, familiar, but so imposing as to stand the wear and tear of repetition. The British Empire represents an area of 13,491,977 square miles, or one-fifth of the land surface of the globe. It carries a population of 450,000,000 people, or one-quarter of the human race. In Australia it owns a continent, in Canada the half of one. Both of these, where habitable at all, are “white man’s territories”. In South Africa the Union and its mandate in South-West Africa, with the adjacent country of the two Rhodesias, adds up to 1,250,000 square miles. The uplands of Africa, the cooler regions of the equatorial highlands, Kenya and Uganda, may perhaps also, though perhaps not, turn out to be suitable for permanent white occupation. To all this there is to be added such insular possessions as New Zealand (in area nearly equal to the British Isles), Newfoundland, and, in a sense, the West Indies. But the calculation of the total population under the British Crown is most misleading. Of the grand total of 450,000,000 no less than 325,000,000 belong in British India and Ceylon. Outside of that the population of the rest of the Empire numbers only 125,000,000, and from this we must subtract again the 20,000,000 natives of Nigeria, the 40,000,000 of various African and other dependencies, so that at the end of the count the population of the British Empire, as far as it is white, becomes striking not by its size but by its lack of it. It numbers only 66,500,000 — about the same number of people who lived, without overcrowding, in the German Empire of 1914, an area of 208,000 square miles, or rather less than the area of Saskatchewan.

  The opportunity for expansion and development thus offered seems at first almost appalling. Here is a population of sixty-six and a half million people with undisputed access to the land and resources of a fifth of the globe. They are recognized by all other Powers, even if with a certain reluctance, as the “owner” of it. They are equipped with the technique of modern production, were themselves the first to invent it, and have control of monetary capital far greater than that of any European nation, as great perhaps indirectly as that of the United States.

  The picture becomes still more highly coloured when we turn to enumerate the share of the British peoples in the principal natural commodities that serve as the basis of the world’s production of wealth. Of these the first and the most fundamental is arable land. The ploughshare is the earliest emblem of our Western civilization as it arose slowly out of and from the land. On the entire globe there are calculated to be 52,500,000 square miles of land surface, and of this 13,500,000 square miles are in the Empire. Only a fraction of this is now cultivated, in Australia only one per cent, in Canada three per cent. No estimate has ever been made of all the arable land in all the Empire. But from calculations made in regard to Canada, it is certain that in the great Dominions cultivation could easily be multiplied as five to one.

  Next to land is coal. Western civilization was not built upon it and knew and cared little about it for the first two thousand years after the rise of Greece and Rome. Its part in the world’s history only began about the year 1700. But once utilized as a source of power in the industrial revolution and the eighteenth century, it rapidly assumed a major importance in material civilization.

  In the year 1700 England mined and used only about two and a half million tons of coal. At the present time the entire consumption of coal in the world for domestic heat, factory power, railway and marine transport amounts to 1,235,000,000 tons per annum. Of this the United States, now the largest producing country in the world, raises 591,720,000 tons. The British Empire mines each year at present an average of 305,000,000 tons, of which 245,000,000 comes from the British Isles. The first warnings of apprehension in regard to the future supply were heard as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, when Professor Stanley Jevons in his Coal Question (1865) prosecuted an inquiry into the probable exhaustion of our coal mines. For two generations already gloomy prognostications have been uttered to the effect that the British coal supply would presently be exhausted. The same apprehension was voiced again by the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies in 1926. “We look forward, says the report of the Commission, to a time not far distant when the rate of increase of output will be slower, to be followed by a period of stationary outputs, another and gradual decline”.

  But as far as the world at large, or even the Empire at large is concerned, this apprehension need not be of a lively character. It resembles somewhat the astronomical alarm at the distressing slackening in the motion of the earth, calculated sooner or later to have disastrous consequences for mankind but at present involving only the loss of one second every two or three thousand years. It is probable that long before the exhaustion of world coal occurs, the world will have ceased to use coal.

