J. L. Garvin

“ Whether an Empire which could only have reached its present extent under political and commercial conditions that have passed away can be maintained under the conditions now prevailing—this is the large question of our national policy. That question governs more or less every other domestic and external issue. It raises a problem admitted at the outset to be at least equal in magnitude and difficulty to any task ever yet presented to constructive statesmanship. Opinion, even amongst ourselves, is not unanimous in believing that a solution can be found. ”

“ It is a matter of life and death to British commerce that some means should be found to preserve for the manufactures of the Mother Country a preferential passage through the barriers of Inter-imperial Protection. Mr. Chamberlain's most bitter opponent would hardly deny, it may be supposed, that since Free Trade throughout the Empire is not attainable, the main aim of the fiscal movement—keeping itself within the bounds of possibility, reckoning step by step with the concrete, and losing sight of no single interest as it goes—is to establish throughout the Empire the freest trade attainable. ”

“ The Trafalgar Centenary reminds us that we are still carrying the immense financial weight of the wars that won the Empire. In the Napoleonic struggle, under Pitt's blindly heroic system of war finance, we pay not only for the defence of our own liberties, but for the freedom of Europe. The subsidies to our allies, though their own interests were more imminently at stake than ours, form part of the heavy heritage which presses upon us. ”

“ The complete transformation of that market will hardly occur before Japan has placed herself in a position to supply it. The vision of a vast export of cotton, machinery, and 'buckwheat cakes'—to recall one expression of that sanguine enthusiasm in which Americans no longer indulge—flowing from all the centres of Western commerce through the 'open door,' is extravagant, perhaps altogether delusive. The tolerable certainty, on the other hand, is that Japan will increase her proportion of Far Eastern trade faster than that trade as a whole develops. ”

“ The final consolidation of the British Empire would be by far the greatest step ever taken towards the ultimate integration of mankind. Only imaginations prone, in Lord Beaconsfield's words, 'to make themselves miserable in the anticipation of evils that never happen,' can sincerely suppose that definite arrangements between the Mother Country, the Colonies, and India for mutual economic support as a means to political security would result in antagonism rather than cohesion. ”

“ Adam Smith failed to do justice to a profound idea when he said that a home transaction, from a purely economic standpoint, is twice as valuable to a country as a foreign transaction. In pure economics that is unquestionably an overstatement; and, nevertheless, the instinct of that sagacious mind was far better than the formula. A transaction in Imperial trade, and, above all, with our white Colonies, gives undoubtedly at least twice the political strength derived from a transaction in foreign trade. ”

“ We have not only to federate with the Colonies. We have to develop the future strength of that federation to the utmost by directing British emigration and attracting foreign emigration to the lands under the British flag, and filling up the empty places of the Empire as the United States peopled the Far West.
This is where the Free Trade theory at its best gives neither help nor light to constructive statesmanship. Free Trade, we are told, means equal benefits—an equal development of power, wealth, and population on both sides. ”

“ The life of the English idea depends upon the maintenance in separate identity and power of the Imperial Commonwealth under the Crown. Sentiment and interest in the case of nations we can no more separate than soul from substance in a living body. If we wish the Colonies to desire with sufficient intensity this future, and no other, we must give them a far more direct and tangible interest in the support of the fleet and the preservation of the whole fabric of Empire than they now possess. ”

“ The age of separatism is over, because the organization of the world proceeds. The great races are rapidly plotting out their definite boundaries. The possibilities of conquest will become more and more strictly limited; the equipoise of human forces more stable; the margin for dispute narrower; the prospect more distinct of an Areopagus of all civilization 'striking a universal peace through sea and land.' The break-up of the British Empire would overturn the existing equilibrium throughout the globe and plunge the world in war upon the greatest question of redistribution known to history. ”

“ Our own policy has nourished the agricultural prosperity of the United States and the manufacturing power superimposed upon it. Our own policy has stimulated the manufacturing, maritime, and naval development of Germany. Foreign tariffs touch our financial resources and our ability to support population, wherever they touch our trade, and they hurt us politically—ours is the only country in which it would be necessary to emphasize the fact—wherever they hurt us economically. They directly attack the very sinews of Empire. ”

“ We are about to see what the world has never seen before—economic competition organized by the State with the same weapons of national revenue and universal training which the Western nations, less logically, have hitherto wielded in full efficiency for the sole purposes of war. Japan is about to create industries just as she creates battleships. She is about to purchase and construct the economic apparatus of a great Power, just as she acquired the fighting apparatus of a great Power. She did the latter part of the work in a single generation ”

