Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 708
There is an old motto — He gives twice who gives quickly. Similarly, he who gives too late, gives nothing. So it always has seemed with Ireland. The Free State (Agreement) Act became a mere ladder from which to reach up for more fruit from the same wall. Ireland proceeded to take further power, without sanction or recognition, smashing up the imperial constitution with Mrs. Nation’s axe. It cut out the claim of the British landlords for interest from Irish tenants, cut out judicial appeals to the Privy Council, oaths of allegiance, and the alien Governor-Generalship. The remaining landlords, about one-third, were bought out by compulsion. By an agreement with the British Government the Free State took over the naval ports reserved by the Act of 1921. It compromised the question of the land purchase debt to Great Britain with a lump sum. Finally, it adopted an entire, new constitution, approved by a plebiscite of July 1st, 1937, and in force by December 29th, 1937. Under this constitution there is no more Irish Free State, it is replaced by Eire, pronounced after the Gaelic fashion in two syllables to rhyme with Sarah. There is no mention here of Crown or King or Empire. Such connection as Ireland retains with the Empire must be deduced from what it has not abolished. By the Constitution (Amendment) Act of December 1936, a product of the abdication of King Edward VIII, Ireland appears to be still an associated member of the Commonwealth of Nations united as the British Empire. Under this Act the King is King outside of Ireland though not in it. This status seems to persist under the new, entire constitution.
The constitution, though without acknowledgment of the King, is written in terms of great piety. ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity,’ so it declares, ‘from Whom is all authority and to Whom as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred. We, the people of Eire, humbly acknowledging all our obligations to our Divine Lord, Jesus Christ... do here adopt... and give to ourselves this constitution.’
By this lowly gift Eire is declared a sovereign independent democratic State. Its official language is Irish — English only recognized as a second language in case of need, a status recalling Mark Twain’s witness who could tell the truth if necessary. There is a national flag — green, white and orange. At the head of the State is an elected Uachlaran na h’ Eirann. It is understood to mean ‘president’ in English. He acts on the advice of the Taoiseach who is himself the nominee of the Dail Eirearm, a translation into Gaelic of what is called Cabinet Government at Westminster.
The Irish, having thus obtained all that they could want, had to look round for something to want next.
Yet when it came they wouldn’t take it. The Abdication of King Edward VIII, officially only a statute of the British Parliament, threw independence at their feet. Had they chosen to keep King Edward, or to have some other King than ours, or no one at all as King, common decency would have forbidden all question of compulsion. It wouldn’t have been cricket — not the thing. There was the independent republic of a century of dreams — harp, shamrock and all. They wouldn’t take it. They prefer still to want something which they can’t have — the compulsion of Northern Ireland by British military force, to join the state of Eire. This of course is outside of all discussion.
But whether the Union of all Ireland, as one Dominion of the British Empire will presently come ‘of itself’ is quite another matter. There is no prophecy at present more calculated than this to enrage Irishmen of both divisions. Ulster shouts with derision at the idea of union with republican idolatry. Eire scoffs at concessions to monarchy. But time is long. The shouts sound hollow, the anger overloud — the voice of age raised in a dispute that the young must settle. Each generation carries its grievances to the grave, and time wreathes its ivy over the stone.
For after all, even in Ireland life must go on. Life is not all moonlight murder behind a hedge or a brawl in the street. Ireland through all its tears has kept the smiles of its literature and art, the humours of its social life, like its own April sunshine through the rain on its green hills. A country as richly favoured by nature’s beauty, a people as richly endowed with bravery and brains, cannot be lost to the world by a mere century or two of discord.
Meantime Ireland, when the present war began, declared itself out of it. This is a strange thing. There has been no war in Europe for hundreds of years without the Irish in it on one side or the other side, or on both, if only as soldiers of fortune. The long list of so-called English generals who were Irish — the Wellingtons and the Wolseleys and the Robertses and the Napiers — is as familiar as the records of the deeds of Irish regiments. But it may presently prove that the Gaelic for neutrality has a kick in it. We can only wait.
SOME BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
KEITH, A. B. Responsible Government in the Dominions. 3 vols. (1912)
KEENLYSIDE, H. Canada and the United States. (1929)
KENNEDY, w p. The Constitution of Canada. (1938)
SIEGFRIED, A. Le Canada, Les Deux Races (1916) and Le Canada, Puissance Internationale. (1937) SEITZ, c. Newfoundland, the Great Island. (1927)
MOORE, w. H. Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia. (1910)
HANCOCK, N. H. Australia. (1930)
ROBERTS, E. New Zealand. (1933)
HOFMEYER, J. H. South Africa. (1931)
HARRISON, H. Ireland and British Empire. (1937)
CHAPTER VI
The Economics of the Empire
Lack of Economic Unity in the Empire — Areas of Separate Authority — The Unsolved Problem of Empire Development — The Parados of Wealth and Want — Land, Migration and Capital under Separate Control — A Handful of Settlers own Half a Continent — The Free Trade Era that Was — Its Collapse — The Present World Dislocation of Money, Exchange and Trade — Nationalism strangling Human Welfare — Tarifs in the Empire — How to Develop the Empire — Integration of Land, Labour, Migration and Capital — The New Migration — Come to Canada — Immigration Companies that were and Can Be Again — Migration as Inspiration and Union
THE British Empire has no corporate existence. It has no offices, no money and no assets. You can’t bring a suit against it. In fact, you can’t find it. Like the famous Mrs. Harris, there is no such person. In other words the British Empire is the name of an association of members which have not consolidated their possessions into one unit, and which have no single or even uniform method of management.
