Remarks On Mr. Elliot's Memorandum.

The leading feature of Mr. Elliot's memorandum is, that while it exposes and condemns the results of the present system, it proposes no practical alteration in that system; consequently, the anomalies and abuses which General Peel points out, and for which he wishes that a remedy he provided, will continue in full force if Mr. Elliot's views be adopted. The Committee was appointed to "prepare a "scheme" for the application of certain principles to each. Colony; but this task Mr. Elliot, as I contend, does not perform. It is true that he expresses an abstract opinion against scattering our troops in small garrisons, and it is true also that "he prefers the plan by which Her Majesty's" "Government determines the amount of force which it deems "reasonable to allot to different Colonies, as being required by "the duties of the Sovereign State, whilst the Colonies themselves "must pay for any additional number of troops which" they may ask for and obtain." But practically this is nothing else than the present system put into words, inasmuch as Her Majesty's Government now "allots the amount of "force which it thinks reasonable," &c.; and if it does not, it can, whenever it pleases, increase or diminish that force.

I do not deny that it would be consistent with the literal terms of Mr. Elliot's definition to throw as much of the responsibility and burden of self-defence on the Colonies as the Report recommends, or even more, for the Imperial Government might say that "the duties of the Sovereign "State" do not "require any force to be allotted" to any Colony, with or without the exception of the half-dozen military posts enumerated in the Report; but that is not the way in which the plan ever has been worked or will be worked; nor is it the way in which Mr. Elliot conceives its working. That I am right in supposing him not to advocate a change of system is shown by his selection of the North American page 296Colonies as an example of the plan which he prefers. "There," he says, "it is already in operation," and consequently, "a "general and intelligible principle is established." Now, it so happens that there is no group of Colonies with which the War-office has been engaged in more constant and irritating correspondence, or about which we have more inconsistent decisions, or which exhibits more marked inequality as regards the plans of defence adopted, the contributions of the various Colonies, and the assistance we have given them, than those of North America. Indeed, it is to this group that I should most naturally recur for illustrations of the present system, involving, as it does, what General Peel calls "the absence of any fixed and recognised principle in determining questions of "military expenditure." Moreover, the practical result, as exemplified in British America, of the system which Mr. Elliot desires to see in general operation is, that in Canada alone has any attempt been made at self-defence; and there it is a feeble and inadequate one; in the other Colonies, comprising, as they do, some of the oldest, most numerous, most prosperous, and most energetic of our colonial communities, not one farthing is expended or one man raised and trained for the defence of their own lives and properties against foreign enemies. I can hardly conceive that he considers this to be a desirable state of things, or one which ought not only to continue indefinitely in British America, but to be extended over the whole Empire.

Nor can I agree with Mr. Elliot that any distinction can be drawn between the system pursued in British America and that pursued at the Cape. In both his principle prevails, for (to use his own words) "the Government determines the amount of force which it deems reasonable to allot to the "Colonies respectively, as being required by the duties of the "Sovereign State." At the Cape, as we all know, the practical result of this has been what Mr. Elliot calls the "grave fact," and what the Report calls the "gigantic anomaly," of an expenditure in one year of £830,000.

These and similar facts lead to the conclusion that no permanent reduction of expense to this country, and no effective stimulus to colonial exertions, will be the result of merely recommending, as Mr. Elliot has done, to Government, the desirableness of reconsidering the distribution of the army in the Colonies. This has been done over and over again, and nothing has come of it. We have, with trifling exceptions, the same extravagance on our side, the same helplessness on theirs; the same confusion, inconsistency, and disputation which has prevailed more or less for the last century in our military policy towards our Colonies.

I will now proceed to consider Mr. Elliot's principal objections to the Report.

