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The lectures which form the substance of this volume were delivered at Columbia University, New York, under the auspices of the Julius Beer Foundation, in January 1925. In revising them for publication in the summer of 1926 I have retained the original spoken form but have freely incorporated references to recent developments.

The first edition was published just before the Imperial Conference of 1926, in which the developments described in the first three lectures reached a climax and the new relationship between the self-governing communities within the British Empire was formally defined. The need for a new edition has enabled the book to be brought up to date both in this and in other respects. On one special point a word of explanation is needed. The extract from the Kenya White Paper cited in the Appendix to Lecture I was selected as a recent and clearly enunciated statement of the established British policy in the non-self-governing Empire. This policy is, however, now under reconsideration as regards areas, such as Kenya, where the climate admits of white settlement.

A. Z.

August 31, 1927

In 1914 there were numbered among the world’s sovereign states a British Empire, a German Empire, a Russian Empire, an Ottoman Empire, and an Austro-Hungarian Monarchy presided over by an Emperor. London, Berlin, St. Petersburg (as it was then still called), Constantinople, and Vienna were all centres of empire. To-day there is a German Republic, an Austrian Republic, a Turkish Republic, and a Federation of Republics on the old Russian soil. But there still remains a British Empire.

The questions to which we shall be seeking answers in these lectures are three in number. Firstly, why has the British Empire survived at a time when these other empires have dissolved and disappeared? Secondly, how has it survived? In what form has it survived? Thirdly, what must it do to justify its survival in an age which seems destined to dissolve empires?

Why has it survived? I might give you an easy answer. I might say that it is because it had as its associate in the war the power of the United States, because it was fighting on the side that was bound to win. But that is only to push the inquiry a stage further back. The true answer to our first question is more fundamental. The British Empire survived the war because it had in it a principle of vitality which the other empires lacked. And that principle, that seed of continuing life, is the spirit of liberty. The British Empire lives to-day because its institutions are free institutions. It survives as one of the world’s guardians of liberty.

But liberty is not a dead possession. It is an active power, a developing power, and at times like the present a transforming power. If the storm which broke over the world and swept the other empires away left the British Empire in being, it did not leave it unchanged. It has in fact transformed it. The British Empire of to-day is not the British Empire of 1914. It is something new—how new neither the outside world nor even its own citizens have yet adequately realized.

Future historians looking back on the history of the British Empire overseas will note three periods in its life and growth. They will point to the first Empire, taking its rise in the early settlements on this Atlantic coast, a colonial empire of the older type common to Spain, Portugal, France, and other states of Continental Europe. That Empire was abruptly extinguished or, at least, summarily curtailed by your predecessors in 1776 or thereabouts. And it failed precisely because it followed too closely the prevailing imperial model. Why is it that we shall soon be celebrating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, whereas only a hundred years divide us from the decisive battle in the struggle of the South American empire-breaker Bolivar? The answer is simple. It is to be found in the transforming principle of liberty which caused the subjects of the British Crown to grow restless and finally to shake off the irksome yoke two generations before the same infectious spirit had spread to the subjects of Spain and Portugal.

After the disruption of 1776, however, the British Empire was given a second chance. Out of the remnants of its old dominion, in Canada, the West Indies, and elsewhere, and out of the pioneering work of nineteenth-century explorers, traders, and administrators, a new and second British Empire came into existence. That Empire was based on British sea-power, the silent and undisputed supremacy of the British Navy throughout the oceans of the world. Its development was stimulated by the immense and rapid growth of international commerce, first in Britain and then in other manufacturing countries; for as an open-door empire it provided a market for all comers. And its maintenance was ensured by the fact that place was found in its institutions for the planting of the seed of liberty.

This second British Empire reached the culmination of its power and of its development in the Great War.

And now a third British Empire has come into existence, new in its form, new in the conditions which it has to face within and without its borders, new even in its name. For The British Empire of 1914 has now become The British Commonwealth of Nations. The new designation, put forward in print shortly before 1914 and popularized by General Smuts in a series of war speeches, was consecrated by its use in the Irish Treaty of 1921 and has now passed into current use. It is with this third Empire, this Commonwealth of Nations, that we are concerned in these lectures.

What is this third British Empire? I was asked this question not long ago by the Dean of the Law Faculty of a celebrated University in Central Europe. ‘Can you tell me’, he said, ‘whether the British Empire is a single state or a group of states?’ Conscious of the effective retorts that his legal mind might have in store for me if I gave a direct answer either way, I told him that I would prefer not to define the existing constitutional position, but that I would be happy to explain to him how it had arisen. ‘I can exhibit the present phase’, I said, ‘as a moment in a long development, but I would rather leave the juridical characterization of it to you.’ An equal caution, not to say ambiguity, marks the definition recently offered by one of the men who have been most closely associated with the passing of the second Empire into the third. ‘Our Commonwealth’, said Sir Robert Borden, the Conservative ex-Premier of Canada, in his address at his installation as Chancellor of Queen’s University, Ontario, ‘may be regarded as a League of Nations owing a single allegiance and possessing international relations that are still in a state of development.’ The loopholes in this formula leap at once to the legal eye. ‘At once a Commonwealth and a League’, I can hear my continental friend interposing; ‘surely that is a contradiction in terms. And the single allegiance—to what or to whom is it due? If to the Crown, in what capacity?’ Sir Robert Borden knows as well as any European jurist that his definition is not watertight, but to all such implied questionings he has an answer in a later sentence of his address. ‘We may be confident that the practical genius of the British people, which has never failed in any need, will find some satisfactory method of meeting this difficulty.’

Our object here, however, is not to meet the difficulty but to state it; but the task of mere statement is hard enough when the problem is so elusive. In attempting to describe the third British Empire, I am reminded of the old Greek philosopher Heraclitus, whose cardinal maxim was that ‘everything flows’, or in other words, all life is flux. ‘No one’, he said, ‘has ever crossed the same river twice.’ ‘No, nor even once’, said one of his pupils, ‘for it has become a different river by the time you have crossed it.’ It was in May 1924 that I accepted the invitation to deliver these lectures and to describe the transformation that has taken place in the British Empire. But hardly a week has passed since that time without some further development. Some of these recent happenings I shall indicate in due course. But I shall not over-emphasize them. The only possible plan under the circumstances is to ignore side issues and back-eddies and to direct your attention to the main flow and direction of events in this new and epoch-making development upon which the British Empire has entered as a result of the Great War.

Let us begin by surveying the British Empire as a whole.

The British Empire is the largest single political community in the world. It includes within its borders one-quarter of the inhabitants of the globe, of whom the vast majority are governed from London. Thus, when his Majesty the King transfers the seals of office from one Prime Minister to another, the governing direction of a large portion of humanity is changed. It is worth while pausing to reflect upon the solemn and indeed almost appalling implications of this plain statement of fact. The responsibility of governing the British Empire is incomparably greater than any political responsibility that falls, or has ever fallen, on any other body of statesmen. Hence the essential qualities of true statesmanship, knowledge, judgement, forethought, patience, single-mindedness, valuable as they are in any community, are indispensable to Britain in her public men. For the mistakes that occur from the absence of these qualities in the supreme direction of British affairs are not local and isolated in their effects. They set up ripples that run throughout the oceans of the world, and no man can foretell what repercussions they may call forth in this or that corner of the King’s dominions and beyond them.

For the British Empire is not only the greatest political community in the world; it is also the most diversified. In actual population it is not much greater than China. But, whereas China is a single compact area, the British Empire extends all over the world and includes almost every variety of humankind.

It is a European Empire—the island of Great Britain, Ireland, the Channel Islands off the coast of France, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus.

It is an Asiatic Empire—Aden, India, Ceylon, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, British North Borneo, Sarawak, Hongkong, and, at any rate pending its retrocession to China under the terms of one of the Washington Conference Agreements, the little naval station of Wei-hai-wei and its surrounding territory.

It is an African Empire—British South Africa, British West Africa, British East Africa, and British North-east Africa, including British Somaliland and that still undetermined territory, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

It is an Australasian Empire—the Continent of Australia, Tasmania, the Dominion of New Zealand, and numerous Pacific Islands.

Finally, as I need hardly remind you, it is an American Empire—the Dominion of Canada, Newfoundland, the British West Indies, British Honduras in Central America, British Guiana in South America, and the Falkland Islands.

Side by side with its geographical variety consider its racial variety. It includes white men, brown men, yellow men, black men. Consider its religious variety. It includes Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists (in Burma, for instance), Jews, Parsis, and a large number of primitive pagans. And, among its Christians, consider the varieties of doctrine and worship. It is a Protestant Empire, its monarch being by law the supreme governor of one Protestant body in England and member of another in Scotland. Yet, although an ancient statute forbids the throne to a Roman Catholic, it is also a Catholic Empire. It includes compact Roman Catholic populations in Ireland, in Malta, and in French Canada, not to mention a large scattered Catholic population in Australia and elsewhere. It includes in Cyprus a community belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church, and in Canada communities belonging to the Uniat Church.

Consider its cultural variety. Adopting the current, if unsatisfactory, division of the Continental European peoples into the Germanic, the Latin, and the Slav forms of culture and language, we find the Germanic strongly represented in Dutch South Africa, the Latin in French Canada, while the Slav, until recently a stranger under the British flag, is making rapid headway in Western Canada.

Turn now from race, religion, and culture to government, with which we are more specially concerned. Constitutionally speaking, the British Empire can, perhaps, best be described as a procession. It consists of a large variety of communities at a number of different stages in their advance towards complete self-government. It is by observing the movement of this procession and comparing the constitutional position of the various British communities to-day with what it was in 1914, that we shall best realize what is meant by the passing of the Second Empire.

In 1914 the British Empire consisted of three governmental groups. The first consisted of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was the electorate (then still a male electorate) of those two islands which chose the Imperial Parliament to which the Imperial Government was responsible.

Next, in the second group of the procession, there were the self-governing colonies or, as most, though not all of them were called, the Dominions. These were communities which had been, by law and custom, granted by the Imperial Government complete independence in dealing with their own internal affairs. But they did not claim a similar independence in respect to external affairs. Still less did they claim to be sovereign states. This class included in 1914 Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland.

In the third and most numerous stage of the procession, there were communities which were dependent upon the Imperial Government, both as regards external and internal affairs. That is to say, they were governed by officials receiving their instructions from London, either from the Colonial Office or, in certain cases, the Foreign Office, or, in the case of India, the India Office, or, in respect of important issues of policy, as a result of a decision by the Imperial Cabinet itself.

Within this third group, however, there was great variety of procedure. There were really five separate stages observable in this part of the procession.

First there came communities enjoying full representative government, as contrasted with responsible government. The difference between representative and responsible institutions is one of the most fundamental distinctions in the British political system. Representative institutions go back to Simon de Montfort’s Parliament. Responsible institutions date from the struggle of the seventeenth century which was fought out on the issue of the responsibility of the Crown, that is of the Executive, to the representative legislature. Now it so happens that before that issue had been decided in Great Britain, Parliaments, as men then understood them, had been set up in three British communities which have preserved their institutions unchanged from that day to this. These are Bermuda, Barbados, and the Bahama Island group off the coast of Florida. The people of Bermuda, whose boast it is that their Assembly is second only in antiquity, as a British legislative body, to the House of Commons at Westminster, do not control their executive, because at the time of its establishment in 1620 neither they nor the colonists on the adjoining American mainland thought of questioning the supreme rights of the Crown in this regard.

Next came communities in which the deliberative body, here called the Legislative Council, contains, side by side with officials and nominated unofficial members, a majority of elected members. This is not representative government in the strict sense but is a practical approximation to it. The communities so governed in 1914 were British Guiana and Cyprus.

In the third group came colonies where the majority on the Legislative Council consisted of officials and nominated members but where a minority of elected members had been introduced. These communities were in 1914 five in number—Fiji, Jamaica, the Leeward Islands Federation, Malta, and Mauritius. Their wide dispersion illustrates the extraordinary geographical variety of the British Empire and the way in which it is working out constitutional experiments simultaneously under widely different conditions. The same system was in force in most of the provinces of India.

Next there was a group of colonies in whose government the elective principle found no place at all. The Legislative Council in such cases consists wholly of appointed persons, some of them actual government officials, others private citizens nominated by the Government. Sixteen British colonies were governed in this way in 1914, their councils being controlled in one case by an unofficial majority and in the rest by a majority of pure officials.

In the fifth group fall the colonies and protectorates, twelve in number in 1914, governed autocratically without any Legislative Council whatsoever. Gibraltar, for instance, is ruled by a Governor who invites no one to share his deliberations and reports solely to the home government.

Before I conclude this survey of the Empire in 1914, I must mention two anomalous cases which do not fall into any of the above categories, or indeed, strictly speaking, into the British Empire at all. The first of these is Egypt, which was in 1914 governed by a British ‘Consul-General’, aided by a number of British ‘advisers’ attached to the various Egyptian ministries and by a considerable British administrative staff, both central and local. The second is the Sudan, which was under a condominium, a joint sovereignty of Britain and Egypt, Britain being, however, in effective control. The affairs of both these territories were dealt with in London in 1914 not by the Colonial Office but by the Foreign Office.

What reaction did the war exercise upon this heterogeneous community? It produced two effects, both equally unexpected by the superficial observer. The first was a spontaneous and practically universal outburst of loyalty and enthusiasm. In Germany and elsewhere it was widely believed that the British Empire would fall to pieces in the moment of danger, or, at the very least, that its more distant communities would remain uninterested and impassive when its European centre was exposed to attack. Had not John Morley, in a famous review of Seeley’s Expansion of England, declared it unthinkable that Australia could ever interest herself in the neutrality of Belgium? The response from the overseas Empire, however, white and non-white alike, not only gave the lie to the pessimists but outdid the expectations of the optimists. All parts of the Empire—the Dominions, India, and the widely scattered colonies—vied with one another in sending troops, labour-battalions, money contributions and gifts of every kind. Indian troops not only took part in the war in Western Europe but also in the Dardanelles, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, where the Moslems among them were pitted against their own co-religionists.

This spontaneous response of the peoples of the Empire to the call of the war was a fine justification of the work of generations of British administrators. It vindicated, and will always vindicate, the record of the second British Empire. But at the same time, little as it was realized in the flush of excitement in 1914, it ushered in its close. For war, as the Greek historian said long ago, is the most forcible of teachers, and the experience to which it exposed men, in the British Empire no less than in Russia, set up questionings to which, whether soon or late, there could be only one reply. A struggle whose watchword was freedom must bring greater freedom to those who waged it.

Thus the war, which began by an unexpected manifestation of the unity of the empire, ended by an equally unexpected assertion of the claims of its various peoples.

Yet this phenomenon should not have surprised any attentive student of British history. I remember, sometime about the middle of the war, listening to a conversation in which Sir Robert Borden, at that time Premier of Canada, took part. Some one had remarked to him that this impressive demonstration of the loyalty of the Dominions to the Empire would surely pave the way for a project of Imperial Federation. I well recall the Canadian Premier’s reflective reply. ‘I am not so sure’, he said; ‘the result may be exactly the opposite of what you are imagining. It may be that the spirit of national pride which the war is evolving will create psychological conditions unanticipated by you in Great Britain and favour processes of decentralization rather than of centralization.’

The Canadian Premier knew his people better than the British Imperialist. Nationality is a force that knows no frontiers, and the effect, the natural and healthy effect, of the part played in the war by Canada, India, and other parts of the Empire was to rouse the citizens of those countries to a more vivid consciousness and a keener sense of their national dignity. If the British North America Act of 1867 gave Canada unity in her political institutions, the common work and effort of the war created a new and deeper unity throughout the far-flung provinces between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is Ypres and Vimy which have made Canadians conscious of their proud place in the world and set Canada among the peoples who are nations in their own right. Self-determination, in the true sense of a much-abused word, is not a political principle but a spiritual principle, and it is right and natural that it should be as potent under the British flag as in other regions where it has won more resounding victories.

Let us now consider the constitutional results which followed from the working of this awakened force of nationality in the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Its first and most significant result has been to elicit from the Imperial Government a definite assertion of the aim toward which British rule over other peoples is directed. The second British Empire did much good in its day. It established the principle of the trusteeship of the ruler on behalf of the ruled. But, for all his good intentions and earnest efforts, the British administrator under the second Empire had no clear aim set before him. It was an Empire without a philosophy, and the lack of a philosophy made itself felt more and more in the realm of practical policy, both in small matters and in great. For the days in which it was possible for a colonial power to govern wisely without a governing direction have passed once and for all. The age which has seen hereditary monarchies overthrown in Russia, Turkey, Persia, and China will only tolerate trusteeship if conceived in terms of developing liberty. The Pronouncement by the Secretary of State for India in the House of Commons on 20 August 1917, in which responsible government is set forth as the goal of British policy in India, is a landmark in British imperial history. It marks the definite repudiation of the idea that there can be, under the British flag, one form of constitutional evolution for the West and another for the East, or one for the white races and another for the non-white. It marks the Imperial Government’s realization of the fact that the principle of nationality, with which the British people, from the days of Byron onwards, have been in sympathy in its European manifestations, is valid also for India, and, if for India, for the other non-white British peoples also.

It is true that the Pronouncement of August 1917 did no more than state a philosophy and a developing programme. India is not yet self-governing, and no date has yet been set for that consummation. But that the Pronouncement is not simply an idle formula but represents a genuine and active policy is clear from the whole record of British imperial policy since the war. A comparison between the groups of the 1914 procession and the grouping of to-day reveals how very marked and widespread are the changes which have already come about as the result of the conscious acceptance of this newer philosophy of empire.

Take the first group. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland has disappeared. Its place is taken by the unit known as ‘Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ or, to speak more strictly, six counties of North-eastern Ireland. It is the men and women of the larger island and these six counties of the smaller who now form the electorate of the mother country and sustain the burden of imperial taxation and defence. Thus the legislative union between England and Scotland, which represents a harmonious and mutually beneficent co-operation, remains, whilst the legislative union between Great Britain and Ireland, which was carried through by force and corruption and never won the assent or assured the co-operation of the Irish people, has been repealed.

The next group, consisting in 1914 of self-governing colonies, has split up into two sharply-marked divisions. The first consists of six communities which have been admitted in their own right to membership in an international League of States which has come into existence since the war. There are in the League of Nations seven British units. There is what is officially called the British Empire, and there are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Irish Free State, and India. These six members (excluding Great Britain) themselves fall into three classes. There are the four young western nations (I call them western, although three of them are in the southern hemisphere)—four communities which were classed before the war as self-governing Dominions but have now been advanced in status by their international recognition in the League. Then there is the Irish Free State, which is the political expression not of a young nation but of an old nation. I spent some weeks not long ago in the little French town of Luxeuil, where there is an abbey founded by a great Irish teacher over a thousand years ago. It is rather difficult to class the national personality represented by St. Columba with that of peoples who have sprung up from overseas migration within the last few generations. The third class in the British membership of the League is represented by India, whose position there is at present hardly amenable to political logic. For the League is professedly limited to ‘states, Dominions, or colonies’ which are ‘fully self-governing’, and India is decidedly not within this class. The Indian delegates at League Assemblies and Conferences are not responsible, either directly or indirectly, to an Indian Parliament, but are the nominees of the British executive, which still has the final voice in Indian policy. But the admission of India to the League is perhaps best explained as the first indication of India’s future status rather than as an honour due to that which she occupies at present.

In the next division come two self-governing colonies which might claim membership in the League of Nations if they so thought fit, but which have not yet done so. These are Newfoundland, Britain’s oldest Colony, which retains that name with pride, and Southern Rhodesia, her youngest, which received responsible government in 1921, and has since decided for the present to remain outside the Union of South Africa.

Next comes a small group which did not exist in 1914—two territories, utterly different one from the other, under a system of semi-responsible government designed by political architects since 1914. This is the system known as Dyarchy. The small community of Malta and most of the provinces of the great sub-continent of India manage part of their affairs (known as ‘transferred subjects’) under a system of responsible government on the Dominion model, while another part, known as ‘reserved subjects’, remains under the old non-responsible system. This device of a half-way house towards complete responsible government was adopted to avoid the deadlocks inherent in the full development of ‘representative’ government. It has led to difficulties and even deadlocks of its own; but with these we are not concerned in this purely descriptive account.

Pass down the list and you will find that a number of changes, small in themselves but cumulative in their effect, have been made in the government of individual colonies. Thus in the West Indies the elective principle has been introduced in Trinidad and some other islands; in Nigeria, voters in the towns of Lagos and Calabar now elect members to the legislative council of the colony, while on the other side of the African continent, in Kenya, the white settlers, the Indian settlers, and the Arabs of the coast now each contribute their quota of elected representatives to a council in which the official members, whose duty it is to safeguard the interests of the African majority, retain a controlling voice. It is worth noting as a somewhat surprising oversight that the elective principle, conceded to the African inhabitants of Lagos and Calabar, has not so far been extended to the colony of Hongkong. Recent events suggest, however, that attention is likely to be paid to the constitutional position in that community. Another new development is the holding of a Conference of administrators of the non-self-governing Empire, excluding India. First summoned in May 1927, this ‘Colonial Conference’, dealing with the problems of an area of two million square miles, inhabited by fifty million people—all but four million of them living in the Tropics—will now meet regularly every three years, following upon the Imperial Conference. The exact position is made clear in the following table:

One wholly new group finds its place in the post-war procession. It consists of certain ex-German and ex-Turkish territories which are under British administration but not under the British flag. These are the mandated areas assigned to Great Britain, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand by the Allied and Associated Powers, subject to the control of the League of Nations exercised through a permanent Commission. Here we find worked out for the first time in constitutional form the theory of colonial government as a trusteeship of an experienced power on behalf of the governed. This conception has been implicit in British colonial policy at least since the time of Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings; but its international consecration carries it a long stage further than that exemplified either in the Pronouncement of August 1917 or in the Kenya White Paper.^[4]

Finally there remains the change in the position of Egypt, which as a result of the war definitely severed its connexion with Turkey. After a short interregnum as a British Protectorate—an unhappy term that gave rise to much misunderstanding—Egypt was in 1922 declared by Great Britain to be a sovereign and independent state, subject to certain reservations on four stated subjects which were to form the subject of later negotiation. As a result, Egyptians have drawn up their own constitution, nominated ambassadors, ministers, and consuls to foreign powers, and taken over the administration of the country. Agreement has, however, not yet been reached on the four outstanding questions—the rights of foreigners, the control of foreign policy, the Canal Zone, and the Sudan—and pending its accomplishment a British High Commissioner is still installed at Cairo. The Sudan, on the other hand, is now completely under British administration, the Egyptian troops of the small occupying force having been withdrawn in November 1924.

But it is time to turn from the change in the grouping of the procession to a consideration of what is happening at its head. Whither is it moving? What is the consummation of the constitutional process which we have been watching at its various stages? What, in fact, is happening to the group which is emerging from pre-war subordination to a condition of equality with the other sovereign states of the world? What is the situation with which we are confronted through the fact that Canada and the other Dominions have passed in varying degrees through a spiritual crisis and a consequent political evolution not dissimilar from that experienced by liberated European communities such as Poland and Czecho-Slovakia? What is the reaction of this development upon the problem of the constitutional unity of the British Empire?

