LECTURE III The expression " Colonial Empire " is familiar to us, and yet there is something strange in the juxtaposition of words. The word Empire seems too military and despotic to suit the relation of a mother-country to colonies.
There are two very different kinds of colonisation. First there is a kind which may be called natural, in the sense that it has manifest analogies in the natural world. “Colonies are like fruits which only cling till they ripen,” said Turgot. Colonisation, say others, is like the swarming of bees ; or it is like the marriage and migration to another house of the grown-up son. And no doubt history furnishes us with real examples of such easy and natural colonisa tion. The primitive migrations may often have been of this kind. In the first chapters of European history, in the earliest traditions of Greece and Italy, which show us the Greco-Italian branch of the Aryan family in the act of occupying the territory whichLECT. in THE EMPIRE 45 was afterwards to be the scene of its greatness, we see this easy process going on under the influence of primitive ideas. We read of the institution called ver sacrum, by which all the children born in one spring would be dedicated to some deity, who was supposed to accept emigration in lieu of sacrifice ; ^ the votaries accordingly, when they grew up, were driven across the frontier, and sometimes they settled and founded a city on the spot where an animal accidentally overtaken on the journey, in whom they saw a guide sent by the god, had chanced to stop. From such a sacred animal we are told that some cities, e.g. Bovianum and Picenum, received their name.
This may be called perhaps natural colonisation, but out of such a system there could grow no colonial empire. Accordingly the Greek airoiKia, though the word is translated colony, was essentially different in fact from the modern colony. By a colony we understand a community which is not merely deriva tive, but which remains politically connected in a relation of dependence with the parent community. Now the Greek airoiKLa was not such a dependent community. Technically it was entirely independent of the mother - state, though the sense of kindred commonly held it in a condition of permanent alliance. The dependency indeed was by no means unknown ^ Thus Paulus : Magnis periculis adducti vovehant Itali quaecunque proximo vere nata essent apud se auinialia immo laturos. Sed quom crudele videretur piieros ac puellas innocentes interficere, perductos in adultam aetatem velabaut atque ita extra fiues suos ezieebaot.
46 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect to the Greeks. Subordinate governments “were often among them established by a State in a community outside itself. But among the Greeks the dependency was not a colony, as the colony was not a de- pendency.
The Latin colonia was no doubt dependent enough, but it was an institution so peculiar, being a sort of contrivance for the purpose of garrisoning conquered territory without the expense of maintaining an army in it, that we need not discuss it further here.
It is a remarkable and fundamental fact that the old primitive system of the Greeks has not been revived in modern times. The colonisation which began with the discovery of Columbus, or more strictly with the conquest of the Canaries by Bethen court in 1404, has been on a vast scale ; it has peopled a territory more extensive a hundredfold than the few Mediterranean islands and peninsulas which those primitive Greek adventurers occupied, yet nowhere, I think, did the mother-state willingly allow its emigrants to form independent communities. Whatever license might be allowed to the first adventurers, to a Cortez or Pizarro, Avhatever formid able powers of levying armies and making war or peace might be granted, for example, to our East India Company, the State nevertheless retained invariably the supreme control in its hands, except where a successful rebellion forced it out of them. Though it seems not to have occurred to Corinth that it could possibly carry on government at the distance of Sicily, on the other hand it seems just as
Ill THE EMPIKE 47 little to have occurred to the Spanish or Portuguese or Dutch or French or English Governments that their emigrants could pretend to independence on the ground that they were hidden away in the Pampas of South America or in the Archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean.
The modern system may be less natural if by " natural " we mean " instinctive,” but if we mean by it " reasonable," which is surely different, we must not call it unnatural simply because it is not the system of bees or of plants. At any rate let us not take up at once the scolding strain, and say, " See the con trast between the humane wisdom of the ancient world and the tyranny of the Gothic Middle Ages The Goth never relaxes for any distance his barbar- ous system of constraint ; the mild intelligent Greek, guided by nature, perceives that the grown-up child has a right to be independent, and so he blesses him and bids him farewell." Perhaps if we examine the circumstances of the modern colonisation we shall see that it grew as inevitably out of them as the instinctive system grew out of the conditions of the ancient world.
