Part 16

Federation should be attained through familiar governmental forms, not through innovations. Burke knew his civilization's aversion to _change_ which "alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them," {215} whose results "cannot certainly be known beforehand." He knew his civilization's belief in _reform_--" a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was."[215-1] In this _re-form_, the essence of our civilization--our language, our individualism, our standards of living based on land plenty--should be left unchanged. The new growth, federation, will "remedy the grievance complained of"--the danger of the extinction of our civilization.

Pending federation, the Pan-Angle nations must on no account weaken each other, and so the entire race, with war. Much faith is put, in these days, in arbitration, but on false presumptions. No so-called "international arbitration court" in existence has any authority whatsoever.[215-2] Such a body is of value only when it is giving advice to contestants who greatly desire to come to a friendly agreement, and who, for the sake of peace, are predisposed to take the "court's" advice. Even then its value is not great, for such contestants might very probably, without its aid, have come to a peaceable understanding. The Pan-Angle nations do most heartily desire peace among themselves. They are then the best calculated to find arbitration useful. The question thus arises whether some tribunal can be established on Pan-Angle soil, for the settlement of Pan-Angle inter-national {216} disputes. It would be a makeshift and powerless, until by the establishment of a common government it ceased to be inter-national, and became a potent source of justice under the Pan-Angle federation.[216-1] It is, however, a straw we well might grasp until we reach a firmer footing. The greatest advantage of an organized body for Pan-Angle arbitration is that from it might develop something more practicable, as from the Maryland-Virginia Conference at Alexandria in 1785[216-2] and as from the South African Railway Rates Conference in 1908[216-3] developed respectively the federations of the United States and South Africa.

Other stepping-stones ready for our use are to be found in Britannic-American conferences on matters of mutual interest. In February 1908 a conference on the conservation of the natural resources of North America was held at Washington, at which three Pan-Angle nations were represented by delegates.[216-4] Some of the subjects suitable for such discussion are forests, river flowage for power or irrigation purposes, and migrating birds. If a conference were held for mutual information on sea-fisheries, all our nations might well send delegates. A similar opportunity is afforded in the urgent need of making uniform and sensible the spelling of our language. At a meeting in connection with the Conference of Education {217} Associations in London, January 5, 1914, it was stated "that an international conference should be summoned at which all parts of the British Empire and the United States should be represented."[217-1]

However great the good resulting from such conferences in relation to their stated objects, it may some day appear insignificant compared to the assistance rendered towards producing federation.

Quicker and cheaper communication is working steadily towards better Pan-Angle understanding. International postal arrangements date only from 1874, but two-cent (penny in the British Isles, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa) postage is now so general from points within to other points within the Pan-Angle world, that by far the majority of inter-Pan-Angle letters have the advantage of that rate. Land and water telegraphs by wire and wireless are steadily linking up points further and further apart, and rates are becoming cheaper. The telephone is now a common household necessity over much of the Pan-Angle world, and bids fair in time to conquer distances as effectively as do telegraph lines. Every such agency, producing a very real "closer union," is a factor in promoting Pan-Angle federation.

The cheapness and speed of travel are increasing at rates to which no bounds can reasonably be set. Steamers, on which we so largely depend as inter-Pan-Angle carriers, yearly serve more routes, are more numerous and faster. We shift easily from one country to another as business or inclination takes us. Ambassador Page has proposed that newspaper men from the British Isles and America serve an {218} apprenticeship on journalistic staffs in each other's countries.[218-1] The imperial "grand tour" of the British Isles parliamentary party, recently completed,[218-2] gave British politicians, better than would any number of voluminous reports, an opportunity to appreciate the needs and aspirations of the five other Britannic nations. The celebration of the Centenary of Peace will this year furnish innumerable similar opportunities. Every personal acquaintance of one Pan-Angle with the country of other Pan-Angles makes for the understanding that must precede federation.

The formation of a Pan-Angle federation must depend in the end on our voters who are the source of first and final appeal in our political problems. It will be achieved when they are self-persuaded that it is desirable, that is, when they have been educated to see its necessity. Only such means of education may properly be used as will open the path to self-persuasion. Among these, two readily suggest themselves. The first is the educative work that can be done by associations of those aroused to interest in the matter. The second is the educative influence of travel and sojourn of Pan-Angles in each other's countries.