In order to answer these questions we must take a long view. It is impossible to understand the problem of the British Commonwealth in its present phase unless it is seen in historical perspective. And that history is best studied in the single example of Canada. Canada is, constitutionally, the Premier Dominion, as has indeed been formally recognized in the Irish Treaty. Where Canada leads, the other Dominions generally follow. Let us then look briefly into the history of Canada, far behind 1914, for the roots of what has been happening between the Armistice and yesterday are to be found in the annals of the British overseas territories from the seventeenth century onwards.

The key to the problem of Dominion status is to be found in one single fact. It is that the Englishman who went overseas in the seventeenth century considered that he carried with him exactly the same rights as the Englishman who was left at home. He carried them with him as his patrimony, because he was an Englishman.

You know all about those rights. You do not need to be reminded of the controversy as to whether the assemblies that were set up on the other side of the Atlantic were mere municipal corporations or whether they were replicas of the British House of Commons as it existed in the seventeenth century. Nor need I recall to your minds how the insistence of New Englanders and others upon the full rights of those assemblies and of the citizens whom they represented led to the break-up of the first Empire. All I would insist on is that it is the constitutional theory familiar to you from your own history which underlies the political sentiments of Canadians and Australians at the present day. What happened to those rights after you passed out of the story?

In 1763 King George III had become the sovereign of some 60,000 French, settled in the valley of the St. Lawrence. These French-Canadian peasants had no theory of indefeasible rights and no constitutional tradition. They were not accustomed to representative institutions and they did not demand them. Thus for about a generation, from 1763 to 1791, there was a set-back in British constitutional development. The few hundred Englishmen, traders and camp-followers, who had come to live in the St. Lawrence valley, were compelled to forgo their rights, much to the indignation of Burke, Fox, Chatham, and other defenders of ‘English liberty’ at Westminster.

Then came a startling new development. As a result of the war of American Independence, thousands of Loyalists moved north across the Canadian border. They had left the new United States in order to remain under British institutions. Of necessity they must be given a Parliament. Should the French be given a Parliament too? The question was answered in the Constitutional Act of 1791, which set up two representative assemblies, one for the predominantly French-speaking province of Lower Canada and the other for Upper Canada, where most of the Loyalists had settled.

This decision marks a decisive turning-point in the history of the British Commonwealth. It established the principle that British liberty and British constitutional rights were not the exclusive patrimony and privilege of the inhabitants of Great Britain and their descendants at home and overseas, but that they rightfully belonged to all those under the British flag who were equal to the responsibilities entailed by them. The representative institutions extended to the French-Canadians in 1791 have since been extended to many other nationalities of many different races under the British flag, as we have already had occasion to notice. If to-day there are three officially bilingual Dominions, and if a representative assembly is installed with an Indian Speaker or President at Delhi, this is the result of the precedent created by the Act of 1791. What had previously been jus sanguinis, a right of Englishmen as Englishmen, came to be acknowledged as jus soli, a system inherent in the territories under British sovereignty and direction.

1791 was a turning-point. We have now to follow rapidly the new road along which it led.

The two Assemblies set up in Upper and Lower Canada found themselves enjoying the same rights as the English Parliament enjoyed previous to the Civil War between King and Parliament a hundred and fifty years before. They could deliberate but they had no responsibility. Over them was an executive which they could not control, in the shape of a Governor or representative of the Crown, appointed by the home government and responsible to it alone.

The result of this system of semi-paternal government was friction, deadlock, and eventually rebellion. By 1837 both Upper Canada and Lower Canada, both the English and the French, were in arms demanding an extension of their rights. Both risings were easily suppressed, but the home government had not forgotten the lesson of the American Revolution. It sent out as Governor-General of British North America a prominent Radical who had made a special study of colonial questions—Lord Durham—and armed him with the widest powers of inquiry and action.

Lord Durham’s Report is one of the classics of British constitutional history. Its main conclusion can be summed up in a sentence. It recommended the cutting off of King Charles’s head. In other words, it recommended that the Canadian Assemblies be given power over the King’s representative similar to that secured by the English Parliament as the result of the Civil War. There were vicissitudes before Durham’s recommendation was accepted, and he himself died a disappointed man. But within twelve years his son-in-law, Lord Elgin, had become Governor-General and was applying the new policy, which was then rapidly extended to the other British colonies growing up in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

It is worth while pausing here to notice the point of divergence between the British and American constitutional system. You too experienced the deadlock between Governor and Assembly; but you did not adopt our British method of turning the governor into a cipher. In fact, you still have the deadlock; but you have turned the difficulty, or at least mitigated it, by working out an independent relationship between the governor and the people. Hence the constitutional difference between the President of the United States and the Governor-General of Canada, or between the Governor of the State of New York and the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario.

Thus in 1849 the principle of responsible government in overseas British communities was definitely established. The rest of the story, from 1849 down to the present day, consists simply of the steady enlargement of the area over which the responsible governments of the Dominions have extended their control.

Lord Durham recommended that Canadians should enjoy control over their internal affairs. It did not occur to him that they would desire to extend their control over matters of foreign trade. Still less did he dream that they would wish to develop a foreign policy of their own.

But the logic of the doctrine of equal rights is relentless, and it soon began to make itself felt. The first test came in the field of fiscal policy. In 1859 Sir Alexander Galt, the Finance Minister of the now united provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, brought in a budget in which he imposed protective duties on foreign goods, including goods from Great Britain. In the eyes of Englishmen such a budget embodied a double heresy. It was the heyday of the Free Trade movement, so that protection in any form was distasteful to home opinion; but protection against English goods was more than distasteful; to the manufacturers of Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and other centres it seemed intolerable. A violent tug-of-war ensued between Dominion rights and English manufacturing interests. Galt penned a memorable dispatch in which he claimed that Canadian self-government would be ‘utterly annihilated’ if the Canadian people could not raise their revenue in the way that seemed best to them. The home government yielded, as in 1917 it yielded in a similar tug-of-war between Lancashire and India; and from that day to this the claim of the complete fiscal autonomy of the Dominions has not been questioned. Those who still dream of a Free Trade Empire or of the British Commonwealth as an economic unit have forgotten the incident of 1859, the developments to which it has given rise in colony after colony, and the unalterable geographical and economic facts of which those developments are the natural outcome.

Closely associated with tariffs are commercial treaties. Here too Canada early manifested her independence. As early as 1854 the United Provinces entered into a reciprocity treaty with the United States, providing for the free exchange of natural products, which remained in force till 1866. This independence was gradually extended to other spheres, the most striking incident in the story being the German-Canadian Tariff War of 1898-1910. By 1914 it had become an established principle that British commercial treaties should contain a clause excluding the Dominions from their provisions except upon notice of their accession.

Next came the demand for consultation with Great Britain on non-domestic questions of imperial concern. This led to the development of the system of Colonial Conferences, the first of which was held in Ottawa in 1887. But Colonial Conference presided over by the Colonial Secretary, sitting like a wise old uncle at the head of a table of representatives of the younger generation, did not satisfy Dominion feeling. In 1907 it was replaced by the Imperial Conference, presided over now by the Prime Minister in person sitting as an equal amongst equals, the Prime Ministers of the Dominions.

The next development took place at the Imperial Conference of 1911, when for the first time Dominion statesmen were let into the secrets of British foreign policy and defence. At that time the home government, in view of the dangerous European situation, hoped that the Dominions would decide to contribute either money or ships to the Imperial navy. Another way, however, was chosen. Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian Premier, who had consented in London to urge his countrymen to make a direct contribution to the Imperial navy, was unable to carry his measure through Parliament, which preferred that Canada should develop her own land and sea forces. A similar development took place in Australia. Then came the war.

What were the constitutional developments of the war period?

The most striking was undoubtedly the admission of Dominion representatives to what was called the Imperial War Cabinet. During the latter part of the war, from 1917 onward, Dominion statesmen sat side by side with members of the London government on the small executive which was in supreme control of Britain’s war effort. Moreover, by a curious development, which shows what can happen under an unwritten and flexible constitution, one of these Dominion statesmen, General Smuts, who remained in England for some time, became almost an ordinary member of the Cabinet and was even on occasion asked to deal with specifically domestic matters. But, in fact, the Imperial War Cabinet was not a true constitutional development and its title was a misnomer. It was simply a standing War Conference, consisting of members of several independent governments, similar to the inter-allied conferences which grew up at the same time, but, of course, more continuous and more intimate.

More permanently important was the Imperial Conference held simultaneously with it, which passed a resolution definitely extending the principle of equality to foreign affairs and favoured the summoning of a special constitutional conference after the war. The resolution is important enough to be quoted textually. It laid down that ‘any readjustment’ of constitutional relations,

The words ‘Imperial Commonwealth’ may appear to you somewhat paradoxical. There may seem to be a little difference of philosophy between the adjective and the noun; but that very fact marks the transitional stage at which Britain had arrived at that moment. It should be added that the constitutional conference provided for in the 1917 Resolution was never summoned, its work being taken up by the ordinary conference of 1926.

Much of great interest, both in itself and for its bearing on the problem of common international action in the future, might be said about the co-operation between Great Britain and the Dominions during the war. But we must hasten on to the post-war period.

What has been the constitutional development since 1918? I well remember a certain day in December 1918, when, as I was working in my room in the British Foreign Office, somebody entered, in a condition of much excitement, and told us that Canada wished to be represented at the Peace Conference and was even taking an interest in the League of Nations. It was very inconvenient. What was the Foreign Office to do? Well, what could it do? Canada’s losses were as heavy as Belgium’s. Canada had morally and materially as much right to share in those deliberations as the smaller allies. Once more, as always in this story, Downing Street acquiesced. Canada secured what she wished, and the other Dominions followed her lead.

The result of separate Dominion representation at Paris was that the Dominions signed the Peace Treaties in their own right and were left free to submit them to their own Parliaments for ratification or not as they pleased. Had the project of the special guarantee treaty between Britain, France, and the United States been proceeded with, several of the Dominions would probably not have signed it, and Great Britain would have had to face already in 1919 the problem of the diplomatic unity of the Empire.

The principle of separate representation led on naturally to the admission of the Dominions into the League of Nations. Their exact status in the League is a matter on which there was for some years disagreement in high quarters. The British members of the League consist of ‘The British Empire’, the five self-governing Dominions, and India. Does ‘The British Empire’ include the whole Empire or only that part of it (Great Britain and the non-self-governing Dominions) not separately represented? Supporters of the former view used to point to the fact that, in the official list of League members, the Dominions and India were placed immediately after Great Britain, out of the proper alphabetical order; but this attempt to solve a knotty constitutional problem by a printer’s device has now been abandoned. Already in 1919 the Dominions received a written assurance from the President of the Paris Conference which drew up the Covenant of the League that they would be eligible for election as non-permanent members of the Council, in spite of the permanent seat assigned in that body to ‘the British Empire’, and their claim was reaffirmed, with the acquiescence of the delegation of Great Britain, in the Assembly of 1926.^[5] It must be added that ‘The British Empire’ and the Dominions by no means always take the same view or vote the same way at Geneva. The seven British votes are anything but a solid phalanx, as is very natural in view of the divergent local interests that they represent.

The next development was one which, when it occurred in northern Europe, caused the break-up of a sovereign state—the right of separate diplomatic representation. When Norway, after a long negotiation, secured that right from Sweden, it proved the occasion of her entry into international society as an independent member. Canada secured that right in 1920, when the British government publicly acquiesced in her wish to have separate diplomatic representation at Washington. For technical reasons the appointment was delayed until 1926, when Mr. Vincent Massey was nominated, but the Irish Free State at once took advantage of the concession. Thus to-day Mr. Massey and Professor Smiddy, the Irish representative at Washington, hold their posts side by side with the British Ambassador, co-operating with him in regard to Irish and Canadian questions of imperial concern on exactly the same terms of independence as they would deal with the representative of a foreign power. The full results of the principle thus conceded remain to be seen; but the extension of Dominion diplomatic systems, in these days of rapidly increasing contacts, is only a matter of time and convenience.

The next important issue which presented itself raised in a peculiarly acute form the problem as to how the foreign relations of the Empire were to be conducted under the new conditions, and whether unity of policy could be maintained among communities whose interests were so widely divergent. The treaty between Great Britain and Japan was due to expire in the summer of 1921. Should it be renewed? The British Foreign Office was in favour of its renewal and its view was shared by the majority of the Dominions; but an Imperial Conference, held at that time, revealed the fact that the Canadian Premier, Mr. Meighen, was strongly opposed to renewal. Relations between Japan and the United States at that moment were not of the best, and Canada was unwilling to take a step which would be viewed unfavourably by her American neighbours.

It was an extremely difficult issue. To terminate the first treaty at the wish of a single Dominion would not only have jeopardized important interests in Great Britain and the other Dominions, but it would have established the principle that each self-governing member of the Commonwealth had a veto upon the policies of his partners. This conception, which had already been put forward on a previous occasion by General Smuts, would have introduced into the British Commonwealth, in an age when swift decisions are often imperative, the liberum veto that contributed to the downfall of Poland. Mr. Meighen attempted to turn the difficulty by arguing that each member of the Imperial Conference should have a decisive voice in regard to policies in his own particular region. But it was difficult to maintain that Canada had a larger stake in the Far East than Great Britain, and this attempt to divide the Empire into regions, each with a Monroe Doctrine of its own, has since been tacitly abandoned.

A way out of the immediate difficulty was found by continuing the treaty for a further year and then merging it in the Four-Power Pact of Pacific Powers worked out at the Washington Conference. But this compromise, which was due to the intervention of the United States, left the difficulty of principle unsolved. We shall meet it again later on in our discussion.

The next important post-war development concerned the question of peace and war. Up to 1914 it was assumed that when Great Britain was at war the Empire was at war. In September 1922, however, this theory was unexpectedly put to the test and emerged greatly weakened. The Greek army had been routed by the Turks, who pursued it to the Dardanelles, where, at the port of Chanak, they were held up by a British detachment. The Government of the day, holding the defence of the Dardanelles to be a major British interest, was prepared to resist a Turkish attack by force of arms and called to the Dominions asking for their co-operation. The Canadian Premier refused to pledge himself to a favourable answer. ‘Under our system of responsible government,’ he stated in the Canadian House of Commons, ‘the Canadian Parliament should determine, except in the case of threatened or actual invasion, whether the country should participate in wars in which other nations or other parts of the British Empire may be involved.’

Fortunately, the crisis passed; but its lesson remains. For the first time a member of the British Commonwealth claimed the right to decide for itself whether it should go to war, or remain neutral, when Great Britain was involved in hostilities.

The next development concerned the right to make separate treaties without the signature of the representative of the Imperial Government. It arose in 1923 in connexion with what was called the Halibut Treaty. Canada negotiated that Treaty with the United States in the usual way, but the Imperial Government desired that when it was signed the British Ambassador at Washington, in accordance with the hitherto recognized practice, should affix his signature to it also. Canada contested that right, and as a result she had her way. At the next Imperial Conference, in the autumn of 1923, it was laid down that

It is true that it was also stated in a subsequent resolution that there was to be consultation between different members of the Commonwealth before they negotiated treaties; but such consultation is a frequent feature of relations between independent states, as for instance, between the different members of the Little Entente, and it cannot be argued that constitutionally an agreement to consult and to co-operate constitutes membership of a common state. Thus the principle was laid down that treaties, whether commercial or political, may be negotiated and signed separately by different parts of the British Commonwealth.

The next difficulty, or controversy, or development, whichever you like to call it, arose in connexion with the signature of the Peace Treaty with Turkey. In the other peace treaties, representatives of the Dominions had taken part in the deliberations. It so happened that in the negotiation of the Turkish treaty, for reasons that seemed sufficient to the British Foreign Secretary at the time, the Dominions were not called in. When, therefore, the question of ratification arose, the Canadian Premier took the position that since Canada had not taken part in the negotiations and was therefore not a signatory of the resulting Treaty ‘my ministers do not feel that they are in a position to recommend to Parliament approval’ of the Treaty. ‘Without the approval of Parliament they feel that they are not warranted in signifying approval and ratification of the Treaty.’ Thus the Turkish Treaty remained unratified by Canada, who is not bound by the obligations assumed in it by Great Britain. The Canadian Premier here lays down two doctrines: first, that the Canadian government can take no responsibility for treaties which it has not itself helped to negotiate, and secondly that, as an executive, it will not ratify a treaty without the approval of Parliament. The first is a doctrine of self-determination; the second a doctrine of democratic control of foreign policy. Together, they constitute a considerable innovation in the British system.

The next issue is that arising out of the registration of the Irish Treaty at the Secretariat of the League of Nations. I speak of it as the Irish Treaty, though perhaps strictly I have no right to do so. From the point of view of the British Government it was an Act of Parliament which terminated a state of rebellion and brought about better relations between two sections of the King’s realm by constituting a new Dominion, the Irish Free State. But on the theory of the other party to the Treaty it was an international engagement between the Irish Republic and the British Empire. On that view the Irish Government deposited the Treaty at Geneva for registration. It was accepted by those responsible for carrying on the routine work at Geneva. The fact that a clerk has accepted a document and put it in a pigeonhole is not itself any argument one way or the other as to its character or validity. That must rest to be determined, if the question is ever reopened, by an international court of justice. But the controversy about the Irish Treaty raises two questions. The first is a question which concerns only Great Britain and Ireland, namely, whether the Irish Republic, which the Irish consider to have been one of the parties to the Treaty, was an international entity and would therefore come into existence again if the Treaty were denounced. The second is whether engagements made between different members of the British Commonwealth who are themselves members of the League of Nations are international documents or domestic documents—whether they are the concern of the society of nations or whether they are not.

Finally, I must refer briefly to the relation of the Dominions to the various schemes drawn up in Europe to deal with the problem of security. The two most important of these are the Geneva Protocol and the Rhine Guarantee Pact negotiated at Locarno. It has been inevitable ever since 1920, when the United States refused to sign the special guarantee treaty, that the security problem would raise, as between Canada and Great Britain, the whole problem of the diplomatic unity of the Empire. Great Britain is part of Europe and cannot isolate herself from the European system. Canada shares with the United States a fear of ‘entangling alliances’. Thus, both as regards the Geneva Protocol, which the government of Great Britain has rejected, and the Rhine Pact, which it has accepted, Canada has pursued a separate policy. She did not indeed sign the Protocol; but her reasons for not doing so were entirely different from the reasons which actuated Great Britain. Great Britain refused to sign because she was unwilling to make an advance in respect of arbitration; Canada on the other hand took occasion expressly to affirm her desire for an advance in that domain. Thus the Locarno Pact, which contains less of arbitration and more of security than its predecessor, is even less palatable to Canadian opinion and marked the occasion of a definite divergence of policy, upon a first-class issue, between a Dominion and Great Britain, and led inevitably to the definite affirmation of Dominion independence at the Imperial Conference of 1926. But this raises considerations that must be left for a subsequent lecture.

For it is time to sum up.

It is clear that the whole process which we have been watching, from the seventeenth century down to the events of the day, shows the same steady drift and direction. It is clear also that each of the incidents to which I have pointed in the post-war period must have caused a shock to those who still conceive of the British Empire in pre-war terms. The community which is discussing whether all parts of it are necessarily at war at once or whether parts can remain at peace while others are at war is necessarily very different from the clearly defined sovereign state of 1914.

On the day that the Canadian correspondence relating to the Treaty of Lausanne was published in the press, I happened to be calling on a British diplomat in a foreign capital. ‘Have you seen this morning’s news?’ he asked me. ‘The Empire is breaking up. Canada has refused to ratify the Turkish Treaty.’

That diplomat was still living in the pre-war world. I prefer to dissociate myself from his pessimism and to share the view expressed by Sir Robert Borden in his address to the students of Queen’s University.

In succeeding lectures, we will examine the nature of those real ties of which Sir Robert Borden speaks, and indicate the policy or policies which, as I believe, will strengthen them to do the work which I firmly believe the British Empire still can do and ought to do for the peace of the world and the welfare of humanity.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE I

I. The Pronouncement on Indian Policy of 20 August, 1917.

The policy of His Majesty’s Government, with which the Government of India is in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire. . . .

I would add that progress in this policy can only be achieved by successive stages. The British Government and the Government of India, on whom the responsibility lies for the welfare and advancement of the Indian peoples, must be the judges of the time and measure of each advance, and they must be guided by the co-operation received from those upon whom new opportunities of service will thus be conferred and by the extent to which it is found that confidence can be reposed in their sense of responsibility. (Statement in the House of Commons by the Rt. Hon. E. S. Montagu, M.P., Secretary of State for India.)

II. Extract from the Kenya White Paper, 1923.

(Indians in Kenya: Memorandum presented to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, July 1923.)

Primarily Kenya is an African territory and His Majesty’s Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount and that if, and when, these interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail. In the administration of Kenya His Majesty’s Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population, and they are unable to delegate or share this trust, the object of which may be defined as the protection and advancement of the native races. It is not necessary to attempt to elaborate this position; lines of development are as yet in many important directions undetermined, and many difficult problems arise which require time for their solution. But there can be no room for doubt that it is the mission of Great Britain to work continuously for the training and education of the Africans towards a higher intellectual moral and economic level than that which they had reached when the Crown assumed the responsibility for the administration of this territory.

III. Declaration by the Rt. Hon. Sir George Foster, G.C.M.G., Principal Delegate of Canada, to the Seventh Assembly of the League of Nations, Sept. 15, 1926.

I think it is right, at this stage, that we should say to this Assembly and to the League of Nations itself, that we consider that we have equal rights to representation on the Council and otherwise with every one of the fifty-six members of the League of Nations.

IV. Extract from the Report of the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee of the Imperial Conference, 1926.

The Committee are of opinion that nothing would be gained by attempting to lay down a Constitution for the British Empire. Its widely scattered parts have very different characteristics, very different histories, and are at very different stages of evolution; while, considered as a whole, it defies classification and bears no real resemblance to any other political organization which now exists or has ever yet been tried.

There is, however, one most important element in it which, from a strictly constitutional point of view, has now, as regards all vital matters, reached its full development—we refer to the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions. Their position and mutual relation may be readily defined. They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

A foreigner endeavouring to understand the true character of the British Empire by the aid of this formula alone would be tempted to think that it was devised rather to make mutual interference impossible than to make mutual co-operation easy.

Such a criticism, however, completely ignores the historic situation. The rapid evolution of the Oversea Dominions during the last fifty years has involved many complicated adjustments of old political machinery to changing conditions. The tendency towards equality of status was both right and inevitable. Geographical and other conditions made this impossible of attainment by the way of federation. The only alternative was by the way of autonomy; and along this road it has been steadily sought. Every self-governing member of the Empire is now the master of its destiny. In fact, if not always in form, it is subject to no compulsion whatever.

But no account, however accurate, of the negative relations in which Great Britain and the Dominions stand to each other can do more than express a portion of the truth. The British Empire is not founded upon negations. It depends essentially, if not formally, on positive ideals. Free institutions are its life-blood. Free co-operation is its instrument. Peace, security, and progress are among its objects. Aspects of all these great themes have been discussed at the present Conference; excellent results have been thereby obtained. And, though every Dominion is now, and must always remain, the sole judge of the nature and extent of its co-operation, no common cause will, in our opinion, be thereby imperilled.

We have seen how the war, which proved fatal to four great empires, enabled the British Empire to survive. We have seen also that, as a result of the working of forces awakened by the war, the Empire has changed its character and is now very different from what it was in 1914. And we are left with the question: what are the ties which bind the Third Empire together and keep it in being?

