MR. FORSTER ON OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE.
FORSTER'S address last week at Edinburgh has brought down upon him the rather severe wrath of the leading journal. The Times cannot disguise its chagrin at Mr. Forster's hope that the Colonial Empire of Great Britain will keep together, and accuses him of vapouring' on the subject, —a word curiously inapplicable to any one sentence or word in Mr. Forster's speech,—only because he has not followed the Times in what are certainly vapourings, if Mr. Forster's hopes are vapourings, though of an opposite drift. You may have vapour of sulphur as well as vapour of iron, the vapour of an irritant as well as the vapour of a tonic. The Times preaches, in season and out of season, that it is only a question of time when the Colonial Empire shall go to pieces. Without professing to be eager for that epoch, it steadily anticipates it, and aims at removing from men's minds all reluctance to accept the result. It is our duty," says the Times," to dispel any-remaining delusion that England can cover all the earth with her wings." If that means that it is our duty to dispel the delusion that England can throughout all time protect the Colonies without the help of the Colonies themselves, no one, as . far as we know, ever cherished the delusion, least of all Mr. Forster. But if it means that England, acting cordially with the Colonies, cannot protect them far more effectually than they could protect themselves without her help--that a Colonial Empire well welded together is not a great.mutual-assurance society against external foes, the remark is certainly false ; and in any case, its ambiguity is precisely of the kind which is intended to suggest that hearty co-operation between England and her Colonies is too dangerous, difficult, and ambitious a policy for sober politicians to adopt, and to throw cold water on its pro- moters. It may be well, then, to ask whether Mr. Forster's policy or that of the Times is really the more sober, practical,. and practicable.
Now, in the first place, the charge brought against Mr. Forster's address by his chief critic is, that he leaps over at a bound the difficulties which arise •between the Colonies and the Mother-country in the actual conduct of our Colonial administration, and " plants himself in the open arena of free speculation," and that a statesman who does this instead of "taking notice of the ephemeral trifles brought to us by the Colonial mails," discards from his view the only land- marks by which the future can be computed. The tendency of all the . disputes which have arisen between England and her Colonies is to enlarge the freedom of these so-called Dependencies, and to diminish the influence of the Home Government ; and if, hints the Times, Mr. Forster had guided his speculations by these facts, instead of by the empty sentiment of colonial loyalty, he would not have found it so easy to indulge the belief that the Colonies will ultimately cling to the centre from which they have been steadily, though gradually, separating themselves. Now the answer to that objection is, we think, twofold. First, it is only partially true ; and next, it is not to the point. It is only partially true, because undoubtedly the various disputes between us and our Colonies, though they have ended in the assertion and the concession of a larger and larger range of self-government, have also ended in the growth of a much more amicable and mutually respectful regard as the re- sult of those concessions, so that while the old tie has in one respect been relaxed, the new one substituted for itis in many ways stronger than the old. Ia the next place, the argument is not to the point. It does not at all follow that because, while we interfered in matters of domestic concern which the colonists held that they were much better able to settle for them-
' selves, the tendency was centrifugal, it will so remain when the matters chiefly needing our united action are matters on
which the colonists could bring to bear neither any special knowledge, nor, often at least, any separate interests of their own. It is not the young men who have had a struggle for their independent rights who are least closely attached to their parents, and least inclined to defer to their authority in all reasonable ways, when those rights are admitted. Practi- cally, too, the growth of great colonial Confederations,-- like the Canadian Dominion, the South-African Dominion now in course of construction, and the Australasian Dominion already seriously anticipated, the rise of which many of us will probably live to see,—will prove to have drawn us much.closer towards, instead of to have alienated us from, the colonies so confederated. Such colonial Confederations greatly need the help of an impartial external authority, to mediate between and over- rule their constituent parts in relation to their mutual differences, and in the case of the Canadian Dominion at least, we have already felt the growth of her confidence towards us as the conse- quence of the judicious exercise of such arbitration. We may, too, fairly anticipate, as a matter of reasonable calculation, that even as regards financial policy, on the blunders of the Colonies in relation to which severe comments are often passed, the effect of federation must be to bring home the mischiefs of a Protective system, and to recommend the adoption of the de- liberately chosen policy of the mother-country, much sooner than the component elements of these Federations would other- wise have accepted it for themselves. There is a largeness of policy rendered necessary by federation which at once creates a new sympathy between the Empire and the new Federal union, Hence we believe that after passing a certain point in the centifrugal movement of colonial development, there will Come a stage when the whole drift of further development tends to bring back the Colonies into sympathy with the Empire, instead of to weaken the tie between them. At all events, it is clearly a more sober, practical, and practicable policy to bind the Colonies to us by binding them closer to each other than it is to make the most of all their divergencies, and by rivetting their attention on their little disputes with the mother-country, to make them despair of a cordial understanding either with us or with each other.