His first objection is to a uniform rate of joint contribution. It will be remembered that the two main principles of the plan proposed in the Report are—(1) colonial responsibility and management; (2) joint contribution, at a uniform rate. Of these, the former is infinitely the more important; and, if it be admitted, the precise mode in which the mother country should assist the colony is comparatively immaterial. It must necessarily be by a contribution of some kind, either in men or money, and I feel assured that a uniform rate for such contribution will be found both more fair and more likely to answer practically than any other arrangement. If it be objected to, we must adopt a rate varying according to some other intelligible and definite principle; and I can conceive no other than one varying according either to the capacity of the different Colonies, or according to their exposure to danger. Now, the application of either of these tests would lead to a result far more anomalous and unsatisfactory than the adoption of a uniform rate. It is absolutely impossible to gauge, even approximately, the comparative capacities of resources of different countries; you cannot do it according to revenue, because that depends on willingness quite as much as on ability to support taxation; (for example, Austria has a larger revenue than the United States, but no one supposes she has page 298greater means of raising one:) nor can you do it according to population, because the producing power of different races, or of the same races in different circumstances, varies indefinitely; but even if you could, I see no justice in dealing with your Colonies as if they were paupers, and giving them money, or money's worth, on account of or in proportion to their poverty; nor do I think that small Colonies have any claim to get their public services performed more cheaply than large ones at other people's expense. The ground of their claim upon us is the fact of their dependence, and that applies equally to the large and the small. It is a matter of justice, not of charity; and Mr. Elliot, in favouring the eleemosynary principle, puts the matter, as I conceive, on a wrong basis altogether. The apportionment of contribution according to exposure to attack would be, if possible, even more impracticable, for the danger of attack which a country lies under depends on such numerous and perpetually varying circumstances, geographical, political, and military, that it may at once be discarded as a basis for any permanent arrangement. If, however, a better way of working out a scheme of joint contribution than that of a uniform rate can be devised, I, for one, should be perfectly ready to consider it; the only principle on which I desire to insist as essential, being that of a common defence under colonial management, as distinguished from that of separation and independence, both of action and contribution, the mother country having the responsibility.

According to the former, which is the course recommended in the Report, the whole system of defence, including the amount of force, would be decided on by the Colony, as the most competent and most interested party, and to the expense of that system the mother country would contribute. According to the latter, which is the course recommended by Mr. Elliot, neither party would have the power or the obligation to provide for the whole defence of a Colony; but the mother country would provide for Imperial interests, or leave them unprovided for.

Of the latter system the fruits are before us in the fact that we incur an enormous outlay for what Mr. Elliot admits to be, in a military point of view, a most imperfect and inadequate result; while the Colonies do virtually nothing. Of the former system we have also had experience, and I will now endeavour to show how it worked as regards military efficiency, not insisting for the present on its more obvious recommendations of justice and economy.

For 150 years after we had colonised North America, the principle of Colonial self-defence prevailed there almost exclusively. The British Colonists found themselves in contact with native nations, more numerous, more warlike, and better organised than any which modern Colonists have had to deal with. They were also surrounded by, and intermingled with, the Colonies of several European nations, each of which separately was in the habit of meeting England in war on equal terms, both by sea and land, viz., the French, the Spaniards, and the Dutch. In all our Colonies there were "Imperial interests" to be protected, that is, there were points of great strategical and commercial importance, such as Boston, New York, Charlestown, and many others. Yet in those days it was not considered by the mother country that it was her interest to garrison her Colonies, nor did it ever occur to the Colonists that when for their own objects they sought by emigrating an asylum of freedom, or a new field of enterprise and profit, they were entitled thereby to claim immunity from the responsibility of self-defence, which devolves on the members of every other organised community in the world. On the contrary, they were content to know that with the greater advantages of a new country, they must meet greater hardships and dangers. They never thought that they were to take the former, and to be protected at other people's expense from the latter.

