Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 548
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as all the world knows, the pendulum swung the other way. Free trade, even as an aspiration, except in Great Britain and New South Wales, faded out. War took the place of peace. The new industrial power looked about for new materials and new markets. Asia and Africa were divided up. Imperialism began again.
England got its full share of the partition in such vast additions as Nigeria, East Africa, the Rhodesias, in all a total of about a million and a half square miles and a population of new native subjects to the extent of 30,000,000.
But Imperialism in the sense of complete economic union with the Dominions was no longer possible. The basis was gone. An Imperial Federation League sprang up over night into a mushroom growth (1884), but perished under the cold breath of colonial suspicion abroad and Cobdenite indifference at home. The conferences — colonial (1887, 1897, 1902) and later imperial (from 1907) — began to work out a form of permanent union by means of permanent separation. Meantime for all the Dominions each separate thread of political connection was worn thin and then snapped asunder. Till the middle of the nineteenth century British military garrisons still guarded the colonies. They were withdrawn — from Canada in 1862, then from Australia and New Zealand, and one by one from all the Dominions. United naval defence lingered on till England tired of paying for it without help. The naval establishments at Halifax and Esquimalt were terminated in 1909-10. The Imperial Australasian squadron was exchanged for an Australian fleet. In vain the Admiralty, in a swan-song called the Memorandum of 1902, preached the strategy of united defence. It was too late. After that, only war could unite it.
Link by link was broken. Justice lingered. The Crown pardoned, or refused to pardon, criminals till 1878. A representation from the Canadian Department of Justice altered the situation; after that, the Dominion claimed the right to hang its own. The final appeal to the King’s Privy Council — historically the last right of the subject to throw himself at the King’s feet — lingers still, but apparently only through the favour of the lawyers. Even at that, Australia limits it, and the Free State, it seems, with a strange home-sickness for something to rebel at, is prepared to circumvent all effects of the appeal in liberated Ireland.
Even the diplomatic unity of the Empire in dealing with foreign Powers is ended. By a series of gradations beginning with Lord Elgin’s treaty with the United States in 1854 and ending with the Halibut treaty of 1923, the Dominions have acquired, bit by bit, the right to make their own treaties. If these stages were meant as footsteps towards independence, they were excellent. If not, each step led out further into the wilderness.
The Great War threw into a high light the wonderful kinship in spirit of all the British peoples. History has never witnessed such a united front. But the war, by showing that combined defence was still possible and successful without political union, encouraged rather than impeded the process of breaking away. Six great Dominions became members of the League of Nations. Apart from the all-embracing bond of the Crown and a common allegiance, and apart from the lawyers’ haven of the Privy Council, it became hard to see in what way the British Empire is a political empire at all. The relation between its parts has become a sort of riddle of the sphinx. There is no answer.
From the Press and the platform, the Parliament and the college debating society, pours an endless discussion as to where and what we are in our political relations to each other. All needless. This discussion, if it goes on, will crystallize into something as interesting as the Chinese classics — and about as useful. The point of interest, the question of importance, the means of salvation for the British Empire no longer lies in the political relations of its parts. Self-government, autonomy, has come. It is there to stay. It is an accepted fact. As to the difference between autonomy and independence that is a mere riddle of the sphinx, of practical interest to no one but the writers of textbooks. The great questions of our future — the question of bread and work and happiness for all — lie elsewhere and must look in other directions for a settlement.
CHAPTER IV. THE MIGRATION OF POPULATION IN THE PAST
IT OUGHT TO be possible to set up a movement of population and capital on a vast scale to develop the unoccupied land and the unused resources of the British Empire. This should not be a movement of little groups, of unaided pioneers and single settlers. It should be a matter of millions of men and billions of money. It can be done.
If successful, such a movement would give free rein, for many generations to come, to the natural increase in British stock. It would banish unemployment as with the wave of a wand. It would, for many generations to come, give to every one concerned a real opportunity in life, bread and work for all, and success everywhere for those of steadfast industry and purpose. This is all that honest people can ask.
The thing can be done. It must be possible. The evidence lies in the fact that every economic element needed is waiting to be put into its place. Two centuries ago, in the old colonial days, such a thing was not possible. Accumulated capital was but small. The machine had not yet come. Transport was still primitive. Nature was still unconquered. Now all is changed. The accumulated capital needed to move a million people across an ocean, and establish homes for them, is a mere nothing compared to the vast total of capital in existence. In point of transport the whole operation could be organized by any competent traffic official in one afternoon. And the population is waiting: without drawing on alien sources at all, we could bring at once 2,000,000 people from Great Britain to the Dominions, and soon find, with a full natural increase of population, 2,000,000 more to follow every year.
One can, in imagination at least, form a picture of such a great outgoing tide, moving noiselessly and without effort or struggle. The labour of those who come, applied to new land and resource, supplies the surplus that brings still more. The immigrant population, if properly varied, is its own support. It supplies its own market. It works its own salvation.