That is the main question for which we are seeking an answer in these lectures. Nevertheless, I propose to leave it for the moment unanswered. For I wish in this lecture to turn aside to answer another and more urgent question which must have occurred to many of you in reflecting upon what has already been said.

This process of transformation that I have been describing, is it not, you may well ask me, a concealed process of disintegration? Is not the British Empire being exposed to exactly the same influences as those which have proved fatal to the other empires? Is it not suffering as a result of victory the same fate as that which overtook its rivals? Is not the only difference between the working of self-determination in the British Empire and in the other empires the fact that what was a quick and violent death in the one case is a slow and painless extinction in the other? Am I not covering up with fine phrases what is in fact a remorseless and inevitable euthanasia?

The answer to these questions is to be found in the relationship between the Third British Empire and the League of Nations.

But before enlarging upon that relationship, which, I believe, provides security, and the only security, for the survival and strengthening of the Empire in the post-war world, let us look a little more closely at the conditions of the problem.

The British Empire at the present moment is living under two distinct régimes. It has, as it were, an old skin which it is engaged in casting and a new skin which is forming as fast as the old disappears. We have already seen some of the tissues of the new skin. We have seen that since the war the Dominions have secured the right of separate membership in the League of Nations, the right of a separate diplomatic system, the right of separate negotiation and signature of treaties, the right to decide for themselves the issues of foreign policy, including the question of peace and war, and finally, in the Imperial Conference of 1926, the right to complete equality of status with Great Britain both in internal and external affairs.

What is the situation resulting from the concession of these rights? Let us face the fact that, viewed coldly, the resultant political entity is something looser than a sovereign state, something looser than a confederacy or even an alliance, because no written bond exists between the Dominions and Great Britain or between the Dominions themselves. It is, in fact, most accurately described by the word Entente. The British Empire of 1914 has become a British Entente, a group of states, each independent and with full control over its policy, but bound together by cordial feelings and by arrangements for mutual consultation at more or less regular intervals.

Nor is this Entente, on its constitutional side, as close as some other international associations between states in the contemporary world. The Entente between Czecho-Slovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania, for instance, is maintained by regular conferences at six-month intervals and by constant diplomatic conversations during the intervening periods. The British Entente meets at much rarer intervals and has so far evolved no satisfactory diplomatic or other machinery for consultation between its conferences.

These may perhaps be dismissed as difficulties of form. But there are other and graver difficulties—difficulties of substance, which cannot be overlooked in a consideration of the working of the Entente. Three in particular may be mentioned.

The first is the geographical dispersion of its membership. Among the seven members of the Imperial Conference all the five continents are represented. An entente so composed is obviously a political association of an entirely different character from a local group in a single region.

Secondly, this geographical dispersion is not mitigated, but rather intensified, by the play of the material interests involved. Two or more states situated at a great distance from one another may nevertheless have common interests resulting from a common situation and common problems. This was to some extent the case between Great Britain and the island Empire of Japan. But the situation, the problems, and hence the material interests, of the seven members of the British Entente do not present these characteristics. The interests of Great Britain as an old-established manufacturing country, for instance, conflict at many points with the interests of young and economically ambitious communities such as Canada and Australia, or with those represented by the spokesmen of India. With the best will in the world, and after conferences extending over nearly forty years, it has not been found possible to develop more than a few relatively insignificant arrangements for common action in the sphere of material interests between the members of the Entente. Feelings indeed continue to unite; but interests continue stubbornly to divide. If material interest were the decisive factor in the relationship, it would long since have dissolved.

In the third place, in all other existing political relationships of this kind the membership is strictly fixed and the policy drawn up accordingly. But the membership of the British Entente is not fixed but capable of indefinite expansion. It has already been enlarged since the war, and the enlargement will continue as one element after another in the procession which we observed in our first lecture reaches its destination of Dominion status. How many members will the Entente contain in twenty years’ time, or in fifty, or in a hundred? It is impossible to say; but evidently we are confronted with an entirely unprecedented form of political association.

Nevertheless, the old imperial constitution (what I called the old skin) still remains, and it is worth while devoting a few moments to its consideration.

It comprises four main elements: the Crown, the Crown’s representatives in the Dominions, the judicial bond, and certain specific limitations of Dominion independence or sovereignty.

Leaving aside the Crown for a few moments, let us consider the Crown’s representative overseas.

Every Dominion and, in the case of Australia, the states or provinces of the Dominion have at the apex of their constitutional system a representative, appointed by the Government of Great Britain, who acts in the King’s name.

We saw how Lord Durham’s son-in-law, Lord Elgin, consented to efface himself and to become assimilated to a constitutional monarch. But the complete acceptance of this principle has been a slow process, for reasons which will readily be understood. Even in the case of the Royal Prerogative in Great Britain attempts are still occasionally made to suspend constitutional usage; but the present wearer of the Crown, like his predecessor, has uniformly resisted them. It is, however, obvious that an individual selected to hold a particular office will experience more difficulty in effacing himself than the monarch himself. The tradition of British constitutional monarchy enables the monarch and his immediate advisers to judge to a nicety the point at which the play of influence and experience merges into positive action. Moreover, the monarch’s prestige is such that he can, so to speak, act without acting. These considerations do not apply to the King’s representative, and instances still occur, particularly in the case of the Australian states, where a Governor has taken action which, in the case of the monarch himself, would have been regarded as unconstitutional. These last survivals of the régime of Charles I have led in Australia to a widespread demand for a change of system. In any case it has for some time past been a recognized constitutional usage that the Prime Minister of the Dominion concerned shall be consulted by the Home Government as to the choice of the King’s representative.

The whole matter was brought to a head in the spring of 1926 when the Governor-General of Canada refused, for the first time in the history of the senior Dominion, to grant a dissolution on the advice of the Prime Minister. With the particular circumstances of the case and its repercussion on Canadian internal politics we are not concerned in these pages; but the course of the discussion of the incident, in Canada and the other Dominions, led the Imperial Conference of 1926 to lay down a formal definition of the position of a Governor-General.^[1]

The question of the constitutionality of the action of the Governor-General of Canada on this occasion was complicated by the fact that uncertainty still exists in some quarters as regards the position in Great Britain itself. The power of the Crown to refuse a dissolution to the Prime Minister of Great Britain has, indeed, generally been regarded as extinct; but this was questioned by the leader of the third party in the House of Commons at a time (Jan. 1924) when a minority government, representing about 31 per cent. of the voters, had just been installed in office. However, the argument of Mr. Asquith (as he then was) for regarding the prerogative of the Crown in this respect ‘not as a mere feudal survival’ but as ‘a useful part of our constitutional system’ cannot be said to have secured acceptance.

No doubt, if minority or coalition governments became the rule rather than the exception in Great Britain, this might conceivably lead, as it has already led in several European countries, to a demand for the strengthening of the powers of the Chief of the State. But to mention this hypothesis is only to reveal its unlikelihood. There is no analogy, and no prospect of assimilation, between the British system and that of the many countries which have retained, in one form or another, powerful traditions of autocratic rule. This opens out wider considerations than can be dealt with in these pages. Suffice it to say that, whatever the defects of the Parliamentary system, present experience, post-war as well as pre-war, would seem to show that it remains as indispensable as when, under British inspiration, it became, in the nineteenth century, the prevalent form of civilized government. The problem, in fact, is not one of replacing parliamentarism, or, still more, constitutionalism, by dictatorship or any other radically different system, but of fitting to the needs of the modern world, with the wide range and complexity of its problems and the constant need for rapid decisions and adjustments, a system devised for a far simpler and less dynamic state of society. The British peoples have hardly yet begun to think out the new agencies that will be needed in order to adapt their traditional system to these new needs; but that the method to be followed will be that of free co-operation between bodies ultimately responsible to independent popular assemblies or Parliaments is already clear. In this sphere of constitutional experiment the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations, the world’s chief examples of the method of free co-operation, will assuredly prove to have been more effective pioneers in institution-making than the exponents of loudly heralded non-Parliamentary systems, whether old or new, are yet ready to admit.

There remains the case of the State Governors of Australia; which rests upon a different footing. Here the right to refuse a dissolution is still recognized and has been exercised quite recently both in Victoria and New South Wales. An Attorney-General of Victoria has even stated in a memorandum submitted by his Premier to the Government of Great Britain that ‘in Australia it is well settled that the Governor has the right, if on an impartial review of the circumstances he thinks fit, to refuse a dissolution when asked for’. If the writer of these words were in line with the opinion widely held in Australia that the State Governor should be an Australian citizen, his view regarding his powers would represent a proposal, on Continental European lines, for a modification of the British Parliamentary system. But since, on the contrary, he held to the view that the Governor should continue to be appointed from Great Britain and be free from ‘local associations’ and ‘local prejudices’, his opinion should perhaps rather be regarded as a belated example of what is sometimes characterized in Canada as the ‘Crown Colony mind’.

The judicial bond is another element in the old imperial constitution. There is no imperial Court of Appeal, and attempts to constitute one have not hitherto found favour. But in the so-called Judicial Committee of the Privy Council there exists a tribunal which hears appeals remitted to it from the most various parts of the Empire and involving the most widely divergent legal systems. And, in the case of the senior Dominion, Canada, the Judicial Committee has the right of interpreting the federal constitution and of deciding between the rights of the Confederation and those of its constituent provinces. It was in virtue of this right that it recently declared unconstitutional the so-called Lemieux Act for conciliation in Trade Disputes after it had been working satisfactorily for the best part of a generation. But it is for Canada herself to decide whether the system shall continue, and the same applies to the other Dominions. The Imperial Conference of 1926 has indeed definitely laid it down that it is ‘no part of the policy of His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain that questions affecting individual appeals should be determined otherwise than in accordance with the wishes of the part of the Empire primarily affected’.

This brings us to the third point—the existence of certain distinct limitations on Dominion sovereignty. These are particularly marked in the case of Canada. Not only has she no power to interpret her constitution; she lacks even the power to change it. The Canadian constitution is embodied in a British Act of Parliament—the British North America Act; but that Act itself embodies what an important section of Canadians regard as the provisions of a perpetual treaty, guaranteeing certain cherished rights of the French-Canadian population, and this point of view has been expressly reaffirmed by the Premier of Quebec since the status of Canada was enhanced by the Imperial Conference of 1926. It is not probable, therefore, that the British House of Commons would consent to amend the Canadian constitution against the wishes of the French-Canadian minority; nor, it must be added, is it likely that a majority in the Canadian Parliament would ever ask for such action to be taken. Thus we have the strange anomaly that Canada, the senior Dominion, who holds in her hands the keys of peace and war, is yet unable to alter one jot or tittle of the constitution under which she lives.

A similar but less striking anomaly exists in the case of South Africa, where certain native areas were deliberately left outside the jurisdiction of the Union. Thus, the Governor-General of the Union of South Africa is at the same time also Imperial High Commissioner, responsible to London, for the territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. The question of the inclusion of these regions in the Union has recently been ventilated by the South African Government, but the last word rests with London. Legislation regarding natives in the Union itself, however, is in the sole discretion of the South African government. It is true that at the time of the passing of the Act of Union, emphatic pledges were given for the protection of native rights and interests under the new constitution and that there was even a control over certain legislation affecting natives reserved to the Imperial Parliament. But in practice this safeguard proved quite illusory, even before the pronouncement by the Imperial Conference of 1926 that ‘it would not be in accordance with constitutional practice for advice to be rendered to His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain in any matter appertaining to the affairs of a Dominion against the views of the Government of that Dominion’ made any direct interference by the London authorities with the native affairs of the Union unthinkable. Thus when the so-called Colour Bar Act, with its provisions against the employment of natives in certain skilled occupations, after being twice rejected by the Senate, was finally passed by a joint sitting of the two Houses, its marked divergence from hitherto unquestioned standards and traditions of British policy did not prevent its securing the Royal Assent. The days when a difference of opinion between Great Britain and South Africa, even on so vital an issue as this, could lead to a conflict are gone for ever. The clash, if it ever comes, will not be between Pretoria and London but between Pretoria and Geneva, not between an inferior and a ‘suzerain’, but between one member of the Society of States and the collective opinion of its compeers.

The various survivals of the old imperial system to which attention has so far been called are of relatively minor importance. There would be no difficulty in putting an end to them if it was so desired. A resolution of the Imperial Conference would suffice to set the necessary parliamentary or executive machinery of revision in motion; several instances of this procedure have recently occurred as a result of the 1926 Conference. Here is another illustration of the convenience which attends the absence of a written constitution. The question of the Crown, however, raises issues of a very different kind and necessitates a few words of frank explanation.

The monarchy or, to use the strict constitutional expression, the Crown is often described as a bond linking together the different members of the British Commonwealth. Enthusiasts sometimes go farther and describe it as the chief and even as the only bond. Such language is gravely misleading and involves a serious confusion of thought.

Let us begin by making certain necessary distinctions. When we speak of the Crown, or the King, or the Monarchy, the term covers two entirely separate meanings. The first is personal and the second constitutional. We may be referring to the person of the King and to other members of the Royal Family, or we may be referring to the King’s constitutional prerogative.

Taking the personal meaning first, we must here make a second distinction which is familiar to Englishmen but perhaps not quite so familiar to Americans—the distinction between the sentiment of loyalty, in the technical sense of the word, and the sentiment of respect.

‘Loyalty’ in the old-fashioned feudal and cavalier sense of the term is a sentiment hardly compatible with a constitutional monarchy. It has long since become extinct as a factor in English political life and survives only in certain circles, often non-British, as a mere shadow of its former self. The prevailing feeling both in Great Britain and throughout the Dominions for the monarch and the Royal Family can be best defined, I think, as one of genuine and unaffected respect. This feeling is not confined to believers in the system of constitutional monarchy; it is to be found among many who in theory would profess the republican creed.

A good example of this occurred in South Africa not long ago. After a visit of the Prince of Wales to that country had been announced, a change of Government took place and a party tinged with republicanism assumed the reins of office. Its first act was to bid the Prince welcome, and the visit was subsequently carried through with the utmost good feeling.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that social as well as personal elements enter into this question, and it is necessary to distinguish between the person of the monarch and his position at the apex of a social system in which traditional and feudal elements still play a conspicuous part. The growing movement in the Dominions to limit and control the bestowal of titles of honour by the monarch shows that this distinction is being increasingly appreciated.

When we turn to the constitutional side of the question, we are met with a curious paradox. It is in the quarters which are most averse to centralization that the praises of the Crown as the bond of empire are sometimes loudest. The motives of this neo-royalism are not difficult to divine. The Crown as a bond of empire is, in the famous phrase of Bismarck, simply ‘a lath painted to look like iron’. It has no binding force at all, but is merely a façade. For the Crown is simply a constitutional organ which acts on the advice of a responsible minister. Thus it is evident that the Crown which acts on the advice of a South African minister is only in name the same Crown as that which acts on the advice of a British, Irish, or Canadian minister. The Crown, in fact, under the post-war constitution, can receive discordant advice from six separate Prime Ministers. It could even receive advice to go to war with itself. Thus behind the comfortable theory of the Crown as a constitutional link is an unresolved constitutional deadlock.

The theory of the Crown as a bond is at bottom simply a theory of the Empire as a group of independent states which happen to be ruled by the same constitutional monarch. It would assimilate the relationship of Great Britain and South Africa to that of Great Britain and the Netherlands under William and Mary, or to that of Great Britain and Hanover under the Georges. Such a union, based neither upon common principles nor upon common interests, has none of the elements of durability; nor is it difficult to imagine circumstances, happily not at present likely to occur, which would bring such a purely personal connexion abruptly to an end.

Thus we see that the old constitution, in so far as it can still be said to exist, is powerless to arrest the process of transformation which we have already observed. The Empire is, in fact, constitutionally speaking, in rapid disintegration. It is drifting steadily towards a condition, if it has not already reached it, in which it is no longer a single state but an entente of states.

Is this the end of the British Empire? Must we acquiesce in this euthanasia?

If we were in 1827 rather than in 1927, I should be inclined to bow the head and accept the verdict of destiny. In the world as it was in 1827, anarchic, individualistic, and restless for change, a society without rules and standards, and devoid even of the idea of organization—in such a world the break-up of a British entente would have been inevitable. We should be compelled to look forward to a relentless process of secession. First the five Dominions would accept the logic of the European nationalist movements. India with its 320 millions would follow and become a republic or a federation of republics on the new Asiatic model. What would be left after this second period of secession would be an Empire of some 100 million inhabitants, some forty million whites and sixty million non-whites, roughly equal in size and composition to the French Empire of to-day.

But happily we are living under very different conditions, political, social, economic, intellectual, from those of the period succeeding the Napoleonic wars. We are living in an age, not of revolution but of integration, an age which is steadily applying ideas and rules of organization not merely in the economic sphere, but also in the political.

Future historians, I believe, will look back to the nineteenth century as the century which knit together the world economically by developing a world-wide system of trade, industry, and communications; and they will point to the twentieth century as that which regularized and controlled these economic contacts by the development of intergovernmental co-operation and by establishing a firm basis for international law as a system of binding rules between states.

I have ventured to project myself into the future and to put a retrospective generalization into the mouth of a spokesman of posterity. In so doing, I have deliberately taken the optimistic side in the great open question of our age. I have assumed that the forces of integration will triumph in their daily struggle against the forces of destruction. But the battle is still undecided. We cannot prejudge its results with confidence. All we can do is to be conscious of the issues involved and to bring our weight to bear on the right side. For we of this generation are faced with this grim dilemma: either we must develop and perfect arrangements for international co-operation or we must look forward to the bankruptcy of civilization. There is no middle course. The problem which we have observed in the case of the British Empire is only an example of the still vaster and more complex problem which confronts the civilized world as a whole.

In this respect, as so often before, the British Empire is making an experiment, the results of which are of vital concern to the whole world. We have examined the mutual relations of the communities inside the British system. Let us now look at that system as a whole in its relation to the rest of the world. We shall see that the British Empire finds itself now for the first time in a situation where it both needs the co-operation of the other members of the society of states and can safely and confidently enter into such co-operative arrangements.

An immense change has, in fact, come about in the international position and foreign relations of the British Empire as a result of the war.

British foreign policy in the nineteenth century can be summed up in four watchwords: glorious isolation, naval supremacy, the workshop of the world, benevolent trusteeship.

Glorious isolation did not imply monasticism. We did not live secluded from the world. On the contrary, we penetrated into its every corner. But we acted as we liked and when we liked. Isolation for us meant the avoidance of commitments, the keeping of our hands free to meet each emergency as it arose. It meant adhesion to the voluntary system in foreign relations as opposed to a system of fixed obligations, alliances, or other entanglements.

As for our naval supremacy, it was absolute and unquestioned. The standard of superiority varied from time to time, but there was no deviation from the principle, which was the maintenance of a naval force sufficient by itself, without alliances, to withstand any probable or possible combination against us. Thus we maintained in the oceans of the world a supremacy so complete and so unchallenged that it became almost part of the order of nature, both in our own eyes and in those of the rest of the world.

Hand in hand with our naval supremacy was our financial, commercial, and industrial supremacy. We were the first community to take advantage of the inventions of the industrial revolution and to develop manufactures on a large scale. We made full use of our early start. We freed ourselves from the shackles of an old protectionist and preferential system, adopted Free Trade because it was good business, preached it to others, not without success, extended our markets in every part of the world, and received in return from our customers the raw materials that we needed for our industrial development.

Finally, we extended and consolidated our rule over large parts of Asia, Africa, and Polynesia in the form of a benevolent despotism. We attempted to govern as trustees, for the benefit of the governed, but no formal international engagement either laid down the conditions under which we held this self-appointed trust or controlled the manner in which we fulfilled it. Here again the voluntary system was supreme and unimpaired.

To-day the conditions represented by these four watchwords have passed away beyond recall, and our whole system of foreign relations needs to be readjusted.

What of ‘glorious isolation’? Not only has it become extinct as a policy but its very physical basis has disappeared. Great Britain is, for political purposes, no longer an island. It is, strategically speaking, as close to the continent of Europe to-day as France was to Germany before the war. The development of air-power and other recent applications of science to warfare have completely altered our situation and tied us to Europe whether we wish it or not. Statesmen may discuss whether the frontier of Great Britain is at Dunkirk or Antwerp, or on the Rhine, or farther east. It has certainly moved beyond the cliffs of Dover.

The British public has taken some little time to realize this change in our position. Hence the discussions and vicissitudes in connexion with the problem of security during the last few years. But, if the popular mind with us moves slowly, it moves surely; and the Rhineland Pact, which embodies a national sentiment, marks the final abandonment of isolation and our definite entry into a continental or, as it should rather be called, a world system of mutual defence.

Naval supremacy passed from us even before the Washington Conference, when our acquiescence in naval equality with the United States became clear to all the world. It was decided upon at the Imperial Conference in the summer of 1921 which agreed to adopt what was euphemistically called a ‘one-power standard’. I need not emphasize all that is involved in this definite relinquishment of supremacy in the most important domain of national power. The oceans of the world are one, and new conditions and new problems have been created for us in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

As for our commercial and industrial supremacy, that too has passed. The war marks the end of the period in which our early start gave us a measurable advantage over our competitors. For a century and more we ‘held the world in fee’. Vestiges of this supremacy still remain; but on the whole we have now to face a far more equal competition and, in many cases, as we have discovered to our cost, a competition in which the dice are heavily loaded against us.

Finally, our benevolent trusteeship in Asia and Africa is being sharply challenged by the spread into these regions of the doctrines of European nationalism. Here we have to face, not a new strategic or a new economic situation, but what is even more difficult for a conservative and unimaginative people, a new psychological situation.

Thus the British system that faces the post-war world is no longer gloriously isolated and proudly self-sufficient, but as dependent as other members of the world’s political society upon the co-operation of other states. Such co-operation has, in fact, become a necessity for us. The only question is how we can best and most safely participate in a co-operative system without detriment to our traditional principles, purposes, and policies.

Fortunately, the very emergency which has made co-operation desirable has also made it practicable and provided an available instrument.

In the world as it was before 1914 international co-operation was not a policy which British statesmen could recommend to their peoples as offering any prospect of substantial achievement. The principles for which we stood were not yet accepted by the majority of the other Great Powers. Constitutional government and democracy were a minority cause in the world. The ideas of the English, American, and French Revolutions had still to run their course before the statesmen of the powers could sit down together at a table with the mutual confidence needed for true co-operation. Congresses and Conferences could indeed meet from time to time to deal with particular emergencies; but the record of The Hague sittings revealed how little practical progress can be achieved when there is deep-seated divergence on principles. The picture of the diplomatic scene drawn by the pre-war British Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, in his recently published memoirs, is the most striking testimony on this point.

To-day the situation is completely transformed. The political doctrines and ideas of Western Europe, the heresies of yesterday, have triumphed. Europe up to the borders of Russia is formally constitutional and democratic. There are exceptions, I know, to be made to this summary statement, but they are not sufficiently important seriously to interfere with the working of an international co-operative system, based on the democratic principle and accepted by the overwhelming majority and the most important individual members of the European community. It is to-day the anti-constitutionalists and the anti-democrats who are the preachers of new, strange, and revolutionary doctrines. Democracy may indeed, as we are constantly told, be under revision, but since 1918 it has become the orthodox creed and there is every likelihood that it will remain so. And the revision will consist, not in the acceptance of forms of irresponsible rule, whether by dictators or by oligarchies, but in the working out of an adjustment between elected assemblies and other more specialized forms of public service.

