John Morley

“ He admits, no doubt, that the American Union exerts a strong influence upon us by 'the strange career it runs and the novel experiments it tries.' These novel experiments in government, institutions, and social development, are the most valuable results, as many think, of the American state, and they are the results of its independence. Yet independence is what Mr. Seeley dreads for our present colonies, both for their own sake and ours. ”

“ Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world. It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history—in the history not of England only, but of the English race. ”

“ Enormous territory is only one of the [Pg 302] acquisitions or instruments of England, and we know no reason why that particular element of growth should be singled out as overtopping the other elements that made it so important as it is. It is not the mere multiplication of a race, nor its diffusion over the habitable globe that sets its deepest mark on the history of a state, but rather those changes in idea, disposition, faculty, and, above all, in institution, which settle what manner of race it shall be that does in this way replenish the earth. ”

“ If they hold together in the generations before us in one world-embracing empire, maintaining and propagating the principles of justice, freedom and peace, what blessings might arise from their united power to beautify and invigorate the world.' This is the eloquent expression of a lofty and generous aspiration which every good Englishman shares, and to which he will in his heart fervently respond. ”

“ The inquiry is simply whether the good of the members of our great English union all over the world will be best promoted by aiming at an artificial centralisation, or by leaving as much room as possible for the expansion of individual communities along lines and in channels which they may spontaneously cut out for themselves. If our ideal is a great Roman Empire, which shall be capable by means of fleets and armies of imposing its will upon the world, then it is satisfactory to think, for the reasons above given, that the ideal is an unattainable one. ”

“ What is the common bond that is to bring the various colonies into a federal union? It is certain that it will have to be a bond of political and national interest, and not of sentiment merely, though the sentiment may serve by way of decoration. We all know how extremely difficult it was to bring the provinces of Canada to form themselves into the Dominion. ”

“ A plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, as prosperous rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, as distressing by the commonness and the flatness of its men and its affairs, we undertake to say that most of us, in the sense of most people who read the English language, know more about, and feel less flatness, and are more interested in the names of the eighteenth century than in those of all other centuries put together. ”

“ We agree in desiring a strong and constant play between the thoughts, the ideals, the institutions, of Englishmen in the island home and Englishmen who have carried its rational freedom and its strenuous industry to new homes in every sea. Those who in our domestic politics are most prepared to welcome democratic changes can have least prejudice against countrymen who are showing triumphantly how order and prosperity are not incompatible with a free Church, with free schools, with the payment of members, with manhood suffrage, and with the absence of a hereditary chamber. ”

“ Colonial-Empire, whose is it to be? Shall half the world be England's, for industrial purposes; which is innocent, laudable, conformable to the Multiplication Table, at least, and other plain laws? Shall there be a Yankee Nation, shall there not be; shall the New World be of Spanish type, shall it be of English? ”

“ But the problems of government bring us into a sphere where people are called upon to make sacrifices, in the shape of taxation if in no other, and here English-speaking men and women are wont not by any means to look at life and its problems, from George Grenville's Stamp Act down to the 333 articles in the tariff of Victoria, with the same eyes. The problems of government arise from clashing interests, and in that clash the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin is the resolution not willingly to make sacrifices without objects which are thought to be worth them. ”

“ Neither are we misled by a spurious analogy between a colony ready for independence and a grown-up son ready to enter life on his own account; nor by Turgot's comparison of colonies to fruit which hangs on the tree only till it is ripe. ”

“ Seeley's definition of history as having to do with the state, with the growth and the changes of a certain corporate society, acting through certain functionaries and certain assemblies. If the expansion of England was important, not less important were other changes vitally affecting the internal fortunes of the land that was destined to undergo this process. Expansion only acquired its significance in consequence of what happened in England itself. It is the growth of population at home, as a result of our vast extension of manufactures, that makes our colonies both possible and important. ”

“ When soil, climate, facility of acquisition, proximity to English ports, are all equalised, it will be quite time enough to hope for a change in the currents of emigration, and when that time comes the change will be wrought not by emotions of patriotic sentiment, but by calculations of prudence. No true patriot can honestly wish that it should be otherwise, for patriotism is regard for the wellbeing of the people of a country as well as affection for its flag. ”

“ Seeley's aversion for the florid, rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of writing history has not carried him to the opposite extreme, but it has made him seek sources of interest, where alone the serious student of human affairs would care to find them, in the magnitude of events, the changes of the fortunes of states, and the derivation of momentous consequences from long chains of antecedent causes. ”

“ Seeley says, the American Union 'is beyond question the state in which free will is most active and alive in every individual.' He says this, and a few pages further on he agrees that 'there has never been in any community so much happiness, or happiness of a kind so little demoralising, as in the United States.' But he proceeds to deny, not only that the causes of this happiness are political, but that it is in any great [Pg 304] degree the consequence of secession. He seems to assume that if we accept the first proposition, the second follows. ”

“ It is when we consider the real life, the material pursuits, the solid interests, the separate frontiers and frontier-policies of the colonies, that we perceive how deeply the notions of Mr. Seeley are tainted with vagueness and dreaminess. ”