  Here are the facts. The coal beds of the earth are estimated to contain 7,863,556,000,000 metric tons of coal. At the present rate of use it would take humanity many centuries to burn the truly available part of it, and 6,000 years to burn it all if it could be reached. The United States, fortunate above all other nations, possesses a potential supply of 3,536,000,000,000 tons, of which great areas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and elsewhere are of anthracite, the coal of highest quality and heating power. In other places, as in the Mesabi range in Minnesota, the coal lies so close to the surface that it does not need to be “mined”; it has only to be shovelled out. In the British Isles, as already said, the total known coal area contains still a supply of 166,000,000,000 tons. But there is no sooner talk of its exhaustion than hope springs up anew with the reports of possible new beds of great potential value under the quiet countryside of South-east England. If the possibility of running out of coal were the chief of England’s worries, the country would be happy indeed.

  In Canada are vast beds of coal. But it is ill situated. It lies in the extreme east and in the far west and is lacking, pending further discoveries, in Central Canada, the principal area of population and manufacture. The coal beds of Nova Scotia are estimated to contain 2,639,000,000 tons, those of Alberta 12,000,000,000. The dependence of Central Canada upon American coal, of which it imports yearly 16,500,000 tons, is one of the weak spots in the self-protective mechanism of the imperial system. Promising discoveries of coal, in the uninhabited littoral of the James Bay, reported officially by the Government of Ontario in 1929, may prove of vital value as an economic link in a broken chain.

  Of the metals one turns first to gold as that of the greatest prestige, the history of which has helped to govern the expansion of Europe. Many modern economists assure us that we could do nicely without it, and that its use as the basis of currency is as antiquated as the stage coach. But public opinion at large still values its possession. Here the British Empire, starting among the last, has become easily the first in production. The discovery of America presently brought to Europe the gold of Mexico and Peru. There was but little of it, as we count our gold now. But in the world of Christopher Columbus’s day, with perhaps no more than the coin equivalent of $160,000,000 of gold and silver in all, and with older sources of supply washed out, it appeared as fabulous wealth. Spain, as between 1500 and 1600, drew about $5,000,000 of gold per annum from the mines of Central and South America. By the middle of the nineteenth century gold production reached $118,000,000 a year, and the accumulated supply, perhaps $200,000,000. Then came the discovery of the California gold which ran soon to an annual output of $56,000,000 and which at the present day still amounts to $12,000,000. The Australian gold fields of Victoria (1851) soon rivalled those of California, and reached in 1853 a maximum output of $60,000,000. Australia, including the gold diggings of Victoria, Tasmania, and Western Australia, produced (1909) only a little more than this total, and has since sunk to an output of $10,000,000, almost nine-tenths of it from Western Australia.

  But South Africa presently eclipsed all other gold fields and still leads the world. The Witwatersrand, a great ridge of buried gold ore on a plateau in the Central Transvaal, is estimated to have produced, up till 1926, a total gold value of about $4,500,000,000, and at present produces annually about $200,000,000, or more than half of all the gold mined in the world. In Canada the gold produced until recent years was negligible in the world’s supply. British Columbia, where gold was discovered in 1858, represented at its highest point (1913) an output of $6,149,027. The discoveries in the Yukon Territory turned the eyes of the world to the Gold Rush to the Klondyke in 1898, and built up Dawson “City” to a temporary population of 20,000 inhabitants. The gold boom passed as it came, pending further good fortune in the Arctic wilderness still only partly explored. But the gold of Northern Ontario, lying in the Lake Temiskaming district, has become a rising factor in the world’s supply. Beginning with $42,000 in 1911, it has reached an annual output of over $32,000,000.

  Taken all in all, the civilized world is estimated to possess in coin and gold a quantity that is equivalent to about 17,000,000,000 gold dollars. The annual production, averaged for the ten years since the war, amounts to $412,000,000. The output of the year 1927 was $410,000,000. For the same ten years the British Empire averages seventy per cent of the total. For the year 1927 the total Empire output was $290,000,000; and that of the rest of the world, $120,000,000; South Africa, $209,000,000; Canada, $38,000,000; Australia, $13,000,000. The production of the United States was $46,000,000. Thus over seventy per cent of the world’s gold is provided by the British Empire, a percentage which in all likelihood is destined to a further and continuous increase.