Voluntary associations established by private initiative are among us recognized means of furthering reform. Through public discussion, whether printed or spoken, they have fostered many of the great movements for which we all {219} are now grateful. "Discussion is the greatest of all reformers. It rationalizes everything it touches. It robs principles of all false sanctity and throws them back upon their reasonableness. If they have no reasonableness, it ruthlessly crushes them out of existence and sets up its own conclusions in their stead."[219-1] These associations and their beliefs, if not supplying a public need, wither and die. But if the times call for them, movements are started which pass through a regular growth from insignificance and obscurity to contempt and ridicule, followed by public opposition and finally by success. Such have been the histories of the freedom of conscience, the abolition of slavery, and a host of similar triumphs. Men of like ideals associate themselves together, take a name that proclaims their tenets, and spend their time and energy and money to set forth the truth as they see it. Everyone is given a chance to learn, but no one is compelled to believe. No purpose can be so lofty, no course of action so advantageous, that it does not need expounding. The countless peace societies and the millions spent in that cause bear witness. Meeting places must be hired, literature must be printed and posted, advertising in its many forms must not be neglected. All this means sacrifice of some sort from somebody--obviously from those who have the success of the work at heart. In every Pan-Angle nation can be found plenty of organizations which are doing on a small scale in reference to some local interest just what some non-local, inter-national organization could {220} well do on a large scale for such an ideal as Pan-Angle federation. The organization should be on an inter-Pan-Angle basis, if for no other reason than to make for uniformity in its efforts and to prevent it from slipping into local points of view. As the demand for Pan-Angle federation grows, practical politics will not remain insensible to it. Then will be the time to marshal to its aid forces such as have finally established by law the present nationhood of each of us.

In this labour of education we must work openly in the presence of each other and under the scrutiny of the nations of the world. If we were Germans or Japanese, an international _coup_ might be accomplished by diplomatic work unknown to the voters, and the affair put through with secrecy and despatch. It is vain to wish for such a style of procedure, and we have no desire, in this case, to change from the more laborious and tedious method of popular education and individual action. So to change would demonstrate that we had lost the very essence of our civilization--the initial as well as the final control of our own destinies. We must work openly, because it is one of our inestimable privileges to make up our own minds.

Not only can individual initiative accomplish this work, it can do it better than can any other method. Ideas of state interference under the guise of public ownership are making headway all over the Pan-Angle world. One industry after another, for one reason or another, is removed from the field of private endeavour, and is run for good or ill by governments. It has never been thus with our political undertakings. The spectacle of {221} a Pan-Angle government calling on all good citizens to aid in celebrating a Twenty-first of November, or a Twenty-fourth of May, or a Fourth of July is so unheard of as to be laughable,[221-1] and it is to be hoped that in the matter of Pan-Angle federation the people will be the compelling power forcing their respective governments to action.

Of the promotion of travel and sojourn of Pan-Angles in each other's countries we have one notable example. Cecil John Rhodes, wishing to instil in the minds of Britannic Pan-Angles "the advantage to the Colonies as well as to the United Kingdom of the retention of the unity of the Empire,"[221-2] and desiring "to encourage and foster an appreciation of the advantages which I implicitly believe will result from the union of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world and to encourage in the students from the United States of North America . . . an attachment to the country from which they have sprung but without I hope withdrawing them or their sympathies from the land of their adoption or birth,"[221-3] directed the trustees of his estate to establish scholarships at the University of Oxford. Each year picked men from English-speaking lands travel to England, enrol themselves in this Pan-Angle university, and there measure themselves against representatives of all their race. At the end of three years they return to their respective countries. The book {222} knowledge they have acquired could have been furnished by any one of many universities. But Rhodes' sagacity has given them infinitely more. They have lived and studied and travelled in what is truly the Mother Country of us all. They have become conscious of their fellow Pan-Angles and have made their fellow Pan-Angles conscious of them. Their understanding and sympathy is freed for all time from narrow prejudices.

The work so generously begun should be extended. Not only in the British Isles but in North America, in South Africa, and in Australasia young Pan-Angles should be brought in touch with the other portions of our race, and should see at first hand what problems require solving by us throughout the world. Not a Pan-Angle university from McGill to Dunedin, from Ann Arbor to Stellenbosch, but would welcome some exchange of students similar to the growing system of exchange professors. Not one, if it could offer scholarships to the youth of the other nations, but would have enlarged the scope of its usefulness and have grown from local to inter-national importance. Patriotic Pan-Angles by endowing such scholarships could hasten the accomplishment of the Pan-Angle federation, and thus share in ensuring the safety of every Pan-Angle nation, and in securing our civilization for the benefit of ourselves and for the peace of the world.