The best evidence of this is the public opinion revealed at the meetings of the Geneva Assembly. There is a movement of common democracy in Europe to-day which is not only breaking down war-time barriers but is preparing in the economic and social sphere for constructive reforms which may yet surprise Americans who still think of Europe as a backward and quarrelsome continent.

It is in this situation that Great Britain and the Dominions have decided to participate in a co-operative international system by entering the League of Nations.

That decision, so far-reaching in its implications and consequences, was taken at a moment when the public mind was still stunned by the events of the war. The two days’ debate in the House of Commons on the Treaty of Versailles will always be remembered in strange contrast with the long and elaborate discussions on the same subject in the Senate of the United States. But the British popular instinct which acclaimed the League from the very first was thoroughly sound, and now that the discussions of seven years have brought out the full significance of the action taken, in Great Britain, at any rate, the policy of international co-operation has won almost universal acceptance. That this should be so is a remarkable triumph of good sense (I had almost said of logic) over habit and prejudice; for not only the policy of the League but still more its embodiment in the letter of the Covenant ran counter, as we have seen, to every British tradition. Thus we now witness the amazing spectacle of the British people, who have always shown the greatest reluctance to enter into written engagements with foreign powers—the Japanese Treaty is, in this respect, an example which merely proves the rule—voluntarily and almost enthusiastically committed to a binding document of twenty-six articles which in its scope and range and in the variety of its details can almost be described as a written constitution for the conduct of its foreign affairs.

What is the League of Nations? Simply a society of states who have agreed to co-operate together for certain purposes defined in a common document. That document, the Covenant, is in itself what jurists call a general treaty. It is the lineal successor of the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of Vienna, which also set forth general international policies. But the Covenant differs from these earlier documents in three all-important respects: its signatories are far more numerous, constituting the overwhelming majority of the world’s governments; its provisions are more far-reaching, including the establishment of a permanent administrative, deliberative, and eventually also a judicial organization; and, last but not least, it is based, implicitly if not avowedly, upon an agreed philosophy of government.

This is not the place to deal at length with the working of the League. The experience of the last seven years has been full of interest to students of political science and constitutional law. But for those, whether friends or enemies of the League, who still think of it in terms of the controversy of 1919, it may be useful to make clear one or two salient points.

In the first place the League is not an executive body. It has no Cabinet. It is not an instrument of international policy. League or no League, policies will still continue to be framed in the capitals and by the ministers and foreign offices of individual states. That has been so during the last seven years and will continue to be so however much the League may gain in authority and efficacy. The reason for that is very simple. The world is far too large and its problems far too complex to permit of centralized direction. When the Powers in January 1919 attempted to evolve a common policy towards Russia, they failed in every respect except in their demonstration of the limits of international co-operation. There is no reason in the nature of things why what is called high policy should be centralized, or even unified. There is no reason why Great Britain should not pursue one policy towards Russia, the United States another, France a third, and so on, corresponding with the differing interests and situations concerned. Flexibility and common sense are of the essence of a wise conduct of public as of private affairs. But this flexibility and its resultant variety are subject to one overmastering condition. All policies are permissible except such as lead to war or the threat of war. It is at this point that the League’s activity begins. The mutual relations of two or more states are of no concern to the society of states unless and until they involve a danger of a breach of the world’s peace. The function of the League, in other words, is in this sphere not positive but negative. It does not conduct policy. It serves as the limiting factor of policy.

But the prevention of war cannot be dissociated from the positive organization of security. Hence the concern of the League for the limitation and control of armaments and the obligation of its members to interchange full and frank information on this subject. The League is an association for mutual protection. It is based on the conception of co-operative defence, and it is pledged to embody that conception in a practical system. It would lose much of its attraction for its weaker members if it failed in this task. For to such states the organization of security by the League, rather than by individual great powers or alliances of powers, is the symbol of the substitution of law, and its instruments, for the old régime of irresponsible force.

Thirdly, and most important of all, the League is a standing agency of co-operation in matters of common concern to all civilized peoples. Its action in this sphere has passed unnoticed by the general public because most of the matters with which it thus deals involve no important elements of controversy and conflicting interest. Health, transport, social welfare, intellectual co-operation are not subjects which occupy headlines or fall within the sphere of high policy. Nevertheless, they are vital to the maintenance of civilization, and it is in this region that the co-operative method has achieved its most important results. The authorities of the League have developed a most practical and ingenious method of collaboration between the various departments of the national governments and the various professional organizations concerned with these questions. Thus Geneva has become an indispensable clearing-house for the discussion of the many and various interests—economic, social, juridical, scientific, and educational—which constitute the texture of modern civilization, and is extending the scope and significance of ‘politics’ until it approaches more nearly to its original Greek meaning. Co-operation between men and women whose common ideals spring out of a common body of knowledge and common professional interests is the surest, if not the quickest, agency for the prevention of war, and provides the best antidote against the recrudescence of the competitive spirit and furtive methods that characterized the official conduct of international relations before 1914.

How does the British Empire fit into this system of League activities? We have only to take the four elements of the nineteenth-century tradition and to observe the process of transformation that they have undergone.

Glorious isolation has been replaced by collaboration on the Council of the League every three months and on the Assembly of the League every September, supplemented by participation at frequent intervals in technical conferences.

Naval supremacy has been replaced by a co-operative system of international defence, in which the British Navy forms part of the common armament necessary to ensure the protection afforded by the Covenant.

Britain, the workshop of the world, is now part of an international society which guarantees equitable commercial conditions to its members.

Finally, in its mandate article and in the elaboration of the idea of international trusteeship, the League has taken over and improved the older system of benevolent despotism.

Thus the League of Nations provides the outline at least of a system fitted to replace that which passed away for Britain in 1914.

This is perhaps most clearly seen in connexion with the most delicate of all the constitutional dilemmas which have arisen between the peoples of the British Entente—the question of the right of peace and war.

Canada demands that she shall decide for herself whether or not she shall go to war, irrespective of the decision of Great Britain. She refuses, in other words, to pledge herself to London to act in co-operation with Great Britain. London cannot compel her to do so; yet if London and Ottawa take divergent courses, the result will be incalculably disastrous and will assuredly weaken and probably disrupt the British Commonwealth.

For this dilemma the Covenant of the League provides a complete and adequate solution. The pledge which Canada has refused to give to London, she has already given to Geneva. Under the Covenant she is doubly bound—bound to refrain from going to war on her own account (at least for nine months) and bound to take action together with her fellow-members in the event of a breach of the Covenant. All that remains, then, of the separate right of the Dominions in matters of peace and war is that the law-breaking state will receive from the members of the British Entente not one declaration of war but six, serving as a striking demonstration of the moral unity of the Commonwealth. When Article XV of the Covenant (which still permits private war under certain circumstances after nine months’ delay) has been amended as proposed in the Geneva Protocol, the unity of the Commonwealth will be still more firmly ensured in this sphere. So, too, the practical development of League schemes of co-operative defence will mitigate the difficulties that have arisen in the past over the arrangements for imperial defence. In this respect also the Protocol would have proved a convenience from the point of view of the British members of the League. Unhappily it was not made clear to the British peoples either at home or in the Dominions that the Protocol limited and defined rather than increased their obligations towards their fellow-members in the League; for the assistance to be given was to be conditioned by their geographical situation and the existing condition of their armaments, thus excluding any obligation to adopt conscription or any other measure of that kind. Hence much of the opposition to the Protocol was based rather upon dislike of the sanction (Article XVI) of the Covenant itself than of the definition given to it in the Protocol. Fortunately, however, this mistake has been repaired at Locarno, where the principal powers adopted an interpretation of Article XVI which reproduces almost textually the relevant phrasing of the Protocol.

When this is understood by British public opinion at home and overseas, it will dispose of a problem which has been a source of much inconvenience and misunderstanding in our relations with other members of the League. The way would then be clear for the general acceptance of a document embodying an all-round system of security, and this in its turn would remove the principal obstacle in the way of an all-round limitation of armaments.

This is not the place in which to enlarge on the results which have followed, both for the Empire and for Continental Europe, from the summary rejection of the Geneva Protocol in March 1925 and the adoption of a local European pact of security in its place. The immediate effects of the Locarno policy upon imperial unity have momentarily been retrieved by wiser counsels; but nothing has yet been done to avert the standing danger of a divergence of policy between Great Britain and the Oversea Dominions to which attention was drawn at the close of the first lecture. So long as Great Britain remains committed to local European obligations from which the Dominions are exempt, and the general obligations of the Covenant remain neglected and undefined, both the Empire and the League, let us frankly admit it, are in real danger, exposed to risks of disruption against which no adequate preparation, either material or moral, has been made. Locarno is no more than a single arch of a bridge. Until the structure is complete from shore to shore, Great Britain and the Dominions remain in separate groups, committed to separate policies. In a world of swiftly moving and incalculable forces, where no man can predict the decisions with which statesmen within and without the Empire may be confronted at a moment’s notice, this is not a condition which should be permitted to continue.

If the Covenant of the League, properly defined, explained and made real to the peoples of the Empire, provides a sure remedy against the danger of a divergence of policy on vital issues, the League machinery is equally serviceable to the British members as an occasion for a regular exchange of views. It is not everywhere sufficiently realized that the annual meeting of the League Assembly automatically brings together a British Empire delegation three times as often as the Imperial Conference. Apart from the psychological advantages of meeting at Geneva, where what is common to the seven British members of the League is apt to stand out much more clearly than in London, the League machinery is particularly useful for the discussion of the many and varied problems of detail in regard to which local interests do not coincide. It is idle to pretend that these differences do not exist and equally idle to attempt to conceal them. They should be discussed fully and frankly in all their bearings with the aid of those who have made a special study of the technical issues involved. Sometimes the Imperial Conference will prove the best medium for such discussion; but often Geneva with its technical equipment will prove a more convenient clearing-house. But the Commonwealth is no more endangered by an honest difference of opinion and policy between its members than is the League itself. Neither the League nor the Commonwealth require for their effective continuance that the policies of their members should be identical. If this were more widely realized in the Commonwealth many unnecessary apprehensions would be allayed.

Thus the League of Nations is exactly fitted to meet the constitutional and other difficulties of adjustment with which the British Commonwealth is confronted. It was once said, in a famous phrase, of the old Austrian Empire, that if it did not exist it would need to be created for the sake of its peoples. I would apply the same saying to the League of Nations and the British peoples. The League of Nations is the deus ex machina of the British Commonwealth.

That Commonwealth, if it is to survive, must survive as a league within the larger League, a society within that larger society. Only in and through the League can the Commonwealth solve its problems of to-day and take up the tasks reserved for it to-morrow.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE II

I. Extract from the Report of the Inter-Imperial Relations Committee of the Imperial Conference of 1926 regarding the position of Governors-General.

‘In our opinion it is an essential consequence of the equality of status existing among the members of the British Commonwealth of Nations that the Governor-General of a Dominion is the representative of the Crown, holding in all essential respects the same position in relation to the administration of public affairs in the Dominion as is held by His Majesty the King in Great Britain, and that he is not the representative or agent of His Majesty’s Government in Great Britain or of any Department of that Government.’

It is added in a foot-note that ‘The Governor of Newfoundland is in the same position as the Governor-General of a Dominion’. It will be noted that no mention is made, in this connexion, of the Governor of Southern Rhodesia, which is not a member of the Imperial Conference.

II. (a). Extract from Article XV and full text of Article XVI of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Article XV (Disputes not submitted to arbitration).

‘If there should arise between Members of the League any dispute likely to lead to a rupture, which is not submitted to arbitration or judicial settlement, in accordance with Article 13, the members of the League agree that they will submit the matter to the Council. Any party to the dispute may effect such submission by giving notice of the existence of the dispute to the Secretary-General, who will make all necessary arrangements for a full investigation and consideration thereof.’

The article goes on to specify the action to be taken by the Council. The ‘loophole for war’ permitting ‘private war’ after nine months’ delay is contained in the following paragraph:

‘If the Council fails to reach a report which is unanimously agreed to by the members thereof, other than the Representatives of one or more of the parties to the dispute, the Members of the League reserve to themselves the right to take such action as they shall consider necessary for the maintenance of right and justice.’

Article XVI (‘Sanctions’ of the League).

§ 1. ‘Should any Member of the League resort to war in disregard of its covenants under Articles 12, 13, or 15, it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League, which hereby undertake immediately to subject it to the severance of all trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the covenant-breaking State, and the prevention of all financial, commercial, or personal intercourse between the nationals of the covenant-breaking State and the nationals of any other State, whether a Member of the League or not.

§ 2. ‘It shall be the duty of the Council in such case to recommend to the several Governments concerned what effective military, naval, or air force the Members of the League shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the covenants of the League.

§ 3. ‘The Members of the League agree, further, that they will mutually support one another in the financial and economic measures which are taken under this Article, in order to minimize the loss and inconvenience resulting from the above measures, and that they will mutually support one another in resisting any special measures aimed at one of their number by the covenant-breaking State, and that they will take the necessary steps to afford passage through their territory to the forces of any of the Members of the League which are co-operating to protect the covenants of the League.

§ 4. ‘Any Member of the League which has violated any covenant of the League may be declared to be no longer a Member of the League by a vote of the Council concurred in by the Representatives of all the other Members of the League represented thereon.’

(b). Extracts from the Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International disputes (known as the Geneva Protocol) adopted by the Assembly of the League of Nations in September 1924. (Italics inserted.)

Article II. ‘The signatory States agree in no case to resort to war either with one another or against a State which, if the occasion arises, accepts all the obligations hereinafter set out, except in case of resistance to acts of aggression or when acting in agreement with the Council or the Assembly of the League of Nations, in accordance with the provisions of the Covenant and of the present Protocol.’

Extracts from Article IV.

§ 4. ‘If the Council fails to reach a report which is concurred in by all its members, other than the representatives of any of the parties to the dispute, it shall submit the dispute to arbitration. . . .’

§ 6. ‘The signatory States undertake that they will carry out in full good faith any judicial sentence or arbitral award that may be rendered, and that they will comply, as provided in paragraph 3 above, with the solutions recommended by the Council.’

Article X. ‘Every State which resorts to war in violation of the undertaking contained in the Covenant or in the present Protocol is an aggressor.’

The article then goes on to lay down the procedure for determining an aggressor, and concludes with the following paragraph: ‘The Council shall call upon the signatory States to apply forthwith against the aggressor the sanctions provided by Article XI of the present Protocol, and any signatory State thus called upon shall thereby be entitled to exercise the rights of a belligerent.’

Article XI. ‘As soon as the Council has called upon the signatory States to apply sanctions, as provided in the last paragraphs of Article X of the present Protocol, the obligations of the said States, in regard to the sanctions of all kinds mentioned in paragraphs 1 and 2 of Article XVI of the Covenant, will immediately become operative in order that such sanctions may forthwith be employed against the aggressor.

‘Those obligations shall be interpreted as obliging each of the signatory States to co-operate loyally and effectively in support of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and in resistance to any act of aggression, in the degree which its geographical position and its particular situation as regards armaments allow.

‘In accordance with paragraph 3 of Article XVI of the Covenant the signatory States give a joint and several undertaking to come to the assistance of the State attacked or threatened, and to give each other mutual support by means of facilities and reciprocal exchanges as regards the provision of raw materials and supplies of every kind, openings of credit, transport, and transit, and for this purpose to take all measures in their power to preserve the safety of communications by land and by sea of the attacked or threatened State.

‘If both parties to the dispute are aggressors within the meaning of Article X, the economic and financial sanctions shall be applied to both of them.’

(c) Locarno Agreements: Annex F.

Draft Collective Note to Germany regarding Article XVI of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

‘The German delegation has requested certain explanations in regard to Article XVI of the Covenant of the League of Nations.

‘We are not in a position to speak in the name of the League, but in view of the discussions which have already taken place in the Assembly and in the commissions of the League of Nations, and after the explanations which have been exchanged between ourselves, we do not hesitate to inform you of the interpretation which, in so far as we are concerned, we place upon Article XVI.

‘In accordance with that interpretation the obligations resulting from the said article on the members of the League must be understood to mean that each State member of the League is bound to co-operate loyally and effectively in support of the Covenant and in resistance to any act of aggression to an extent which is compatible with its military situation and takes its geographical position into account.’

E. V., A. B., A. C., B. M., Dr. B., A. S.

We have seen that the League of Nations provides a means of escape from certain difficulties in which the British Empire has become involved through the play of forces awakened by the war. But this solution, however satisfactory from the technical point of view, is not sufficient. It is a constitutional answer to a constitutional dilemma; but it leaves our initial difficulty unsolved. It merely pushes it a stage farther back. For, is not the League, you may well ask, simply a convenient and painless extinguisher for the Empire? What is there left of the Empire when its problems are thus merged in those of the larger League? Does the Empire, in any real sense, still exist? And, if so, what are the ties that bind its members together? And what is its raison d’être in the post-war world? What is the work that it is called upon to do?

These are the questions which we must seek to answer in the three remaining lectures.

I could answer the last question in a single sentence. The work that the British Empire is called upon to do is to preserve the peace of the world. The British Empire is the surest bulwark against war in the present-day world—for this generation, at any rate, a surer bulwark than the League of Nations itself. And it is so, not so much in virtue of what it does or of the physical force that it can muster at need, as in virtue of what it is—a multi-national association of peoples in five continents. If this association were destroyed, if the communities that compose the British Commonwealth separated in anger or broke up into two or more opposing camps, the outbreak of a new and more terrible world-war would only be a question of years. No League could prevent it. The forces unchained would prove too strong. If the League can keep the peace to-day, it is because the British Empire provides the chief of its guardians and executants. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? What power in the world is strong enough to restrain those guardians if they fall out among themselves?

The League of Nations is more than a mere convenient mechanism of intergovernmental co-operation. It represents a great political ideal—the greatest that has yet been conceived in the domain of pure politics. But that ideal in its concrete embodiment has not yet won the moral authority that is its due. It is still on its trial. The peoples watch it with interest and pay it the homage of respect; but the loyalty and devotion which turn the scale in a supreme crisis are still withheld.

The British Empire, on the other hand, imperfect as a constitutional mechanism, has that which the League still lacks—the authority and momentum of a great past, a past that lives on and works on in the present. To millions of its members who know nothing of constitutional law or diplomatic practice, the British Empire is a living reality. It embodies loyalties and affections, reserves of wisdom and public spirit, of experience and attachment such as men keep for the political community in which they have been born and bred.

Men from five continents gave their lives for the Empire during the war. Why did they do so? What did the Empire mean to them? It is hard to say. Those who offered the sacrifice would themselves have given many different answers. Some, perhaps the most British of all, would have refused to attempt the analysis. For the content of that adjective ‘British’, so common on men’s lips, defies exact interpretation. It is not an adjective of race. It is not an adjective of nationality. It is not an adjective of territory. It is indeed at home in five continents and, most of all perhaps, on the oceans that unite them. If we are to attempt to define the indefinable we can perhaps say that it denotes a political and social tradition and a mode of life in which that tradition is revealed—a mode of life characterized by common habits, common institutions, and a certain unexpressed philosophy of public affairs. These habits and institutions and the outlook and philosophy of those who maintain them together constitute the atmosphere of homeliness, of Britishness, of which any one who is British-born is instantly conscious when, coming from ‘abroad’, he finds himself once more, whether on land or sea, under the British flag.

But it is time to come to closer grips with the two questions which await us. What are the real ties that bind the Empire together? And what are the special tasks that await it in the post-war world? The first question is in the psychological order, the second in the political. Let us deal with them successively.

When we turn to the psychology of the imperial relationship, to an analysis of how men actually feel about the British connexion, we must make one sharp distinction at the outset. There is a great and obvious difference between the attitude of settlers from Great Britain and their descendants and the attitude of dependent or formerly dependent peoples.

Let us take first what I would call the sentiment of Greater Britain—of the overseas English, Scottish, Welsh, and their descendants. Ulstermen should, no doubt, be placed in the same category. The rest of Ireland occupies in this respect an intermediate position; there is a complex psychology here which it would carry us too far to analyse.

The tie between Great Britain and Greater Britain was originally one of kinship and of common ideas and institutions based on kinship. For us in England the idea of kinship with Britons overseas still looms very large, and language is constantly being used by our public men suggesting that this is the real basis of our connexion with the Dominions. Such a view is, of course, as dangerous to our Commonwealth as similar theories as to what constitutes genuine Americanism are to yours. We will leave to social theorists the task of determining the exact weight and influence to be assigned to hereditary and environmental factors respectively in the building up of a community. It is undeniable, however, on any theory, that the tie of kinship between dwellers in a new country and an old must diminish in intensity and in political importance with every passing generation. Moreover, the new communities that have grown up overseas include considerable populations which do not derive their origin from Great Britain. The Dutch, Germans, and Huguenots in South Africa, the French-Canadians, Slavs, and other Continental immigrants in Canada, are not far from making up a majority among the settlers in those two Dominions. Thus there is a real danger, too often overlooked by facile orators in the old country, that undue emphasis on the tie of kinship, so far from uniting the Commonwealth, may be a cause of cleavage in individual Dominions themselves.

Thus among Greater Britons the tie of kinship has been steadily weakening and had already before the war tended to assume the vaguer form of an attachment, not so much to the inhabitants of Great Britain as a people of kindred stock, as to the country itself. Englishmen might be so different from born Canadians and Australians as to seem foreign to them, but England was still thought of and dreamt of as home. The cottages and meadows of the ‘old Country’, its lanes and its parks, its downs and its cliffs, were felt to be a kind of patrimony of Greater Britons overseas. So too with the social tradition and inheritance of English life, its old universities and cathedrals, the Monarchy, the House of Commons, and the unwritten constitution. This tradition and inheritance constituted, and still constitute, a kind of moral support for dwellers in a new society. They give Greater Britons a comforting sense of anchorage in an older world. The United States by the clean break of 1776 became a land of déracinés. Their Canadian neighbours, no less independent and forward-looking in spirit, feel that somehow their hold on the past adds to their confidence in facing the future. This is the running undercurrent, whether of sentiment or social philosophy, to which Kipling has given expression in his famous phrase: The Abbey makes us we.

In this form the tie between Britain and Greater Britain contained elements of dependence, elements also of romance and unreality, at which the war dealt a heavy blow. After Ypres and Vimy Canada means more for Canadians. It would not be true to say that therefore England means less; but undoubtedly the relationship has become one of more equality and less dependence. To that extent the war has reproduced something of the psychology of 1776, though happily its political application has taken a very different form.

In its present phase the resultant relationship is not altogether happy. Dependence has passed, at least in the case of Canada, but the privileges that dependence brought with it are still claimed and regarded as natural. The boy has grown to manhood, but he is still not averse to receiving an allowance. These privileges take the form of certain economic advantages, which I will describe in my next lecture, and also, in the case of Australia and New Zealand especially, of certain tangible benefits in the domain of defence. It is sometimes suggested that the bond between the Australasian Dominions and Great Britain is one of fear rather than of affection; that they remain within the Empire because of the dangers to which they would be exposed if they stood alone. This is certainly a gross overstatement of the real position. If fear were the main motive involved, protection would be ensured as effectively and with less political complication by a connexion with the United States. But there is just enough truth in the thrust to invite reflection. For the Dominions in question have undoubtedly grown used to relying for their protection on the British Navy rather than on their own policies and weapons. The self-reliance and the sense of responsibility which come naturally to those who stand alone in the world are more difficult to develop under such sheltered conditions. It is not healthy for either party, the protectors or the protected, to prolong habits of this kind into an age where partnership and equal self-respect have become the watchwords.

