AN IMPERIALIST CENTRE PARTY.
[To THE EDITOR Or TER "SPECTATOR."]
Si,—The suggestions which you have made for the formation of a Centre Party, and the correspondence to which they have given rise, have dealt mainly with questions of domestic policy. It seems to me that they offer a favourable opportunity for adjusting the focus, as it were, of our outlook upon Imperial questions, and for working oat what may be called a common Imperialism. No thoughtful observer can fail to note that the quickening of interest in the Colonies has been accom- panied by other less satisfactory developments in our attitude towards Imperial concerns. In the first place, they have never before been used so frankly as a weapon of party conflict. Serious danger to our relations with the Colonies must arise from the attempt to persuade them that they are to expect sympathetic treatment from one only of our English parties. Is it not time that we should recognise facts with regard to the Imperial record of the two parties P At the time of the Imperial Conference the Liberal Government were hostile to the strongly expressed views of considerable groups in the self-governing Colonies on the subject of Preferential duties. The Unionists, on the other hand, were out of sympathy with Colonial feeling, more unanimous, and equally strongly expressed, on the subject of Asiatic labour and Constitutional settlement in the Transvaal. The slightest examination of the recent record of the two parties will show that neither can claim an exclusive right to speak for the Empire. The Unionists during ten years of administration did a good deal to promote an interest in Imperial unity and to organise the Colonial Conferences. They achieved useful work in connexion with Uganda and with the West Indies. But the result of the Tibet Expedition—in the opinion, at least, of an influential section of their followers—the unfortunate dis- agreement which led to Lord Curzon's resignation, and, above all, the Report of the War Commission on the conduct of the Boer War, did not certainly support the contention that it was in their hands only that Imperial interests were safe, and for the problem of national defence they failed to find a satis- factory solution.
Turning to the two years during which the Liberals have been in power, we find that they had a unique opportunity in South Africa, their use of which satisfied the vast majority of the population of the Empire, and across the seas met with hardly a dissentient voice. Nigeria and Uganda testify to their activity. They have accomplished a reform strangely neglected by Mr. Chamberlain both at the Board of Trade and at the Colonial Office,—the appointment, namely, of commercial agents for Great Britain in our own Colonies similar to those of other nations. They have kept down disorder in India. And finally, they have succeeded in carrying through an acceptable scheme of Army reform. National defence and Colonial settlement have, in fact, from Cardwell to Mr. Haldane, from Gibbon Wakefield and Lord Durham to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, always been specially the work of Liberals. It may, at any rate, be allowed that to "bow the head in shame" at the present moment, as we have recently been invited to do, is a theatrical gesture not likely to commend itself to the humour and good sense of Englishmen. That kind of smaller sectionalism can have no meaning to the Imperialist of "the Centre." It will be his duty to recognise two divergent but not conflicting aspects of Empire.
No one who has reached middle age can have failed to notice a change in the conception of Empire from what he remembers in his youth. That the task of the British was to raise the savage, to succour the oppressed, to spread the reign of order, enlightenment, justice, and freedom,—this was the thought which fired the imagination of hundreds of young men a generation ago. During the last quarter of a century the note has changed; the stress is laid elsewhere. Even the recent addresses of Lord Curzon and Lord Milner hardly touch—at any rate, do not emphasise—the Empire as a civilising agency. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's reference to the "beneficent mission" at the close of his address of welcome to the Colonial Premiers stood almost alone amidst the oratory of the Colonial Con- ference. Unity, strength, kinship, the great heritage, these are noble thoughts ; but to allow them to dominate our con- ception of Empire is to narrow that conception, and to forget that the real key to the influence of the Englishman in other continents is his altruism, the belief which he inspires that he is not solely bent on "grinding his own axe." There are, in fact, two sides to the Imperial ideal; and it is incumbent upon us never to forget that they are interdependent, and that the one has little value without the other. A "Centre Party" can have no higher aim before it than to recover the theory of Empire in its completeness ; to slacken no effort in presenting a front four-square to the world, but to remember that faith in the Empire means primarily faith in its unique opportunity to help forward the progress of the human race.
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