Delphi complete works of.., p.546
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 546
We conclude, then, where we began, that the outer Empire can easily absorb half a billion settlers. For their coming and their increase nothing is needed but understanding of the economic problem involved. For over a hundred years mankind has been in possession of an accumulated capital and an industrial technique and a mechanism of transport adequate to the task involved. The great accumulations of industrial capital, and the monetary forms that made it fluid and usable were in full growth after the Napoleonic War. But British capital flowed all over the world and least of all to the Dominions. The flood tide stream of British migration began about 1820. But it flowed chiefly to the United States and left the Dominions empty for half a century. Transport followed in the path of capital and migration. It had not learned to go first. Only in our time have we learned that the most profitable route of a railway is to connect two places which do not yet exist.
But by our great good fortune the opportunity is still there. The gate is still open. All that is needed now is to set our minds to the way in which the expenditure of a few billion dollars can open an era of prosperity never before known.
CHAPTER III. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS WITHIN THE EMPIRE
IN THIS CHAPTER I propose to discuss the historical development of economic relations within the Empire. I desire to show the way in which the British colonial system became economically disarranged; how it lost through this its most illustrious colony whose inhabitants had not yet on political grounds dreamt of leaving it; how it proceeded later to imitate in a smaller degree the independence of the United States by the political separation of the responsible colonies; and how under the misleading idea of political rights the major colonies, as “Dominions” were led further and further from the benefits of economic unity until we reach the situation we have to-day. In this situation we have the spectacle of 66,500,000 British white people, united together under a single monarchy, valued by practically all of them and treasured by most of them; joined by a common language and a common literature; united by a common military glory, whose record runs unbroken from Queen Anne and Marlborough to Flanders fields; held together by a warmth of affection and sentiment stronger than political ties; joined in the casual intercourse of every day and every hour by the marvellous inventions of communication of this present era — held thus, as a unit to the wonder and envy of the world, but broken up economically into half a dozen entirely separate States without common action, or common resources or a common system of control, and unable to make use of the heritage which their history has given to them.
In this situation thus they sit, spinning fine cobwebs of discussion about their mutual political rights and glorying in their political separation.
The story of the expansion of England is too well known to require a detailed repetition. There are those who know it so well that they will prefer to turn the page; and there are those, too, who know it so well that they are never tired of hearing it.
But I propose only briefly to review the history of the colonial empire and to do so in the light of the economic relations that were developed as between the mother country and the overseas settlements.
The British Overseas Empire begins with the island, or rather with the fisheries, of Newfoundland. Sir Humphrey Gilbert landed at what is now St. John’s in 1583 and took possession of the island in the name and with the written authority of Queen Elizabeth. But the beginning was long before then. John Cabot and his son landed somewhere on the island in 1497 and claimed the whole adjacent territory — as a part of Asia — for Henry VII. The Portuguese Corte Real came three years later and announced a similar Asiatic claim. Neither explorer made any actual settlement. Neither claim had any particular meaning; but these discoveries made known to the sailors of Western Europe the inconceivable quantities of fish at that time obtainable in the shallow waters of the Grand Banks. English, French, Portuguese and Spanish vessels came back and forward every summer. There was no attempt at settlement. The fish caught were salted and dried on the land, but the ships returned to Europe before winter. So numerous were the fish that at times the ships were unable to carry home their catch. In Queen Elizabeth’s time, before Gilbert made his voyage, there were said to be some 400 vessels in the Newfoundland fishing trade. Almost a quarter of them were English.
Gilbert made his claim and was lost at sea. Others followed. An attempt was even made by Lord Baltimore, with the permission of James I, to plant a settlement. But the French worried him out of it. After that the English Government forbade all permanent settlement; the idea was to turn the country into a sort of summer fishing station for the good of the British commercial interest. In Charles the First’s time the Devon seaports alone sent 150 fishing ships to the Banks every year.
Settlements gradually followed, legal or illegal. But these were merely fishing stations. There were about 2,000 people living within the island in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and about 10,000 at the American Revolution. There was no question, as yet, of overseas migration and no real need for it. England at the opening of the Tudor times was still an undeveloped country. There were wolves in the great forests of the centre. Vast marshes extended in East Anglia, and in the north and the south-west wide and desolate moorland. Coal slumbered in its bed. The population was perhaps two and a half million. Nor for nearly 300 years after Gilbert was there any real basis for migration from over-population. Emigration when it began was not economic in its motive. It arose from persecution; it was a means of escape; its essence lay in its farewell. Or it was a movement of adventure, of sea-wandering, with the hope of gold and treasure; in such cases its essence lay in the glad return. The idea of a greater England overseas had to wait for the birth of a greater England at home.