Yet contrast such a picture of continuous and prosperous settlement with what has happened in the past. There were first the isolated days of pioneer settlement, a hand-to-hand struggle; capital was utterly lacking; machines were unknown; numbers were too few for associated toil on any large scale. Hunger and want were but at arm’s length. Death took its toll everywhere. Of the Pilgrim settlers of 1620 one-half by the end of the first winter were buried on Cole’s hill, the graves laid flat and without headstones so as to conceal their death from the knowledge of the savages. Some settlements, like that of the Huguenots in Florida, vanished off the earth. Others narrowly escaped. In the infant settlement of Virginia (1622) no less than 350 persons were massacred by the Indians, and of the rest, disease and famine removed fifty per cent before relief came to them. Even in the nineteenth century Lord Selkirk’s colonists, moving into what is now one of the granaries and gardens of the world, could barely survive. Decimated by the fevers that haunted the crowded emigrant ships, slaughtered by enemies and their substance devoured for years (1818 and onwards) by great flocks of locusts against which they had nothing to avail, they almost disappeared from the earth. Later on, while technique and capital should have made genuine migration possible, there followed an era of wild rushes into new country, of a temporary “boom” of prosperity, as in Manitoba and South Australia, followed by sudden and disastrous collapse. And in our own time we reach a condition of stalemate — a deadlock — with landless people on one side of the ocean and empty land on the other.
But to understand the migration problem of the present, the best way is to examine the migration of the past — its circumstances and conditions, its few conspicuous successes and the warning of its innumerable failures.
Let us begin a long way back.
In the fourteenth century, England, where it did not consist of forests and fen, of marsh and moorland, was an agricultural country of about 4,000,000 inhabitants. Then came the great plague of 1349, the Black Death. It destroyed nearly half the people, leaving perhaps two millions and a half. Recovery was slow. For over a hundred years there was no growth. Even at the opening of the Tudor century the population is only estimated at 3,000,000. But there followed a period of great economic change. Society was disintegrated by the break-up of the monastic lands; by the eviction of the small peasantry in favour of pasture-making; by the continuous rise in prices that followed the advancing wave of Spanish gold. All this broke the mould in which mediæval society was cast. Population grew apace and without adequate means of support. There appeared a flock of beggars, vagrants, idle and lawless men. This caused alarm. It was thought that England must get rid of them. Sir Humphrey Gilbert spoke of the “needy people of the country who now trouble the Commonwealth”. Richard Hakluyt, the famous compiler of the Voyages, speaks of the vagrants “who go up and down in swarms for lack of honest entertainment”.
These tears and laments were really groundless. The over-population was apparent, not real. The resources of England itself were still undeveloped. But it was these groundless apprehensions which helped to set in motion the first wave of migration toward North America. These fears also gave a false bias to British emigration which has lasted until our time. It was a policy of “casting out”: its results were seen for two centuries in the stream of indentured criminals and paupers banished to America, of convicts carried to Australia, and pauper children shipped to anywhere or nowhere.
Other motives joined. Most of the Puritans were religious refugees. Many of the Virginians were adventurers. The West Indians — on a great scale or a small — planter capitalists.
The stream ran strongly from the accession of James I to the end of the century of the Stuarts, from the Virginia establishment of 1607 and the Mayflower of 1620 till the opening of the eighteenth century. In the reign of Queen Anne (1700) the population of England had risen to five and a half million, but there was now no over-population. The rise of home industry and commerce held it in check for another hundred years. Meantime, to the West Indies there had gone a British population which, in 1700, with its increase on the spot, reached 50,000. But with it were now 100,000 negro slaves. The introduction of the negroes checked wherever it fell the movement of white labour. In Jamaica there were put, in spite of fevers and hardships, during the regime of the Commonwealth which had captured it, 4,000 whites and 1,000 negroes. A quarter of a century later the negroes had been increased by ten to one, the white only by two to one. Migration to the North American provinces of Great Britain in the seventeenth century was almost entirely British. There were a few exceptions. The conquest of New Amsterdam (New York) in 1664 incorporated some 7,500 Dutch, a mere leaven in the lump, albeit a strengthening one. The outcast Huguenots, after 1685, looked for new homes. A few came to Massachusetts and to New York, a good many (500 in one body in the year 1700) to the South. But their language rapidly faded out, and even their names were either translated or mispronounced to extinction.
A more notable exception was found in the coming of the “Pennsylvania Dutch”, Germans from the Palatinate, who left Europe after the ravages of Marlborough’s campaigns. The British Government planted nearly 10,000 of them in Pennsylvania in Queen Anne’s time, and other bodies followed in groups from then till the close of the colonial period. These people kept their language and remained a distinctive element in the population, miscalled “Dutch” through the linguistic ignorance of their fellow-citizens. But migration, as a whole, slackened after the close of Queen Anne’s war. Industry was increasing and the era of iron and coal was dawning. There was work at home. As a result there was no general plan or scheme of emigration, except for the criminal class. These were carried over by contract and sold into service for seven or fourteen years. This helped to check the emigration of free men, a check that was further emphasized by the slave ship and its cargo of negro slaves. For the period 1680 to 1786 the total number of negro slaves introduced into the British colonies was 2,130,000, or an annual import of 20,000. The greater part went to the thirteen colonies. At the first census the ex-slaves and their offspring numbered 757,000.