The drift then is towards partnership; but partnership in what? It cannot be a partnership in material things, for, as a moment’s reflection will show, such an idea is incapable of realization in the variety of the Commonwealth. Here again public men, both at home and overseas, are apt to indulge in unmeaning talk. The phrase ‘a common standard of life for the Empire’ has, for instance, been used in authoritative quarters. Presumably what was meant was a common minimum standard of life; but no one would be so foolish as to wish to interfere either with the traditional roast beef of England or with the deliberate vegetarianism of Rabindranath Tagore and many of his compatriots. But however desirable it may be to raise the standard of life of the poorer parts of the Empire, especially among the non-white races, there is not the slightest possibility of constituting an imperial minimum above and distinct from the international minimum which has become the object of social and industrial reformers. To fix on a common standard of life as a bond of Empire is therefore to emphasize rather than to bridge over the cleavage between its white and non-white members.

No, the real bond between Great and Greater Britain will not be found on this plane, and all attempts at material definitions of this kind are foredoomed to failure. The tie remains, what it has always been, not material but spiritual. It is the tie of a common political tradition, common political institutions, and a common outlook on public affairs.

How is that common philosophy to be applied in the post-war world? That question we will leave unanswered until we have examined the position of the dependent or ex-dependent empire.

Here we have a relationship which was frankly inaugurated with force. We conquered French Canada, we conquered India, we conquered large parts of Africa, either directly or indirectly. But although we won our position there by force, we do not hold it by force. Here figures are more eloquent than argument. We have a small professional army of some 250,000 men. The population of the Empire is about 440 million, of whom some 380 millions are non-white. If they were actively hostile, how could our force control them? Our sea-power is, no doubt, formidable; but navies cannot govern; nor can they even help the land power to govern in face of active or even passive resistance. Force, in fact, is of little use in governing an empire. It must be available in the last resort, in an empire as in a municipality, but by itself it is almost powerless. You can do almost anything with bayonets except sit on them.

Thus in the dependent Empire, by dint of wise administration, the tie of force became transformed insensibly into a tie of passive acquiescence. In French Canada this happened very rapidly. Between the conquest in 1763 and the American invasion in 1775 something had happened which made French-Canadians unwilling to take up arms against their conquerors. Thus by prudence, by tolerance, by avoiding occasions of provocation, British rule in the dependent Empire gradually brought about a condition best described perhaps by the now familiar term of ‘normalcy’ The countries in question ‘settled down’. They had no wars and very little other history. They were left free to develop their own mode of life, and achieved a form, if not the highest form, of contentment. No doubt there is a certain provincialism about the life of a community in this situation. There is a certain sapping of independence, a certain sluggishness in the pace of development. There have been few great literary and artistic masterpieces, few explosions of the human genius, to record among the civilized dependent communities under the British flag. But they had peace and justice. They did not desire to rebel. They acquiesced.

This acquiescence was reinforced, as time went on, by the growth of what is best described as a relationship of prestige. Prestige is a word which is often on men’s lips in characterizing British policy, particularly in the East. It needs careful definition, for it embodies a twofold meaning. The prestige by which we maintained our dominant position in the dependent Empire was in part the prestige of western civilization in general and in part the particular prestige of Great Britain. The prestige of the west was the prestige of science, of the practical application of scientific invention to political and social life. In its extreme form it is the prestige of gunpowder and of modern developments in the art of war. But its most powerful and far-reaching effects have been in the economic field, in the transformation effected by the forces set in motion by the industrial revolution. The particular prestige of Great Britain, on the other hand, has been associated, not so much with science, in which other peoples have rivalled and perhaps even excelled us, as with character. We have in fact held India by the double bond of science and character.

When we in England use the word character, our minds turn to the qualities of the English gentleman. The English gentleman represents a specific and clearly marked type of civilized humanity. As a ruler, he is very different from the ancient Roman, very different too from other masterful types on the modern stage, whether in the old world or the new. He has evolved his own special technique of government, the result of long development and much stored-up experience. If to-day we are living under conditions in which success often calls for other qualities than his, let us not underestimate those which the English gentleman brought to his task. For courage, for honour and loyalty, for tolerance, for wisdom and calm judgement, for self-control in emergencies, I doubt whether the world has ever seen his equal. Certainly there has never been any public administration in history whose record of service can be compared with that of the Indian Civil Service, now gradually passing out of existence. The English gentleman has been, in fact, an unrivalled primary teacher of peoples.

The history of the British Empire is full of striking individual examples of these qualities in action. The story of James Brooke will serve as well as any other. About a hundred years ago, James Brooke, a well-to-do young officer in the employ of the East India Company, took a holiday on his private yacht and found his way to Borneo, where he found a war going on between two tribes. Instead of retiring from a disagreeable scene which was no concern of his, he interested himself in the questions at issue, applied his public spirit and common sense to their solution, and proved so successful in his intercourse with the natives that they first invited him to act as mediator and later offered him the kingship. The descendants of Rajah Brooke still bear rule in Sarawak, which became officially a British Protectorate a generation or so ago. That is an instance of old-fashioned imperialism; but it embodies a real piece of public work. A more recent and substantial instance of the same kind is afforded by the work of Sir Frederick Lugard, the most distinguished living representative of the tradition of British colonial rule, in British East and West Africa. His book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, will long remain a classic on this subject. Another field of service of a somewhat different kind, but of the same semi-paternal order, is that of the Indian army officer. You may urge, perhaps with justice, that the military forces of India should be officered by Indians. Nevertheless, the relationship between the British officers and the Indian petty officers and rank and file has been less difficult and has evolved finer feelings and a closer sympathy on both sides than has been possible, except in the rarest instances, in the civilian service. If there was an Indian Mutiny in 1857, it was quelled by the loyalty of other Indians.

But the dependent nations of the Commonwealth are rapidly passing beyond this stage of what I have called primary training. What of the secondary and university stage? What is to take the place of a prestige which cannot be maintained in its old form?

Leaving this question unanswered for the moment, let us consider what the British Empire has actually achieved.

It has brought one-quarter of humanity under a single law. That is far more than the Romans achieved—far more than has been achieved by any other single imperial power. During the last four centuries, ever since the great explorations at the close of the Middle Ages, there has been increasing contact between the stronger and the weaker peoples; the white peoples, armed with gunpowder and modern science, imposing their will on the non-whites, irrespective of the antiquity or character of their civilization. In the control and regulation of these inevitable contacts, the British Empire has been more successful than any of its rivals. It has succeeded in transforming what was at first and long remained a purely commercial relationship into a political relationship.

We are faced to-day with the choice between an equal relationship between peoples, irrespective of race or colour, and an unequal relationship. But that was not the choice which faced those who built up the British Empire. Theirs was the choice between commerce and politics—between unregulated commercial exploitation and paternal government. To our lasting honour, we chose paternal government. By so doing, we anticipated the League of Nations. We established a system of trusteeship, but without any authority to whom we were responsible. We carried out international work; but we did so in our own way, on our own authority, as volunteers.

When I say that we anticipated the League of Nations I am speaking precisely. We did so in three special directions.

We anticipated the dispute clauses of the Covenant of the League of Nations. We established an obligatory system for the peaceful settlement of disputes within the British Empire. There has recently been some discussion as to whether, in international affairs, Security should precede or should follow Justice. In the British Empire, under the Pax Britannica, the question has been decided in favour of the precedence of Security. A good instance of the British imperial practice in this connexion is afforded by the relationship between India and South Africa. Here are two countries remote from one another and with very little occasion or predisposition for mutual understanding. Some time ago serious issues arose between them over the treatment of Indians domiciled in South Africa. Had they been independent communities, diplomatic relations would quite possibly have been broken off at a certain stage of the controversy and hostilities might have resulted. Inside the Commonwealth that has been impossible. The British system narrowed the dispute, dangerous and inflammatory as it was, to a discussion between the India Office and the Colonial Office on opposite sides of a quadrangle in Whitehall. I do not claim that the result of that discussion, or of the subsequent handling of the question, has been satisfactory. But in the modern world almost any settlement is more satisfactory than war. The Pax Britannica is an imposed peace, and has the advantages and disadvantages of any system of imposed peace.

In the second place, the British Empire anticipated the League of Nations by developing an international police force, the British Navy. During the greater part of the nineteenth century the British Navy was engaged, often single-handed, upon international work—such work, for instance, as carrying out the provisions of the Treaty of Vienna for the suppression of the Slave Trade. This is, I know, not the pleasantest subject to recall to an American audience; but if you will study the record of the lengthy diplomatic controversy between the British and American Governments with regard to the right of the British Navy to search American ships suspected of conveying slaves, you will realize how the British Government tried, by means of its Navy, often under very trying circumstances, to carry out an international duty which other countries were not seldom inclined to shirk. In this matter, the British Navy was the champion of common human rights; and this reflection may serve to mitigate what may seem to some the arrogance of the familiar motto—Britannia rules the waves. The world would never have allowed us to keep the tremendous power we exercised through our Navy in the nineteenth century had we shown any disposition to abuse it. The fact that through the long period of unchallenged British naval supremacy, from the battle of Trafalgar down to 1914, no coalitions were formed against us is the finest testimony to the use we made of our power.

The third international task in which we anticipated the League is that to which I have already referred—the attempt to govern our dependent territories according to the principles enshrined in the mandate article of the Covenant. Our record has been far from perfect. It is not perfect to-day. There are black spots on the map of the Commonwealth on which the well-informed student can lay his finger. But if you take our colonial record as a whole, I believe that history will justify it. The work has not been done scientifically or systematically, but experimentally, in the spirit of your pioneers. We have been, and in fact we still are, a nation of public-spirited adventurers. Indeed, the criticism that we invite is that we are so public-spirited, so ready to do crusading, that we sometimes feel impelled to interfere to clean up abuses which the victims themselves would have preferred to leave untouched.

Such is the work that the Second Empire did in the international field. To-day that work is being taken over from us by the League of Nations. The peaceful settlement of disputes, the armed vindication of international rights, the trusteeship of backward peoples, have become part, no longer of the British order but of the world order. Robbed of its special tasks of yesterday, our British genius needs new worlds to conquer. Our energy, our experience, our public spirit, our immense goodwill—how are we to employ them?

The answer is simple. In the great task that lies before us in this generation, the task of ensuring the peace of the world. We talked much during the war of ‘the war to end war’. No war can put an end to war, or to the causes of war. Remove those causes in one generation and the ordinary processes of time will bring new causes of war into operation in the next.

No, the Great War has not abolished the causes of war. But the British Empire can do immensely valuable pioneering work in dealing with these causes, in setting an example within its own borders of how these difficulties, which affect other countries besides our own, may be mitigated or even removed.

There are three great causes of war in the world in the present age. If you will bear them in mind and then seek to analyse the different disputes and occasions of friction of which you read in the newspapers from time to time, you will see how these can all, or almost all, be reduced to one or more of these three issues.

There is, firstly, the problem of inter-racial relations, the issue between the white and the non-white peoples.

There is, secondly, the problem of economic relations, or the issue between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.

There is, thirdly, the problem of nationality, or the issue between the cultured and the uncultured, that is, between the peoples who consider themselves culturally superior and those whom they despise.

Let us take up to-day the first of these.

How dangerous are the issues involved in the race question was brought vividly before my mind by the temper of the audience during the discussion on the Japanese amendment to the Geneva Protocol in the Legal Committee of the Fifth Assembly. The delegates themselves were cool enough, as befitted the highly technical character of the clause under consideration; but there was an ominous tension in the attitude of the onlookers that reminded me of some similar occasion in the past. I searched my memory and located the experience. It was the House of Commons on 3 August 1914. As a distinguished writer in the Press remarked at the time: ‘Suddenly, in the temple of peace, the shadow of the goddess of war appeared on the wall.’ Happily, that crisis—if it can be called a crisis—passed; but its lesson remains. The race question, stirring as it does some of the most elemental of human passions, is the most urgent problem of our time. I left the committee-room with the conviction that to allow it to drift was to court disaster. It cannot be evaded. It cannot be glossed over with fine phrases. It must be faced in all its unpleasantness—or the consequences of neglecting it will be a thousand times more unpleasant.

The duty of facing the race problem is one that is especially incumbent on British citizens. For the British Empire, on a majority vote, is not a white empire but a coloured empire. Hitherto, the whites have borne rule; but if the Third Empire is to be a Commonwealth of Nations, based on the idea of equal partnership, we must discover how to transform the relationship of prestige to which I have already referred into a more equal co-operation for common ends.

The task is indeed urgent, for the white man’s prestige, in the old sense of the word, has become greatly weakened. The prestige based on Western science and invention has been weakened because the East has unlocked the secrets of the Western laboratory. This was demonstrated for all the world to see a generation ago, in the Russo-Japanese war. Well do I remember, as though it were yesterday, the impression made upon my mind when, as a young lecturer in Ancient History at Oxford, I read of the first great victory of the Japanese over the Russians. I went into my class and told them that I was going to lay aside Greek history for that morning, ‘because’, I said, ‘I feel I must speak to you about the most important historical event which has happened, or is likely to happen, in our lifetime, the victory of a non-white people over a white people’. After a lapse of twenty years, and in spite of the Great War, I am still inclined to hold to that statement. The demonstration that science and its practical applications are not the appanage of any one race, that the secrets of power can be learned and used by every people which acquires the necessary knowledge and discipline, has had incalculable reactions which we of the white race are hardly yet beginning to estimate.

But the prestige of character, too, has been weakened. The movement of self-determination, which is, on its deeper side, a movement for the affirmation of human personality, has profoundly altered the standard of values of the non-white peoples. There was a time, not so far distant, when the English gentleman was set up, in spite of himself, as a standard to be admired and imitated by the other races with whom he came into contact. The dress, the manners, the speech, the social customs of the English upper class were promulgated among the dependent peoples: pathetic and ludicrous at once were the results in too many cases of this orgy of mimicry. But, to-day, all this is happily becoming a thing of the past; and, to their credit be it said, Englishmen are much relieved that it should be so. There are few things which an Englishman finds more disagreeable than to be mimicked. He has always shown a preference for the independent-minded peoples rather than for the imitative peoples. He likes the nations which, as he says, produce ‘gentlemen’—that is to say, types of humanity with a tradition and a scale of values of their own. This is the real reason for the sympathy which Englishmen familiar with the Near East have so often expressed for the Turks, in spite of their political record. The phrase common on English lips—‘The Turk is a gentleman’—is a testimony at once to the Turks’ indifference to the prestige of ‘British character’ and to the English preference for upstanding impassivity over subservient admiration.

The established British principle in regard to racial distinctions is one of complete equality. Racial discrimination is unknown to the traditional British constitution. There have indeed been several instances in which Indians have been elected to the British House of Commons by English voters, and the Imperial Government has on repeated occasions maintained the doctrine that a British subject, irrespective of race or nationality, is entitled to equal rights and should suffer no discrimination in respect of his colour. It is indeed for this reason that the very stringent immigration legislation of Australia has been worded in such a way as not to infringe this principle.

We have, no doubt, to face the fact that this abstract doctrine set up by the central white Government of a multi-national Empire has been very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to apply literally owing to complex local conditions in certain territories. Leaving that aside for the moment, let us concentrate on the question of principle.

That question can be simply stated. It is as follows. Is the British Empire to be run on the basis of white supremacy? Does it represent a permanent supremacy of the white over the non-white races, based on the conception of the innate superiority of the white man and on the policy of ‘keeping the coloured man in his place’?

That indeed is a familiar and a very convenient theory, and one, be it added, which makes a particular appeal to white men of inferior calibre who like to feel that, whatever their individual defects, they belong to a superior type. But it is a theory for which there is no warrant either in science, or in religion, or in morals, or in any decent code of manners.

Scientific inquirers have been discussing the race problem for generations, and have devoted particular attention to it since Gobineau and other romantic writers popularized theories of the innate superiority of particular races. So far the results have been purely negative. Theory after theory of racial aristocracy has been shattered. In the immense complication of racial and environmental factors no equally definite positive results can be expected. It is sufficient to be able to say that science affords no warrant for the stigma of inferiority which it has been sought to cast upon the non-white peoples.

Those who popularize these notions of innate differences between races little realize what inflammable material they are handling. It is against human nature to expect such insults—for insults they are felt to be—to pass unredressed. If the innate inferiority of the coloured races were, which it is not, a scientific fact, it would be no occasion for the white man’s boasting. On the contrary, it would be a terrible tragedy. For it would compel the white man to live in a world the majority of whose inhabitants were stricken by an incurable infirmity. That would be a situation as tragic for the healthy as for the sick; for it would throw an intolerable strain upon the superior race. ‘The white man’s burden’ would become almost too heavy to be borne. Happily the truth is otherwise, and we are not compelled to apply mental reservations to our acceptance of the common fatherhood of God, as expressed in the Christian religion—and not in that religion alone.

For what, after all, is colour? John Locke defined it as a secondary quality. Throughout history, at any rate, pigmentation has been largely a question of fashion. There have been peoples and times in which other colours were more highly regarded than that which we name white. Othello may perhaps serve as an instance. It is a pure survival of barbarism to lay so much stress on a mere external symbol. In that, as in so many other respects, the ancient Greeks had a higher standard than we.

I am treading here, I know, upon delicate ground; for we cannot blind ourselves to the fact that large sections of what are popularly called the Anglo-Saxon peoples experience a special difficulty in dealing with this colour problem. We feel shy and embarrassed about it. This is not the place in which to probe into the reasons for this embarrassment, an inquiry which might indeed carry us very far afield. The fact remains that as a general rule we feel less easy in our relationship with peoples of other colours than do the French, the Italians, and, in general, those whom we call members of the Latin family. From embarrassment to rationalization is but a single step; hence the vogue of certain theories which are neither more nor less than a reaffirmation of the time-honoured arguments in favour of slavery.

There are two elements in our embarrassment which it is worth while disentangling. There is, firstly, what I would call our superiority complex. Because we find equal association with coloured people difficult for us, we take refuge in our imagined superiority and the dignity it brings with it. There are, of course, no grounds on which to base that superiority. There is no heaven-sent scale of values to which we can refer. Indeed, looked at from above, a Christian civilization which has allowed a century of unexampled material progress to culminate in a holocaust of war should be in no mood of self-congratulation! But our superiority complex, not being based on rational grounds, is proof against such considerations.

The second complex is that which every inquirer encounters after a few moments’ conversation with an average ‘Anglo-Saxon’ on this subject: ‘How would you like a coloured man to marry your sister?’ I call it the brother-in-law complex. It is so grotesquely beside the point as a comment on the actual matter at issue that it must be treated as a symptom rather than as an argument. In a discussion regarding the extension of the franchise or other rights to working men nobody would dream of interposing the question: ‘How would you like a working man to marry your sister?’ The other interrogatory is equally misplaced. The coloured peoples under the British flag are not asking to be loved by their white fellow citizens. They are not afflicted with a mania of watery cosmopolitanism. They are indeed often far less sentimental than those who resist their claims. They are only asking for certain ordinary commonplace political and social rights—for justice, for civil equality, for tolerance, and for courtesy.

The hidden embarrassments thus manifested cannot be overcome by legislative or any other form of public action. They belong to the domain of personal conduct. There let us leave them. But when they have been faced and overcome—as they must be in the interests of the health and harmony of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ themselves—the problem of the relation between the white and the non-white peoples of the British Empire will appear in its true proportions and will submit to scientific analysis.

What remains is a twofold problem. It has its educational side and its economic side. On its educational side it can be stated thus. How much of the West should the non-white peoples accept? To this I would add the corollary—how much should we accept from the non-white peoples? I have no time to go into the details of a fascinating problem. It is, of course, the central issue of Gandhi’s philosophy of the spinning wheel. It was raised many years ago in a singularly penetrating form in the famous letter of advice by Herbert Spencer to the Japanese people, warning them against excessive imitation of the West. And, in a very different domain, you can study it in the field of negro education in the United States and in British, French, and Belgian Tropical Africa.

The economic issue is perhaps even more difficult. It is the problem which has arisen through the fact that the white peoples exercise political control over nine-tenths of the habitable area of the globe. (I am, of course, including in that the control that Britain still exercises over India.) And that problem is itself greatly intensified by the fact that contact between the white and the non-white peoples has caused the break-up of the ancient economic systems which regulated the social life of the non-white peoples. This has been the inevitable result of the inrush of Western adventurers, Western commerce, and Western influences generally.

The result of this has been a social and economic revolution in the communities open to Western penetration. In past ages history teaches us that such revolutions have invariably led to serious social disorder and often to extensive migrations. You have only to recall what happened in ancient Greece when the primitive economy was replaced by money-standards. Those whom the change has uprooted from their ancient mode of life become an unstable and discontented element, and in this situation colonization is a convenient, often an inevitable, safety-valve.

In the present case the problem, difficult enough as it is, has been intensified by the very benevolence of the invading Westerners; for they have brought with them their medical science and thus, by waging war against dirt and disease, they have promoted vast increases of population. Thus the population of India, which is 320,000,000 to-day, was only about 200,000,000 in 1870. The same phenomenon on a smaller scale can be observed in Egypt, the inhabitants of which have increased under British rule from 8,000,000 to 13,000,000.

This is not the place in which to discuss this problem in all its bearings. I can do no more than draw your attention to the very interesting triangular combat that is being carried on in this country between three redoubtable protagonists. There is Mr. Lothrop Stoddard with his book on The Rising Tide of Colour. There is Professor Edward M. East of Harvard in his Mankind at the Cross-roads, who contests the doctrine of the rising tide of colour and declares that the white peoples will have a true majority, and not a mere plurality, over the non-whites by 1950, their rapid increase being due to the greater territory which they possess. He adds that in his belief, the world can only maintain three times the population it has at present, placing the maximum population that the world can conveniently hold at 5,200,000,000. That is what he terms the saturation-point, and he estimates that it will be reached in less than a century. Finally, the third party to this triangular combat, Professor Russell Smith, of this University, takes a far more optimistic view in his book on The Food Resources of the World. Here I must leave the problem, giving these references, which you can follow up for yourselves.

Let me make it perfectly clear that I am neither expressing nor implying any criticism whatsoever upon any existing immigration restrictions in the British Dominions, still less upon those of any other country. I never knew a community which voluntarily signed its own death warrant, and, taking things as they are in certain British Dominions, to break down the national immigration policy would be to invite a complete change in the form and nature of the national society.

Such changes have sometimes in the past been imposed by events. Such a change was imposed, for instance, on the old South by the North as a result of the Civil War. But it is not for any student of politics, and least of all for one who has not studied the problem on the spot, to transgress the famous maxim of Burke and to draw an indictment against the policy of a whole nation. All that I am pleading for here as a British policy is the frank discussion of the whole problem in a dispassionate spirit and in an atmosphere from which the two embarrassments that I have spoken of have been eliminated.

When that discussion takes place, it will probably be found that so far from there being one heaven-sent ‘solution’, there are many different ways in which the problem can be dealt with, both by white and by non-white governments. No one can say in advance what a scientific analysis of the problem will reveal. What is all-important is to create conditions in which such an analysis by the representatives of all the peoples affected can be undertaken and its results put into practical effect.