  Iron comes next. Here the world at large is blest with one of the few supplies which we still dare call “inexhaustible”. Vast deposits of iron ore exist all over the globe, many of them, such as those of inland Brazil, as yet untouched, and beyond the present reach of man. From those in use the world extracts each year about 146,000,000 tons. From the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, where the ore lies close to the surface, about 35,000,000 tons are shovelled up every year. Altogether 780,000,000 tons have been taken out. The geological department of the state of Minnesota estimates that there are still 1,250,000,000 tons left. From the great iron deposits of the Franco-German borderland a similar quantity, at present about 37,000,000 tons of ore, is raised annually. In the iron deposits that underlie the North of England, north of a line drawn from Yorkshire to Dorset, there are said to be 3,400,000,000 tons of workable ore. But when all these resources are gone the world, at large, has no occasion to worry. Geologists tell us that the workable ore beds of the globe comprise 30,000,000,000 tons. With a present annual utilization of 146,000,000 tons, we can see our way ahead for about two hundred years. After that — but that is far enough.

  For the first hundred years of the modern industrial era Great Britain led the world in the production of iron. Indeed the rise of the iron and steel industry was one of the largest features of the industrial revolution. In Queen Anne’s reign England only produced each year a few thousand tons of iron. About 18,000 tons of pig iron were produced by 1740. In 1820 the entire world production ran to a million tons; in 1850 about four and three quarter million tons. Of these Great Britain produced two and a quarter million and the United States only 630,000 tons. But between the years 1880 and 1890 the United States industry, stimulated by the protective tariff and organized on a basis of mechanical transport and manufacture never seen before, overtook the British with giant strides, passed it and left it presently in relative insignificance. In 1890 the United States produced 9,000,000 tons of pig iron and Great Britain less than 8,000,000. In 1928 the figures stood at 37,800,000 against 6,500,000.

  It is not necessary to deal with the other minerals in the same detail. But a glance at the table of the world’s mineral output which is here appended will illustrate the general position. In certain cases the British Empire enjoys an overwhelming superiority in the possession of mineral resources. Extreme cases are those of cobalt, asbestos and nickel. Cobalt is a metal, unknown till yesterday to the industry and commerce of the world, but now of great utility for advanced forms of steel manufacture and for the making of pigments for the linoleum manufactures. The entire world’s supply is in the Empire, the greater part of it coming from the deposits of Northern Ontario.

  In asbestos, Quebec and South Africa supply ninety-five per cent of the world’s consumption; in nickel, the northern districts of Ontario and Saskatchewan enjoy an overwhelming advantage: in the last ten years Canada has produced from eighty-seven to ninety per cent of the world’s output. With certain other minerals and metals, though to a lesser degree, the advantage is all the other way. Of copper the British Empire only produces four and one half per cent of the annual supply, though there is every prospect of a great wealth of copper ore being discovered between the Hudson Bay and the Copper Mine River in Arctic Canada. Almost the whole of the world’s quicksilver (99·8) per cent comes from Spain; sulphur and phosphates from the United States and the world’s nitrate from Chile.

  But the case of extreme importance is that of petroleum, the basis of the now universal gasolene, without which, under present conditions, the industrial life of any nation comes to a full stop. It seems strange now to look back to the despised “rock oil”, which was about a hundred years ago oozing out on the surface of the marshlands of the Pennsylvania valleys and floating on the ponds. The early settlers could find no use for it except as a liniment for sores and burns. Then a certain Mr. Ker purified it enough to burn it in a “coal oil” lamp as “kerosene”. Chemists distilled it. Naphtha, benzine and paraffin flared upon the market. Industrial capital sank wells and pumped it out. The 2,000 barrels of 1857 had become 150,000,000 barrels at the end of the century. Then came the invention of the explosive engine, making possible the aeroplane and the motor-car. Rock oil became the most conspicuously important product in the world. All the world was ransacked to find it, and up to now it is the hard fate of the British Empire to be away behind in the supply. The whole world produced in 1927 a total of 1,254,145,000 barrels, of which 905,000,000, or seventy-two per cent, came from the United States. Next stood Russia with 5·77 per cent, Venezuela with 5·12 per cent. British India is set down at 8,200,000 barrels, or less than half of one per cent of the world’s supply, and beyond that the Empire is clean out of it. Canada, with half a million barrels, makes only an insignificant contribution.

