Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 696
Then in South Africa came the devil with diamonds in Griqualand and round Kimberley, in places best termed ‘no man’s land.’ Arbitration showed they belonged to Great Britain. Right. And with that the devil waved away the mists from the rolling upland and showed a great reef of over fifty miles of gold ore and asked whose was that? And with that came the Rand Mines, and the city of Johannesburg and a babel of all the world. The Dutch republic with its little capital of Pretoria, fast asleep round its ox-cart market square looked as ill-suited to the change as the Old Testament wrapped around the West Side of Chicago. Anger, greed, controversy and patriotism struggled together. Yet the British never hated the Boers nor the Boers the British. They got on well together, always have. All those who know South Africa will agree. They have never known the mutual exclusion which keep the French and English as far apart in Montreal, as the two ship-wrecked gentlemen of Gilbert’s ballad — never introduced.
But the situation forced quarrels. Should the newcomers, the Uitlanders vote? Did they really want to be citizens, or just want money? Was it fair for a handful of Dutch farmers to tax dynamite, sweep off profits, sell railways. Yet was this influx really British expansion overseas, or was this just the clamour of the stock exchange for Kaffir stock? But even if it was for the moment capitalism, did it not show far away the green hills of future union under the Empire? People must judge for themselves. Few witnesses speak alike.
Mimic revolt seethed in the Rand Club of Johannesburg over Scotch and seltzer. Rifles came in piano cases. Was this a storm in a teacup, or was this the ground-swell of a great tempest? A brave man called Dr. Jameson undertook to bet that it was in a teacup. He betted wrong. His raid into the Transvaal (New Year, 1895-96) and his capture, set all the world in tumult. Angry winds blew from every cave. The German Emperor in a famous telegram of congratulation to old Paul Kruger, president at Pretoria, opened the Great War eighteen years before it started. The raid was followed by a feverish four years of conference and armaments. Whose was the fault? Did the British declare the war inevitable and then start it? Or did the Boers refuse every last and reasonable overture, and mean to drive the British into the sea, clearing out the Cape and all. At least the struggle of the Boers under arms, against overwhelming odds for three years is unsurpassed in the world’s record of patriotic heroism. The tragedy of it is, as seen by many of us, that all that was ever gained by the war would have come naturally enough anyway with patience and a lapse of time. People cannot, not even Dutch farmers, live forever on memories of Great Treks and kraals and assegais. Life must go on and would have, and Dutch and British union under the Empire would have come as easy and welcome destiny. It came another way. The forced treaty of Vereeniging (1902) gave generous terms to the conquered — magnanimous and almost divine as compared with what we see at this hour of the mercy meted out by conquerors. Four years later the triumph of common sense and magnanimity in granting self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony went far to healing wounds that nature was trying to close. The Union of South Africa (1909) brought about by conferences in which shared the leaders of both sides so recently under arms, seemed to crown the work. It would have done so, but for the war of 1914 that seemed to many of the Dutch a release from a forced oath and an opportunity for freedom. The suppression of the rebellion, Dutch by Dutch, left but little animosity. After which, South Africa its clouds drifting away for what next — and now the next has come.
Thus stands the Empire aligned, dressing its ranks, as the onslaught of war comes upon it. Behind it, since Gilbert first claimed Newfoundland, are three and a half centuries of the expansion of the British people overseas, of decent government and fair play, of faults redeemed and bygone angers mellowed into friendship. From the myriad graves that mark where courage lies, on land or under sea, or mark at least the spot where a life of honest effort ended in rest, its spirit speaks. It is a great heritage.
If there is guidance to the world, and not mere devil’s chance, the ordeal of the war will show what it has been worth.