For the moment one sure line of advance lies in the strictest application of the principle of reciprocity accepted by the Imperial Conference of 1917. On this principle the governments of the several Dominions enjoy complete control over the composition of their populations, just as they enjoy complete control over the budget and taxation and over the issues of peace and war. But the price they pay for the right to impose discrimination against others is the obligation to accept it without complaint against themselves.

But something further is needed. The condition of the problem calls for some positive affirmation of the traditional British position as against the prevalent doctrine of the innate superiority of the white race. If we had an imperial constitution we could find a place for it there, as you have put similar general statements in your Declaration of Independence. But we have none. All that we have is what I have called our written constitution for foreign affairs, the Covenant of the League of Nations. You may remember that when that Covenant was being drafted, the Japanese delegation at Paris desired to insert a short phrase recognizing the principle of the equality of races in international society. They did not press for a special article, but were willing that the cherished phrase should be inserted merely in the preamble, where it could not have been invoked to press a claim on a matter of concrete policy. A vote was taken in the Commission on the Japanese amendment. It was carried by a majority, against the vote of the British delegation. The Chairman, President Wilson, thereupon stated that unanimity was required to effect the alteration and the motion was declared lost.

I look forward to the day, not, I hope, far distant, when the representative of India, acting on behalf of the British delegations, will reintroduce this Japanese proposal before the League of Nations Assembly. When the principle of racial equality—equality in international society and before the League of Nations—has been solemnly accepted by the representatives of fifty nations and inscribed in the world’s charter, the apologists of the new slavery, of whom the world is hearing too much, will be effectually silenced. At the same time, the greatest psychological obstacle in the way of the world’s peace will have been removed. Moreover, we of the British Commonwealth will have shown that we are prepared to stand by our profession that the Third Empire is a true Commonwealth of Nations. We would testify to all the world that our first and most pressing preoccupation is to devise a satisfactory adjustment, upon a basis of mutual self-respect, of all the difficult, delicate, complex, and far-reaching problems involved by the contact of races in the modern world. If we do not take up this task, no other power will dare to do so. The peace of the world depends upon the moral courage of Britain.

In the last lecture we began to consider the real ties that bind together the different communities of the British Empire. We found them in a common outlook on public affairs, a common philosophy and a common idealistic tradition. We saw also that the course before the empire to-day is plainly indicated. It is to maintain and justify that tradition by undertaking pioneer work in the new conditions that confront the world after the war and by dealing with the causes which, unless effective action is taken, will assuredly bring about another and even more disastrous conflict.

To-day we come to the second of those sources of difficulty, what I called the problem of commercial policy or the issue of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’.

It is often said that economic issues are the sole cause of war. There is a school of thought which views all history in the light of the economic process and regards the conflict between rich and poor—rich groups, rich classes, rich nations, and poor groups, poor classes, and poor nations—as a complete interpretation of the human record. I am not sure that I ever agreed with that philosophy, but I remember having it conclusively driven from my mind by reading, many more years ago than I like to remember, a little book called The Economic Interpretation of History written by our chairman of this evening, Professor Edwin R. A. Seligman.

But if economic causes do not afford the sole explanation of historical events, they are nevertheless extremely important: they have been the source of numerous conflicts of interest between peoples, and of a great many wars.

Of the three causes of war that we are considering in these three concluding lectures—race, commercial policy, and nationality—commercial policy is by far the most political in the narrow sense of the word. It requires far less insight and subtlety for its analysis: and it is not so difficult to find appropriate methods for its treatment. It is indeed a problem which insistently calls for organized effort. It will not yield to mere moral suasion or to a change of heart or a change of mind.

What is this problem of the international struggle between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’? The relationship between rich states and poor states simply reproduces on a larger scale the familiar problem between rich men and poor men, or a rich class and a poor class, within a single political community. And the broad solution is along the same lines. Just as we need social justice inside the community, so we need international social justice between the different states, rich and poor, of which the world is composed. And that social justice will realize itself exactly in the same way as justice inside any community—not by any general process of equal distribution, not by expecting a poor country to participate in the advantages conferred by climate or by superior natural resources upon a more fortunate neighbour, but by equality before the law, by equality of opportunity, by equality applied in the rules of international co-operation framed for the common life of the society of nations.

The problem before us then is to work out in the relations between states a régime based on justice and not simply on power, on the interdependence of states and not on cut-throat competition between states. It is a task of the same order as that which has led to the establishment of civil equality, of an equal measure of security and justice for the poor as for the rich, inside individual states.

But so soon as you begin to apply this conception to the relation between states you discover how backward we still are in respect of international social justice. It is not easy for us to realize, for instance, that powerful governments such as those of Great Britain and the United States have on this principle no justification for using, for the enforcement of their policies, any measures which are not equally open to weak governments such as those of Norway or Switzerland.

I will give you an example of what I mean. Not long ago I was talking to a Swiss banker. He told me that he was being kept very busy just then. I asked him why, and he informed me that one of the smaller states of Europe had decided to pay the interest on its bonds not in sterling, as it had done hitherto according to its engagement to its creditors, but in French francs, and that consequently the Swiss authorities and certain other governments (he mentioned several smaller countries) were acting together on behalf of the bond-holders.

‘What is our country doing?’ I asked him. ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘I understand that in your case a suggestion of naval action has had the desired result; a special exception has been made for the British citizens holding those bonds. No further diplomacy will be needed.’

That is a small instance, which may, moreover, not have been accurately reported to me. But it is suggestive, and, as I must hasten to add, parallel cases could be found in your own record. I merely cite it to bring out the fact that, in the world as it now is, international economic relations are still often associated with force and prestige rather than with impartial recognized rules of justice.

In previous lectures I have generally suggested a watchword for a policy before I have given you its details; there are two that I would put forward in this field. The first is economic disarmament—the applications to the economic sphere of the idea of military disarmament; and the second is international economic co-operation. If you abstain from setting your own special weapons in motion for your individual purposes you will naturally combine with others to use a common power for common ends.

Let us define the problem a little more strictly. We will have to go over it very quickly because there is material enough for a whole course of lectures. The problem is really twofold. It has what I would call a static aspect and a dynamic aspect. The conflict of interest that we find between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, between rich states and poor states, is based, firstly on unalterable facts, namely on the unequal and haphazard distribution of natural resources throughout the globe. Nature has been extremely capricious in the way in which she has distributed the world’s gold, silver, iron, copper, coal, oil, nitrates, and various other commodities of value, and disputes over these mineral deposits and over vegetable and other forms of wealth are as old as history and have led to innumerable wars.

The first recorded trade expedition which found its way to England came from Tyre or Carthage; and it braved the journey not because Britain was a beautiful island and the Britons an attractive people, but because there was tin in its south-western corner. Cornwall was the Mexico, the Mesopotamia, or any other happy hunting ground of concession hunters you please, of that primitive age.

The best way in which to survey the conflicts of interest in the modern world due to the distribution of its natural resources is simply to take an atlas of economic geography and to ponder over its pages. Just as before the war men used to study maps showing the distribution of nationalities in Central and Eastern Europe, so in this post-war age, when the causes of war are rather economic than narrowly political, such maps as those published by the United States Geological Survey provide a key to much of what you read in the newspapers.

That is what I would call the static side of the problem, but there is also the dynamic side. The ancient Greeks, or Egyptians, or Babylonians, when they conquered a gold deposit, simply annexed it and enjoyed it; they used it for personal adornment and in other visible ways. It did not enter into international relations, because trade was a small element in their lives. But to-day the world is dominated by forces set in motion by Western science and enterprise, and the result is that gold, tin, oil, and the rest are not simply things to be enjoyed, but things to be sold. They are the raw materials of manufacture. This has brought about what did not exist in olden times, an interdependence between centres of manufacture and centres of raw material, between the big manufacturing plants of Europe and America and other parts of the world, rich in natural resources but as yet not fully equipped with the means of transforming these natural resources into finished articles.

Through this interdependence each side has, as it were, given hostages to the other. Each has put itself in the position of being unable to continue its normal existence without the co-operation of the other.

You can realize this best if you study this dynamic problem, not in an atlas, but in a survey of the trade statistics of the world, paying especial attention to the volume and distribution of the foreign trade of the chief industrial countries. They will bring vividly before your mind the extent to which countries have become mutually interdependent by developing their industries.

Such peoples, by industrializing themselves, have placed themselves in dependence upon foreign powers—upon states over which their governments have no direct political control. Moreover, this dependence affects all those who are engaged in the industrial process. It affects employers and working men alike. Neither of them, either together or by any power they can separately exercise, have any constitutional means, in our existing international system, for ensuring the continuance of the indispensable relationship of interdependence. If the foreign state where the cotton, or copper, or oil is situated chooses to use its political power, it can declare an embargo and ruin such of its foreign customers as it wishes.

Previous to the Great War most modern peoples did not realize the extent to which they had given hostages to fortune—or, shall I say, hostages to normalcy—by the development of the industrial process and the vast increase of international trade. They assumed that trade would inevitably continue on the familiar lines; in Great Britain in particular, a continuance of these normal conditions and the maintenance of the pre-war economic equilibrium was the unspoken assumption behind the programme of all political parties.

The war revealed to us in a flash that there are political forces which cut across the economic process and make havoc of its delicate mechanism; and it has proved to us also that in these circumstances it is the rich hostage who suffers more than the poor hostage.

The result has been to bring about a condition of permanent economic insecurity, particularly in the manufacturing countries.

We have heard much talk of the insecurity of such countries as France or Poland owing to their populations being afraid of armed invasion. But this economic insecurity, due to the fact that the industrial countries do not control the sources of their own manufactures, is just as serious and is a cause of just as much anxiety. That is what is meant by saying that Peace is the greatest British interest. But it is also the greatest interest of every industrial country, the greatest Swiss interest, the greatest Dutch interest, the greatest Swedish interest. Thus the view sometimes expressed that capitalist society has an interest in making war is completely mistaken. It is true, of course, that there are always, in any society, certain elements which stand to benefit in their own particular interests by a war, provided they can keep such a war under their control and stop it at a certain point. I will give you an instance which by its very absurdity will serve to make my meaning clear. It is sometimes asked how my country will ever repay its debt to yours. Well, there is a perfectly simple way in which we could repay our debt very rapidly, and that is by provoking you into a war with another first-class power, and then selling you the munitions as you sold munitions to us. But if any government embarked on such a speculation, it would undoubtedly find that the process thus set in motion would outrun its reckoning. The result would assuredly not correspond with the calculation.

Under the pre-war political system states attempted in various ways to maintain their control over forces that they felt in an obscure way were vital to their own well-being. These attempts had one common characteristic; they proceeded on the basis of independent action rather than of international co-operation.

There was first an attempt to secure control over raw materials—the policy of ‘the place in the sun’. This involved the idea that every industrial country should have its own back garden, its own colonial area, and that in that colonial area it should find all the raw materials it needed in order to maintain its normal existence, so that each industrial country would be self-supporting and self-sufficient.

The resultant policy was never logically worked out. It was impossible that it should be, because the colonial prizes were very unequally divided. The largest fell to Great Britain and France; next in the distribution came Germany, Portugal, Holland, and Belgium. All these, with the exception of Germany, still hold colonial possessions, and are therefore sometimes described by envious writers as the capitalist powers, in contrast with the proletarian powers who have been less fortunate in their access to the natural resources of industry. Thus to-day there are three proletarian great powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan. In spite of their preponderant political position, these powers are in practically the same situation as smaller industrial countries like Sweden and Switzerland.

These proletarian powers are very acutely aware of their situation, far more so than the populations of the rich powers choose to remember. The Italians in particular have repeatedly drawn the attention of other peoples to the possible causes of war arising out of this unequal distribution of colonial territory. For instance, the Italian Premier, in the parliamentary speech in which he discussed the Geneva Protocol, made a very frank allusion to the subject.

Thus the first attempt to deal with this problem was through the policy of ‘every country its own place under the sun’—a policy that necessarily left most industrial countries in the shade.

The second method was by attempting to secure control over the markets in which the manufactured articles were sold. Some countries secured such markets in their own empires; others advocated and practised the policy of the open door. They adopted this policy not simply in the hope of being able to sell freely in colonial areas, but also in order to establish fair trading conditions in countries like China, which were not colonies but were nevertheless very important from the point of view of Western industrialism. The formula of the open door in that connexion did not mean that the country in question was free to open or close its own door; it meant that the door was to be kept open from the outside and kept open equally to all comers.

There has, even in recent years, been a suggestion to apply outside pressure to the doors of countries in Central and Eastern Europe so as to make the markets of these countries more accessible to the manufacturers of more highly developed countries. Mr. Keynes, for instance, in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, advocated a customs union in that area, heedless of the fact that the countries whose tariffs he proposed to abolish are independent sovereign states who have as much right to have a fiscal policy of their own as the British Dominions.

That policy, which would have excited the bitter opposition of all the countries concerned, was pursued a little less openly at the Genoa Conference of 1922. It inevitably broke down because the public opinion in the countries concerned placed a higher value on their independence than on such material inducements as could be held out to them.

The third method was that of securing control over the road between the raw material and the factory. Here we come to the great question of the economic significance of sea-power. I said last time that British sea-power had been exercised impartially and benevolently during the nineteenth century. We never employed it to promote our trade interests or to put impediments in the way of trade rivals. Nevertheless, we retained the power to do so, and the Germans in particular were aware of it. During the generation previous to 1914 they were haunted by the offensive possibilities of sea-power. Sea-power for countries that do not possess it signifies nothing less than a standing veto, in the hands of a foreign power, over their economic activities. The effect of the use of this veto is stupendous. A blockade or an embargo in the modern world is something like a medieval interdict. It involves a complete excommunication of a whole territory. No wonder that nations feel uneasy at being at the mercy of the great sea-powers, however liberal their policies and benevolent their intentions may be.

The resulting situation is well summed up in a passage in a recent book by a thoughtful English writer, Mr. J. H. Oldham (Christianity and the Race Problem, p. 208), in which he tries to make clear to his readers how the problem of British or American sea-power appears to the non-seagoing peoples. After citing the familiar argument that Britain is absolutely dependent upon supplies from overseas, even for the material of munitions in time of war, and that, without command of sea and air communications, she could only survive on such terms as more powerful nations might choose to dictate,

Thus far Mr. Oldham’s reasoning, which I confess it seems to be impossible to evade. If we really commit ourselves to the principles of equal justice and of equal opportunities for the weak and for the strong, we have to face this problem of sea-power and the exceptional advantages which it affords to certain states.

The result of this situation and of the rather haphazard exercise of these policies that I have enumerated has been twofold. It has intensified the competition between the strong and the weak; but it has also intensified the competition between the strong and the strong. That makes the problem much more urgent. It is not now simply a question of Switzerland versus Great Britain. Switzerland could go on complaining for a very long time without bringing about a general coalition of the weaker states. But the urgency of the problem lies in the fact that in the effort to become self-supporting the strong powers are coming into conflict with one another. It is these conflicts that tend to make war inevitable.

I will not enter into details; but you will remember that only five years ago there was a great deal of recrimination between your country and mine on the subject of oil. There was a dangerous situation due simply to the anxiety which we felt because we realized that we had not quite as much oil under the British flag or within assured reach of our shores as we needed in order to satisfy an old-fashioned sense of security.

You will find fuller details on this subject ably set forth in the writings of Mr. W. S. Culbertson, late vice-chairman of the United States Tariff Commission, who has gone into this problem more fully, more courageously, and with a greater wealth of expert knowledge than any other English-speaking writer on either side of the Atlantic.^[1]

I would also refer you to the United States Tariff Commission’s own report on Colonial Tariff Policies, which is a mine of information on the way in which the various colonizing powers have dealt with what I have called their back gardens.

The general conclusion at which Mr. Culbertson arrives is so grave that I will cite it in his own words.

To avert this conflict of economic policies and its inevitable upshot in war is, I consider, a primary responsibility of the peoples of the British Commonwealth. Together they are responsible for the largest, the richest, the most widespread, and the most powerful political and economic society in the world. They have colonies in every continent; they have naval stations in every ocean, and they have financial and commercial connexions in all parts of the globe. The chief responsibility is upon them. It is not for me to say whether there is any responsibility on you also.

Here again, just as in the question of race relations, our British tradition is progressive, idealistic, and international. In the nineteenth century we were pioneers in international economic policy. We adopted deliberately and in a deeply religious spirit—because it was a curious association of business and idealism—the policy which we believed was in the interest of mankind. We did pioneering work for the world. We did not do it as we are now asked to do it, with the world, because we are not accustomed to co-operate with other nations; but we did it for the world. We tried to make the world follow our example, and to some slight extent in the third quarter of the nineteenth century we succeeded.

I think we succeeded to a greater extent than most historians recognize. I doubt, for instance, whether the partition of Africa in the 1880’s would have been carried through without European complications had the situation at that time been what it was in 1914. In the 1880’s the free trade era was just passing, and the great conflicts of political interest over economic issues were still in their infancy. People were not yet thinking of economic policies in Darwinian terms.

The problem before the British peoples to-day is whether they are ready to adapt their idealistic tradition in commercial policy to the new situation which confronts us and to the new needs of the post-war world, or whether, on the other hand, just at the moment when the rest of the world is adopting methods of associated action, we will turn round and revert to the mercantilistic and monopolistic traditions of our first Empire, as to which you gave us so rude a lesson.

In this matter no compromise is possible. It is a definite choice that we have to make. There is no middle course between organizing a community in terms of peace and organizing it in terms of war. To attempt a middle course is merely to make yourself ridiculous. You might just as well half organize an army or half draw up a time table for a military movement. Either we are going to live the life of the Athenians or we are going to live the life of the Spartans and organize our whole economic system on a basis of perfect military security and perfect economic self-sufficiency. Or, to put it in terms of an earlier lecture, either we are going to believe in co-operative economic security, pooling our security economically as we are committed by the League of Nations to pooling it in the military and naval sphere—or we are thrown back on pursuing a completely independent policy, assuring security by our own unaided power, eked out by precarious bargains with this or that nation based on an opportunist calculation of mutual advantage.

Let us look, for a moment, at the traditions of our economic policy, and then we can see how we shall have to adapt it. It took some little time for us to digest the lesson you gave us at the end of the eighteenth century and to break with the old commercial system. But from 1850 to 1914 we practised an international economic policy based on the break-down of all barriers impeding free intercourse between traders of different nations. We believed that every nation ought to be allowed to produce that which it was best fitted to produce and to exchange its products freely in a sort of co-operative harmony—a harmony based not on a law or on intergovernmental relations, or on any kind of associated political action, but simply on the self-interest of the traders themselves. The fundamental conception of the Manchester school was that of an harmonious world in which everybody pursued his own interest and by so doing contributed to the interest of others.

These principles were crystallized in three policies which were, broadly speaking, the policies of Great Britain and the whole of our dependent Empire (I leave out the Dominions for the moment) during the period between 1850 and 1914. The first of those was free trade.

By free trade I mean something quite definite. I mean customs duties for revenue only. I do not mean no customs duties at all. We have always had customs duties in England, and we have customs duties in our dependent colonies; many of them derive a large part of their revenue from customs duties. But those customs duties were imposed strictly for revenue and not for any protective purpose.

Our second policy was the open door—that is to say, there was to be no discrimination between a national and a non-national trading in our Empire, either in respect to customs or in respect to shipping. We abolished the last vestiges of the Navigation Acts in the middle of the nineteenth century, and since then British ports have been open on equal terms to the shipping of the world, whether ocean or coastwise.

Our third policy was universal most-favoured-nation treatment—that is to say, not only no discrimination between a British subject and a foreigner, but no discrimination between one foreigner and another foreigner, or, as President Wilson put it in his third point, ‘equality of trade conditions’. One single rate, one single set of regulations, for everybody; no retaliation, no special bargains, no reciprocity, no preferences.

The result of those three policies was that we opened up vast areas of the earth’s surface in the nineteenth century for the benefit of mankind.

This suggests a question which I have often been asked in this country. ‘If you practise the universal open door,’ you will ask, ‘if you developed Egypt, India, and other areas for the benefit of American, Swedish, Swiss, and Spanish merchants on equal terms with yourselves, what value is the Empire to you? What economic advantage do you derive from it?’

That is a question often put by reactionary British journals when they seek to alter our policy. The best answer I can give you is to refer you to the very able treatment of this subject by a distinguished American writer, Mr. George Louis Beer, whose premature death has been an irreparable loss to the scholarly study of international affairs. You will find in his book on The English-Speaking Peoples a chapter on the economic problem, with a very careful discussion of the pros and cons, the assets and liabilities of British rule.^[2] He points out that undoubtedly, although we drew no direct advantages either in tribute or trade preference from India or our Crown Colonies, nevertheless there have been certain indirect advantages through Government contracts, through the fact that English is the prevailing language, and in other ways. He shows, however, that there is another side to that—that we have certain liabilities, expenditures, and anxieties; and he concludes that ‘it is by no means clear that the economic advantage gained counterbalances the assumption of the added responsibilities and concomitant expenses of administration and protection’. He supports his argument by some very interesting figures which indicate that although British rule has led to a great increase of the total volume of trade in the dependent Empire, nevertheless, the increase in British trade has not been greater than that in non-British trade. In Egypt the proportion of British to non-British trade declined from 57 per cent. before the British occupation to 37 per cent. in 1913. In other words, we have benefited our own industries by opening up these countries and persuading the people to buy our products; but we have also provided equal benefits to manufacturers and traders of other lands.

I must add a few words on this subject about the Dominions. The economic relations between Great Britain and the Dominions are wholly different from those between Great Britain and the dependent Empire, because the Dominions are masters of their own fiscal policy while the dependent Empire is not. The Dominions have undoubtedly given us certain trade advantages. They have given us a certain preference in their tariffs. It is true that they have put the interests of their own manufacturers first, but they have pulled some bricks out of the wall for our benefit.

That is a departure in our favour from the traditional policy of Great Britain, the policy of universal most-favoured-nation treatment that I have just described. On the other hand it must be remembered that if they have given us something we have also given them a great deal, both in respect of defence and in another respect, which is often overlooked. I refer to cheap money. By the Colonial Stock Act passed in 1900 through the instrumentality of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, we listed Colonial Government loans as trustee stock on the British market, and thus stimulated their sale in competition with ordinary British gilt-edged stock. The result of that is that a country like Southern Rhodesia, which, if it were outside the Empire, might find it difficult to borrow at easy rates, can raise money in London at 5 per cent., while a country like Czecho-Slovakia, which is in a far more advanced stage of economic development and has been wisely and prudently governed, has to pay 8 per cent.

One further word on this topic. It follows, I think, from what I have said in my earlier lecture about the development of Dominion self-government, that the most satisfactory way of regulating trade relations between Great Britain and the Dominions is not through informal conferences but through regular commercial treaties. At present a great deal of confusion and heart-burning is caused by our habit of spontaneously making gifts to one another, the spontaneous gift being really dependent on an unwritten understanding that the other party is contemplating an equally spontaneous gift. Sometimes these spontaneities are interfered with by political changes and general elections, and then the result is unsatisfactory. If these matters were regulated by treaty, if Canada negotiated with Britain in exactly the same way as Portugal negotiates with Norway, it would be a great improvement. There is nothing disruptive in taking these matters out of a sentimental atmosphere in which they are not at home and transferring them to a business atmosphere. As between individual Dominions themselves this method is already being adopted. The recent Trade Agreement negotiated between Canada and Australia is an instance in point.