Meanwhile no vision of future Pan-Angle safety should blind anyone of us to his country's present needs. In the interim before federation, we must so strengthen each of our respective nations as best to weather the storm of adversity should it {223} burst upon us before co-operation is secured. Simultaneously with the recession to home waters of the British Isles fleet, the younger Britannic nations are taking appropriate steps to ensure their separate interests. This is an evidence that each recognizes danger. Each assumes that these defensive efforts are not induced by the fear of other Pan-Angles. This is no place to discuss the compulsory military service already established in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa, nor to suggest that it would not be needed were Pan-Angle federation already an accomplished fact. Nor is this a suitable occasion to discuss the policies, strengths, or weaknesses of separate Britannic or Pan-Angle navies. America must be equal to the emergency of defending all Pan-Angles who would seek its protection if the British Isles fleet were to suffer a serious setback. Wisely, America and Canada waste no Pan-Angle funds in fortifications on their long boundary or in war vessels on the Great Lakes. But they should both maintain on salt water navies, which they can use for the joint interests of Pan-Angles. Canada and America may soon need to co-operate with Australasia in solving the problems of the Pacific.[223-1] Pan-Angle nations may severally make alliances with foreign powers for the purpose of protecting us all. One of them has already done so.[223-2] But peoples who are strong enough make no foreign alliances.

As we work towards federation we must not be {224} discouraged at our slow rate of visible progress. For "slow thought is the ballast of a self-governing state."[224-1] The growth of the federal idea may be none the less vigorous because its fruitage appears long delayed. These pages abound with examples of the fact that we are slow to move politically. Were it otherwise, the autonomous nations of the Britannic world would long since have had representation in some common parliament, would have established a single final court of appeal, and a common citizenship; an overburdened British Parliament would no longer legislate on English municipal drainage, affairs of the dependencies, and questions of inter-Pan-Angle concern. As it is, the five younger Britannic nations, realizing tardily that the British navy no longer adequately protects them, have not as yet bestirred themselves to effect more cohesive and coherent political relations with each other, and between themselves and the British Isles. America, astride the Western Hemisphere, in her own estimation secure against invasion, is taken up with internal development, and but seldom, even since the last Pan-Angle war with Spain, looks out at the increasing pressure beyond her borders.

We move slowly. Pan-Angle federation is still a dream. But no one can foresee how rapidly external pressure may turn dreams into practical politics. The federation of the Pan-Angles may be forced upon us--ready or not. Or we may find some day that it is too late to federate.

Our method of combining, the distribution of powers between the existing governments and the {225} new government, it is not here necessary or appropriate to discuss, other than to acknowledge that our history confesses that federation is the present ideal of government of this civilization. In other instances of suggested closer union, "The advocates of national consolidation have been constantly subjected, as everyone familiar with current discussion knows, to two diametrically opposite forms of criticism. They are vigorously reproached . . . for not stating in detail the method by which their purposes are to be accomplished; they are ridiculed . . . as people who aim at binding together by means of a 'cut and dried plan' an Empire which has hitherto depended upon slow processes of growth for its constitutional development."[225-1] Enough that in our previous separate histories we have had constitutional conventions to draw up both national and state constitutions. Many men who have taken part in such conventions are now living. What we have acquired a habit of doing on a large scale, we can do again on a larger scale. Such representatives can construct, for submission to our voters, a framework of federal Pan-Angle government.

With the voters of the seven Pan-Angle nations rest the decisions of when and how our co-operation is to be accomplished. That it is to be accomplished many now earnestly believe. And of it many can now say, as did Washington in the American Constitutional Convention: "Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair." Before that future constitutional convention can have been accomplished, men will have {226} gathered together the wisdom of the race, and will have drawn up a constitution better than any now in use. Voters from the ends of the earth will discuss what our governmental framework should be, and, although our statesmen will act the major parts, we may agree with Burke: "I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business."[226-1]

What is desirable in this federation to preserve ourselves from the menace of other civilizations? How shall we balance our powers to ensure freedom to the individual and freedom to local groups to follow their individual yearnings with safety to them and to us all? How shall we bind ourselves for that all-time, the indefinite future, so that we shall be gladly bound, and yet be freemen still? "If, . . . in the famous words of Lincoln, we as a body in our minds and hearts 'highly resolve' to work for the general recognition: by society of the binding character of international duties and rights as they arise within the Anglo-Saxon group, we shall not resolve in vain. A mere common desire may seem an intangible instrument, and yet, intangible as it is, it may be enough to form the beginning of what in the end can make the whole difference."[226-2]

[207-1] A. L. Burt, _Imperial Architects_, Oxford, 1913, p. 86.