To Newfoundland followed the West Indian possessions. Beginning with Barbados (1605) a series of important islands [Bermudas (1609); Bahamas (1665), etc.] were acquired by actual settlement; one, Jamaica (1655), as a prize of war. These were “plantations” in the literal sense, a form of overseas commercial venture, to be worked with slave labour, and not constituting new homes for the people of England. These were the days when sugar filled a more important place than coal, and pepper outclassed the unknown petroleum. The spice islands of the East and West seemed like a treasure-house awaiting only the “open sesame” of European enterprise.
Of such character was the great India trading venture that began with East India Company in 1600, and reached its splendours of profit and rapacity in days of Clive. But it had nothing to do, and still has nothing to do, with the development and expansion of the British people, except through the pages of a ledger or through the annals and the arts of war. Their true homes were waiting still, away beyond the snows and over the veldt or under the sunlit shadow of the eucalyptus tree.
The first real “home” was made, and lost, in America. All the world has read the story of the Puritans of the Mayflower of 1620 and the Massachusetts Bay Company of 1629. They left England with a noble motive and in a good cause; but such grief as there was at their going seems to have been one sided. Their disagreeable character was redeemed by the heroism of their endurance. They carried with them, somehow, more than any other group of outgoing emigrants, the seed of a future civilization; the seed of American education in the people’s school, a thing unknown in England; the seed of American efficiency in their native ingenuity and smartness; and in their code of conduct the seed of the eighteenth amendment to the constitution of the United States.
Separately came to the Virginias (1607) a people of a different kind, soon to develop great plantations, chronically half bankrupt and worked with troops of slaves hardly worth having, till the cotton gin and the English factory riveted their claims on their necks. The Virginias and such, till the Stamp Act of 1765, were further, in points of real contact, from Massachusetts than from England. Other colonies followed. Every reader of history knows of the establishment of the “towns” of Connecticut, the foundation of Rhode Island as a place where nobody need agree with anybody; the chartering of Pennsylvania (1681) as the home of brotherly love; the conquest of New York and the absorption of the Dutch; the broad ground plan of the Carolinas and, last in the list, the opening (1730), of a free-for-all refuge for the distressed named as Georgia after George II.
Here begins in true reality the story and the problem of the overseas British Empire. British the provinces were, as no overseas colony ever again except Australia and New Zealand. The emigration was practically all from the British Isles. The exceptions, as will be shown in the next chapter, were so few as to leave little trace after the passage of a generation. The migration came in waves, proportionately of great size, at the foundation of each colony. But after the first 100,000 of immigrants and their offspring, the succeeding addition was mainly by the natural increase of population under circumstances favourable as nowhere else. Especially did migration dwindle to a flow of small dimensions in the first half of the eighteenth century. England could at that time utilize its own people. Foreigners were virtually shut out, and, in any case, did not want to come. The cosmopolitan movement of population, irrespective of flag, allegiance and language, was still a hundred years away. From the time when Wolfe overcame Montcalm in 1759, the British had North America to themselves. The Indians, in point of numbers, never mattered. No one ever counted them, but scholars’ estimates assign perhaps one Indian to every six square miles, not more. The Eskimos were a legend. The French-Canadians (60,000) were agricultural prisoners of war in the St. Lawrence valley. Spanish claims mattered about as much as the Papal Bull of 1493 which defined them. Black slaves were property. There were in America, before the Revolution, 3,000,000 British people with the best continent in the world all their own: ruled, in a nominal way, by an affectionate and kindly king, no stupider than they themselves were; deeply attached to their kindred people in the British Isles, the place which even Washington called “home”.
What a chance! If not for humanity at large at least for all those who still spoke the common speech and shared the common history of England.
The inhabitants of the United States who are descended from Germans, Russians, or Czechoslovaks naturally cannot see that the American Revolution was a great tragedy. For them it was not. Without it they would probably not be there. No doubt most Americans think of the Revolution as a noble chapter in history, a great forward movement in the world’s progress. Who can blame them if they do? Such great figures as those of Washington and Jefferson, the splendid courage of the farmers and “minute men” of Bunker Hill, and the resounding phrases of the opening part of the Declaration of Independence (no one ever reads the rest) have thrown a halo around the separation of England and America.
The soil is, for many, too sacred to be treated as controversial ground. And what is more, the amazing material success of the United States, now rapidly tending to dominate the industrial world, seems to speak for itself. The carelessness — the superciliousness — of the English long since accepted the American Revolution as part of the general epic of British freedom, annexed George Washington as an English gentleman and agreed that the separation was inevitable. Such was the verdict of the Goldwin Smiths and the Victorian historians: a verdict which helped further to disrupt and cripple the Empire that was left after this first partition.
