CHAPTER IV.

THE UNITED KINGDOM.

To understand the relation of the United Kingdom to the question of national unity we must try to grasp the main features of the astonishing and unparalleled change which in the last half or three quarters of a century has come over the industrial condition of the British Islands. This change has left them in a position absolutely unique among the nations of the present day, a position, moreover, to which history furnishes no parallel.

It has been estimated that when the Queen came to the throne, of the working population of the country one-third were agricultural labourers, and one-third were artizans. There has since been an addition of from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 to the whole population, and at the end of this period of remarkable growth we find ourselves face to face with the overwhelming fact that of all the working classes of Great Britain only an eighth are agricultural labourers while three-fourths are artizans. What this means is in no way more tersely described than when we say that Britain has become the workshop of the {104} world. What it involves is the conclusion that never in the history of the human race has any great nation lived under such artificial conditions as do British people at the end of this period of extraordinary industrial development, a period which has its limit well within the century. All the circumstances of national existence have been revolutionized.

After the application to the soil of intense culture, of scientific skill, of abundant capital, of cheap labour, only about 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 quarters of wheat are produced out of the 28,000,000 quarters which now represent the annual consumption. The rest comes from the far distant prairies of the United States and Canada, from India, South Australia, New Zealand, the Black Sea and the Baltic. With other cereals it is the same, the demand for those which cannot be produced at all in Great Britain, such as rice and maize, being immense.

Cheap ocean freights, which make it possible to transfer a bushel of wheat by sea from Montreal or New York to London at a lower price than it can be carried by rail from some English counties to London, handicap the English producer still more. It seems as if the dependence upon the outside world for grain supplies were likely to increase, not merely with the rapid increase of population which is still going on, but with the necessity of applying the land to more profitable forms of production as ocean transit is still further cheapened, and as increasing prosperity leads to a greater consumption of animal food.

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As with grain foods so with meat. Hundreds of thousands of live cattle, many hundred thousand tons of meat, chilled, frozen, salted, or tinned, pour into the country every year from across the sea. Canada alone last year sent 123,000 head of cattle; New Zealand nearly 1,500,000 frozen carcasses of sheep. It has been estimated that the quantity of meat food in the United Kingdom at any time is only sufficient to supply the market for three months; beyond that all must come from without.

So also with cheese, fruit, and other staple articles of consumption. Still more striking is the dependence on distant lands for a wide range of articles once esteemed luxuries, but now reckoned among the comforts, if not the necessities, of daily life, such as sugar, tea, and coffee. If the massing of facts into figures best conveys to some minds the nature of the situation it may be put in the statement that every year the United Kingdom pays for articles used for food brought from abroad the sum of £153,000,000 sterling. Or it may be better illustrated by a comparison. Draw around almost any other nation or country of modern times--Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia--a barrier preventing the ingress of any food supply from the outer world. There will be inconvenience, some measure of restriction of consumption in a few particulars, but the condition is one which could be endured not merely for months but for years. Place a like barrier around the British Islands and {106} in six weeks the pressure of want will begin to be felt; in six months starvation will be the prevalent condition of the population.

Such a picture is, of course, imaginary--the fact which lies behind it is stern reality.

The illustration emphasizes, but does not exaggerate, the absolutely unique nature of the national position.

For the first time in the course of human history we have had in the last half century presented to us in the British Islands the spectacle of a great people depending for its existence upon the safe and continuous transport from the most remote corners of the globe of about two-thirds of the chief articles of daily consumption.

That the outlook of such a people upon the world should differ fundamentally from that of any other people of past times or of the present day is manifest. What has been said is not meant to prove that the situation is one which should necessarily induce extraordinary anxiety. Difficulties are to be measured by the resources at hand to grapple with them. Danger only comes when the sense of proportion between the two is lost.