“ In short, since the concession of independent legislatures to all the most important colonies, the [Pg 321] idea of summoning representatives to the Imperial Parliament is, indeed, as one high colonial authority has declared it to be, a romantic dream. If the legislature of Victoria is left to settle the local affairs of Victoria, the legislature of the United Kingdom must be left to settle our local affairs. ”

“ Seeley's phrase—unless it is to be a Pessimist to seek a foothold in positive conditions and to insist on facing hard facts. The sense of English kinship is as lively in us as in other people, and we have the same pride in English energy, resolution, and stoutness of heart, whether these virtues show themselves in the young countries or the old. ”

“ If the Crown is to act on the advice of the agents then the imperial politics of any one colony must either be regulated by a vote of the majority of the members of the council—however unpalatable the decision arrived at may be to the colony affected—or else the Crown will be enabled to exercise its own discretion, and so to arrogate to itself the right to direct colonial policy (Rowe's Bonds of Disunion, 356) . The simpleton in the jestbooks is made to talk of a bridge dividing the two banks of a stream. Sir Henry Parkes's plan of union would soon prove a dividing bridge in good earnest. ”

“ He scolds Liberals for attaching too little importance to colonies, and not perceiving that our national existence is bound up with our existence as an empire. We are dependent in an increasing degree on foreign countries for our supply of food, and therefore we might starve in time of war unless we had an efficient fleet; but fleets, to be efficient, must be able to keep the sea for any length of time, and they can only do this by means of the accommodation afforded by our various dependencies and colonies dotted over the surface of the globe. ”

“ But the Australian statesman cannot seriously think that the maintenance and propagation of justice, freedom and peace, the beautifying and invigorating of the world, or any of the other blessings of united power, depend on the four or five devices, all of them trivial, and some of them contemptible, which figure in his project. ”

“ Seeley's book is in substance this, that if we allow 'ourselves to be moved sensibly nearer in our thoughts and feelings to the colonies, and accustom ourselves to think of emigrants as not in any way lost to England by settling in the colonies, the result might be, first, that emigration on a vast scale might become our remedy for pauperism; and, secondly, that some organisation might gradually be arrived at which might make the whole force of the empire available in time of war' (p. 298) . ”

“ It is perfectly plain that the chief source of the embarrassments of the mother country in dealing with colonies endowed with responsible government would simply be reproduced if a Federal Council were sitting in Downing Street in the place of the Secretary of State. ”

“ The substance of character, the leading instincts, the love of freedom, the turn for integrity, the taste for fair play, all the great traits and larger principles may remain the same, but there is abundant room in the application of the same principles and the satisfaction of the same instincts for the rise of bitter contention and passionate differences. ”

“ It would hardly be either an advantage or a pleasure to the people of a young country, with all their busy tasks hot on their hands, to be interrupted by the duty of helping by men or cash to put down an Indian Mutiny, and even in quiet times to see their politicians attending to India instead of minding their own very sufficiently exacting business. ”

“ Supposing, for the sake of argument, that Australia were represented in the body that decided on war, though we may notice that war is often entered upon even in our own virtuous days without preliminary consent from Parliament, nobody believes that the presence of Australian representatives in the imperial assembly that voted the funds would reconcile their constituents at the other side of the globe to paying money for a war, say, for the defence of Afghanistan against Russia, or for the defence of Belgian neutrality. ”

“ THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND.
'There is a vulgar view of politics which sinks them into a mere struggle of interests and parties, and there is a foppish kind of history which aims only at literary display, which produces delightful books hovering between poetry and prose. These perversions, according to me, come from an unnatural divorce between two subjects which belong to one another. Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' These very just remarks are made by Mr. ”

“ The conduct of the colonists to the natives has been the main cause of these wars, and yet it is stated that they themselves have never contributed more than £10,000 a year towards military expenditure on their account. Is it possible to suppose that the Canadian lumberman and the Australian sheep-farmer will cheerfully become contributors to a Greater British fund for keeping Basutos, Pondos, Zulus quiet to please the honourable gentlemen from South Africa, especially as two-thirds of the constituents of these honourable gentlemen would be not Englishmen but Dutchmen? ”

“ Seeley assures us, 'we see nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to lead to nothing, and we do not perceive the working of any new political ideas. That time seems to have created little, so that we can only think of it as prosperous, but not as memorable. ”

“ If we can both persuade ourselves and convince the colonists that the gains of a closer confederation will compensate for the sacrifices entailed by it, we shall then look at the problem with the same eyes: if not, not. Englishmen at home withdrew the troops from New Zealand because we did [Pg 333] not choose to pay for them. Englishmen in Canada and Victoria do their best to injure our manufactures because they wish to nurse their own. ”

“ In Australia the recent conference at Sydney is supposed to have given a little impulse towards confederation, but the best informed persons on the spot have no belief that anything practical can come of it for a very long time to come, if ever,—so divergent are both the various interests and men's views of their interests. Three years ago a conference of all the Australian colonies was held to consider the adoption of a common fiscal policy. ”

“ Seeley describes, and which exist in much the same degree in the colonies that still remain to us. It is the value that we set on alacrity and freshness of mind that makes us distrust any project that interferes with the unfettered play and continual liveliness of what Mr. Seeley calls free will in these new communities, and makes us extremely suspicious of that 'clear and reasoned system,' whatever it may be, to which Mr. Seeley implores us all to turn our attention. ”