The appropriation by a settled community of lands on the other side of an ocean is wholly different from the gradual diffusion of a race over a continuous territory or across narrow seas. Slight motives calling into operation moderate forces may suffice for the latter, but the former demands a prodigious leverage. In the life of Colombus it may be re- marked that he needs the help of the State at every 48 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
turn. It is the State which has equipped him and paid the expense of the discovery. Moreover when the discovery is made, it is observable that no irresistible impulse prompts the Europeans to take advantage of it. When the floodgates are thrown open, there is no stream ready to flow, for in Europe at that time there was no superfluous population seeking an outlet, only individual adventurers ready to go in search of gold. Columbus can make no progress but by proving to the Sovereigns that the territory he dis- covers will yield revenue to them. In these circum stances the State, as its help was always needed, had the less difficulty in maintaining its authority. We may observe also that the modern State almost necessarily colonises in a difi’erent way, because its nature is different from that of the Greek State. The Greek mind identifies the State and City so completely that the language, as you know, has but one word for both. Aristotle, though he knew of country-states such as Macedonia and Persia, yet in his Politics seems almost to omit them from consideration. Fre- quently he lays down principles from which it appears that he could not bring himself to regard them as states in the proper sense of the word, because they were not cities. The modern idea on the other hand —few of us know how modern it is, or how gi-adually it has been formed—is that the people of one nation, speaking one language, ought in general to have one government.
Now it is evident that these difi’erent ideas of the State involve of necessity different ideas of the effect in THE EMPIRE 49 of emigration. If the State is the City, it follows that he who goes out of the City goes out of the State. Hence the Greek view of the colony was natural to the Greeks, for those Greeks who under took to form a new city (7roXt9,) did ipso facto and inevitably undertake to form a new state. But if the State is the Nation (not the Country, observe, but the Nation), then we see a sufficient ground for the universal usage of modern states, which has been to regard their emigrants not as going out of the State but as carrying the State with them. The notion was, WTiere Englishmen are there is England, where French- men are there is France, and so the possessions of France in North America were called New France, and one group at least of the English possessions New England.
It is involved in this, but it is so important that it must be stated separately, that the organisation of the modern State admits of unbounded territorial ex tension, while that of the ancient State did not. The Greek iroXi’i, as it actually was a city, could not be modified so as to become anything else. I must never be tired of quoting that passage of the Politics which is so infinitely important to the student of political science, where Aristotle lays it doAvn that the State must be of moderate population, because " who could command it in war, if the population were excessive, or what herald short of a Stentor could speak to them^ (ti9 8e Krjpv^ firj ^revropeto^ ;)." The modern State, being already as large as a country, would bear to become larger. Either it had no s 50 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lbct.
national assemblies, as was practically the case with France and Spain, or its national assembly, as in the case of England, was representative—that is to say, was expressly contrived to overcome the diffi- culty of bringing together the whole body of the citizens.
I have indulged in these general reflections upon the nature of modern colonisation in order that we may understand what our Empire is, and how it necessarily came into existence. There might easily have been a great emigration from England which would not in any way have enlarged the English State. For by Greater Britain we mean an enlarge ment of the English State, and not simply of the English nationality. It is not simply that a popula tion of English blood is now found in Canada and in Australia, as in old time a Greek population was spread over Sicily, South Italy and the Western Coast of Asia Minor. That was an extension of the Nationality but not of the State, an extension which gave no new strength, and did not in any way help the Greek name when it was attacked and conquered from Macedonia. In like manner at present we see a constant stream of emigration from Germany to America, but no Greater Germany comes into exist- ence, because these emigrants, though they carry with them and may perhaps not altogether lose their language and their ideas, do not carry with them their State. This is the case with Germany because its emigration has happened too late, when the NewWorld is already carved into States, into which its Ill THE EMPIRE 51 emigrants are compelled to enter, as with Greece it was the result of a theory of the State, which identi fied it with the City. But Greater Britain is a real enlargement of the English State; it carries across the seas not merely the English race, but the authority of the English Government. We call it for want of a better word an Empire. And it does re- semble the great Empires of history in this respect, that it is an aggregate of provinces, each of which has a government sent out to it from the political head quarters, which is a kind of delegation from the supreme government. But yet it is wholly unlike the great Empires of the Old World, Persian or Macedonian or Roman or Turkish, because it is not in the main founded on conquest, and because in the main the inhabitants of the distant provinces are of the same nation as those of the dominant country. It resembles them in its vast extent, but it does not resemble them in that violent military character which has made most Empires short-lived and liable to speedy decay.