So far I have been describing our pre-war economic arrangements. The war brought about revolutionary changes in the whole situation. It revealed in a flash the significance of economic power and of sea-power, the importance of securing access to raw materials, and the overwhelming compulsion of blockade. It is sufficient to recall a single phrase once used by Lord Curzon about only one of the material factors involved: ‘The allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.’ The result was that we all began to study the economic conditions of security. We began to do so during the war at a time when defeatists in high places were contemplating the necessity of waging an economic war after the other war had ended in a stalemate. It was in this state of mind that the famous Paris Resolutions of 1916 were drawn up. They looked forward to the division of the world into two camps, each organized on a basis of self-sufficiency—or rather, the Allies were to organize for their own self-sufficiency, and the others were to continue in prison.

The Paris Resolutions were inoperative because they were only to come into force in the event of an Allied failure. But they had a considerable effect on British public opinion, and as a result the British Imperial Conference of 1917 committed itself to a policy of economic self-sufficiency. The following are the terms of the resolution in question:

What is contemplated here, as you see, is a regular policy of Imperial preference, extending even to the non-self-governing part of the Empire, with the object of achieving economic security or the greatest possible measure of it.

As is evident from the wording, the resolution was not clearly thought out. It embodied both an Imperial policy and an inter-allied policy, the Allies being put in as a side-issue in a subsidiary clause. Had it really been the object of the framers of the resolution that Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and others should be associated in one comprehensive economic system, the wording would have been very different. It was the Imperial side of the policy which was foremost in the minds of its framers, and it is this which has since been developed.

Imperial self-sufficiency is not a practical policy. As I explained in the first lecture, the Dominions cherish and will assuredly not surrender their independence in matters of fiscal and economic policy. But even if they were willing to enter into a complete imperial combination, a programme of self-sufficiency would still remain nothing more than a mirage. The facts on this matter will be found summarized in the Final Report of the Dominions Royal Commission issued in 1917. It shows that there is hardly one really important commodity in regard to which self-sufficiency is attainable. We have, it is true, over 60 per cent. of the world’s gold and some 45 per cent. of its wool; but, as against that, how much can we muster of the world’s copper or cotton? And what of oil or nitrates, or flax or silk? We are as dependent on others for these as you in the United States are for tin and rubber.

But the policy of Imperial self-sufficiency is not only impracticable: it is also very reactionary. It involves the staking out of a vast economic empire, or, to use President Wilson’s phrase—a ‘selfish economic league’—compared with which the Berlin-Bagdad scheme of the Germans would be a plaything. And it would be an economic empire in which the several parts would be subordinated in their development to the political needs of the whole, and undoubtedly also to the needs of the predominant partner. Everybody knows that the Berlin-Bagdad plan did not involve an equal relationship between Germany and Turkey or Germany and Bulgaria. The Bulgars and the Turks were to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the German capitalists and working men. So it would be in any similar policy worked out between Great Britain and the less industrialized communities of the Commonwealth.

Moreover, it follows, from what have hitherto been the accepted principles of the Commonwealth, that the nickel of Canada belongs to Canada, the wool of Australia to Australia, and the palm oil of Nigeria to Nigeria, either to be freely administered by their inhabitants or, if, as in the case of Nigeria, they cannot yet administer their resources for themselves, to be administered on their behalf.

This ill-conceived new programme on Berlin-Bagdad lines has already resulted in the reversal of our traditional British policy in three directions.

Firstly, we have introduced into our British budget preferential rates on products not only from the self-governing Dominions, but also from the dependent Empire. Tea from Ceylon, for instance, comes in cheaper than Chinese tea, and sugar from Mauritius than American sugar. This is a reversion to eighteenth-century policy. It may be said in extenuation that our list of dutiable articles is very small and that all parties in Great Britain have pledged themselves not to enlarge the existing list of duties on foodstuffs. Nevertheless the principle involved is of vital importance.

Secondly, we have reintroduced preferential duties in our Crown Colonies. That is to say, we have abandoned in principle the policy of the open door in the dependent Empire. Since 1919, in particular, numerous differential import and export duties have been imposed. Little attention has been paid to this matter except by those whose trade interests are directly affected by it—a class not unrepresented in this country. Its broader implications seem to have generally passed unnoticed. That the policy has not been adopted in a fit of absence of mind is, however, clear from a statement made by the Governor of Jamaica, who must have been expounding the policy of the home authorities. That personage declared in 1920, in an official address, that the ‘Imperial principle is that you should not be obliged to impose any duties except those which suit the local interests of the colony, but that where duties are imposed preference should be given to goods of Imperial origin’.

The concluding words in this statement, if logically applied, involve an abandonment of the open-door policy consistently followed in the dependent Empire since 1850. It is certain that the British people have never sanctioned this radical departure from a sound tradition, and it is almost equally certain that they would not do so if the issue were squarely laid before them. The fact remains, however, that twenty-four colonies, most of them indeed of minor importance, have adopted differential import and export duties and that between 5 and 6 per cent. of the total trade of the Crown Colonies and India has been affected by it.

More important are the differential export duties; these include duties on tin from the Malay states and from Nigeria. A differential duty on hides and skins was imposed by the Indian Government but was subsequently repealed.^[3]

Thirdly there is the policy of direct Government investment in the provision of certain raw materials and essential services. The first instance of this socialistic procedure was the purchase by the British Government of the Khedive of Egypt’s shares in the Suez Canal Company. We considered the canal to be performing an essential service in the maintenance of British ocean communications. Let me add, however, that the political status of the canal is not affected by the ownership of the shares, but is regulated by a special international convention. Another instance of the same order was the purchase in 1914 by the British Government of the controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, whose deposits are within easy reach of the Persian Gulf. An attempt to make a somewhat similar arrangement for the Mosul oil fields, with France as a joint partner, which was projected at the San Remo conference in 1921, was defeated by the defenders of the open door. There have been one or two other recent instances of direct Government investment, notably in the development of cotton-growing within the Empire.^[4]

All these expedients and a few more that could be mentioned, such as the subsidies given to so-called key-industries, are not in themselves of much consequence. They represent a timid and ill-thought-out attempt to attain security by means of economic self-sufficiency. But the means adopted are so grotesquely out of proportion to the end proposed that the absurdity of the policy must soon become evident. For the people of Great Britain will never face the logic of a real policy of self-sufficiency with its Spartan consequences. It is only a question of time before the present tide is reversed and the current sets in the opposite direction.

The true policy for the British Commonwealth is the policy of international economic co-operation.

What does that mean in the concrete? It does not mean free trade. Free trade is a purely domestic question. The fact that free trade is generally regarded as a wise policy for the island of Great Britain has no bearing whatsoever on imperial policy, still less on the policy of Canada or of India. Free Trade versus Protection is an issue to be decided according to the needs and problems of each particular community. As Protectionism happens to be the prevalent creed in the self-governing communities of the Commonwealth, it will not be surprising if the British Empire, as its Dominions increase in number, includes an increasing contingent of protectionist units. Some day fashion may change and people may consider King David the shepherd to be a higher specimen of humanity than the manufacturer and the factory mechanic. If so, protectionist policies may pass away; but at present the tendencies in this direction, though they undoubtedly exist, have not yet strongly asserted themselves.

The line of advance, then, is not through concentration on Free Trade or the mere removal of economic barriers. What is needed is concerted action to work out a programme of economic disarmament in the many fields which economic militarism has invaded. The natural method is a World Economic Conference based on the commercial policy agreed upon by the members of the League in the Covenant. Article XXIII (e) of the Covenant binds the members to ‘make provision to secure and maintain freedom of communication and of transit and equitable treatment for the commerce of all members of the League’. Such a policy cannot, of course, be reconciled with that of economic self-sufficiency, and a League Conference must necessarily crystallize opposition against policies which have hitherto passed unchallenged simply because they have never been considered in their broader bearings.

Such a Conference was decided on by the League Assembly in September 1925 and, after careful preparation, it finally met in May 1927. Fifty countries were represented, including non-members of the League such as the United States, the U.S.S.R., Turkey, and Egypt, as well as various important international organizations, and the work was divided between three Committees, dealing respectively with Trade, Industry, and Agriculture. This is not the place in which to review in detail the work of the Conference.^[5] One important result, as suggested in the final resolution, should be the strengthening of the permanent economic organization of the League by widening the basis of its membership and increasing its authority and independence. What is needed, here as in the other sphere of disarmament, is a permanent body continuously reviewing the field and applying an international criterion to problems as they come before it. ‘No task is more urgent or more vital’, as the Report of the Conference observes, ‘than that of securing agreement on certain principles of policy which are necessary in the interests of future peace. And there is perhaps no question which, in comparison with its intrinsic importance, has had so little careful and collective deliberation.’ It is, in fact, an immense task to work out the principles and practice of fair dealing between nations, based on the conception of international social justice.

It is significant that the Resolution pledging the Conference to this policy was moved by a member of the British delegation. It is a task in which Britain is specially called to take a leading role, not only because ‘Peace is the greatest British interest’, but because we are, by tradition, the pioneers in commercial and industrial relationships. We were the first to see the possibilities of the great industrial revolution a hundred and fifty years ago. We should be the first also in this post-war era to see the possibilities of international economic co-operation, which involves nothing less than a change of outlook in the whole management of the public affairs of the world.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE IV

I. Extract from the Report of the United States Tariff Commission on Colonial Tariff Policies, Washington, 1922, pp. 38, 36, and 370. Revised up to June 1927.

Between 1860 and 1919 Great Britain maintained the Open Door in India and in the Crown Colonies generally, with either Free Trade or low tariffs for revenue only. In this period no British dependent colony had a general system of preferential rates;^[1] but ten of the West Indian tariff schedules already contained preferential rates upon a fairly extensive but by no means complete list of Canadian and British goods.^[2] Previous to 1919 there was also a preferential export duty upon tin ore exported from the Federated Malay States. Beginning with September 1919, the British market has given a special preference to colonial imports, and this may be described as a general system of preference, since it extends to all of the articles dutiable under the British tariff. But it must be noted that the British tariff before the war was limited to sugar, cocoa, coffee, tea, tobacco, liquors, dried fruit, gasoline, and a few lesser items, and that only a few manufactured articles were added during the war. The British Government accepted this preferential principle as applicable to the whole Empire, and during 1919-27 there has been a considerable extension of differential tariffs in the dependent colonies and India. In these years complete preferential import schedules have been adopted or extended by all the tariff divisions of the West Indies, and the amount of the preferentials has been increased; a complete system of preferences has been introduced in Cyprus, Fiji, and Mauritius; a differential export duty has been imposed upon tin ore exported from Nigeria, and a preferential duty on imported steel has been imposed in India (1927).^[3] There are thus, in addition to the self-governing Dominions and the possessions dependent upon or intimately associated with them, 24 tariff jurisdictions among the British Crown colonies, including India, which now have more or less extensive differential duties—20 (India,^[4] Cyprus, Fiji, Mauritius, and 16 in the West Indies) have more or less complete schedules of differential import duties, and 4 Federated Malay States have differential export duties upon not more than two articles each. But, since only about five per cent.^[5] of the total trade of the British Crown Colonies and India is affected by these differential duties, the open door is still the policy prevailing in the dependencies of Great Britain. . . . While the differential duties at present are so few, in so vast an Empire and one that controls the major part of the world’s supplies of so many articles, the reintroduction, on however limited a scale, of the old mercantilist principle of the reservation of colonial products to the Mother Country must cause serious concern to the rest of the world.

II. Extracts from the Final Report of the World Economic Conference, Geneva, 1927.

Economic Tendencies affecting the Peace of the World.

The Conference:

Recognizing that the maintenance of world peace depends largely upon the principles on which the economic policies of nations are framed and executed:

Recommends that the Governments and peoples of the countries here represented should together give continuous attention to this aspect of the economic problem, and looks forward to the establishment of recognized principles designed to eliminate those economic difficulties which cause friction and misunderstanding in a world which has everything to gain from peaceful and harmonious progress.

Commercial Policy and Treaties.

The main conclusion to be drawn from the work of the Conference in the field of commercial policy is that the time has come to put a stop to the growth of Customs tariffs, and to reverse the direction of the movement by an effort made along three lines, viz.:

With the question of import duties is bound up the question of the fiscal burdens which are sometimes imposed in addition, and which, in the Conference’s opinion, should not aim at providing disguised protection for national production.

In a similar connexion, the Conference is anxious that the free circulation of raw materials and articles of consumption should not be unduly hindered by export duties, and that such duties, whether levied to meet fiscal needs or exceptional or compelling circumstances, should not discriminate between different foreign countries.

Lastly, commercial treaties should contain the unconditional most-favoured-nation clause in its broadest and most liberal form, and the League of Nations is recommended to consider the possibility of establishing clear and uniform principles in regard to that clause and introducing common rules relating to commercial treaties. . . .

In enumerating the causes and ideas which are responsible for the super-protectionism of post-war years, the International Economic Conference does not attempt to pass judgement on the fundamental principles of protection and free trade respectively.

In contrast to ideas which have led nations into a situation which is equally harmful to their own economic life and to their international economic relations, it remains to set out the considerations which demand a return to a general policy of freer international commerce.

It is too often overlooked that the attempt to stimulate artificially industries which would not otherwise flourish in a country may check the development of those activities for which it is most naturally suited. Nations may determine, for political or other reasons, that it is essential to their safety to develop increased self-sufficiency, but it is appropriate for the Conference to point out that this has in most cases involved a sacrifice of material prosperity. In such cases, the loss is borne by consumers, who have to pay more for the products of the protected industry, and by those engaged in the industries that would otherwise have a larger possibility of export. . . .

The Conference recognizes that the removal or substantial reduction of Customs barriers cannot be brought about suddenly without causing dislocation, but it is of opinion that Governments should immediately prepare plans for removing or diminishing by successive stages those barriers that gravely hamper trade, starting with those duties which have been imposed to counteract the effect of disturbances that are now past.

The Conference believes that, if the true results of the present system now prevalent in Europe were understood by public opinion, it would be possible for Governments to commence this process forthwith.

It is, however, clear that the process will be hastened if it can be carried out as a result of concerted action among States.

This is why the Conference is of opinion that it should make provision in its resolutions, not merely for the encouragement of bilateral agreements as nearly as possible in keeping with its doctrines, but also for the methodical examination, by the Economic Organization of the League of Nations, of common measures which might be adopted, in the matter of tariffs, by States Members of the League and by States non-members, and also of the mutual agreements at which these States might arrive.

To-day we reach the last of the three issues which it falls, as I believe, to the British Empire to take up in its pioneering work in dealing with the causes of war. We come to the problem of nationality, or what I call the issue between the cultured and the uncultured. On the surface this would hardly seem to be a cause of war; but when you think it out and have discovered its ramifications you will realize that it is probably a more insidious and deep-seated cause of discord and antagonism than either of the other two. Indeed it is often the hidden cause of difficulties commonly expressed in other terms, just as the discontent of working men is often expressed in a desire for more wages when in reality much more deep-seated issues are involved.

The problem of nationality is a problem of education rather than of politics, but the two spheres overlap, and it is impossible to pass it over in any discussion of the British Empire.

The British Empire is now known as a Commonwealth of Nations. What is meant by that phrase? What is meant by the term ‘Nation’? What, in fact, is nationality? A moment’s reflection on that question brings to light a striking contrast. On the one hand there is the British Commonwealth which has gathered under one system of government a considerable proportion of the inhabitants of the globe; on the other there is the continent of Europe, consisting of a congeries of independent nations—states inhabited by separate nations. This contrast is further emphasized by the official nomenclature. ‘The British Commonwealth’ like ‘The United States of America’ is a non-national designation. ‘France’, ‘Italy’, ‘Spain’, ‘Poland’, ‘Greece’, ‘Bulgaria’, on the other hand, are terms of nationality employed to describe political entities.

Is this difference between the map of the British Commonwealth with its one colour and the map of Europe with its many colours due to the backwardness of the British Empire? Are the nations in the British Commonwealth merely in an arrested stage of their development towards becoming full sovereign states? Or, on the other hand, is their political association in one commonwealth a more advanced relationship than the system of watertight compartments in which the various European nations have enclosed themselves?

For my part, I believe that in this matter also the British peoples have done pioneering work. I believe that the map of the British Commonwealth indicates a more satisfactory relationship between nations than the map of Europe.

Let us consider for a moment the common European doctrine of nationality. According to that doctrine every nation is or should be an independent state, and every state should comprise a single nation; in other words, the nation and the state are naturally coterminous and the nation-state which results from this association forms a fixed and homogeneous cultural and political unit. Thus when you meet a citizen of a European State you expect to find him hallmarked, as it were, with the cultural and mental attitudes of the nation whose name the state bears. He is not only, let us say, a loyal Bulgarian citizen; he also has a Bulgarian mind and is steeped in the Bulgarian tradition.

This political conception of nationality is of comparatively recent origin. You will not find it in the Middle Ages, when men were perfectly familiar with the spectacle of many nationalities owing a single political allegiance. Medieval political theory, whether it favoured the temporal supremacy of the Empire or the spiritual supremacy of the Papacy, was based on the conception of a political authority superior to the individual nation. Nor will you find it in the eighteenth century in the minds of the cosmopolitan philosophers of that age of enlightenment.

The nation-state doctrine dates in fact from the French Revolution, and its rise is not difficult to explain. It came about through the supersession of the supremacy of the sovereign king by that of the sovereign nation. The doctrine of the ancient régime was l’État c’est moi. The French Revolution replaced it by l’État c’est nous. ‘We, the French nation, are the French state.’

In this way, the movement for political freedom, for the sweeping away of the abuses of despotism, coincided in France with the awakening of a national self-consciousness. And in this double form the movement spread to other European countries. Hence, the free institutions which the French and other peoples made for themselves as a result of the French Revolution were thought of as being national institutions.

It was owing to this close association between two essentially separate movements that the Declaration of the Rights of Man had so different an effect upon the map of Europe from that of the Declaration of Independence upon the map of North America. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was not a national document; it was a universal document. It was not a declaration of the rights of Frenchmen; it was a declaration of the rights of men. Nevertheless, owing to the fact that it awakened the slumbering self-consciousness of the French nation and then, through the natural infection of ideas, awakened similar sentiments in other countries, it gave rise to a powerful movement of political nationalism which in the course of the nineteenth century spread over the whole continent of Europe.

One is tempted to ask what would have happened in North America if the great movement of immigration from Europe, which came after Europe had become infected with the idea of political nationalism, had come to this country before your own political ideas had been so securely established, before you had become so firmly attached to your constitution and to your conception of the United States. One can easily conceive of movements for establishing separate national states for separate national groups of immigrants which would have reproduced on the American scene the intellectual confusion and consequent political difficulties with which nineteenth-century Europe had to contend. Fortunately for you and for the world, this prospect was averted by the farsightedness of those who planned your federal institutions.

Meanwhile, in the old world the doctrine of political nationalism transformed the map of Europe into a mosaic of so-called nation-states. It changed the Holy Roman Empire, which was international, into a German national state. It changed the United Netherlands into Holland and Belgium. It changed the Balkan Peninsula, as that area was released from the Turks, not into a single Christian state but into a number of separate nation-states.

Political nationalism was the accepted doctrine of the European liberal movement during the nineteenth century. It was set forth notably by Mazzini in Italy and by John Stuart Mill in Great Britain, and it was re-echoed in many different forms by writers and statesmen in other countries. There was only one liberal writer that I know of who opposed it—Lord Acton. If you read Lord Acton’s ‘Essay on Nationality’, written in 1862, and published in his History of Freedom, and Other Essays, you will find a very clear statement of the criticism that I am making to-day. He made it at the time when the doctrine of the nation-state was at its zenith. To-day it is in its decline because it does not fit the facts. It is unsound in theory and unworkable in practice.

Why is it unsound in theory? Because it is incompatible with justice, which is the basis of all sound political life.

The moment you say that the Bulgarian state belongs to the Bulgarians you immediately reduce the non-Bulgarians who happen to live in that area to a position of inferiority. They cease to be citizens in their own right and become resident aliens. Such a situation is incompatible with equal justice between all persons within any given community. It raises, of course, many other practical difficulties at the same time.

Moreover, an analysis of the facts reveals that there is no such thing in the modern world as a homogeneous national state. Trade, travel, migration, intercourse of all kinds, are of the very texture of modern life, so that however much you may try to keep your state national, it will always have a fringe of resident aliens and migrants.

Furthermore, you have only to look at an atlas of Europe and to compare the language map with the political map to realize that practically every European state is multi-national—that is to say, it has considerable groups of persons within its borders who do not belong culturally to the nation which gives the state its name.

Spain has its Basques and its Catalans; France its Bretons and its Alsatians; Belgium its Flemings and its Walloons; Denmark its group of Germans; Norway its Lapps; Italy has its Germans and Slovenes; Switzerland has its three nationalities. When you go farther east you find Poland with a very large percentage of non-Poles, and there are similar conditions in Czecho-Slovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, the Baltic States, and so on. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the point with regard to that part of Europe.

The situation in this matter was set forth once and for all in an historic address delivered by Professor (now President) Masaryk in the University of London in 1915 on ‘The Place of Small Nations in the European System’. Looking forward thus early in the war to the break-up of the despotic empires, he pointed out that the doctrine of the nation-state would prove inadequate as a basis for practical reconstruction and that some kind of federal arrangement would have to be devised.

Unfortunately, neither the peoples nor the statesmen of Europe proved as wise or as well informed as the President of Czecho-Slovakia, and the survival of this unsound theory of the nation-state has immensely complicated the task of post-war European statesmanship. It has made it much harder for the cultural minorities to feel themselves full members of the state of which they are citizens, bound by as strong a tie of obligation as their fellow citizens who speak the language after which the state is called. But the President has at least now convinced the majority of his own countrymen, and the collaboration of Czechs, Slovaks, and Germans in a common Cabinet has now definitely aligned Czecho-Slovakia with Switzerland as an example of a freer and happier conception of community-life than that of the nation-state.^[1]

The theory of the nation-state is unsound, I repeat, because it is based on a confusion of thought, a confusion between government and nationality, between free institutions and national institutions.

It is a perfectly simple distinction. Nevertheless, it is one which people seem to find extremely difficult to grasp. Let me try to make it clearer by one or two illustrations. The British House of Commons is an example of a free institution; but when Scotsmen meet together for a St. Andrews Day dinner they are engaged in celebrating a national institution. Similarly, the Czecho-Slovak Parliament is an example of a free institution. But when you pass from that to the German Opera House in Prague, you enter a national institution.

You will see that free institutions are the condition of national institutions. The Opera House would not be allowed except in a free state, a state which cherished liberty and nationality and practised tolerance. But the two planes are quite distinct.

Justice and Liberty, the supreme political goods, are not the same thing as personality. They are merely the conditions which permit you and me to develop our personalities. Personality and nationality on the other hand are simply two forms of the same thing, because we cannot express ourselves without also expressing something of the national group to which we belong.

So much for the European situation, for that map of Europe which I think represents a backward stage of the relationship between peoples.