Until the year 1754 I can only find two instances when regular soldiers were sent to British America. One was in 1664, in the case of the army which took New York, and the page 300other in 1695, when a body of troops was sent to reinforce the Colonists who were carrying on war against the French. In 1754 a change of policy occurred in this respect for the first time. Braddock was sent to America with a considerable force, the English Mutiny Act was extended for the first time to the Colonies, and they were never again without British troops till we recognised their independence.

Let us see how this system (the idea of applying which, in a modified form, and under circumstances beyond comparison more favourable, appears now so rash and ruinous) actually worked. In the first place, the British Colonies not only successfully established themselves and resisted all attacks on them, but they attacked and conquered foreign possessions, and handed them over to the British Crown; secondly, they attained great prosperity, their increase as regards commerce and population from the commencement of the 18th century to the declaration of independence, being as great as any recorded in history, except that of Australia and California, since the discovery of gold; thirdly, they produced and trained a race of statesmen and soldiers who proved themselves at least equal to the greatest of their European contemporaries. "What I have said is illustrated in almost everv page of early Colonial history, and I know of no history more fruitful in the record of heroic deeds. For example, in 1710 the American Colonists conquered Nova Scotia from the French without any help from England. In 1745, three New England States? Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, of which the whole population at that time was only about 300,000, organised and equipped a naval and military expedition against Louisburg, a fortress described by a contemporary historian as "of prodigious strength," garrisoned by 600 regulars and 1300 militia, and took it after a regular siege, with 49 days of open trenches, its fall involving the surrender of the whole of Cape Breton. The expense, amounting to £200,000, was defrayed in the first place by the Colonists, and only repaid to them by England after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which Louisburg was restored to France.

It would have seemed strange to the men who executed such military operations as these to be told (as Mr. Elliott says of the people of Nova Scotia) that they "could not be expected" to provide for the defence of their own capitals. Yet the population of the three Colonies which conquered Cape Breton was not so large, collectively, as that of Nova Scotia alone, nor was their commerce so great, nor were they, like her, within eight days steaming of the aid of the mother country. If there had been a British garrison in those days at Boston, a place as "important to the general power of the Empire" as Halifax is now, the people of New England would soon have found out that they too "could not bo expected" even to contribute towards defending it.

I next come to the consideration of Mr. Elliot's opinion, that the dependence of the Colonies is not the only ground for our undertaking to defend them, and his argument that the interest we have in their defence constitutes alone a sufficient ground for such undertaking. This view may be perhaps best tested by considering a case where we have "interest" without "dependence." We have a strong interest in the defence of Belgium, if for no other reason, because we are bound by treaty to protect it; indeed, I think it will hardly be denied that there is no British Colony of which the security against foreign conquest is more important to us, and certainly, there is not one in half as much danger of being conquered. Yet it would seem very strange if Belgium proposed that we should undertake the expense of fortifying Antwerp and the maintenance of its garrison. "We should of course reply that though we had an interest in the security of Belgium, that of the Belgians was so much more powerful and direct, that it was for them and not for us to provide for it. We should probably add the expression of our opinion, that the business would be better done if they managed it by themselves, and in their own way than if we interfered; and this is precisely what we ought to say to the Colonies, except that, as was said in the Report, their dependence on us imposes on us an obligation to give page 302them material assistance. I therefore propose to deal with them as we should with Belgium, only so far as is consistent with a reasonable discharge of that obligation.

Although I consider that this is a sufficient answer to the whole argument about "interest," I cannot pass by without remark the illustrations by which Mr. Elliot endeavours to show the importance to England of the political connection with the Colonies. I do so the more willingly because the fallacy (as I conceive it to be) which he employs is one very generally received.

Mr. Elliot argues that the fact of Australia taking our exports to the amount of "nearly £12" a-head of her population, while the United States take them only at the rate of "less than £1," "shows how much larger in proportion is the "commerce with countries which remain part of the Empire." I might with equal justice and greater plausibility (the cases being far more analogous) argue, that because the United States take, in proportion to population, a greater amount of our exports than Canada, that fact "shows how much larger is "the commerce with countries which do not remain part of the "Empire."^*

• 1. Two countries, one a colony and the other independent, of which the economical conditions are tolerably similar; and,—
• 2. Two different periods of the same country's existence, involving different sets of political conditions.

