Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 547
The British Government, as a matter of British interest, fully intended the colonies to flourish, especially the West Indies and such, true “plantations”, enterprises of investment, as opposed to Massachusetts and New England at first deservedly and desiredly disregarded.
Manufacture, except the domestic handicraft of the farm, the forge and the loom, was denied. A resolution of the House of Commons in 1719 declared “that the erecting of manufactures in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence upon Great Britain”. The sentiment was crudely, even brutally expressed; but the real idea is excellent. Substitute “union” for “dependence” and the resolution becomes almost a caress. Truly excellent was the shipping and navigation code, the visible result of which, down the decades, is the British mercantile marine of to-day. Everybody has heard of the Navigation Acts that dominated English policy in the mercantile days and only finally passed away in 1849. Such statutes have their origin as far back as the reign of Richard II, but it is the series of statutes of Charles II (1660, 1661, 1663 and 1672) which constituted the famous code for the regulation of the colonial trade. Their general purpose was to keep English trade in English ships, built in England, officered by Englishmen and manned with at least three Englishmen to every four of the crew. It accepted a measurable economic loss for a political and national gain of incalculable extent. The Acts went further and regulated the substance of trade. The great staple colonial articles — sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool and others could only be carried to English territory. Foreigners were forbidden to be merchants in the colonies, and, a more doubtful provision, duties were levied on goods shipped from colony to colony.
The Navigation Acts interfered with natural liberty at every point. Yet even Adam Smith couldn’t find it in his heart to condemn them. “Defence”, he said, expressing himself with unaccustomed brevity, “is better than opulence.” In point of fact the laws were tempered with exceptions and exercised at the colonial ports with a salutary negligence. Much important trade was left open. New England could send its fish direct to Catholic Europe. The trade in grain was unimpeded, the trade in timber and rum was positively encouraged.
The whole code of colonial regulation was awkward, unsystematic, and here and there vexatious. But on the whole it could have been fashioned true imperial system. It was the attempt to add to it the burden of taxation that broke the system down. England was appalled by the growth of the national debt, which was mistaken by the ignorance of the eighteenth century for national indebtedness. The Stuart kings never had a debt except in and out of their pocket. They hadn’t the credit. The national debt originated (1694) with banking and the expansion of national wealth and the creation of credit mechanism. That it could exist at all was a sign of a national stability never known before. But its bearing was not understood, and its rapid increase aroused misgivings. After the French War (1756-63) the debt stood at £132,000,000. (In 1928 it stood at £7,631,000,000.) This was alarming. England undertook by means of the Stamp Act of 1765, and the new customs acts (tea, etc.) which followed it, to collect a revenue to offset the cost of American defence. This led to controversy, to anger, to rioting, then to “petitioning in arms”, to rebellion and finally to independence. The old colonial system ended in the disastrous separation of 1783.
Having lost one colonial empire England set to work in a queer haphazard way to make another. The settlement of the peace of 1783 occasioned the migration of the Loyalists and necessitated the establishment of Australia. The United Empire Loyalists, refusing to remain in the new American republic, were moved at the expense of the British Government to Nova Scotia (1783-1799) and into Upper Canada. Some of them came because they dared no longer stay at home, but for the most part they were people of patriotism, energy and substance, whose history soon proved their real worth. The economic circumstances of their settlement are of great interest for the present discussion. It shows what could be done now on a scale vastly greater and with equal success. With aid in transport, money and land from the accumulated capital of Great Britain over 40,000 Loyalists were transported. The operation was enormously successful and profitable. It has returned a fabulous, if incalculable, interest. In a later chapter the circumstances of the settlement will be further examined. But we note it here historically chiefly to regret that the movement of migration came to so early an end. There was no need to limit to it the “Loyalists” of New York and Massachusetts. Every pauper in England was a “loyalist”; every dispossessed weaver among the victims of the power loom was a “loyalist”; the unhappy children of the parish carried round by the cartful and sold as pauper apprentices for the new factories, all these were “loyalists”. If in these and the succeeding decades, when English capital went to bolster up rickety Greek Governments, to build Erie canals and buy Pennsylvania bonds — if there had only been the knowledge of how to use it!
Then came Australia. Its existence as a legend goes back to ancient times. The Dutch had touched its shores early in the seventeenth century. English sailors had seen it from Dampier’s ship in 1688. But no one claimed it. No one wanted it. The world of the seventeenth century was still inconceivably vast, and few foresaw how rapidly it would shrink to the little globe on which we live. British ownership begins with Captain James Cook’s voyage to the South Seas of 1768-70, undertaken to allow a group of Royal Society astronomers to view the transit of Venus. Cook circumnavigated New Zealand and sailed along the south-east coast of Australia. From a fancied resemblance to a more familiar shore he named it New South Wales. Cook claimed the land, found a wonderful bay where “great quantity of plants” grew and named it Botany Bay. The report made by Captain Cook and his companions was favourable, even enthusiastic. The Government determined to take up the claim. It seemed necessary. The American colonies had served among other purposes as a place for the transportation of criminals. After independence began, the United States had no need, has never since had any need, to import foreign criminals. The colonization began, as all the world knows, with the expedition of 1787-88 in which Captain Arthur Phillip and a fleet of eleven vessels landed at Botany Bay 717 “criminals”, both men and women, convicted of all sorts of offences, great and small, real and imaginary. Within a short time the discovery of the marvellous grazing land behind the barrier of inaccessible mountains that shut in the convict settlement, changed the whole character of the colony. Within a generation, a quarter of a million sheep were grazing on the Bathurst plains. A few free settlers had come in within three or four years of Phillip’s landing. But for three decades the colony was mainly made up of “emancipated” convicts. Even in 1821 the “emancipists” and their families numbered over 13,000 as against 2,500 free settlers. But the migration after the Napoleonic War soon washed out the convict stain.