But in the next place, how could it in any case be more produc- tive of a sober policy to anticipate separation than to anticipate a permanent union ? No doubt, Mr. Forster, with that deep. popular Conservatism for all things dear to the national heart and imagination which has always distinguished him, counts up with delight the great numbers of our British colonists, the almost inexhaustible area secured to them, and the enormous mileage of their sea-coast within the limits of a temperate climate ; but it seems to us that that striking picture has very far indeed from a disturbing or over-stimulating, nay, that it has a most sobering effect, on the imagination of states- men who are to rule with the great design of keeping these Colonies together. Is it likely to lead to a policy of bragga- docio in the mother-country, that she should have to study in her foreign policy the interests of millions of Englishmen scattered over all the temperate regions of the globe ? Or will it make her less tender and regardful of those interests, that she is relying on a permanent union with the States of which they form the essence, instead of counting the years till it is decent to cut the painter and set them free ? How will it promote dis- putes to assume beforehand that they must be amicably settled, instead of that they will lead to a break ? How will
it make us more ambitious and unscrupulous to know that our policy is criticised with sympathetic anxiety by a whole group of subsidiary Parliaments in America, Africa, and Australia ? Va,pouring? Surely, if any policy is likely to be a vapouring policy, it is one which boasts that it must be decided on quite without regard to the Colonies ; and that, if the Colonies don't like it, they must just take. themselves off, and look out for their own interests. It is not the policy which is full of solicitude for maintaining the integrity of the Empire, but the policy which does not care what the colonial view of our action may be, which must be said to overleap the difficulties of the present, and expatiate in the arena of free speculation. Would it in few way have tended to increase, for instance.the difficulty with New Zealand in 1869-1870, if Lord Granville, instead of taking the caustic and indifferent
tone of a statesman who did not care how soon New,Zealand demanded her independence, had assumed throughout the bearing of an anxious and even solicitous desire to promote in every way New Zealand's interests We complained of Lord. Granville's policy at the time, quite as much for its curt and
rasping manner, as for the risks which we believed to be in- volved in its substance. It has turned out that Lord Granville was more right than we were on the latter head, but it is cer- tain that if he had adopted a less cavalier, and we may fairly say in one case, a less supercilious tone, he would have accom- plished his purpose with far more ease and far less injurious results. We take this merely as a sample of many little colonial quarrels in which the Colonies have been involved with the British Government. Compare, for instance, Lord Carnarvon's mode of dealing with Natal and the Cape with Lord Gran- ville's mode of dealing with New Zealand, and we shall see at once the advantages of that ideal assumption on which Mr. Forster so wisely insists,—that the connection between Great Britain and her Colonies is not a temporary one which any fit of petulance may be expected to break through, but a per- manent one, which it behoves both parties to a dispute, even when it is at its hottest, to remember is by right a sacred and enduring one, if not quite indissoluble. No doubt there is a very real difficulty in determining the ultimate form which the connection between England and her Colonies would take, whenever the Colonies have so outgrown the mother-country in the magnitude of their resources and popu- lation as to render it impossible even to conceive that we should simply dictate a foreign policy which they in their turn would implicitly accept. But so long as the tie is, strictly speaking, a voluntary one,—which, in the case of our larger colonies at least, it is already,—is there not a motive for sustaining it far stronger than any which ever sustained an offensive and defensive alliance between nations of different tongues and different genius Here are a number of peoples who all of them attach the same kind of importance to liberty, labour, and commerce, who all of them draw their ideas from the same literature, and look for their political precedents to the same great history, distributed over the earth as missionaries of these ideas and guardians of the same type of civilisation. Is not Mr. Forster right in supposing that the natural impulse of such peoples will be to hold to- gether, and not to forget " the rock from which they were hewn ?" that it will, in many respects, be far easier thus to hold together, than to pursue separated and isolated ways ? that, at all events, it will be for generations to come an infi- nitely wiser and more practicable assumption for the Home Government to accept, that our Colonial Empire will be per- manent and the parent of peace and of great enterprises, than the assumption that the Colonies are soon to part company like a rope of sand, and must then become as useless to England as the South-American Republics are to the unfortu- nate country which so early learnt the art of alienating by misgovernment her possessions on the Pacific Ocean.
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