Food is not all. Britain the workshop of the world, and three-fourths of its working population artizans! Upon what do these vast armies of industry, these millions of working men and women, spend their toil to earn the wages that buy the food thus brought to them from such great distances and at {107} such expense? Once more we find the ends of the earth scoured to furnish them with the raw material upon which they work. Wool from Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, South America; cotton from the Southern States, India, Egypt; timber from Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Honduras; precious metals, ores, jute, hemp and other fibres, oils, gums, ivory, shells, hides, furs, precious stones--everything that can be moulded for use or beauty, all productions of land and sea, are poured forth day by day from the holds of a thousand ships in the greater ports of the United Kingdom to be transferred to the centres of British industry.

The critical character of this dependence for a perfectly steady supply of raw material is under modern conditions as striking as the extent of the dependence. The great Yorkshire woollen spinners tell us that to be cut off even for three or four weeks from the supplies of Australian wool would mean the closing of hundreds or thousands of factories and a widespread paralysis of industry. They point out that when the regularity of sea transport depended upon wind and weather, or when the home market supplied a larger share of the material, common prudence made it necessary to lay in heavy stocks to provide against contingencies for many months. So fixed has now become the habit of depending upon the regular arrival of ocean steam-ships from week to week, the regular sequence of great wool sales at frequent stated periods, that it is possible {108} in manufacturing to live as it were from hand to mouth; that, as a matter of fact, a large proportion of manufacturers do so live, purchasing only enough for their immediate wants, and renewing their stock at very short intervals. Thus the effect of any stoppage of sea-transport would be disastrously felt at once, reaching in its influence alike the manufacturing capitalist and the workman in his cottage.

A group of manufacturers at Galashiels, one of the important Scottish centres of the wool trade, told me that nine out of every ten pounds of wool they used was Australian. The proportion can scarcely be less in the Bradford district and other large areas of Yorkshire. Nor are such illustrations of the completeness of dependence on supplies abroad exceptional or confined to wool. Cut off Dundee from its importations of Indian jute and the collapse of its main industry would be sudden and general. Lancashire is not likely to forget what it means to lose control of her ordinary markets for obtaining raw cotton. We may put together once more the figures which express this marvellous relation to British industry to the remoter parts of the world.

For wool last year Britain paid £26,000,000; for raw cotton £40,000,000; wood £14,000,000; metals £23,000,000; flax, hemp, and jute £10,000,000; and so on.

But even what has been said of food and raw material of manufacture exhibits but one side of the national position. To be the workshop of the world {109} implies access to the markets of the world. I say nothing of the vast centres of commerce abroad which serve as the main points of distribution. But go to the loneliest Australian or New Zealand bush; to the backwoods and remote prairies of Canada; to distant South African gold and diamond diggings, and we find the shelves of the humblest shop filled with the products of the looms of Yorkshire, Lancashire, or Paisley, of the factories everywhere scattered throughout the United Kingdom where the vast inflow of raw material is worked up. To foreign countries, as well as to those inhabited by British people, to every civilized or uncivilized continent, district, or island, however remote, these manufactures penetrate, and must continue to penetrate, if the vast fabric of British industry is to be maintained.

Once more, the figures which represent the annual aggregate of export trade are immense: cotton goods £70,000,000; woollen goods £26,000,000; iron and steel £28,000,000; machinery £ 13,000,000.

Between this great inflow of raw material and food, and the equally great output of manufactured goods, has sprung up yet another prime factor in Britain's industrial position, her shipping interests. She has become by far the greatest of ocean carriers. It is not merely that scores of millions of capital are invested in ships alone; that 60 per cent. of all the steam tonnage of the world and a large proportion of its sailing tonnage are under the British flag; that tens of thousands of men find employment {110} upon the seas, and tens of thousands more in the immediate handling of ships and their cargoes around British harbours and docks. The mere construction of ships and their equipment for this vast carrying trade gives an impulse to almost every form of British industry. The shipyards of the Clyde alone turn out at times a thousand tons or more of iron or steel shipping for every working day of the year. The vast aggregate for the whole country forms a large element in the industrial life of the nation.

Here, then, in roughest outline, is a picture of the unique position which the British Islands hold in the world today. Let us remind ourselves once more that the extreme singularity of this situation has been created well within the span of an ordinary life, for the sea-borne commerce of the United Kingdom, which today has an annual value of more than £740,000,000, was, when the Queen came to the throne in 1837, only £155,000,000. The difference between these figures fairly measures the increased dependence of the country upon its imports, exports, and the carrying trade.

