CHATHAM'S COLONIAL POLICY.* Miss KATE HorstAck was enabled by the
J. E. Cairnes Scholarship of Girton College, Cambridge, to undertake researches for which not many historical students have the time, the patience, or the means. It is a great irony that the Record Office should demand much labour on the part of those who would discover its secrets, but it is a commonplace that it is so. No one who has had sight of its many unclassified and unnamed manuscripts will be sur- prised that Miss Hotblack has been able to give us several very interesting and relevant Chatham letters which have not hitherto been published. Her book will be useful to all who want to know more of the motives and principles of the creator of British Imperialism.
What did Imperialism mean to Chatham ? If we were compelled to express his doctrine in a single word, we should say " Trade." " When trade is at stake," he exclaimed, " it is your last entrench- ment—you must defend it or perish." When he thought out his schemes of expansion they wore fundamentally commercial in character. When he urged moderation in taxing the American Colonists his arguments were mainly commercial ; he implored his countrymen to think of the trade they would lose, for he was convinced that the Colonists would be able to win in the end if they were wantonly forced to desperate courses. Again, " he ap- proved," as Miss Hotblack says, " and indeed partly composed, Shelburne's speech on the repeal of the Stamp Act, a speech in which the President of the Board of Trade dealt almost entirely with the commercial view of the question." Chatham was a very great designer of Empire, but his vision was of a vast community of traders rather than of a map painted in a flattering colour. When he had excogitated a plan it was complete to the last detail. " I can save this country," he said, and he was as good as his word. He felt that France was the enemy, and that France must be beaten or nothing would be safe. In saving his country by a series of conquests—commercial in inspiration—to which British history can show no parallel he trusted his soldiers rather than his politicians. He laid down exact rules for his political assistants because ho knew thorn to be on the whole inferior instruments. But he never interfered with his Generals. It is true that the slowness of com- munications in those days made a complete delegation of authority in distant campaigns almost inevitable; but oven when that has been admitted much remains to admire in the manner in which Chatham, having explained his objects, left the military interpre- tation of them to the mon of his choice and kept his mind in a state of serene detachment. He was indeed well served in the field. Victories flowed in even when he had sought none, as in the case of Clive's conquests in India. The saying of Walpole is universally remembered that every day he feared to miss hearing of the latest victory.
Chatham's intimacy with the City, its merchants and its trading adventurers, is well known. Miss Hotblack throws some light on this intimacy, and shows how naturally it fitted in with his Imperial theory. It need not be pretended that Chatham's principles were noble, as we should judge them to-day ; he liked moderation for its own sake, whenever it was a practical policy, and of course the Great Commoner wished all Colonists to be freemen ; but, for the rest, he was not much averse from the conception of Colonies which was typical of his days. Miss Hotblack says :- " It was a recognised principle with eighteenth-century economists that the colony existed for the commercial good of the mother i country, a good interpreted by the crude mercantilist dictum, ' You are to take our manufactures and supply us with raw products, and if possible naval stores.' Each colony was considered as ' a choice branch springing from the main root.' It was the duty of the parent state to give nourishment to its offshoot ; but no project for the good of the colony was to be considered on its own merits, but only so far as it contributed towards the general balance of the whole ltato. In fact, the colony was to be ' a useful and profitable member.' . . . For these reasons illicit trade between a colony and a foreign state, or between the colonies of different states, was a serious offence, the action of an ungrateful child, a blow at imperial unity, a drain on the national resources."
Hardly any ono judged foreign affairs from the moral standpoint. Take for example the issue between Britain and France in North America. Chatham always insisted that the French must be deprived of all their fishing rights and that England must have a monopoly. The Duke of Bedford, however, when Chatham's power declined, granted the French fishing rights off Newfoundland as well as possession of the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, arguing that " to do as we would be done by is the most golden rule as well as in what relates to the public as in private life." Similarly when Martinique and Guadaloupe were captured by Chatham's orders nobody in England that we know of raised any question about the feelings of the French populations. The fact was that bits of territory were pieces in the game at which both Britain and France played with an equal zest. We may gratify ourselves now with the thought that the aims of the present war are towards a settlement with natural and moral elements of per- manence. Yet again, Chatham's African policy was a sweeping
• Chatham's Colonial Policy. By Kate Hotblack, B.A., F.R.Illst.S., &c. London George Routledge and Sons. Os. net.)
commercial success, but it lacked the humanity which was characteristic of the younger Pitt :- " It deprived the enemy of a valuable source of revenue during the war, and correspondingly increased the resources of Great Britain. It raised the price of negroes in the French West Indies to a prohibi- tive price, and weakened the French privateers which were partly maimed by slaves. There is nothing to show that the Great Com- moner had enlightened ideas on the subject of slavery. His attention appears to have been first drawn to Africa by Cununing's stories of the gum trade. Ho was also interested in schemes for discovering gold mines and exploring the interior. But although it was not his first consideration, Pitt by no means neglected the slave trade, and on one occasion promised to use his influence to get the traffic so regulated that the West Indies might have a continual supply of slaves at a cheap rate. It was left to his groat son to discover the human element in this branch of African commerce."
" Trade," said Chatham in one of his brilliant passages, " is an extended and complicated consideration : it reaches as far as ships can sail or winds can blow : it is a great and various machine."
He added that the regulation of the numberless movements of this machine required the superintending wisdom and energy of the supreme power of the Empire.
The final test of Chatham's policy was his attitude towards the Stamp Act. His splendid vision of British America as he had laboured to train it up was expressed in memorable words :—
" America was of moan beginnings, so was Rome, but the scanty fountain is now become a large stream covered with sails and floated with commerce, and nothing shall prevent my using an effort beyond my force to avert the Dangers of such an express and full declaration. I think you have not the right I mean to waive it by silence, and most magnanimous exertion of power is often in the non-exertion of it. I wish this to be an Empire of Freemen : it will be -the stronger for it and it will be the more easily governed. Let the premises and consequences agree therefore, decline the right, do not let lenity ho misapplied or rigour unexecuted : take not the worst of both. The colonies are too great an object to be grasped but in the arms of affection."
No doubt Chatham's ideas of what might be galling to Colonists were limited. He said once : " We may bind their trade, confine their manufactures, and exorcise every power whatsoever except that of taking their money out of their pockets without their consent."
But to bind a man's trade and exercise arbitrary commercial powers over him is only another way of taking his money. Chatham's commercial policy, in fine, had inherent weaknesses ; it lacked the idealism which the world of that day had not guessed to be tho most powerful of possible common causes for a scattered Empire.
But when Chatham's political architecture is compared with the many petty and mean buildings of his day it must, be pronounced a design of overwhelming grandeur.
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