We may see now out of what conditions it arose. It is the only considerable survivor of a family of great Empires, which arose out of the contact of the Western States of Europe with the New World so suddenly laid open by Vasco da Gama and Columbus. What England did, was done equally by Spain, Portugal, France and Holland. There was once a Greater Spain, a Greater Portugal, a Greater France and a Greater Holland, as well as a Greater Britain, but from various causes those four Empires have 52 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lkct.
either perished or have become insignificant. Greater Spain disappeared and Greater Portugal lost its largest province Brazil half a century ago in wars of independence similar to that which tore from us our American colonies. Greater France and a large part of Greater Holland were lost in war and became merged in Greater Britain. Greater Britain itself after suffering one severe shock has survived to the present day, and remains the single monument of a state of the world which has almost passed away. At the same time it differs in a very essential point from some of those Empires.
The countries which were suddenly thrown open to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century fall into three classes. Vasco da Gama threw open countries in which for the most part ancient and extensive states existed, such as the adventurers did not for a long time think of subverting. Columbus on the other hand discovered a Continent in which only two such states appeared to exist, and even these were soon proved to have no solidity. The contact which Columbus established, being the most strange and violent which ever took place between two parts of the human family, led to a fierce struggle and furnished one of the most terrible pages to the annals of the world. But in this struggle there was no sort of equality. The American race had no more power of resisting the European than the sheep has of resisting the wolf. Even where it was numerous and had a settled polity, as in Peru, it could make no resistance ; its states were crushed, the ruling families extinguished, Ill THE EMPIRE 53 and the population itself reduced to a form of slavery. Everywhere therefore the country fell into the hands of the immigrating race, and was disposed of at its pleasure as so much plunder. The immigrants did not merely, as in India, gradually show a great military superiority to the native race, so as in the end to subdue them, but overwhelmed them at once like a party of hunters suddenly assailing a herd of antelopes. This was the case everywhere, but yet the countries of America also fall into two classes. There was a great difference between the regions of Central and Southern America, which fell principally to the Spanish and Portuguese, and the North American territories, which fell to England. In Mexico, Peru and some other parts of South America the native population, though feeble compared to the Europeans, was not insignificant in numbers ; it was counted by millions, had reached the agricultural stage of civilisation, and had cities. But the tribes of Indians which wandered over the territories of North America, which noAv belong to the United States and the Dominion of Canada, were much more insignificant. It has been estimated that " the total Indian population within the territory of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, did not at any time subsequent to the discovery of America exceed, if indeed it even reached, three hundred thousand individuals." Accordingly, whereas in New Spain the European, though supreme, yet lived in the midst of a population of native Indians, the European in North America supplanted the native race entirely, 54 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
pushed it ever farther back as he advanced, and did not blend with it at all.
It was ultimately the fortune of England to ac- quire the most important share both of what Vasco da Gama and of what Columbus laid open. On one side has grown up her Indian, and mainly on the other her Colonial Empire. But of the latter group of countries, the countries wanting in strong states, England occupied those which were comparatively empty, and the Australian territory which has since fallen to her is in the same condition. This fact has an all-important consequence.
