EMPIRE IN FACT AND FANCY.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXV, Issue LXV, 2 August 1913, Page 9

EMPIRE IN FACT AND FANCY.

In a thoughtful and well-written paper on "The Ethics of Empire" in the current number of the Round Table we read: "There is but one way of promise. It is that the peoples of the Empire shall realise their national unity and draw from that ideal an in- , spiration to common endeavor in the fulfilment of the moral obligations which their membership of the Empire entails." The writer, in an eloquent plea for the fulfilment of these obligations, explains that neither trade relations nor defence are of the essence of the true Imperialism, which is 'concerned with securing such a union of freedom and law as will subserve the moral interests of all members of the Empire. A GRAVE PERIL. "There is," says the Nation, "grave peril in the schemes to move the selfgoverning Dominions to closer union, economic, defensive, or political. It would weaken, instead of strengthening, the likelihood of our fulfilling in any adequate sense the duty of extending liberty to the subject-races under our control. For the British* Empire at present is not a fact; it is two facts largely unrelated, politically and spiritually. "The free Empire is not an Empire in any historic sense of . that term. It is the grouping of five virtually independent nations under a single Crown. All the qualifications of such a statement are slight or potentially dangerous anomalies. On the other hand, the Empire proper, consisting of India and the various Crown Colonies and Protectorates, shading clown to such obscure relations as those with Egypt and the Soudan, has no political connection whatever with four out of the five free nations. "There are well-meaning Imperialists who desire, above all things, to induce the Dominions to come into a federal arrangement which will saddle them with their 'proper' share of the government of this subject-empire. We hope they will never consent—at any rate until this country has carried her mission of liberty and equality a good deal further than she is disposed at present to carry it. For everyone familiar with the prevailing sentiments of the people in each of our Dominions must be aware that any assumption by them of the white man's burden at the present time would be no help to the fulfilment of precisely those obligations which the writers of articles upon 'ethics of empire' desiderate. Between the parts of our Empire which govern themselves and those which do not there is a great gulf fixed, so wide and deep, indeed, that it is literally true that 'they which would pass from hence to you cannot.' "Now this absolute and vehement negation of the first. element of British liberty and imperial unity, the right to move freely- from any one part of the Empire to any other, and to enjoy, wherever they may be, effective rights, destroys the possibility of realising the lofty ideals of 'liberal' Imperialists. The white governments of our self-governing Dominions will not consent to treat the three hundred and sixty millions of colored British subjects on a basis of humanity and equal liberty. This policy of discrimination is sustained by the passionate feelings of the overwhelming majority of their peoples. So long as this is so, nothing but evil could come to the moral mission of the British Empire by enticing these Dominions into a share of the government of the subject-races. EMPIRE AND MORAL UNITY. "Such progress as we have made towards the extension of liberty and selfgovernment in India and elsewhere would be gravely jeopardised by any admission to an Imperial Council of representatives of our Sglf-governing Dominions. For if we allowed their exclusive sentiments to prevail in our imperial or our foreign policy we should stir more unrest in India and provoke an instant entanglement with our ally, Japan. If, on the other hand, we used our numerical predominance to extort from them a juster and humaner policy, we should snap the bonds of Empire, and each Dominion would either drift along a course of complete independence or would form a Pacific Confederacy under the hegemony of the United States. It is as yet little use talking about Empire as a basis of moral unity of. purpose, for that unity of purpose has no real existence."