SOME BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
TREVELYAN, G. M. History of England (1926)
MORISON, s. E. Oxford History of the United States. 2 vols. (1927)
LECKY, w. H. England in the Eighteenth Century SEELEY, J. R. The Expansion of England (1883)
EGERTON, H. E. British Colonial Policy. 8th Ed. (1928)
DILKE, SIR c. Greater Britain (1890)
HALL, w p. Empire to Commonwealth. (1928)
KING-HALL, s. Our Own Times (1913-1934)
ROBINSON, H. The Development of the British Empire (1922)
CHAPTER II
The Geographical and Maritime Aspect of Empire
Extent of the Empire — A Quarter of the Globe — Its Share of each Continent — Doubtful Areas; the Mandates, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, etc. — Comparison of Areas — A Century of Expansion — Points of Strategy and Ports of Call — Zones of Climate — Extent of White Population — Emptiness of the Empire
UNROLL the map of the world, in the familiar form called ‘Mercator’s projection’ which rolls out like wallpaper, and you see the British Empire, done in pink, stretched out all over it. Colossal it is, especially Canada, with nothing to humble it except Siberia twice as large. It touches the North Pole as part of Canada and the South Pole as part of Victoria Land. East and west it never stops, with territories in both hemispheres and in each continent, and with islands in each of the seven seas. Where it stops, it begins again; as Mercator draws it, you can start it anywhere like a movie film.
The sun, as the poets put it, never sets on the British Empire. The time line of the meridian of 180 degrees from Greenwich, half-way round the world, east or west as you like, cuts just past the upturned heel of New Zealand. When it is six o’clock by the sun on Monday morning in Auckland, it is still twenty-four minutes past four o’clock in the morning at Sydney, Australia. In Ceylon it is not yet Monday but only eleven o’clock on Sunday night; in London it is six o’clock on Sunday evening; in Montreal still Sunday afternoon, one o’clock; in Vancouver, and on Pitcairn Island away to the south of it in the Pacific Ocean, the time is ten o’clock on Sunday morning. From there further across the Pacific beside the Friendly Islands, it is six o’clock on Sunday morning, with Monday morning just a few miles further on. A naval battle begun off the east coast of New Zealand could start on a Monday and end on the Sunday before. No, the sun never sets on the British Empire. It tries to, but it can’t.
Mercator when he made the map certainly flattered the British Empire. This, however, was the least of his intentions since the Empire in his day did not exist, or only in the germ. He lived in the time of the Tudors in what was then the Spanish Netherlands and his name was Gerhard Kremer, or as we might say, Gerry the Shopkeeper. But when he became a celebrated geographer he latinized his name to ‘Mercator’ to give it style. At this period scientific map-making was just beginning. The old rough and ready methods of counting in a ‘thousand paces,’ and ‘two nights’ sleep’ and a ‘ten days’ sail,’ were giving way to the exact methods of the new mathematics as needed for the new travel and exploration. Mercator made for the Emperor Charles V wonderfully accurate maps of part of Central Europe. But his world-map was made for sailors. In a sense it is as crazy as anything in Alice in Wonderland since the only correct line on it is the equator. All the north and south meridians go straight up at equal distances apart, which makes everything too wide in proportion and getting worse all the time. Mercator makes Canada about six thousand miles wide at the base instead of three, everything on the British Isles is about as ‘broad as it is long’ — though it is all too small to notice on a world scale. This is kept up until Mercator’s world reaches a North Pole about 25,000 miles wide where everything ends with a full stop like the edge of a cliff. But east and west you can roll it round for ever.
Yet, crazy as it appears, Mercator’s is the best ‘map’ of the entire world that we can make. The earth is a globe. You can’t see it all at once. There is no bird’s-eye view of it because the bird can’t see it all. If you draw two separate hemispheres, as we often do, that is two maps, not one, and in any case each is foreshortened till the side parts vanish to nothing. In fact every map is a compromise. You can’t draw a bulged surface on a flat paper.
Mercator made his world-map ( 1569) for sailors and for the sailors of his day, steering by compass but without chronometers, it was just the thing. Put a compass on Mercator’s map and north is north, which is not so on any other map above an insignificant scale. Later it turned out that Mercator’s world-map suited all kinds of purposes for rough and ready illustration of trade routes, islands, winds, currents and the maritime divisions of the nations. In practice the north and south poles didn’t matter, whether big or little, nor till yesterday, did northern Canada and Siberia. Life in the Spice Islands days clung to the Equator, and there Mercator was as right as rain.
