TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PLACE OF ENGLAND IN THE COMING CENTURY. u-NDER the heading "Will England Last the Cen- tury ?" a writer in the January Fortnightly who signs himself " Calchas " considers the problem of Eng- land's future. Will the century which begins next Tues- day see the decline and fall of England as the seven- teenth century saw that of Spain, or shall we be able to survive the competition of our rivals, and will "the meteor flag of England" hold as high a place at the end of the next hundred years as it holds now ? "Calchas's " answer is that we may keep our place in the world if only we read the signs of the times aright, and if we meet the new century with a great national awakening. The direction which our renewed activity should take is con- sidered in detail by "Celebes," and he sets forth what is in fact a political, commercial, and moral programme for the guidance of the nation. With a part of " Calehas's " programme we are in entire sympathy. We hold with him, to begin with, that there are no signs of national decay, and that whatever may be the fate of the ship of State, it is no rotten, water-logged vessel manned by a drunken or lazy, or disordered crew that now rides the sea. No doubt the best found ships have ere now been cast away, and the ablest captains have thrown their charges upon the rocks, but, at any rate, if we perish it will not be because we are degenerate. Again, we agree with " Celebes " that the nation must spare no effort, must practise a conservation of moral and intellectual energy, and must by means of education in all its branches equip itself for that struggle for life in which nations are as much plunged as are individual men. Lastly, we hold with him that if we are wise we shall come to an under- standing with Russia, and shall base our world-policy not on antagonism to her, but on a proper recognition of what are the aims and objects she has at heart. But, unfortunately, "Celebes," like so many of the prophets of the new epoch, makes these sound premisses the foundation for an absolutely suicidal set of proposals in regard to our commerce. When we come to the kernel of his scheme, it is apparently—for we admit he writes here with a certain vagueness—for Protection, —i.e., for a tariff and the adoption, under some con- venient alias such as a Zollverein, of the Continental policy of the closed, as opposed to the open, market. In our view, it would be impossible to devise a quicker or more certain way of destroying the British Empire than to give up our policy of the free and open market, and to try to increase our resources by buying dear and selling cheap. At present, however, we do not intend to do battle with " Calchas" on the question of Free-trade. We desire instead to set forth what we believe will be the policy that will keep England her present high place in the community of nations.
The coming century is clearly destined to be for all the great nations of the world the century of Imperial and Colonial expansion. It will, that is, be marked by the acquisition or development by the European Powers of vast tracts of country beyond the seas in Asia, in Africa, and in South America. Rightly or wrongly, all the European Powers have come to believe that a nation in order to be great must have an oversee Empire,—colonies and possessions in the uncivilised and undeveloped parts of the world which are governed from and controlled by their European possessors. Britain already possesses a great oversee Empire. France has lately acquired one on a vast scale in North-West Africa and Indo-China. Germany has made a beginning, and is determined to have more, and her ambitions lead her to look to Asia Minor, to China, to East Africa, and to South America. Italy, in spite of her severe trials in Erythrea, still hankers for external possessions ; while Russia, though her colonies are not oversee, is among the greatest of expanding nations. The United States also has entered the lists, and has in Cuba, and the Philippines the beginnings of an Empire. All things, then, show that the new century, as we have said, will be the century of Imperialism. But that being so, success or failure will be achieved in the new century by the Power or Powers which prove able to manage best and develop best their Imperial possessions. The Great Powers have each and all backed themselves in the great game of Empire, and on their good or ill fortune their fate must depend. It is our belief that, granted we keep our heads and play the game in the future as we have played it in the past, Great Britain will win. We believe, that is, that we hold the secret of success, and that the other Powers have not divined it. They imagine that in order to make Empire a benefit to the Imperial power colonies and dependencies must be controlled from home, and, what is more, must be organ- ised and developed in the interests of the home-country. The French and the Germans argue, logically enough in ap- pearance, that if they spend blood and treasure in acquiring oversee possessions those possessions must be made to pay the bill. 