[209-1] A. L. Burt, _Imperial Architects_, Oxford, 1913, p. 125.

[210-1] Richard Jebb, _Colonial Nationalism_, London, 1905, p. 336: "The imperial city shall lose her pride of place. In another seagirt isle, by the margin of the Pacific. . . . sleeps a fair city." According to Mrs. Henshaw, F.R.G.S., in _United Empire_, London, January 1914, p. 80, Vancouver Island was named by Sir Francis Drake, 1579, New Albion.

[210-2] A _résumé_ of projects for Britannic federation is given in A. L. Burt, _Imperial Architects_, Oxford, 1913, pp. 152-195; the necessity of, and possible transitional stages on the way towards, federation are discussed, _ibid._, pp. 196-225.

[210-3] Richard Jebb, _Studies in Colonial Nationalism_, London, 1905; and _The Britannic Question_, London, 1913.

[210-4] A.L. Burt, _Imperial Architects_, Oxford, 1913, p. 147.

[211-1] _Ibid_., Introduction by H. E. Egerton, p. vi.

[212-1] Arthur Murphy, _The Works of Cornelius Tacitus_, London, 1793, vol. iv. p. 17.

[213-1] H. E. Egerton, _Federations and Union within the British Empire_, Oxford, 1911, p. 183.

[213-2] W. B. Worsfold, _The Union of South Africa_, London, 1912, p. 104.

[213-3] _Ency. Brit._, vol. xxv. p. 475.

[214-1] _A Review of the Present Mutual Relations of the British South African Colonies, to which is appended a Memorandum on South African Railway Unification_, "Printed by Authority" [Johannesburg, 1907], p. 5.

[215-1] Quoted in Woodrow Wilson, _Mere Literature_, Boston, 1900, p. 149.

[215-2] Cf. _ante_, p. 121.

[216-1] The growth of inter-cantonal arbitration in Switzerland, leading to present federal court, is alluded to in Woodrow Wilson, _The State_, 1898, rev. ed., Boston, 1911, p. 328.

[216-2] _Ency. Brit._, vol. xxvii. p. 685.

[216-3] _Ibid._, vol. xxv. p. 482.

[216-4] _Britannica Year Book_, London, 1913, p. 664.

[217-1] _The Times_ Weekly Edition, London, January 9, 1914.

[218-1] _The Times_ Weekly Edition, London, December 19, 1913. Account of Speech of American Ambassador at dinner of the Institute of Journalists, London, December 13, 1913.

[218-2] _United Empire_, London, January 1914, p. 13.

[219-1] Woodrow Wilson, _The State_, 1898, Boston, rev. ed., 191, p. 139.

[221-1] The French Government Proclamations posted in Paris (in 1909) concerning the 14th of July called on all good citizens to help the government celebrate the day.

[221-2] W.T. Stead, _The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes_, London, 1902, p. 28.

[221-3] _Ibid_., pp. 24-29.

[223-1] _Cf_. R.M. Johnston in the _New York Times_, November 16, 1913, p. 5; and _Round Table_, London, June 1913, pp. 572-583.

[223-2] British-Japanese treaty and French understanding.

[224-1] Woodrow Wilson, _Mere Literature_, Boston, 1900, p. 98.

[225-1] G.R. Parkin, _Imperial Federation_, London, 1892, p. 296.

[226-1] Quoted in Woodrow Wilson, _Mere Literature_, Boston, 1900, p. 152.

[226-2] Rt. Hon. Richard Burdon Haldane, Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, before the American Bar Association, Montreal, September 1, 1913, _Report of Thirty-Sixth Meeting of the Association_, Baltimore, 1913, p. 416.

{227}

X

CONCLUSION

THE English-speaking peoples who govern themselves are faced by the not remote possibility of the destruction of one or more of their seven nations, should these nations be unable to co-operate. The destruction of anyone would be a loss to all the others. The destruction of one or more of these nations might carry in its turn the destruction of others--or all. If one of the densely populated and wealthy nations were overpowered, the others would be exposed to the greater risk of attack. If one of the less densely populated and less wealthy nations were destroyed, the race would be deprived of homes for its growing numbers. The Britannic nations and America have identical interests in the safety of each and everyone of these seven nations. The belief is here expressed that no co-operation short of unity of government will form an effective means of safeguarding the Pan-Angle civilization.