But if free immigrants were thus shut out from contract labour in the plantation States they could have land for the asking. There was plenty everywhere.
It followed, therefore, from what has been said that the white population of the American colonies in the colonial days was almost entirely native born. Migration had been replaced by natural increase. Families grew fast, children, in the rural parts, at least — and almost all America was rural — were a blessing and an asset. A widow with a growing family was a matrimonial prize. Benjamin Franklin was one of a flock of seventeen. It was Franklin himself who calculated that in America population was doubling every twenty-five years. Under these circumstances minor foreign elements of language and culture washed easily out. The Swedes of Delaware left no trace; even the Dutch of Manhattan and the Hudson very little, except in point of sentiment and pride. The country was all British at the time of the conquest of Canada, more so than Canada itself has ever been, and comparable in this aspect to the Australia and New Zealand of to-day.
Its British character was heightened during the last generation of the colonial life by the tide of migration that set in during the period between the conquest of Canada and the outbreak of the American Revolution. The rebellion of 1745, the break-up of the clans and the economic poverty of the Highlands and of Ireland, set in movement the most serious volume of migration that had gone forth since the original establishment of the colonies. It has been estimated that 40,000 Ulster-Scots left the northern ports of Ireland in the five years before the summons of the Continental Congress. From the lochs and harbours of north-west Scotland shiploads of Highlanders set forth for the Carolinas or for the King’s newly organized province of Nova Scotia.
The close of the American Revolution brought with it the most important, the most significant episode in the story of British migration — the transfer of the Loyalists to what is now Canada. What happened has an important bearing on the situation of to-day. The transfer was a huge success. At a relatively small cost — though the sacrifice seemed large at the time — it set up a British community in a new and fertile territory, whose wealth has since returned a thousand times all that was spent on the undertaking.
In all, some 40,000 Loyalists were moved into British North America. In the year immediately following the war (1784) about 25,000 were settled in Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and the western section of Nova Scotia organized as New Brunswick. Other Loyalists migrated by way of the Hudson and Lake Champlain to the southern part of what is now Quebec (the Eastern townships), left relatively empty by the French settlers who had preferred to string out along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu. Others went down the Richelieu to Sorel, wintered there and then made their way up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario. And others again moved west through the forests of New York State and so to the Niagara River and Lake Ontario. The transit was arduous. There were no roads, no shelter by the way, no food except that carried. To-day the 30,000 Loyalists who thus came to Upper Canada could all have run over in their motor-cars in one morning and back (if on the quota) in the afternoon. Tempora mutantur. A century and a half ago the infiltration lasted several years. The British Government stood behind it. It supplied transport where it could. It handed out rations of food for some three years. It gave land, the original grant being on the scale of 2,000 to 5,000 acres for officers, 200 acres for non-commissioned officers, and 100 each for the men. Some Loyalists came in compact lots or units, like the Highlanders from western New York, who were settled along the upper St. Lawrence (1784) and followed other groups of Highlanders from Scotland, including (1802) the Glengarry Fencible Regiment, who gave the name to the district. For those who had lost homes and property by confiscation in the United States, the Government paid money; £4,000,000 was spent on this.
Here was a real beginning of a consolidated Empire. All that was needed was to continue on the lines indicated by the Loyalist settlement. But the spirit of the time was against it. The Napoleonic wars impeded and almost terminated migration till after the peace of 1815. In the period which followed, the dominant conception of laissez-faire left the movement of capital and the outflow of population chiefly under the direction of individual incentive. Within a very short time individual incentive guided both the capital and the settlers in directions other than British.
In the period between the peace treaty of 1815 and the beginning of responsible government in the colonies the British Government indeed did something towards systematic colonization. Imperial authority still controlled the public land, and the Imperial Government had therefore a legislative power over colonization never since possessed. Moreover, the war of 1812 had seemed to emphasize the need of a “loyal” population in the Canadas for defence against the United States. Considerations of Imperial defence have always moved the British Government more readily to action than any other reasons of policy. As a consequence a number of transfers of emigrant colonies were managed, directly and indirectly by the Home Government. In 1815 and 1816 about fourteen hundred settlers were carried free to Upper Canada, placed on the land, with 100 acres for each family, and supplied with a temporary loan of money. The plan was not continued. But various group settlements were made with government aid in the period between this time and the Canadian rebellion of 1837 — in the Rice Lake district, in the county of Lanark and elsewhere. In 1821 the Imperial Government granted £68,000 to aid Irish immigration. Irish colonies were brought out, under the direction of Peter Robinson (whose name lingers in the town of Peterboro’), in the years 1823 and 1825. In all, some 5,000 people were established.