Thus, by one of the marvels of British good fortune, was secured, unopposed and unquestioned, the control of a continent.
The outcome of the same wars brought with the settlement of 1815 a great accretion of territory to the British Crown. The Cape of Good Hope (276,995 square miles) and Ceylon (25,481 square miles) taken from the Dutch during their eclipse as the Batavian Republic, and with these, Trinidad and Malta, British Guiana, the Seychelles and Mauritius. The opportunity was now open to found again a British Empire in permanent unity and strength. Unfortunately the drift of Fate was against it. The current of opinion and events during the next generation bore on its surface, not the materials for making a new British Empire but for making a whole series of New United States.
From the outbreak of the French War in 1793 till the final peace of 1815, colonial policy was entirely dominated by the exigencies of the military and naval situation. But even before the war a powerful set of forces of an entirely new character was coming into being, and was destined presently to alter the entire outlook. The improvements in the processes of production in the eighteenth century, the utilization of coal, the application of steam and water-power, the consequent creation of factory industry in the place of house industry, the cheapening of transportation by improved roads and by canals, had brought about what has since been called the industrial revolution.
Central and Northern England changed from a land of great estates to a land of factory workshops, of coal mines, of iron or steel. Commerce multiplied at the sea ports of the “workshop of the world”, now easily first, and long without even a second. New interests began to dictate a new policy, a world policy in place of the insular mercantilism of the preceding centuries. And mingling with the roar of the new machines could be heard already, as an undertone, the first murmurings of a self-conscious working class. The theoretical basis of this new and cosmopolitan outlook had been laid even before the French War, was in the writings of Hume and the French “Economists”, and, above all, by Adam Smith. But Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which was meant to teach, among other things, the art of retaining the American colonies, was not published till the year 1776, when they were already lost.
It remained for the powerful commercial interests of Manchester and Birmingham and other manufacturing centres to force into practical legislation the policy of the laissez-faire inspired by the theories of Smith. After the Napoleonic wars, the manufacturers of England had no more need of protection. The demand arose for the removal of all duties, whether on manufactures or on raw material or on food. This demand, rising into a great national movement and taking to itself, under the inspired leadership of Cobden and Bright, something of the aspects of a religious crusade, attained its overwhelming triumph in the spectacular repeal of the duties on corn in 1846 and the destruction (1842-63) of the whole protective system. The economic aspects of free trade fall into the discussion of a later chapter. But it is to be noted here that “free trade” — the abolition of protective duties — was only one aspect of the system and programme of “national liberty”. It involved also the removal of governmental regulation of industry, of laws of apprentices (1813), of laws of settlement, the establishment of freedom of combination for workmen (1824-5), and the removal, presently (1849), of what was left of the navigation laws.
Most of all, it affected the economics of colonial policy. The British Colonial Empire that sprang up after 1783 was governed much as had been the lost empire of the thirteen American provinces. The British Government regulated the customs duties by imperial acts; it maintained in modified shape the navigation laws; it granted lands; it maintained garrisons; it regulated all shipping. But it gave to these colonists political privileges equal to those that the Americans had enjoyed. An elected provincial assembly had been set up in Halifax in 1758 as the official expression of an existing right of Britons overseas; in New Brunswick in 1784; in Upper and Lower Canada in 1791 after the Loyalists moved in; and in New South Wales in 1842; in Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand shortly after.
But the situation contained within itself the making of its own ruin. It was neither one thing nor the other; it was not economic unity under Central control and it was not economic separation under independence. After its first settlement of the Loyalists the British Government did little to develop any of the Dominions. The fatal idea that everything developed itself, if let alone, paralysed action. The accumulation of pecuniary capital which now began to form in what had become the money market of London, flew away in this and that direction: it went into foreign loans, American canal securities and South American revolutions. Little of it went to the undeveloped colonies. There was no understanding of what to do. England had men to throw away, paupers to deplore, money to invest and new apparatus of steam and machinery to give it power. But the dominant notion of the time was to leave it all alone, to follow the line of least resistance. England followed it. Meantime the “liberated” United States of America, with economic unity of control and economic power over resources, were witnessing an onrush of material development, easily mistaken for a consequence of political independence.