I remarked before that Greater Britain is an ex- tension of the English State and not merely of the English nationality. But it is an equally striking characteristic of Greater Britain that nevertheless it is an extension of the English nationality. When a nationality is extended without any extension of the State, as in the case of the Greek colonies, there may be an increase of moral and intellectual influence, but there is no increase of political power. On the other hand, when the State advances beyond the limits of the nationality, its power becomes precarious and artificial. This is the condition of most empires ; it is the condition for example of our own empire in India. The English State is powerful there, but the English nation is but an imperceptible drop in the ocean of an Asiatic population. And when a nation extends itself into other territories the chances are that it will there meet with other nationalities which it cannot destroy or completely drive out, even if itin THE EMPIRE 56 succeeds in conquering them. When this happens, it has a great and permanent difficulty to contend with. The subject or rival nationalities cannot be perfectly assimilated, and remain as a permanent cause of weakness and danger. It has been the for- tune of England in extending itself to evade on the whole this danger. For it has occupied parts of the globe which were so empty that they offered an un- bounded scope for new settlement. There was land for every emigrant who chose to come, and the native races were not in a condition sufficiently advanced to withstand even the peaceful competition, much less the power, of the immigrants.
This statement is true on the whole. The English Empire is on the whole free from that weakness which has brought down most empires, the weakness of being a mere mechanical forced union of alien nationalities.
It is sometimes described as an essentially feeble union which could not bear the slightest shock, with what reason I may examine later, but it has the fundamental strength which most empires and some commonwealths want. Austria for instance is divided by the nationality-rivalry of German, Slav, and Mag yar ; the Swiss Confederation unites three languages, but the English Empire in the main and broadly may be said to be English throughout.
Of course, however, considerable abatements are to be made. It is only in one of the four great groups, namely, in the Australian colonies, that the statement is true almost without qualification. The native Australian race is so low in the ethnological scale 56 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND LEOT.
that it can never give the least trouble, but even here, since we reckon New Zealand in this group, we are to bear in mind that the Maori tribes occupy the Northern island in some force, much as in the last century the Highland Clans gave us trouble in the northern part of our own island, and the Maori is by no means a contemptible type of man. Nevertheless the whole number of Maories is not supposed to exceed forty thousand, and it is rapidly diminishing. When we turn to another group, the North American colonies, included principally in the Dominion of Canada, we find that the nucleus of it was acquired originally, not by English settlement, but by the con- quest of French settlements. At the outset therefore the nationality-difficulty, instead of being absent here, was present in the gravest form. The original Canada of the French was afterwards known as Lower Canada, and since the establishment of the Dominion it has borne the name of the Province of Quebec. It has a population of nearly a million and a half, while the whole Dominion does not contain four millions and a half. These are Frenchmen and Catholics in the midst of a population mainly English and Protestant. It is not so long since the inconvenience of this alien population was felt in Canada by discords essentially similar to those which the nationality-question has created in Austria and Russia. The Canadian Re bellion which marked the first years of the reign of Queen Victoria, was in fact a war of nationality in the British Empire, though it wore the disguise of a war of liberty, as Lord Durham expressly remarks Ill THE EMPIRE 57 in the opening of his famous Report on Canada : " I expected to find a contest between a government and a people ; I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state ; I found a struggle not of principles but of races." It is however to be remarked on the other side that here too the alien element dwindles, and is likely ultimately to be lost in the English immigration, and also that its animosity has been much pacified by the introduction of federal in- stitutions.
In the third or West Indian group also the differ- ences of nationality are considerable. Here almost alone in our Empire are to be traced the eff"ects of the peculiar phenomenon of the history of the New World, negro slavery. Here it first appeared on a considerable scale, as the immediate result of the discovery of Columbus. So long as it lasted, it did not call into existence the nationality-difficulty, for a thoroughly enslaved nation is a nation no longer, and a servile insurrection is wholly different from the insurrection of an oppressed nationality. But when slavery is abolished, while the slaves themselves re- main, stamped so visibly in colour and physical type with the badge of their different nationality, yet now free and laying claim to citizenship, then it is that the nationality-difl^iculty begins to threaten. But in the West-Indian group such difficulties for the present do not take a serious form, because the colonies are in the main dispersed in small islands and have no community of feeling.