There is no uniform system of money, not even of money of account, no unified exchange, no Empire bank, or consolidated public debt, or command of public lands or natural resources. There is no unified control of navigation or of commerce. The Empire is broken up at present into seven major tariff systems — the United Kingdom, five Dominions and India — all conducted on a protective basis as against one another. The United Kingdom controls in addition the separate customs systems of the Crown Colonies and other dependencies. Most striking of all is the fact that there is no unified control over immigration and land settlement.
Inside these economic frames, assets and population are distributed with the greatest inequality and irregularity. England carries 685 people to the square mile, Barbadoes has just about reached standing room only with 1,138. But vast stretches of British territory — good, usable land as in northern British Columbia — carry only one or two people to the square mile. The half million occupants of Western Australia own at least 1,000 acres each of public land, but they have no capital, and no control of immigration. The capital is in London, the control is in Canberra, and the people, for example, in Glasgow or elsewhere, on the relief. The first impression thus given by the Empire is the need for unification and integration, and the glory there would be in its accomplishment. To bring together the land and the people and the capital into one orderly state with such abundant resources and opportunities as to banish want and to ensure plenty, would seem to be one of the major ambitions of the world. So it is.
But it is not so easy as it looks. The nations not so blessed as us — the words are from Rule Britannia — look on our vast heritage and think, ‘If we only had that our people could never want.’ Yet when Italy tries to develop Lybia, or Holland to drain the Zuider Zee, they run up against the same puzzle as did Western Australia under the Empire Settlement Act. The capital spent is more than the return. It would cost less to pay the people to stay at home. Hence these economic misfits of a world seeking vainly for adjustment have brought the settlement of the overseas Empire to a full stop, with migration closed, except for people rich enough not to want it, and population drifting slowly back from the huge empty Dominions to the little British Isles, crowded but indomitable.
This Empire problem should invite the most earnest endeavour and the best patriotism that we possess among us. It is obvious that co-operation is needed. But what is to be done with co-operation when we get it? Are we to remove all tariffs? If we did, all the big cities of the Dominions would collapse. Open up immigration? If we did, we should have a yellow Canada and a brown Australia, and two new people on the dole in a poor community for every one taken off in a rich. Some one may say that we should abolish the ‘profits system,’ the new name under which an old dog is nowadays hanged. There is no time in this limited volume to discuss nonsense of that sort. The ‘profits system’ is only the name for the fact that I eat my food and you eat yours, and you don’t wear my boots. In its proper sense ‘every man for himself’ is the only starting-point in economics.
Socialism is just a beautiful soap bubble. Communism is a penitentiary. Unlimited free competition, let it be admitted, means the London slums of the 1860’s and the sweated labour of ‘the Song of the Shirt.’ Yet somewhere there must be findable the relative equilibrium of a stable society, where even ‘the poorest,’ like Evangeline’s people in Arcadia, ‘have in abundance.’ And if such a new Arcadia is to be found, it is within and by the British Empire that we can best find it. If this is so, it means that our Empire not only contains in its destiny the chief hope for universal peace, but the chief opportunity towards that abiding plenty and prosperity on which alone universal peace can permanently rest. Whether or not it can be done, at least it is fine stuff to make dreams of.
But we can see at once that a part of the difficulty in this great problem does not belong to the Empire alone, but is shared by all industrialized countries. All over the world we have this aspect of unused capital and unemployed labour. All over the world we have the same unsolved riddle of wealth and want; the same paradox of starvation in the midst of plenty; the same power of over-production exercised only to break the machine.
As yet we can only realize the problem, not solve it. It is clear that our present economic system of private buying and selling (the only system that ever worked outside of the Garden of Eden) hangs on scarcity. We must always produce just less than enough and not more, or else the price will crash and the machine goes out of gear. Over plenty spells danger. This paradox seems to go beyond patience. Old-time economists explained that this meant a nice adjustment of demand and supply; but a part of the nice adjustment was the existence of underpaid people half starving on the edge of wages, and other people entirely starving with no work at all. As the scale of production increased the sweep of this ‘adjustment,’ and the swath reaped by pauperism went wider and wider. The situation forced the attempt at social regulation that began with the factory acts of a century ago and continues in the ‘new deals’ of today. Meantime these economic paradoxes and maladjustments check and hinder new countries as they do old. For all countries now run on machinery, and on buying and selling. The pioneer with the axe, self-sufficient in his happy cabin, has passed out of the picture. South Sea Islands, dropping bread and fruit on the grass beside ‘limpid streams,’ are occupied now by labour unions of South Sea Islanders.
