The British Empire
HIS MAJESTY'S Government in the Mother Country is to go into the coming Imperial Conference with an " open," or fairly open, mind. That is right, but open does not mean vacuous, and the country must study beforehand some of the questions to be raised rather than wait to think of them " on the staircase " when the party is over. About some of these questions we are fairly happy. Lord Rosebery said that Kruger made the Empire realize itself. Since then the ex-Emperor of Germany has done even more than Oom Paul. The questions that will loom largest will be those of commerce, supplies of food and raw materials, Imperial trading. and so forth. Imperial Free Trade will be pressed by some ; Imperial Protection will be urged by others under the same name. Some bubbles will be pricked, we hope, but that will be only a negative success. The Spectator is not a trade paper, and it cares more for ideals than for the materialism into which discussions on trade tend to fall, but these economic matters are indissolubly entwined with ideals that we hold most dear, and with the modern politics to which it is every citizen's duty to attend.
The conspicuous political dangers to-day are these. The Labour Government, rightly desirous of being recognized as being as good Imperialists as any, have behind them supporters on whom they depend who have little experience or knowledge of the Empire, who see (and have our sympathy in seeing) immediate hard- ships at home that obscure the bigger problems of Empire ; who are open to the false guiding that led the Australian Trade Unions, for example, to the narrowest views of commerce, disastrous to themselves and contrary to all the Imperial and international hopes of to-day. The Unionist Party is harassed by efforts to put upon its leader illegitimate pressure to follow paths leading to bogs in which his envious enemies would gladly see him engulfed. The Liberal Party, whose economic doctrines have in these matters been our own, are, with Mr. Snowden, right in theory but unadaptable to change and apparently as hard-hearted as they are hard-headed when sentiment cries out for considera- tion ; and sentiment is more powerful in a democracy than economic doctrine.
We refuse to put trade first as a link of Empire. It can be a strong link, but it can also cause friction. Our hope is so to use it as to avoid friction, and to gain by its binding force. With the greater binding force of sentiment, which must be paramount, the links may be unbreakably strong. So may it be. The paramount sentiment will lie in loyalty to the Crown, the common feeling that we are all subjects of one King and Emperor; in sharing the advantages of British Law and Justice, accessible to every subject up to the Privy Council ; and those ideals of personal freedom and responsibility which have been the great contribution of our race to the world's progress. We are lovers of freedom and initiative, and there is no definite line where freedom of spirit can be cut clear from freedom and initiative in trade. How can arrangements made at the Imperial Conference best increase the volume and ease of trade without restricting initiative and turning the best intentions into a restraint upon enterprise, and even into the unamiable feelings that exist where bargains are made, and self-interest comes first ? Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's Imperial schemes foundered upon the taxation of food and raw materials. He did not get so far as to bring to light the inevitable sources of irritating inequality between Dominions or Colonies whose staple exports, food or others, could not be treated equally for extraneous reasons. He scarcely thought at all of the problems of the Crown Colonies, whom, as we showed some weeks ago, Lord Beaverbrook would treat with such masterful hardness. With those and many other difficulties before our eyes we still see the need not only for an exchange of views, but for positive action. At this moment production is in excess of demand. To some economists those words might mean " wealth is super-abundant." But it is not so. Wealth is there or can be produced ; so much the better. Demand is not a fixed quantity. It can be enlarged indefinitely. Anyone can see that a demand for silly and fleeting luxuries is unlimited ; so may be the demand for true wealth, material as well as spiritual. To bring supply and demand together is the problem. " The Market " has done it for centuries with great success. Can we improve on that success by organization ? It is our duty to try, and the sphere in which the British can make the attempt is the Empire.
We have before now drawn attention to the scheme of Sir Robert Hadfield which centres in an Empire Development Board. He is one of those who have tried to think out the means of putting ideals into practice. He has experience in international trade and he has always been a stout Free Trader. We trust his opinions as based on the soundest foundations, and like ourselves he would ward off from these problems the interference of party politics which cannot be disinterested. To-day we want to point to the Report of the British Preparatory Committee for the Imperial Conference, which sums up and gives the greatest common measure of the Reports of the Federation of British Industries and the Association of the British Chambers of Commerce, and of a memo- randum of the Shipping Industry. The result is that they want before anything else the machinery for investiga- tion and consultation within the Empire, and this should he provided by an Imperial Economic Secretariat. We should like to see the establishment of such a body of inen drawn from all parts of the Empire, although it is in the men who will devote themselves to the service that we have faith rather than in any artificially esta- blished office. Even when we think of the inevitable overlapping with the Department of Overseas Trade which has helped our trade considerably through the abnormal years since the War, we arc more than content that there should be a voluntary organization detached from politics or the bureaucracy. The Secretariat should not be Government officials any more than the staff of the F.B.I. or the Chambers of Commerce or Shipping, if they would keep their freedom and initiative. The Imperial Conference itself may demand an office of Imperial Civil Servants distinct from those of the Dominions and Colonies Offices, but if it blesses, as we hope it will, the establishment of a business centre of information, we hope that it will allow the business men the free control of an organization devoted to their aid and interests. In a similar way we approve the words of the F.B.I. on emigration. The work of the official' Overseas Settlement Committee must be limited and expensive. The real way to stimulate migration within the Empire is to develop the prosperity of the Dominions which will then both need and attract settlers from the Mother Country. Another reason against a new organiza- tion being State-controlled is that it would not be under- stood at Geneva, where the British Empire is officially represented on the Economic Committee of the League. Similarly we are not yet convinced by the plea of the Chambers of Commerce for new " Ministerial posts" for representatives in the " Empire Trade Assembly " which they propose. The Chambers themselves do the better work for being voluntary bodies, and the taxpayer does not deserve the new burden of salaries for specu- lative work.
To return to the Conference, it should always have in mind a fact put forward by the Shipping Industry.
We quote it without comment :-
" The main increases of tariff rates an British exports have been within the British Empire, where the average ad valorem incidence has risen by nearly two-thirds, while in foreign (sundries, despite the great increase in the United States tariff, the average ad valorem incidence has decreased by one-fifth." (Survey of Orerseaa MarkeI8, 1925.) Since that was written there havo been further increases in Dominion tariffs. . . .
The new Canadian and New Zealand tariffs, however, were not published when the Chamber wrote their memorandum.
The Conference may more happily keep in mind the fact that the Empire by its climates and natural resources could be as nearly self-sullicient as the United States, and could steadily develop several products of which it lacks sufficiency to-day, e.g., cotton, timber, pulp, iron ore and petroleum. By the side of these facts are is no sign yet of the nations of the Continents of Europe and America relaxing their national aspirations inn iudu,t ry or thinking that they would be better served by taking more of our goods. The conclusion must be that the Conference can and must do its best in the sphere where its influence prevails—the Empire—to bring the unlimited demand of us all into due relation with bounteous pro- ducts of nature and of industry with which that Empire is blessed.
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