It is in the fourth or South African group that 58 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect the nationality-difficulty is most serious. It is here a double difficulty. There have been two conquests, the one superinduced upon the other. The Dutch first settled themselves among the native races, and then the Dutch colony was conquered by England. So far the case may seem to resemble that of Canada, where the French settled among the Indians and were then conquered by the English. But there are two differences. In the first place the native tribes of South Africa, instead of disappearing and dwindling before the whites, greatly outnumber them, and show a power of combination and progress such as the Red Indian never showed. Thus in the census of 1875 I find that the Cape Colony had a total population of nearly three quarters- of a million, but two out of the three quarters were native and only one European. And behind this native population dwelling among the settlers there is an indefinite native population ex- tending without limit into the interior of the vast continent. But secondly the other difficulty, which arises from the fact that the settlers themselves were at the outset not English but Dutch, does not diminish or tend to disappear, as it has done in Canada. In Canada there took place a rapid immigration of Eng lish, who, showing themselves in a marked degree more energetic than the French and increasing much faster, gradually gave the whole community a pre- dominantly English character, so that in fact the rising of the French in 1838 was the convulsion of despair of a sinking nationality. Nothing similar has happened in South Africa, no rapid English im- Ill THE EMPIRE 69 migration has come to give a new character to the community.
These are the abatements which must be made to the general proposition that Greater Britain is homo geneous in nationality. They need not prevent us from laying down this general proposition as true. If in these islands we feel ourselves for all purposes one nation, though in Wales, in Scotland and in Ireland there is Celtic blood, and Celtic languages utterly unintelligible to us are still spoken, so in the Empire a good many French and Dutch and a good many Caffres and Maories may be admitted without marring the ethnological unity of the whole.
This ethnological unity is of great importance when we would form an opinion about the stability and chance of duration of the Empire. . The chief forces which hold a community together and cause it to constitute one State are three, common nationalit}’, common religion, and common interest. These may act in various degrees of intensity, and they may also act singly or in combination. Now when it is argued that Greater Britain is a union which will not last long and will soon fall to pieces, the ground taken is that it wants the third of these binding forces, that it is not held together by community of interest. " What," it is said, " can the inhabitants of Australia and New Zealand, living on the other side of the Tropic of Capricorn, have in common with ourselves who live beyond the 50th degree of north latitude? Who does not see tliat two communities so remote from each other cannot long continue parts of one political 60 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
whole 1 " Now this is a very important consideration, especially as it is backed by the impressive fact that our American Colonies did in the last century find their union with us intolerable. But, allowing its importance, we may remark that, even if this bond is wanting, the other two bonds which hold states together are not wanting. Many empires in which hostile nationalities and religions have been but artificially united have nevertheless lasted several centuries, but Greater Britain is not a mere empire, though we often call it so. Its union is of the more vital kind. It is united by blood and religion, and though circumstances may be imagined in which these ties might snap, yet they are strong ties, and will only give way before some violent dissolving force.
I have enlarged in this lecture upon the essential nature of our colonial Empire, because there is much ambiguity both about the word " colonial " and about the word “Empire.” Our colonies do not resemble the colonies which classical students meet with in Greek and Eoman history, and our Empire is not an Empire at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It does not consist of a congeries of nations held together by force, but in the main of one nation, as much as if it were no Empire but an ordinary state. This fact is fundamental when we look to the future and inquire whether it is calculated for duration.
But I have also enlarged upon the whole class of Empires which sprang out of the discovery of the New World, to which class our own Empire belongs, in Ill THE EMPIRE 61 order that we may understand the past. England in the eighteenth century is regarded, I said, too much as a European insular State and too little as an American and Asiatic Empire ; in short, we think of Great Britain too much and of Greater Britain too little. But the misconception spreads further, for in that century there is also a Greater France, a Greater Holland, a Greater Portugal, and a Greater Spain, and all these we overlook as we overlook Greater Britain.
Here is a fundamental characteristic of the European States during the eighteenth and seven- teenth centuries, which is seldom borne in mind, namely that each of the five Western States has an Empire in the New World attached to it. Before the seventeenth century this condition of things was but beginning, and since the eighteenth it has ceased again to exist. The vast immeasurable results of the discovery of Columbus were developed with extreme slowness, so that the whole sixteenth century passed away before most of these nations bestiiTcd them selves to claim a share in the New World. There existed no independent Holland till near the end of that century, so that a furtiori there could be no Greater Holland, nor did either England or France in that century become possessors of colonies. France did indeed plan a settlement in North America, as the name Carolina, derived from Charles IX. of Fi’ance, still remains to prove, but the neigh bouring Spaniards of Florida interfered to destroy it. A little later Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony in the same 62 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect, neighbourhood disappeared altogether, leaving no trace behind it. Accordingly during almost the whole of that century the New World remained in the possession of the two States which had done most to lay it open, viz. Spain and Portugal, Spain look- ing chiefly towards America and Portugal towards Asia, until in 1580 the two States coalesced in a union which lasted sixty years. The Dutch made their grand entrance into the competition for empire in the seven years from 1595 to 1602, and they were followed by France and England in the early years of the seventeenth century, that is, in the reign of our King James I.
