CHAPTER I
THE EMPIRE AS A PROPRIETARY ASSET

It is the purpose of this book to discuss the economic integration of the British Empire. By this is meant the establishment of a system of mutual co-operation for the development of the vast potential wealth of the Empire and for the expansion of its present limited population.

It is no longer possible to aim at complete economic union. For that the day is past. Such a union is probably no longer even desirable. In each of the great Dominions there has been established a system of manufacture and an urban concentration dependent on it, that cannot now be obliterated. But as towards the outside world a uniformity of economic policy may still be achieved; and the now separated parts of the Empire may co-operate with one another in the use of capital, the movement of population and the development of national resources, with results as yet scarcely imagined. It is within the reach of statesmanship to initiate in the British Empire an era of prosperity and progress such as the world has never yet seen anywhere at any time.

For three generations past, in the name of “political freedom”, British statecraft and colonial aspirations have set themselves to break up the Empire into a series of disconnected parts. The gift of “responsible government” to the colonies, that began in 1840, carried with it a division of resources, a separation of public debts, a repudiation of all common obligations, a complete dislocation of all common action. It was the partition of an estate. Each of the beneficiaries retired with his own, to use it or not as each saw fit. Most of the talents stayed hidden in the ground. The parent source of capital and migration flowed away to enrich the United States and Argentina. In the sixty years from 1840 to 1900, 10,513,000 British emigrants, or seventy-five per cent of the total, moved outside of the bounds of the Empire; only 3,688,000, or twenty-five per cent, migrated to territory under the British Crown.

As a result of all this, what should have been a united economic commonwealth, comparable to the United States, but immensely greater, is but a group of fragments. The vast totality of resources that is the heritage of all is available to none. A part of the Empire is crowded to the verge of standing room. Two million idle men look across the sea at 2,000,000 square miles of empty land. In some quarters of our disunited commonwealth each single subject of the Crown, as in Western Australia, represents three square miles of land; elsewhere, as in England itself, his share is less than the five-hundredth part of one square mile.

Nor is there any single authority left that can bring the people to the land or the land to the people. Capital accumulates in Lombard Street while the empty fertile spaces of the outer Empire remain, decade after decade, silent. Western Australia, as large as all of Europe west of Warsaw, lies almost motionless under its own weight. Its little handful of people cannot use more than a fraction of it. Canada, portioned off into half a continent in 1867, staggers forward under its burden; alternately it falls prone and rises again: each successive “land boom” is followed by a flat collapse. It has never had mone