But even without Mercator’s exaggeration the area of the British Empire, is imposing enough. The land surface of the globe is estimated at 55, 214,000 square miles, and of this an area of about 13,353,000 square miles, nearly 25 per cent, is under the British Crown. This is a space of about the same size as the continent of Africa, is about as large again as the whole stretch of Russia with Siberia, and four times as large as the land area of the United States. The area of the Empire cannot, however, be given in exact figures, and indeed not within a million square miles. It is difficult to say where the British Empire ends, and whether certain areas are to be included in it or not.
The Irish Free State, now officially Eire, is certainly one of the Dominions associated in the Commonwealth of Nations of the Statute of Westminster, but in Eire the British flag does not fly, the national language is Irish, with English officially a substitute in the legislature and in the courts, and the King is only King of Eire outside of it, not in it. The rest of the Empire accepts this as a way the Irish have of being British without admitting it. Peculiar also are the mandated territories carried over from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 under the guardianship of the League of Nations and by it assigned to various powers. Dominion over these in the theory of the matter, is revocable by the League. Some of the mandates were entrusted to Great Britain itself, such as Tanganyika, once German East Africa, a territory of 365,000 square miles and, in Africa also, the British section (13,000 square miles) of Togoland and (34,000 square miles) of the Cameroons. In Asia there is the mandate of Palestine (10,000 square miles) which originally covered also Transjordan, now an independent government under an Amir, but not a sovereign state. Such odd cases defy all classification. In the Pacific Ocean Britain itself has a mandate over the once German island of Nauru, a strategic point situated about 2,500 miles north of Zealand and only 26 miles south of the Equator. The other mandates in the Pacific are entrusted not to Great Britain but to its Dominions. Papua, formerly Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land, along with a group of adjacent islands is under Australia. This is the south-eastern part, approximately one-third, of the great island of New Guinea, which is half as large again as France. A part of the Samoan group of islands, 1,200 square miles with 57,000 inhabitants, are assigned to New Zealand, a source of pride rather than profit. The Union of South Africa has a mandate over South West Africa (once German South West) an area of 317,725 square miles. The military and naval power of the Empire everywhere extends over the mandates and there is no very evident intention of giving away any worth keeping. To our disillusioned eyes, islands and mandates are indistinguishable from gun-platforms and air-bases. It would be better to nail the flag to the mast or to the coconut tree. A certain aspect of humbug on our part has often infuriated other nations in the past. Plain speech wears better.
The theorist with the magnifying glass may find still more perplexing the case of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. This has an area of 950,000 square miles, a quarter of the size of Europe. Its territory covers the region on the upper Nile from Egypt to Uganda, 1,200 miles, north and south, and reaches from the Red Sea and Abyssinia on the east to French Africa on the west, a distance of 1,000 miles. Here fly the combined flags of Egypt and England to indicate joint sovereignty. In practice England pays all the costs. Egypt is a sleeping partner, a role easy in the land of the Pyramids.
To this list of anomalies may be added the two native states of Nepal and Bhutan, the mountain fortresses that guard north-eastern India. In recognition of their imperial solidarity in the Great War they were officially declared in 1922 absolutely independent, that is, outside of the Empire. The list of curiosities ends with the Antarctic continent, on which the Empire has whatever sovereignty springs from its explorations and discoveries. The whole area of Antarctica is known to be over 5,000,000 square miles. But it is all under permanent snow except in a few little patches, in all about a hundred square miles, where the ice melts enough to show the rock. There are no trees in Antarctica but even here, as the age of wood passes to the edge of metal, the world may yet quarrel over sovereignty.
