THE EMPIRE

Evening Star, Issue 20988, 30 December 1931, Page 9

THE EMPIRE

DAY OF CHANGING IDEAS IMPORTANT FUTURE The conception of the British Colonial Empire as an entity of its own within the, wider Imperial framework which also the Empire of India and the dominions, is a comparatively new one. And, indeed, the greater part of that Empire is itself a recent acquisition (writes the Hon. L. M. S. Amery, in the / Daily Telegraph’). When the last generation talked of “ the colonics ” it thought, primarily, of the various self-governing units which have since merged in the great dominions, and, secondarily, of certain other units, mostly insular, and largely held for the purposes of naval or commercial strategy, such as the West Indies and Ceylon, Malta, Singaport, and Hongkong, with a few trading stations on the West Coast of Africa.

British Malaga was only just beginning < to shape itself, and its economic possibilities were hardly suspected. The scramble for African “hinterlands ’ was still regarded as mainly a matter of demarcation, the keeping of large areas free for our traders, than as a conscious extension of administration and development. CHAMBERLAIN’S WORK. To-day we are beginning to realise the Colonial Empire both in_ its extent, in its immense economic possibilities, and in the magnitude of the responsibilities involved in its government. Its area, excluding the Sudan, is over 2,000,000 square miles. It is thus larger than the Empire of India, while its population of some 60,000,000 is already nearly three times as great as that of the dominions, and may well double or treble itself within the next half-century. Its total trade has reached the £500,000,000 mark, while its trade with this country for the first time last year exceeded the corresponding trade of the Indian Empire. The first statesman to envisage the possibilities of the new Colonial Empire was Mr Joseph Chamberlain. Every aspect almost of the constructive work of modern colonial development goes back to his creative impulse. It was his practical grasp of the connection between the military and financial problems involved that established the cheap, but efficient, Native forces without which the immense extension of British administration in Africa would have been impossible. He laid the foundations of African railway, road, and harbour development. He inaugurated the active health policy upon which depends not only the efficiency of our own administrations, but the whole future development of the native races. MODERNISED MACHINERY. In the West Indies he initiated the scientific study of the problems of tropical agriculture. Not least, his authority and imaginative power were devoted "to opening the eyes of his fel-low-countrymen to the potentialities of this groat if undeveloped af&aWi for

which we in this island still exercise a special and direct responsibility, and by whose development we stand to gain so mightily. Meanwhile the machinery of the Colonial Office was becoming inadequate to the execution of two entirely different and, indeed, incongruous tasks—thetask, on the one hand, of supervising and helping forward the evolution of a group of young nations from a status of subordination to one of equal partnership, and, on the other hand, the task of directly controlling and stimulating the administrative development of vast backward territories inhabited by primitive peoples. The incongruity was most keenly felt in the dominions, where it was a common complaint of public men that their point of view would never be understood by bureaucrats who tended to regard Australians and Fijians as belonging to the same category because they dealt with them in the same department of the Colonial Office. My experience as Under-Secretary of State from 1919 to 1921 not only confirmed my long-held conviction as to the necessity, from the point of view of a better handling of dominion affairs, of removing them from the Colonial Office, but made me realise how much the development of the Colonial Empire itself was suffering from the lack of undivided attention to its problems by the heads of the office. Until the Colonial Office could be freed from the distracting influence of dominion business I felt it would never get down to the task of reorganising itself and the Colonial Empire to meet modern conditions. SEPARATION. Accordingly my first stipulation in accepting the Colonial Secretaryship at the end of 1924 was that I should bo allowed to effect a complete separation between dominion and colonial affairs. The separation was effected in the summer of 1925 by the creation of the office of Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs, and although 1 continued to hold both offices their divorce was henceforward The two offices, although stiirhoused in the same building, have had less to do with each other since the division—in fact, than either of them has had to do with the Foreign Office or the War Office. In the course of the next few years the organisation was gradually transformed. The general geographical division of the work for administrative purposes was retained, as ensuring the closest contact with the peculiar idiosyncrasies of each territory. But a cross division by subject matter was introduced by the appointment of a series of advisers—financial, medical, agricultural—to the Secretary of State, and by the building up of special committees on education and medical research. The evolution on this side is nob yet complete in all its details, but, broadly speaking, it may be said that the Colonial Office to-day is effectively equipped not, only to supervise the general administration of the Colonial Empire, but to act as a stimulating and co-ordinating force over the whole field of progress in the health and education, as well as in the economic evolution, of the peoples and territories under its control.

_ No less essential than the organisation of tho office was to bring it into effective personal contact with its problems and to get jjd of the old complaint

on the part of the colonial administrations of misunderstanding by bureaucracy at home. The first step was to appoint, as permanent head of the office, in the shape 'of Sir SamUel Wilson, one who was himself a colonial Governor and knew what official despatches read like to the recipient. The next was to get the office itself to visit the Colonial Empire, oh one pretext or another, as soon as possible. FOR DEVELOPMENT. I had visited various colonies before taking office, and was fortunate in having in Mr Ormsby Gore a political Uu-der-Secretary of State who was not only an enthusiast for the whole conception of modern colonial development, but one who already knew the West Indies and East Africa, and was only too eager to take the opportunity afforded during our partnerships in office to go on extensive tours to West Africa, Ceylon, and Malaya. Meanwhile a project for which I had secured approval before the Unionist Government left office, the creation of a colonial development fund, was, with praiseworthy promptitude, translated into action by our successors. This fund, amounting to £1,000,000 annually, is available both to assist and stimulate railway and other general development, and also to help health and research campaigns in colonies whoso own resources are inadequate for the purpose. In this field it supplements, without overlapping, the valuable work which the Empire Marketing Board has been carrying on since 1925. I hope I have said enough _to indicate how our Colonial Empire is gradually taking shape as a distinctive and increasingly important consistent element in the Britannic Commonwealth.