'What is the use,' they argue, 'of establishing a colony and then allowing the ships and traders of foreign nations to use its ports and to exploit its markets as if they were its own ? That is not business. A colony is like a branch office, and its business is to feed and help the central office, not that central office's rivals and competitors. A colony's raison d'être is the bringing of help and support to those who founded it.' Hence an Empire, as understood abroad, means great outlying estates to be worked for the benefit of the absentee possessors in Europe. By a series of most happy accidents, moral, physical, commer;ial, and political, which cannot be de- scribed here, we have come to regard oversee possessions in a perfectly different spirit. Gradually during the past century we have learned that the first thing to be thought of in our oversee possessions is how to make them pros- perous in themselves. The object has been not to develop them so as to feed England with trade and money, but to make them individually flourishing communities. We have never argued: 'This or that trade policy if adopted in a Colony might be very good for the Colony if it could be considered in isolation, but we, the Mother-country, should lose a certain benefit, and therefore it cannot be adopted.' We have thought instead first of the benefit of each unit of Empire. And we have done this not merely in the case of the great self-governing Colonies peopled with white men. In India and Ceylon and all our dependencies, as contrasted with our Colonies, we have endeavoured, quite as strongly, to think primarily of the benefit of the inhabitants. In the case of the self-governing Colonies, we have even allowed them to subject the goods of the Mother-country to hostile tariffs, holding that they must be allowed to be the judges of what is to the interests of the Colony. In a word, our rule of Empire has been to consider always the interests of the inhabitants of each oversee community, and to make no attempt to benefit the Mother-country at the expense of the daughter State or dependency. What has been the result of that policy of liberty and unselfishness ? It has placed the Empire on foundations of the most stable kind. Politically, it has made the self-governing Colonies view their con- nection with us with pride and satisfaction, and has taught them to consider themselves as partners not as dependents. But there is no need to enlarge on this point,—almost every action that has been fought in South Africa is a witness of the soundness of the Empire. And even in the case of India and of Colonies like Ceylon, the know- ledge that we govern for the benefit of the inhabitants, and not of the taxpayers at home, has had its effect. The people of India may not love their white rulers, but at any rate it cannot be argued that we bleed the people of India to fatten ourselves. At the same time that we make no attempt to exploit the Empire for the benefit of the United Kingdom' we throw open our home ports to all our Colonies and dependencies. They may tax our goods, but we do not tax theirs in order to protect our home products, and any man throughout the Empire who has unexcisable goods to sell can come and sell them freely here. As we have urged before in these columns, the Empire of which we are so proud, and so justly proud, is the child of liberty and Free-trade. On these principles, and on that of government in the interests of the governed, the British Empire rests, and as long as they are main- tained we have no fear for its future. Not until we give them up for the Colonial system of the Continent, and rest the Empire not on moral ideas but upon a mere materialistic basis, will the position of England be really in danger. That we did not adopt these principles in order to make the Empire secure is no doubt historically true, but that this is so is good rather than evil. Honesty is the best policy ; but he is not an honest man who is only honest for that reason. We found our Empire and the secret of Imperial success not by looking for it, but even while we were half-inclined to abandon our Imperialism as not consistent with the idea of liberty. So true it is, as Cromwell said, that none rise so high as those who take no thought of rising. There is yet another reason why, if we retain our past Imperial policy, we shall not lose our present high position. We have never attempted, like the great Empires of the past, to create a monopoly of Empire. The notion of a monopoly of power or of universal Empire has never been entertained by us, and in spite of our keenness in trade we have never shown that ap- palling selfishness and angry rivalry which defaced the commercial Empire of the Dutch. We have understood that healthful competition was far safer than monopoly. We hold, then, that liberty, Free-trade, government in the interests of the governed, and avoidance of any attempt to obtain a monopoly of power will prove the antiseptics of Empire.
If other nations adopt these principles may not they also rise to an Empire as great as ours ? Possibly they may, and most certainly we should be glad to see them make the attempt. Except, however, in the case of the . United States, which will, we trust and believe, develop her Imperialism on our lines, we do not think it probable that any Continental nation will be content to abandon the immediate fruits of Empire in order to reap later a far better crop. Unless the spirit of the Continental Govern- ments changes fundamentally, we do not think it possible that they will copy our principles of Empire. It is far more likely that they will act in the future as in the past, and make a rigid control from home in the interests of the Mother-State their rule of policy, jealously dreaming meantime of universal Empire. If they do, then their Empires will be short-lived, and they will be lucky if the home-land is not involved in the ruin of their ill-founded colonies. The fate of the world-Empire of Spain will be theirs. Spain, indeed, affords the great example of how not to rule an Empire ; but when were examples in the world of politics of any avail ? France is acting at this moment in Madagascar exactly as Spain acted in South America.
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