THE BRITISH EMPIRE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1506, 10 January 1901, Page 38

THE BRITISH EMPIRE

A GREAT FACT TO BE PROUD OF. Little Englanders may be invited to ponder an article on the growth of the British Empire during the Nineteenth Century, which is illustrated in the “Pall Mall Magazine” by a series of Mr Holt Schooling’s striking diagrams'. This vast growth is, as he says, “awe-full when we realise what such growth really means. It means that land lias been added to the British Empire at the average rate of two acres for every second of time during the century/’ Such a, statement is a trial of faith, but Mr Schooling is prepared to prove it. It is more interesting, however, to compare British possessions shown on maps in the year 1800 with the corresponding maps of to-day: A British-tinted map of the world in 1800 would shew to us, in place of the present great solid mass marked “Dominion of Canada,” which extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore, and which is nearly as big from south to north as it is from east to west, merely a few small areas, that even as late as

1887 were widely different from the Canada of to-day, i;cfh geographically and politically.. The independent British. Provinces of Nova Scotia, .New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the tiny Canada or ISOu, with Newfoundland, were in North America the representatives of the British Empire; and "to the north" and west stretched the vast regions abandoned to the lonely trappers and furtraders of the Hudson’s Bay Company—wild regions unknown to civilisation/ In Asia a _ strip or two down by the coasts of India, and at the north, represented in 1800 the consolidated India of to-day; and these patches, with Ceylon and a part of the present Straits Settlements, were then all that existed or the present British Empire in Asia. In Africa there was in 1800 not even the tiny patch on its southern point that ?l.i 1814 marked Cape Colony as British, land. Two or three dots on or near to the Geld Coast did in 1800 represent thepresent British Empire in Africa, east, west, south, and central, without counting what is now very much like a large British Protectorate in North-east Africa. In Australasia, the year 1800 showed a little, scratch cn what is now New South Wales —at Botany Bay. where we dumped the convicts. In 1800 a noble continent and the large islands of New Zealand the latter in. the very van of progress as regards their experiments in : social political economy by way of old age pensions, etc. —fly the Union Jack. To speak roundly, the empire during the century new drawing to a close has grown from two millions of square miles to its present size of nearly twelve millions or square miles. The- increase in the Empire’s population is not less remarkable. In 1800 it was 11-5,000,ut-o ; to-day if is 380,000,000. Excluding India, there are in Great Britain 62,000,000 people, of whom 12.000,000 are whites—one white person to five coloured. In closing his interesting paper—and this is the point the Little Englanders should read on to Mr Schooling, in his imagination, gathers all these millions around St. Paul's Cathedral at midnight on December 31, 1900, to cheer the Queen and the Twentieth Century : As the are at bell of St. Paul’s struck the notes, the deep and booming notesof the passing Wonderful Century, how few of that great and motley aencourse from many lands would say NO to the question at that moment most solemnly vibrating into the night above their heads—“ Has your land: been the better for the British rule which has been carried tc it by the Expansion of England: during this century which is now dead r” The massed shout cf YEb would go up, and the citizens of the British Empire would enter the twentieth century acclaiming their Queen, and shoulder to shoulder as their voices drowned the last deep boom ef the Nineteenth Century of Time.

That as. we say, is a flight- of the imagination, but is it not also the statement of a, great fact ? The growth of the Empire and the extension of British rule have bestowed upon millions of people all over the world the blessings of enlightened government; they have bestowed upon the British people themselves incalculable privileges, . and imposed the highest responsibilities. Mr Schooling’s article could not have appeared at a more appropriate time than, on the eve of a general election.