But if the Empire thus shares a problem common to all the world, it is in the Empire that it is most acute, or rather most obvious and conspicuous. The contrast between our resources and our limited ability to use them, challenges us to do better. Thus the problem confronts us with a double difficulty — how to solve the riddle of labour and capital, and how to unify and integrate our vast domain.
Oddly enough the Empire started on its career with organic economic unity, and once, in mid-career, again achieved it. That is to say, the old-time colonial Empire was all controlled from London. After it was gone, in Cobden’s time, it looked as if the Empire, along with all the world, would be controlled and united by political economy. The world would be made one by enlightened self-interest.
The old colonial system that began under James I and ended with the American Revolution, was based on the plantation idea. It was conquered, occupied and exploited, first and foremost for the advantage of Great Britain. But it had in it from the first the germs of better things. The merchant owners and the settlers enjoyed British protection. From the first the colonies had certain special rights in the British markets, such as the monopoly of tobacco, the growth of the plant being forbidden in Great Britain itself. The Navigation Laws pressed the plantations in one direction, but gave them room in another. Thus the American sea-board colonies enjoyed the lucrative West Indian trade but lost it (for the time) when they became independent. Massachusetts and the others, enjoyed, if we can use the word, the profitable treaty rights for slave catching and slave selling obtained by Great Britain from Spain. Two at least of the great plantation and trading companies of this first epoch, the Hudson Bay and the East India Companies, carried forward till 1858 and 1869, and carried British sovereignty with them. The former is still there, strong as ever, with the laurels of commerce in place of the arms of sovereignty. With wiser management and more foresight this unified and regulated colonial Empire could THE ECONOMICS OF THE EMPIRE 221 have rounded the Stamp Act corner, and entered by a short cut on the road so difficult to find now. But the strain of the colonial controversy from the Stamp Act to the Boston Tea Party was too intense for such a frail structure.
Unity seemed to dawn with the aurora of the free trade period. The Liberal school which dominated European thought for a generation confidently expected universal free trade and the abolition of all barriers to international intercourse. But the ‘freedom’ school took for granted the very thing that it wanted to create — a world of brotherly love and equality. Free competition, unchecked at home, would have put the weak under the strong. Free migration would have filled the newer worlds with mixtures of all kinds of peoples, of all colours, of all creeds, of all races, without coherence or common thought. Free trade, unchecked, would have killed overseas manufacture at the start, as an oak tree can be killed while yet a shoot. International free trade would have levelled down high wages to the standards of lower races, and prevented all social betterment by the sheer extent of the field that must be covered all at once or not at all.
We can see now the errors in these pre-conceptions of free trade. But it managed in the mid-Victorian days to invest itself with a sort of godliness that clung to it for two generations. It was not business, it was gospel. It ranked along with the Protestant Reformation and the Whig Revolution, and the eminence of Mr. Gladstone.
It reached even to the colonies. A certain taint of wickedness long clung to a Canadian manufacturer. Those of us who can recall the British public opinion of fifty years ago realize how reluctantly this frame of mind was abandoned. A Gladstonian Liberal now belongs in a museum, but in his day he looked over the world as from an eminence, an Ark of Salvation on Mount Ararat.
But the pity is that in abandoning one extreme we should have been carried to the other; that the world’s escape was from the frying pan to the fire. In giving up the illusions of universalism, the dream of an all-one world, we should not have turned restriction into a set of fetters. Even if all the world could not be one garden, as of Eden, we should not have allowed nationalism, in replacing liberalism, to grow like a tangled weed over its separated fields and hedges, choking their own growth.
This is what the Great War did for us.
On the eve of the Great War at the opening of the year 1914, universal free trade was dead. But international commerce went strong. The protective tariffs of the United States and of the great Dominions, as of the industrial European countries, still permitted a vast and continued importation. Even the self-sufficient economy that marked the German ‘agricultural tariff’ after 1900, was far from exclusive. Public policy everywhere aimed at a sort of happy equilibrium favouring home manufacture and drawing a revenue from foreign imports. The ugly cloud of the balance of trade doctrine still hung before the vision of common sense. Yet the nations thought of it in the general rather than in the particular,
and it need be bought without selling, in individual cases. Migration, apart from oriental exclusion, was still relatively free. Europe sent out about 2,000,000 emigrants every year. For navigation and commerce the open door was the rule; restrictions, such as coastal laws, the exception.
Most happy of all was the system of universal money, the one legacy of the Cobdenite era that had endured and expanded. This was so widespread that it was taken for granted, just as the highest art seems effortless and the most beautiful language inevitable. The adoption of gold as a basis, with paper as its representative, with free coinage and instant redemption, had been evolved by the happy accidents of British monetary history. It spread over the civilized world in the nineteenth century. It connected indirectly with a fixed exchange for silver money. Payment could be made in any country from any other, with nothing extra but the cost on the carriage of gold. Even that vanished where bargains cancelled out, or turned into a premium if the majorities of bargains turned the other way. Everybody’s actual money became everybody else’s. In transit, gold napoleons, or roubles or dollars were all one.