Now for a nation existing under conditions such as have been described, where the work and wages and food of the masses of the people depend on easy and constant access to the remotest corners of the globe, it seems possible to indicate what must be the end and aim of national policy--the supreme objects of statesmanship. Surely the first object must be to {111} secure the absolute safety for trading purposes of the water-ways of the world.

Maritime security Britain is bound to maintain, if she is to retain manufacturing superiority. The only manufacturing rival which seriously threatens her is the United States. It is a friendly rivalry, and should remain such. But each country, with what advantages it has, will play relentlessly for its own hand, and for the welfare, real or supposed, of its own people. Britain carries on the contest by means of Free Trade, thereby cheapening production, and winning the market of the world. The United States use for their weapon Protection, stimulating production till it becomes cheap. Britain also, under this opposing condition, depends for food and material on the outside world--the United States have the food and most of the material within themselves. The first serious break in Britain's power to hold the waterways of the world would place her at a fatal disadvantage. Safe in a continental isolation the United States could supply the customers who came to her for manufactured goods with what they wanted. To be on even terms Britain must have maritime security, and this she could not have if by the successive cutting away of her great outlying offshoots she should lose control of those points of vantage which now are the secret of her supremacy quite as much as the ships which she sends forth from her dockyards.

Second only to maritime security seems to me the necessity for a country in the position of Great Britain {112} to keep as far as possible the sources from which she draws her food and raw material within the national domain.

Great Britain has had at least one sharp reminder of the advantage which would accrue to a country so dependent as she is on the outside world of having the areas of production under the national flag. This reminder was one which gave a rough shock to the generally accepted theory that if the consumer wants to buy and the producer wants to sell, all the conditions for satisfactory commercial intercourse between countries are fulfilled without reference to national relationship. In 1865 the War of Secession broke out in America, and the ports of the cotton-producing states were blockaded. Millions of bales of cotton were wasting on the wharves and in the warehouses at New Orleans, Charleston, and other Southern towns. On the other hand, in Lancashire millions of spindles were idle, and vast bodies of people were reduced to extreme need or thrown for a long period upon the charity of the benevolent from want of the raw material of their industry. The producers certainly wished to sell, the consumers to purchase. English manufacturers had money with which to buy--English shippers had the vessels to carry--the English Government had the men-of-war which could easily have forced a way to the supplies which were needed. Between was the barrier of international law and national honour, which forbid a neutral nation to interfere with belligerents. The barrier was respected, {113} and England passed triumphantly through the moral strain involved in resisting the temptation to go to war for an industrial end alone. The lesson to be learned from such an example appears manifest. The retention of the national right to keep open the communication between the centre of consumption and the areas of supply is alike desirable for the industry of the one and of the other. To give an obvious illustration. The vast woollen industries of Yorkshire are supplied almost exclusively from regions now within the Empire--New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. So long as these countries remain under a common British flag the working man who produces the wool and the working man who spins it retain the national right to keep their industries in touch with each other: the moment they pass out from under the flag that right is given up. Great Britain would have no more right to force her way into the ports of an independent Australia or New Zealand, blockaded by a German, French, or Chinese fleet, than she had to force her way into the harbours of Louisiana or South Carolina. The neutral flag may furnish a way of escape for Britain's industry when she is herself in direct conflict with another power; it gives no assistance when a nation with which she is at peace chooses to close the ports of a country from which she draws her food or the material of her industry. The reader will find that the illustration is a far-reaching one if he extends it to the whole range of Britain's wants either for supply or for markets for her manufactured {114} goods; and to the whole range of colonial necessity for a market for their staple products, and a supply of what they do not produce.

Still more significant is the illustration if he remember that as regards food supply the Empire might, in an emergency, soon become entirely independent of foreign countries, while, with the single exception of cotton, we could tide over an indefinite period even in the matter of raw material for manufacture.

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