But leaving out every one of these dubious cases from Ireland to the South Pole, the Empire still occupies an area of 11,750,000 square miles. In following the distribution of this area among its component parts, it will be noted that the Empire has less territory, and a less proportion of territory, in its own continent of Europe, than in any other part of the world. In Europe, apart from the British Isles themselves, there are only 2 square miles of Gibraltar and the 122 square miles of Malta. Cyprus, strategically a part of Europe, is geographically in Asia. Contrast with this 3,847,597 square miles of British North America and the British West Indies, the 3,818,000 square miles under the British flag in Africa, and the 2,126,000 square miles under British rule in Asia. Australia, 100 per cent British, holds the continental record.
For the recurrent comparisons of area needed in a volume like the present it is well to cany in one’s mind certain yard-sticks of reference. This is the more needed since we habitually see many countries expanded on a large scale map, and others contracted on a small. It may be noted that the area of the British Isles is about the same as that of New Zealand, that England itself contains about 50,000 square miles which makes it about twice the size of Nova Scotia. This area of 50,000 miles is, in a rough and ready sense, familiar to most of us on the map of America as the size of typical Eastern and Middle States such as Florida (54,000), Virginia (40,000), New York (47,000). It may be compared with a conspicuous unit above it, that of 250,000 square miles,
Texas (262,000), Alberta (256,000), Saskatchewan (25-1,000), France (213,000) and the German Empire of the Kaiser (208,000). Above these one may note, as a gradation, India with 1,800,000 square miles about the same size as French West Africa and just above Chinese Mongolia (1,150,000) and the Argentine Republic (1,150,000). A very notable group of roughly similar areas is found around the unit of 3,000,000 square miles. Here belongs the United States 3,026,000 (the land area without the Great Lakes), Canada 3,689,000, Brazil 3,275,000, Australia 2,974,000 and the continent of Europe 3,879,000. For the lack of such a scale of comparison the ideas of many people are hopelessly confused as to size and distance.
There are many countries, only seen on small scale maps, whose dimensions become permanently blighted in our thought. The Philippine Islands laid across the map of Europe would have one end at Stockholm in Sweden and the other end in Sicily. The Canadian province of Quebec is large enough to hold all France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland and still have room for the British Isles. On the other hand, it would never do to form our conception of the Empire on the mere size of vast areas as yet mostly empty and of little immediate significance. Spacious territory may look very imposing but, without water, fertility or mineral resources the possession of it is not worth, for peaceful uses, one paradise island in the South Seas. Compare the Sahara desert which represents under various flags 3,500,000 square miles of dry sand; or the frozen north of Canada, an area to be computed as a million square miles.
From this we can understand why in past history, and not so very recently, inordinate value, as we see it now, was attached to very minor areas, and little value at all to huge areas now beyond price. The West India Islands even in the eighteenth century, seemed the world’s prize. Golden cargoes of sugar made musk-rat and beaver skins look poor stuff. Cuba was the Pearl of the Antilles. Guadeloupe was discussed as a possible equivalent to trade back for the ‘few acres of snow’ called Canada. San Domingo meant more to Napoleon, as first consul, than the huge quarter continent of Louisiana sold to the States. The Spice Islands, meaning the Moluccas from Sumatra to New Guinea, still carry in their picturesque name the aroma of a forgotten dream of wealth, wafted from an unknown world.
On the other hand our new world of large scale industry and the science that feeds it, is beginning to readjust these values. Dykes cut into the Sahara can flood an inland sea, drift rain clouds over Timbuctoo and restore the vast garden that once was, but which now is sand and bones. The Arabs have a saying, ‘Men once could walk from Mecca to Morocco in the shade.’ Perhaps they will again. When we have time off from war, we can set ourselves to alter climate itself; not only flood the Sahara but block the Straits of Belle Isle to turn aside the Polar current; make the James Bay rivers run south to feed the insufficient waters of the St. Lawrence, and irrigate all Nevada and Mongolia as easily as we now ‘air condition’ a New York hotel. These are the dreams of refashioning our world for the welfare of mankind that will one day come to us in the sleep of peace. Even in their dimmest vision they help to exalt the majesty and the responsibility of our Empire.