But for people outside of the United States the historical problem is still worthy of attention. And most of all to us who live in Canada, whose past history, whose present situation and whose whole future are intimately concerned.
The truth is, that the American Colonies were not separated from England because of political discontent. There wasn’t enough of it to notice. The colonies governed themselves. The great mass of the people, ninety-nine out of every hundred, never dreamed of independence. No one, so Benjamin Franklin has assured us, ever dreamed of independence before 1775, whether drunk or sober. Washington repudiated the very idea of it as late as the year 1775. There were, in colonial days, no conspiracies, no underground plots, no patriots taking oaths in a cellar at midnight, no Catilines, no Guido Fawkes — nothing. All the quarrel that there was was focused in the decade from 1765 to 1775, and it rested on economic grounds, not political. The quarrel led to actual fighting, Lexington was only a skirmish, yet Bunker Hill was a fierce and appalling conflict with a British loss of over a thousand dead and wounded, not far from twice as many as the British killed, wounded and missing (655) of the battle on the Plains of Abraham, sixteen years before.
Fighting such as this leads to war. A declaration of war only followed twelve months after Bunker Hill, under the name of the Declaration of Independence. According to the words of this document, the separation that followed was mainly based on inalienable political rights and the rejection of political tyranny. But nobody, except here and there an Adams and a Patrick Henry, had ever thought of this before. One may find such people to-day here and there in Canada, or even in New Zealand, talking school-book republicanism. But nobody pays any more attention to them than the American at large did to Samuel Adams before the summer of 1775.
But the economic situation is worth studying.
The old colonial system regulating the relations of the plantations to the mother-country in the eighteenth century, like many other things, was not as black as it has been painted. In its essential basis it was far ahead of what we have now, for it started from the idea of the unity of all the British possessions, whereas we start now, since 1840, with the idea of their separation. The old colonial system regarded all foreign countries as on a different footing from the British Empire. Our present regime — save for a few preferential gestures — treats all parts of the Empire as countries, foreign to one another. The colonial system contained in itself the idea of a distinct purpose, namely British Unity — which it failed to achieve. The present system is stamped equally plainly with the idea of ultimate separation, which may yet be prevented.
The colonial system began with the idea that all the land in all British possessions belonged to the Crown, meaning the Imperial Government in Great Britain. This was excellent. It compares admirably with the present silly notion that 600,000 settlers in Alberta, by a new arrangement of 1930, are the uncontrolled owners of 100,000,000 acres of unoccupied fertile land; that the 333,000 people lost in the 975,000 square miles of Western Australia own every foot of it. Who else in the early days of settlement should own the enormous and unknown territory, on the edges and outskirts of which a few new-comers have clustered, except the government from which they come, whose flag and arms still shelter them? The premature abandonment of the imperial ownership of unused lands was one of the most disastrous errors of colonial policy.
It is true that in colonial days the grants were often enormous in extent and foolish in lavish generosity to the undeserving. But often they were not. William Penn received 45,000 square miles to manage as a proprietor under the Crown and Parliament — perhaps the best disposition ever made of colonial land. As the colonies grew, the royal governors on the spot, as in Virginia, made grants of land to individual settlers, a practice that lasted far into the nineteenth century. But behind this power of the governor was still, quite properly, the over-riding authority of the Crown. When the colonies undertook to grant to the Ohio Company and such the lands beyond the Alleghany mountains, unsurveyed and empty, the Crown interfered. This vast territory was not to belong to the 3,000,000 people who happened to get to America first. The unoccupied land of the Empire, apart from actual settlements, from land reclaimed with the axe and defended with the musket, was Royal Domain. Substitute for “royal” the word “British” and the proposition ought to hold good to-day. It did hold good till well into the nineteenth century. This ownership of the public land by the Imperial Government proved the means of settlement for the United Empire Loyalists. The system finished with responsible government. What was done cannot be undone. It is a clock that we cannot turn back. But we can at least realize the economic check involved in the transfer of vast areas of land to the mimic ownership of a few settlers.
In the colonial days, however, no one thought much about the question of the land. There seemed so much of it. George Washington, by inheritance and marriage, by purchase and speculation, acquired some 100,000 acres. No one worried over this. In the gorgeous and bountiful endowment in which even the humblest American lived, there was no room for a land question.
More complicated was the control of commerce. The British Government expected the plantations to be a source of profit to the commercial interest of Great Britain. Hence arose the mercantile code which presented to the other country the whole colonial market to sell in, and the whole colonial export in such great articles as tobacco and sugar. But even this was not quite as one sided as it seemed. Colonial tobacco, for instance, had a virtual monopoly of the English market. Home growing was very early prohibited. The colonies also could trade with one another to the exclusion of the foreigners. The United States realized this at once, when their independence of 1783 shut them out of the West Indian market.