The trouble that was bound to come in such a case to all the colonies, came first to the two Canadas. They were the largest in population, 427,000 in Lower Canada in 1822, in Upper Canada 150,000 in 1824, while as yet even in New South Wales the population was only 35,000 in 1828. The Loyalists of Canada, moreover, had within sight across the St. Lawrence and across Lakes Ontario and Erie, the aspect of American prosperity to contrast with their own stagnation.
The fact that in Lower Canada five people out of every six were French complicated the situation and added national rancour to political discontent. There followed the abortive double rebellion of 1837-8, an event local and even insignificant in its occurrence, but world-wide in its consequences. The change of government that followed in the Canadas, and was afterwards extended all over the British Empire, has become one of the great factors in the world’s present outlook. Lord Durham, as everybody knows, came out to Canada in 1838 as High Commissioner to find out how the rebellion had arisen. He finds its cause in the lack of political freedom and in the struggle of two nations “warring in the bosom of a single state”. He recommended as the cure for it that the colonies should receive “responsible government”; this would satisfy all just and proper demands of the British malcontents, of which Lord Durham as an advanced Whig thoroughly approved; and this — by combining at the same time the government of the Upper and the Lower Province into a single legislature — would vote out of existence the French and terminate their “vain hope of nationality”, and the survival of their language: a culmination of which Lord Durham as a thorough Englishman warmly approved. Such was the measure of Lord Durham’s foresight.
Responsible government — after a little subsequent bickering as to its application — came with the Act of 1840 which united the two Canadas. At the same time it was extended to Nova Scotia and to New Brunswick; and by parity of reasoning to New South Wales, New Zealand and the other Australian colonies (1854-6). It was extended similarly to the Cape Colony in 1872 and Natal in 1893. Its application to the Transvaal and to the Orange Free State in 1906 rests in an entirely other setting. In the colonies of the middle century it foreshadowed an independence to come. For the Transvaal and the Free State it replaced an independence that was lost. There is no connection between the two. One act was an error in statesmanship, the other a glorious triumph.
The grant of political self-government to the greater colonies in the middle century was accompanied by a loosening, indeed a casting off, of all economic ties. After 1846 England permitted the self-governing colonies to frame their own tariffs. The final repeal of the Navigation Acts in 1849 left them in control of their own shipping. The public lands went to the new Dominions in full and complete sovereignty. Between the event of the Canadian rebellion of 1837 and the confederation of the Dominion of Canada there elapsed thirty years, one generation. In this time the whole aspect of the Empire was altered. It became and remained a group of economically independent States.
This movement of disruption was greeted at the time with self-complacent satisfaction. It was another triumph of the idea of natural liberty, of laissez-faire, of enlightened self-interest, which appeared to have done so much already for national wealth and progress in England. Few voices were raised in protest. Only here and there was doubt expressed about handing over to the miniature civilization of the colonies the vast heritage of land and resources which they could neither occupy, utilize or defend. Only a few realized that the regime of laissez-faire was only a passing phase, only a chapter in the economic history of Great Britain. Here and there was heard a voice in the wilderness. “Self-government”, said Disraeli in 1872, looking back on the irremediable, “ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of imperial consolidation. It ought to have been accompanied by an Imperial tariff, and by securities for the people of England for the enjoyment of unappropriated lands.” Quite so. But the harm had already been done. The climax had already been reached when the whole vast area of North-west Canada was separated from British control (existing through the overlordship of the Hudson’s Bay Company) and given to the new Dominion of Canada. It took the people of Canada almost twenty years to build a Pacific Railway — a creditable and courageous enterprise for such a minor population with so little wealth. But Great Britain could have built it in a couple of years. The United States had already built five.
There was some protest, also, in certain quarters, when the colonies used their new liberty to set up protective tariffs against England. This was done in the province of Canada in 1859 to respond to the rising demands of local manufacturers. In England certain bodies such as the Chamber of Commerce of Sheffield petitioned the Imperial Government to act. But the Government disclaimed all constitutional power. It reasserted this again in 1887 when the effect of the protective tariff of the Dominion (the National Policy of 1879) began to be felt in the mother-country. Meantime, the colony of Victoria, where severe local unemployment was crying out for a remedy, had followed Canada’s lead in adopting against England, as well as the outside world, the protective tariff, since then a permanent feature of Australian policy.
Looking back now, it is hard to believe that the statesmen of the Empire could so deliberately have broken it up. The explanation lies in the background of the scene. It was not merely that the leading minds of the period did not foresee what would happen. The trouble was that they foresaw a lot of things that didn’t happen. They foresaw universal free trade, a matter for them of simple common sense. The trade of every nation would be open to every other. “Ownership” and control of colonies would have no meaning. There was nothing in the economic world but individual work and individual interest: national well-being was merely the sum total of all this. There was no need for regulation, for state action, for legislation: all of this was as antiquated as the mediæval guild. This dream of a cosmopolitan world was, and is, as beautiful a picture as ever brightened the horizon of hope. At some distant day humanity may yet find it at the end of the rainbow.