  The case, however, is not as bad as it seems. Our present dependence on the outside world may easily lessen and disappear. There are various fields within the confines of the British Empire which may prove of great wealth in oil. It would be strange if it were not so. The province of Alberta lies over a vast bed of coal: natural gas exists in great quantities. All geological indications point to the presence of oil-bearing strata as yet unrevealed. Even now oil is produced in promising quantities in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and it is likely that far to the north of the Alberta in the valley of the Mackenzie River the small discoveries of oil already made will prove only a beginning. Australia still seeks petroleum in vain. But there is oil in British Borneo, most probably in Papua, certainly in New Zealand (but with the quantity in doubt), and undoubtedly, and in large quantities, in the West Indian island of Trinidad. Another generation, another decade, may alter the entire outlook.

  Another commodity, like petroleum of little significance to the world till yesterday, is rubber. Though known and used for a century, it had little place in the greater manufactures. Even in 1910 the world’s annual consumption was only about 3,000 tons. Goodyear’s discovery of “hot vulcanization” goes back as far as 1839, but it is only of late years that processes have been devised for combining rubber with other materials (fabrics, metals, glass, wood, etc.) so as to secure both elasticity and strength. The development of the motor-car both stimulated and utilized these processes. The production of rubber in 1927 reached over 622,000 British tons, an increase which is not an end but apparently only a beginning. Almost the whole of the rubber supply at present originates from rubber trees; the manufacture of synthetic rubber, as in Germany, from lime and coke by a complicated chemical process is yet of small commercial importance. The principal natural forests are in the valley of the Amazon, with lesser sources of supply in Central America and the East Indies, Siam, French Indo-China and Siberia. But the world’s rubber supply no longer comes to any great extent from the natural forests. About ninety-five per cent of it is drawn from “plantations” of rubber trees, the greater part of them grown in Malaya and other British tropical dependencies. The Empire produces about seventy-five per cent of the world’s rubber. But when it comes to the manufacture of rubber, into motor tyres and other goods, the situation is reversed. The Empire is relatively out of it. The United States uses about seventy per cent of the world’s rubber, which thus becomes the basis of one of its greatest industries, with an output valued at over one and a quarter billion dollars.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495 496 497 498 499 500 501 502 503 504 505 506 507 508 509 510 511 512 513 514 515 516 517 518 519 520 521 522 523 524 525 526 527 528 529 530 531 532 533 534 535 536 537 538 539 540 541 542 543 544 545 546 547 548 549 550 551 552 553 554 555 556 557 558 559 560 561 562 563 564 565 566 567 568 569 570 571 572 573 574 575 576 577 578 579 580 581 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 598 599 600 601 602 603 604 605 606 607 608 609 610 611 612 613 614 615 616 617 618 619 620 621 622 623 624 625 626 627 628 629 630 631 632 633 634 635 636 637 638 639 640 641 642 643 644 645 646 647 648 649 650 651 652 653 654 655 656 657 658 659 660 661 662 663 664 665 666 667 668 669 670 671 672 673 674 675 676 677 678 679 680 681 682 683 684 685 686 687 688 689 690 691 692 693 694 695 696 697 698 699 700 701 702 703 704 705 706 707 708 709 710 711 712 713 714 715 716 717 718 719 720 721 722 723 724 725 726 727 728 729 730 731 732 733 734 735 736 737 738 739 740 741 742 743 744 745 746 747 748 749 750 751 752 753 754 755 756 757 758 759 760 761 762 763 764 765 766 767 768 769 770 771 772 773 774 775 776 777 778 779 780 781 782 783 784 785 786 787 788 789 790 791 792 793 794 795 796 797 798 799 800 801 802 803 804 805 806 807 808 809 810 811 812 813 814 815 816 817 818 819 820 821 822 823 824 825 826 827 828 829 830 831 832 833 834 835 836 837 838