The British Commonwealth, both inside and outside Europe, both in the island of Great Britain and in its overseas dominions, has avoided this vicious confusion. So far from associating and confusing government with nationality it has recognized that the whole art of government consists in bringing different kinds of people, different nations, different groups, different religions, different cultures, under a single law, under what we call the ‘Pax Britannica’, under an international system—I stress the ‘inter’—of justice. And we have realized, I think, that to attempt to shut up the different nationalities under the British flag into separate pens is simply to shirk the problem and to heap up difficulties for the future. It was on this principle that in the Act of 1867 French Canada and British Canada were included in a single confederation, and a similar policy has been applied throughout our development.

It is exemplified, firstly, by Great Britain itself, by the union of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ulster under a single government. It is exemplified even more strikingly by the fact that out of our five dominions no less than three, Canada, South Africa, and the Irish Free State, are officially bilingual.

When we survey the development of nationality and of nationality policies in the British Empire we shall find that although the development has begun, as I think, on sound lines, it has not yet run its full course. There is still pioneering work to be done in this realm. We have a further advance to make in order to exhibit to the rest of the world what equal association between nations really means.

In studying the process of the development of nationality in the British Empire, we must sharply distinguish it from the story of constitutional development with which we were concerned in the first lecture. The order and grouping of what I then called the procession are here quite different from those which we observe in connexion with constitutional development. It is in fact a misnomer to speak of a procession in this connexion. The whole situation is of a different order. A Dominion is not the same thing as a nation. A Dominion is a political entity. Its citizens are a body of people who, having become conscious of their political rights, demand a fuller expression of them in their institutions. This demand has led to the political and constitutional problem which we have examined—the problem of how at once to preserve the unity of the Empire and to maintain an adequate degree of independence for the different political communities or dominions of which it is composed. The problem, as you see, is purely political.

The question of nationality raises a spiritual problem, or, if you like, a cultural problem. It is thus in a wholly different realm. It is perfectly possible for a group to be at once politically self-governing and culturally immature and even dependent. I have not been in New Zealand, but I fancy that that is to some extent the situation there. New Zealand is a Dominion enjoying exactly the same rights as Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the Irish Free State. But culturally, as I have been told, it is in many ways more dependent upon England than the other Dominions.

On the other hand, it is possible for a community under the British flag to be politically dependent and culturally independent. Such no doubt is the case in India; such, to a certain extent, is the case in Scotland and Wales, which are politically united with England but maintain a very strong intellectual and spiritual life of their own.

The two problems are thus entirely distinct. And, what is more, they require a different quality of mind in the statesmen who deal with them. This is strikingly shown by the fact that some of those whose statesmanship has been the wisest and most far-sighted on the political plane, have been completely blind to the bearings of nationality, and have given quite wrong-headed advice on the subject.

Take for instance the great statesman to whom, more than to any other single man, we owe the constitutional evolution of the British Empire, Lord Durham. Lord Durham was magnificently right when he said that the political development of Canada demanded that we should grant Canada full responsible government. But if you turn to the passages in his Report which deal with French Canada, you will see that he had no conception at all of the problem of nationality. He believed that in a few generations, by the ordinary process of commerce and intercourse, the French language would disappear, French culture would disintegrate, and the French population would be assimilated into the English-speaking population; in other words, he believed that settlers whose ancestors had come from Brittany, Touraine, and Poitou would in a generation or two become just like those whose ancestors came from England, Scotland, Ulster, and the south of Ireland. He saw the future of British North America as British in the narrower sense of the word. Nobody would be more surprised than Lord Durham were he to come back to life and find that the sixty thousand French-Canadians of 1760 had grown to nearly three millions, and were as firmly attached to their national institutions as they were in his own day.

Another instance of a great liberal statesman who had no sense of the problem of nationality is that of Lord Macaulay. When Macaulay was faced with the problem of the cultural development of India, he wrote the famous Minute in which he advocated that Sanskrit and Arabic, the learned languages of India, should be superseded by English because the culture of India was bound in time to become English. He did not indeed attempt to sweep away the vernacular languages spoken by the mass of the people, but he thought that as Indians became more educated they would naturally become more English.

An account of the Macaulay policy is to be found in a document which has had a great deal of influence in reversing it, the Report of Sir Michael Sadler and his colleagues on the University of Calcutta. It is a very long and detailed report, but in its pages, especially in the first volume, you will find a deeply pondered affirmation of the educational value of nationality and a complete refutation of Macaulay’s idea that Indians would become more civilized if they lost contact with their own roots.^[2]

You find exactly the same blind spot among a certain school of Russian statesmen, the Russian Constitutional Democrats, who were liberals of the same type as Macaulay and Lord Durham.

I will give you two other examples, those of two well-known English writers, one of whom was also a statesman. Some two generations ago, Sir John Seeley and Sir Charles Dilke wrote two books which exercised a great influence on our thought with regard to the British Empire. Seeley called his book The Expansion of England, and Dilke called his book Greater Britain. Both titles, if you think them out, embody a reactionary philosophy. Let me cite one last example. The Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, who reigned at the end of the eighteenth century, was one of the most enlightened monarchs who ever sat on a throne; but he did not understand the nationality problem, and therefore, in spite of all his industry and good intentions, he failed to transform the Hapsburg monarchy into a commonwealth of nations.

The central fact about the British treatment of this problem is that the British Empire is not, and has never been thought of as, an English Empire. Nobody ever speaks of the English Empire. Ask yourselves why. Well, I think the first reason why there has never been an English Empire is Scotland. Any attempts that were made in the direction of English supremacy, English cultural imperialism, were early broken on the granite rock of Scottish nationality. Scottish nationality, both in its persistence and in its quality, is one of the marvels of the modern world; and it is all the more remarkable and all the more effective because it flourishes without what almost every other nation regards as an indispensable condition for the survival of nationality—I mean a language. Scottish nationality is like one of those drinks which are all the stronger because they look exactly like water. When you meet a Scotsman he talks English; you take him for an Englishman until all at once you encounter his Scottish mind and Scottish personality. That is a much better way of encountering a nationality, a much more spiritual way, if I may say so, than through any kind of external distinction, or even through a separate language, which is in itself something a little closer to the material world than the thought which it exists to express.

With Wales and Ireland, on the other hand, on which I must make a brief digression, our relationship has been less happy. There the recognition of nationality by England was long delayed, no doubt partly because the resistance was not so firm. Even within living memory, children were punished in primary schools in Wales for speaking Welsh. Welsh was the language of the home and the chapel, and not the language of the school. Even to-day the provision of Welsh in the schools is very meagre compared with what would be thought adequate for national groups in Eastern Europe, although it is all that the majority of the Welsh people themselves demand.

I emphasize the problem of Wales rather than the problem of Ireland because it is a purely cultural problem without any political admixture. There is no demand in Wales for dominion status; to make Wales a Dominion would be an absurdity, and yet the problem of nationality on its cultural side, the problem of an inner disharmony between two nations living side by side, is as acute in Wales as anywhere in the British Commonwealth. There is no community under the British flag which has suffered more from such cultural imperialism as we English have indulged in (and it has been almost wholly unconscious) than Wales. That has been due to the simple fact that there were two million people with a culture of their own, very different from that of England, living side by side with some thirty-five or forty million people, and the contrast in respect of numbers, prestige, wealth, and other factors necessarily produced a relationship of superiority and inferiority, so that the weaker and lesser culture had a great deal of difficulty in maintaining itself and a great deal of unconscious resentment and bitterness grew up.

The first decisive step dissociating Britain from European methods of cultural imperialism was taken in 1774 in the Quebec Act. That Act committed us once and for all in our overseas Empire against the policy of an English Empire. It committed us to tolerance of non-English and even non-British institutions, as the word British was understood at that time. The British Empire, as a result of the Quebec Act, was set on a course under which it could neither become an expansion of England nor a Greater Britain. You can see what I mean if you think for a moment of the gradual expansion of the meaning of the term ‘British’. It started on its career as an adjective of nationality. That is what it was in the time of Shakespeare. To-day it has no national significance whatever. If you are told to-day that a man is British or a Britisher, it does not convey anything at all as to his language or his culture. ‘British’ has become nationally colourless, in order to become politically significant. It has passed through a number of intermediate stages. First, ‘British’ applied to England and Scotland, which were called Great Britain. Then it included Ireland; when Dilke wrote his book Greater Britain, referring to the overseas Empire, the title shows that he was thinking of the two islands as a unit—something than which the overseas Britain was greater. Next you have the term applied to the overseas British, that is to say, to the English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, who had gone to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and so on. Then gradually it was extended to include the overseas whites, and in that sense it is still often used to-day—the peoples under the British flag who have a white skin. Finally it has reached its true sense, when it is simply an adjective to denote a subject of King George. When we speak of a man as ‘a British subject’, we do not think about his nationality. When Lord Palmerston nearly went to war with Greece because he claimed that a British subject had not been paid adequate compensation by the Greek Government, it made no difference that that British subject was a Maltese Jew.

Under the policy of which the Quebec Act is an example, the non-English communities in the British Empire have been enjoying their own institutions for generations. Often these institutions are not understood by the local representative of the British Government. Our administrators are not all anthropologists. When they have Pacific Islands or tropical African territories to attend to they are often ignorant of the significance of the practices they tolerate. But they do tolerate. There has been no attempt at assimilation.

Nevertheless, the problem of nationality is not solved by such methods. Tolerance is not enough. There is something further required—understanding and an effort to reach an equal relationship. I will not say an equal relationship between the Pacific Islanders and the English, but at any rate an equal relationship between all the advanced cultures and the English. There is still lingering in the minds of many the idea that, though we have not an English Empire, we ought to aim at having an Anglo-centric Empire. On this theory, while we tolerate non-English nations and cultures, we should persuade the subjects of King George who are not English by nationality to regard England as their centre and as the model and exemplar of true culture. Thus one sometimes reads panegyrics on English education or government which assume that what we call ‘English character’ is just character par excellence. Such notions are often set forth by thoughtless orators and phrase-makers at banquets, at imperial education conferences, and I have even heard of them occasionally in connexion with Rhodes Scholarships.

It cannot be said too strongly that all such doctrines are simply pale reproductions of the German doctrine of Kultur which we so reprobated during the war. According to that view there was one single all-powerful and all-beneficent form of culture which other nations ought to assimilate for their own good. That doctrine had a certain vogue in Germany and did a great deal of harm. It would be a very evil day for us in the British Empire if we took it over, and took it over, as we necessarily should, on a very much larger scale. Here again, just as in the economic problem, we are confronted with a German idea which we are in danger of applying without realizing its true nature.

As an Oxford man, I should like to express my strong dissent from the idea that my university should be used to promote cultural imperialism, to impose or dictate or in any way inculcate English national standards as universal standards. Oxford should no more be the instrument for the ascendancy of a nation than for the ascendancy of a class. Some of us have worked very hard in our time to make Oxford more democratic—that is to say, to make all kinds of Englishmen feel more at home there, feel that they are on equal terms with everybody else who is there, whatever his title or rank. We would naturally desire exactly the same relationship between the English and the non-English there, or, shall I say?, between the hosts and the guests. Oxford is a national university, an English university. The non-English are there as guests. They are guests both to receive and to give. What such an institution exists for is not to assimilate others into its own culture; it exists for the purpose of cross-fertilization, in order that each side may gain from the other.

Moreover, this Anglo-centric idea is quite incompatible with any real education, because real education demands an equal relationship between those who learn, and I would add between those who learn and those who teach. Socrates said long ago: ‘How can a man learn from a man who is not his friend?’ That embodies a profound truth regarding the relationship between the teacher and the student. All the more does it apply as between student and student. How can there be friendship between fellow students without a sense of equality?

If Oxford ever became (although I speak of Oxford, the same applies to Cambridge and any other English university, but I have fallen into speaking of Oxford because of the Rhodes Scholarships) a self-conscious intellectual metropolis, inculcating an imperial culture, she would very quickly degenerate; she would lose her own peculiar English vitality, and the regions to which her students returned would degenerate also. The metropolis would stiffen into a cold and pedantic conceit, as Athens stiffened under the Romans when men flocked thither for culture and Greece herself was dying; and the colonies (for colonies they still would be) who looked to Oxford for light and leadership would become mere intellectual provinces, peopled with restless déracinés nervously following the latest intellectual fashion from their spiritual home. There would be a real empire, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, an empire with provinces, and everything outside of England would be incurably provincial. And to be provincial is to be dissatisfied, to have your eyes perpetually on the centre.

The bond between Oxford men (this is true of any national university that has many guests) is not that of a common culture. It cannot be so. Nor is it that of politics, because that is outside the sphere of the university. It is simply personal. It is a bond between individuals. When Oxford men say, adapting Kipling, ‘Oxford makes us we’, what they mean is that they owe to Oxford friendships and intellectual understanding that sprang up in their minds and spirits because they met in a congenial society. That, and not cultural imperialism, is what universities exist for. Every university is national, but no university should be propagandist.

Let us then banish entirely from our minds an adjective against which a great deal of resentment is rightly felt, the adjective ‘colonial’. The adjective ‘colonial’ implies an outpost looking towards a centre. But the principle of nationality knows of no colonies; it knows only of equal, self-respecting communities. It is in fact colonialism, the patronage of the mother country and of its culture, together with the diffidence of the younger communities, which has made the British Empire so much of an ice-box. It is one of the difficulties against which we have to contend in the Empire, that through our very tolerance we are in danger of arresting progress. Our prestige has been so great that unconsciously we have prevented growth and development in communities under the flag.

Such communities have preserved their languages, their traditions, their customs. They have preserved their nationality, but preserved it perhaps a little too passively; they have preserved without the stimulus to develop which should have come through equal association with other peoples in the way in which stimulus comes at a university.

To preserve is excellent, but after all, a museum is one thing, a nation is another. I will not give any instances of what I mean, but they will readily occur to any of you who will study the problem as to why communities, separated from Europe and yet connected with it by language, have failed to make contributions to literature, art, and other forms of human excellence comparable with those made by their compatriots in the Old World.

Thus the movement for cultural self-determination which we find springing up within the British Empire is perfectly sound, healthy, and indeed inevitable. It is a movement which has manifested itself in Ireland, in Wales, where there is now a very active native drama, in French Canada, in Dutch South Africa, and has spread, of course, throughout India. Such a movement, with the emotional ardour and the spiritual awakening that it implies, is far healthier than the mere insistence on political action along nationalist lines which has led to so many wars in Europe, and which may so easily lead to further wars in Asia.

The more the different nations of the Empire find themselves spiritually, the easier it will be for them to solve their political problems. After all, inner order is the condition of outer order. It has been one of the temptations and the drawbacks in our Empire, due to our preoccupation with technical administration, that we tend to think that when we have solved a problem administratively we have solved it from the bottom.

In preaching this doctrine of cultural self-determination, I am only putting into articulate form what the English have actually done. The English have been pioneers in the deflection of nationality from politics to its true region, the region of culture. The English are the people who have most completely solved the problem of nationality, because they have most completely divorced it from politics.

I mentioned that the adjective ‘British’ was a purely political adjective. The adjective ‘English’, on the other hand, is a purely cultural adjective and has no political meaning at all. I know that Continental journalists always talk of ‘England and English policy’. We say ‘Britain and British policy’. There is no English Government except the local governments of our counties. There is no English Parliament. There is no English representative in the League of Nations, and there is comparatively seldom an English Prime Minister; he is often a Scotsman, sometimes a Welshman or a Canadian.

We English, in fact, have de-politicized nationality. If all the nations could do that, the greatest cause of war in the world would disappear, because the greatest inward obstacle to mutual understanding between nations and governments would be removed.

We English have learned how to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and to render unto the spiritual and intimate side of life those things which belong there and not at all to the platform or the Parliament or to propaganda. Moreover, we have learned how to draw the frontier between the two, between the things of Caesar and the more sacred things. We have learned how to draw the difficult line, the cause of so many wars in history, between what is public and what is private, what is common and what is sacred, or, to recur to the two adjectives of which I have spoken, the frontier between what is English and what is British, what belongs to each national personality and what belongs to the commonwealth of nations.

In having made that distinction, in having gradually come to realize that Shakespeare is English but that our Empire is British, we have rendered a service not only to our own fellow citizens in the Commonwealth, but to all who labour at the science and art of politics. We have been scholars in action, employing methods which, unknown to ourselves (because we are very slow to interpret the significance of what we do or what we think), have made the older political systems of Europe and elsewhere obsolete.

How obsolete is the map of Europe compared with such a conception as that which I have been trying to put before you!

If, as I believe, the British Commonwealth surmounts its present difficulties, which I am the last to underrate, if it survives to play a pioneering part in future world affairs, it is because its foundations are securely laid on the rock of human nature; because we have tried to develop institutions which correspond to what men and nations really are, rather than to any artificial scheme in our own minds. We have tried to be true to the laws of life, not simply to the rules of politics and the schemes of constitution-makers, to those laws which relate political science, the specialism of the scholar, to the deeper realm of ethics and of psychology.

We of the Third British Empire know that empires and constitutions are nothing in themselves. They exist to serve men and nations, not to mould them or to exploit them.

It is because we know this and have lived ourselves into this conviction that we believe that our Commonwealth of Nations will live on as an enduring partnership in common tasks and common hopes, still fitted, and perhaps especially fitted, in this age of political transformations, to render service both to its own citizens and to all mankind.

APPENDIX TO LECTURE V

I. Extracts from Lord Durham’s Report on the Affairs of British North America.

(Oxford edition, edited by Sir C. P. Lucas, pp. 291-3.)

The French-Canadians, . . . are but the remains of an ancient colonization, and are and ever must be isolated in the midst of an Anglo-Saxon world. Whatever may happen, whatever government shall be established over them, British or American, they can see no hope for their nationality. . . .

It is but a question of time and mode; it is but to determine whether the small number of French who now inhabit Lower Canada shall be made English, under a government which can protect them, or whether the process shall be delayed until a much larger number shall have to undergo, at the rude hands of its uncontrolled rivals, the extinction of a nationality strengthened and embittered by continuance.

And is this French-Canadian nationality one which, for the good merely of that people, we ought to strive to perpetuate, even if it were possible? I know of no national distinctions marking and continuing a more hopeless inferiority. The language, the laws, the character of the North American Continent are English; and every race but the English (I apply this to all who speak the English language) appears there in a condition of inferiority. It is to elevate them from that inferiority that I desire to give to the Canadians our English character. I desire it for the sake of the educated classes, whom the distinction of language and manners keeps apart from the great Empire to which they belong. At the best, the fate of the educated and aspiring colonist is, at present, one of little hope, and little activity; but the French-Canadian is cast still farther into the shade by a language and habits foreign to those of the Imperial Government. A spirit of exclusion has closed the higher professions on the educated classes of the French Canadians, more, perhaps, than was absolutely necessary; but it is impossible for the utmost liberality on the part of the British Government to give an equal position in the general competition of its vast population to those who speak a foreign language.

I desire the amalgamation still more for the sake of the humble classes. Their present state of rude and equal plenty is fast deteriorating under the pressure of population in the narrow limits to which they are confined. If they attempt to better their condition by extending themselves over the neighbouring country, they will necessarily get more and more mingled with an English population. If they prefer remaining stationary, the greater part of them must be labourers in the employ of English capitalists. In either case it would appear that the great mass of the French-Canadians are doomed, in some measure, to occupy an inferior position, and to be dependent on the English for employment. The evils of poverty and dependence would merely be aggravated in a tenfold degree, by a spirit of jealous and resentful nationality, which should separate the working class of the community from the possessors of wealth and employers of labour.

II. Extract from the Report of the Commission appointed by the Government of India to inquire into the condition and prospects of the University of Calcutta.

(Report, Vol. I, Part 1, Analysis of Present Conditions, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, London, 1919, pp. 244-5.)

Linguistic studies are essential to education. In secondary schools and in higher education generally in India, English is indispensable. But the mother tongue is of primary importance.

By means of languages learnt at school or later, an educated man or woman should hold at least the chief keys to the world’s culture. In his hand should be the passport which will admit him, through words written and spoken, to the society of thinkers and writers, dead or living, near at hand or far off. For the scholar of the Middle Ages in Europe the master-key was Latin. For the man of affairs in Europe in the eighteenth century the master-key was French. For the educated Indian of to-day the master-key is English. English, then, is indispensable to the higher education of India at this time. It cannot be foregone. The instinct of the people is right. It is not merely that for the Indian student English is an instrument of livelihood. It is more than that. It is a pathway leading into a wider intellectual life.

But, on the other hand, the mother tongue is of primary importance. The mother tongue is the true vehicle of mother wit. Another medium of speech may bring with it, as English brings with it, a current of new ideas. But the mother tongue is one with the air in which a man is born. It is through the vernacular (refined, though not weakened, by scholarship and taste) that the new conceptions of the mind should press their way to birth in speech. This is almost universally true, except in cases so rare (like that of Joseph Conrad) as to emphasize the general rule. A man’s native speech is almost like his shadow, inseparable from his personality. In our way of speech we must each, as the old saying runs, drink water out of our own cistern. For each one of us is a member of a community. We share its energy and its instincts; its memories, however dim, of old and far off things. And it is through our vernacular, through our folk-speech, whether actually uttered or harboured in our unspoken thoughts, that most of us attain to the characteristic expression of our nature and of what our nature allows us to be or to discern.^[1] Through its mother tongue the infant first learns to name the things it sees or feels or tastes or hears, as well as the ties of kindred and the colours of good and evil. It is the mother tongue which gives to the adult mind the relief and illumination of utterance, as it clutches after the aid of words when new ideas or judgements spring from the wordless recesses of thought or feeling under the stimulus of physical experience or of emotion. Hence in all education, the primary place should be given to training in the exact and free use of the mother tongue.’

See also the whole chapter on the Medium of Instruction and Examination and the Teaching of English and the mother tongue. Part I, vol. ii, chapter 18, pp. 226 ff.

III.

The following extract from an article by Professor F. Dominois, a leading French authority on the subject, is interesting not only as a comment on the new situation in Czecho-Slovakia, but as illustrating the change that is taking place in Continental ideas, partly as a result of the study of British institutions. It is taken from Le Monde Slave of January 1927:

‘Before the end of its first decade the Czecho-Slovak Republic is realizing what the old Austro-Hungarian monarchy failed to achieve for its nationalities in the course of centuries. It is taking its place as a State on the Swiss model. . . . Is there a thinking Frenchman who does not feel how fortunate it is for French civilization that it includes numerous and original cultures rooted in homes as independent and as different from France as are Belgium, Switzerland, and Canada? And is it not a privilege for the Anglo-Saxon and Spanish civilizations that they include a multiplicity of forms across the Atlantic, side by side with those of their European homelands? The German and Slav worlds, on the other hand, have been poisoned by the notion popularized through Arndt, that politics and culture must necessarily be within the same frame. The entry of two German ministers into the Prague Cabinet is the most striking refutation, so far as Czecho-Slovakia is concerned, of this dangerous sophism. It gives the true interpretation, which is in the realm of the spirit, to the formula of the German fatherland that is to spread “so weit die Deutsche Zunge klingt”. Side by side with its centres in the Reich and in Switzerland, German civilization is henceforward assured of a third and equally independent centre in Czecho-Slovakia which will be the bridge between the German and Slav cultures, as Switzerland is between the German and the Latin.’

Minor typographic errors were corrected, and hyphenation made consistent.

[The end of The Third British Empire by Alfred Eckard Zimmern]