“ The foundation principle of that policy will be preference—preference in every market under the flag, at home, in the Colonies, and in the dependencies alike, for those members of the Imperial State who bear its burthens, increase its resources, strengthen its defence, and whose morale and organization, whose sufficiency in numbers and efficiency in spirit, can alone perpetuate its existence. ”

“ Germany and America absorb into their industrial system year by year a number of new workers twice and three times as large as we can find employment for. These States, therefore, gain upon us in man-power and money-power alike; in fighting-power and budget-power; and, in strict consequence, sea-power itself must ultimately be shared between them, unless we can call in the Colonies to redress the balance, and can maintain as an Empire what as an island we should lose. ”

“ We are beaten by every one of our protected competitors. France beats us.
What is the reason? We have our Colonies, where our traditional pre-eminence, as we shall see, is not yet forfeited—where the same language, similar tastes, and a common Imperial citizenship still help to retain for us the advantage we nowhere else enjoy. We have the richness of our coal deposits and their unique proximity to the factory and the wharf. We have still a geographical position more favourable than that of any of our competitors with regard to the world's markets as a whole. ”

“ Military and naval federation with the Colonies, even if we could secure it, would not people our territories or extend our trade. Protection was adopted in the United States and Germany as a doctrine of development. It has been brilliantly successful for that purpose in both instances. Our competitors have unquestionably made the most of their opportunities; of ours we as unquestionably have made the least. What the British Empire needs in its turn is a policy of practical development meant to develop as well as to unite the human and financial forces of the Mother Country and her Colonies. ”

“ There is no alternative in trade. There is none in policy. Under the present system the relative decay of our commerce must begin at no very distant date to sap the foundations of our power. We shall remain without means to negotiate for reciprocity with our foreign competitors, or to check the steady decline of our trade in the protected markets of Europe and the United States. We shall be helpless to prevent the repetition of that injury in neutral markets, like those of the Far East and South America. ”

“ In relation to the first group of markets our commercial supremacy has totally disappeared already. It will not, presumably, be denied by any orthodox economist that hostile tariffs have driven down our trade in manufacture in the principal protected countries. It will not be denied that free imports have enormously increased the influx of foreign manufacture from these same countries. This process seriously weakens ourselves and sensibly strengthens our rivals—so much will be admitted—and must, therefore, reduce our relative competitive vigour. ”

“ But, as a manufacturing country, we are not only outstripped in extent and rate of progress by the United States and Germany. We do not quite hold our own even by comparison with France—which works on imported coal, which has a stationary population, with conscription in its severest form, and a national debt half as large again as ours, which in the eyes of our orthodox economists is loaded with every fiscal disadvantage the human imagination can conceive. ”

“ We paid to raise against France the allied armies of the rest of Europe, and Napoleon was in the long run beaten by numbers, nor could have been beaten otherwise. Again, while Europe was passing through the political revolution, we were passing through the industrial revolution. With a monopoly of machine-power and a monopoly of the sea, wealth and trade were increased faster in this country than in all the rest of the world put together. As an island we can have no similar compensation in the future. In the United States and Germany money-power now increases as man-power increases. ”

“ But the soul of a whole people seems to strengthen or decay with that sense of national vitality and national achievement which—like the electric helix, giving energy to what was before the dead weight of a soft iron bar—raises to a higher power the faculties of its component individuals. 'Humanity' can do nothing for 'humanity,' and races do most for other races by the example they give and the ideals they pursue in the process of their own development. ”

“ Every witness competent to speak for colonial opinion agrees that without a radical alteration of our economic policy we can never hope to secure an Imperial Federation for defence purposes. Canada and Australia will not contribute to a naval expenditure which, for all the purposes of war and peace, would give precisely the same protection to food-supplies and raw material from the United States and Argentina as to those from the Dominion and the Commonwealth. War is an occasional episode in the life of nations. Commerce is its constant element. ”

“ The rise of Japan in the Far East, regarded as a purely economic phenomenon, cannot be more favourable to our interests in that sphere than the commercial rise of Germany has been upon the Continent. The nation which is happily our ally in arms must be our rival in trade, the most formidable of all competitors in the East Asiatic market, and eventually elsewhere. ”