Again in the nineteenth century the competition of these five states in the New World ceased. It ceased from two causes : wars of independence, in which Transatlantic colonies severed themselves from the mother-country, and the colonial conquests of England. I have described already the Hundred Years’ War in which Greater France was swallowed up in Greater Britain ; Greater Holland in like manner suffered serious diminution, losing the Cape of Good Hope and Demerara to England, though even now a Greater Holland may be said to exist in the magni ficent dependency of Java, with a population of not less than nineteen millions. The fall of Greater Spain and Greater Portugal has happened in the present century within the lifetime of many who are still among us. If we estimated occurrences less by the excitement they cause at the moment and more by the consequences which are certain to follow them, Ill THE EMPIRE 63 we should call this one of the most stupendous events in the history of the globe, for it is the beginning of the independent life of almost the Avhole of Southern and Central America. It took place mainly in the twenties of this century, and was the result of a series of rebellions which, when we inquire into their origin, we find to have arisen out of the shock given to Spain and Portugal by Napoleon’s invasion of them, so that in fact one of the chief, if not the chief, result of Napoleon’s career has been the fall of Greater Spain and Greater Portugal, and the independence of South America.
The result of all these mighty revolutions —of which however I fancy that few of you know any thing—is that the Western States of Europe, with the exception of England, have been in the main severed again from the New World. This of course is only roughly true. Spain still possesses Cuba and Porto Rico, Portugal still has large African possessions, France has begun to found a new Empire in North Africa. Nevertheless these four states have materially altered their position in the world. They have become in the main purely European States again, as they were before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. It is easy to show you the immense magnitude of this change. Spain has lately passed through a disturbed time. She expelled a Bourbon sovereign and tried for a time the experiment of a Republic. This change was doubtless very serious in the peninsula, but it pro- duced wonderfully little excitement in the world at large. Now if anything similar had happened in the 64 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND lect.
eighteenth or in the seventeenth century, the shock of it would have been felt over a great part of the planet. From Mexico to Buenos Ayres, from above the Tropic of Cancer to below the Tropic of Capricorn, every territory probably would have been convulsed with rebellion and civil war. In like manner the recent calamities in France would in the eighteenth century have shaken the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes of North America and the Mississippi, and have influenced the policy of princes in the Deccan and the valley of the Ganges, nay perhaps have altered the balance of Hindostan. As it was, those calamities were nearly confined to France itself ; else- where sympathies were excited, but interests were not touched.
Thus then we see in the seventeenth and still more the eighteenth century a period when the New World was attached in a peculiar way to the five Western States of the European system. This attachment modifies and determines all the wars and negotiations, all the international relations of Europe during that period. In the last lecture I pointed out that the struggle between England and France in those centuries cannot be understood so long as we look at Europe alone, and that the belligerents are really the World-Powers, Greater Britain and Greater France. Now I remark that in like manner during the same period we must always read for Holland, Portugal, and Spain, Greater Holland, Greater Portugal, and Greater Spain. I remark also that this state of things has now passed away, that the Spanish Empire,Ill THE EMPIEE 65 and in the main also the Portuguese and Dutch Empires, have gone the same way as the Empire of France. But Greater Britain still remains. And thus we perceive the historical origin and character of this Empire. It is the sole survivor of a whole family of Empires, which arose out of the action of the discovery of the New World upon the peculiar condition and political ideas of Europe. All these Empires were beset by certain dangers, which Greater Britain alone has hitherto escaped, though she too has felt the shock of them and is still exposed to them, and the great question now is whether she can modify her defective constitution in such a way as to escape them for the future.
LECTURE IV