1. The difference between the tariff of the United States and that of Canada (as regards the present question) is just this, that in the former British manufactures are charged with a duty of 24 per cent., and in the latter of 20 per cent., with the exception of leather and clothes, which, on account of some special interest, are charged at 25 per cent. Such is the exact amount of the difference in the obstacles which our trade meets with in our own dependency and the neighbouring foreign state respectively, the result being, as I have shown, that we export more to the foreigner than to the colonist.

And it is further to be observed that the present American tariff is less, the Canadian tariff more, protective than the last, showing that while the Canadians are following the old path, and protecting in proportion as the interests which demand protection grow powerful, the Americans are beginning to see the folly of restrictive tariffs, and show a tendency at least towards greater freedom of trade.

2. I have compared the statistics of our trade with the United States before and after their independence, with the page 304following results^*:—From 1760 to 1770, the last decade of their Colonial dependence, the average annual exports from this country to British North America were £1,763,409, (official value.) From 1783 to 1790, the first seven years after our recognition of their independence, the average annual exports, similarly calculated, were £2,349,040. From 1805 to 1808, the average annual exports were £6,479,277. These figures show that the dissolution of the connection with England caused no appreciable injury to the commercial intercourse of the two countries, although the period to which they relate embraces a transition from a system under which the mother country had a strict monopoly of the trade with her Colonies, to one under which the latter enjoyed, of course, unlimited access to all the markets of the world.

It is true, as Mr. Elliot says, that "the habit of resorting to "a particular market" has a considerable effect upon commerce, but he has not explained what that has to do with the politicial connection, which is the only relevant question; and I have shown, on the contrary, that, in the case of the only available precedent, the habit of resorting to a particular market survived the change from dependence to independence, nor is there any ground whatever for supposing that it could cease to operate on the Australians, merely because their political connection with England was dissolved.

The only group on which Mr. Elliot's observations appear to call for special remark from me is that of the West Indies. Here he deserts the ground of defence against foreign aggression, and lays down broadly our obligations to keep troops there for the purpose of preserving "the existence of society," intimating that without such a force they would be in danger page 306of "falling into helpless and perhaps sanguinary anarchy;" and again, "that without troops these Colonies could not exist." If such were really the case I think it would be difficult to justify our maintaining indefinitely, by the pressure of external force, a society so rotten as to be utterly incapable of holding together alone. But I entirely dissent from this gloomy view. If the negroes were slaves, or if they were, though nominally free, a down-trodden and oppressed race, there might be a danger of Jacobinical insurrection; but the converse of this is the case. The complaint is that the negroes have, under the existing arrangements of society, entirely their own way; and if so, there appears to be no temptation to alter them by violence.

At any rate, the principle laid down by the Secretary of State for War in the letter on which the appointment of the Committee was founded, (and concurred in by the Lords of the Treasury and the Secretary of State for the Colonies), was, that "military expenditure for purposes of internal police "should be defrayed by local funds"—a principle which would go even farther than that suggested in the Report, inasmuch as it would deprive the West Indies of any claim even for Imperial contribution towards a force kept for the purposes of preventing internal disturbance.

I must add that it is difficult to understand why, upon any view of the subject, we keep black troops in the West Indies; as, in the case of a negro insurrection (the only alleged danger to "society,") they would not only be untrustworthy, but formidable; and no one, I suppose, believes that they would be capable of meeting French or American troops in the field.

In conclusion, I wish emphatically to repeat, that the real question is not whether the arrangements which we make for the defence of our Colonies are capable or not of being improved, by re-distribution of force here, or reduction of force there, but whether they are not radically wrong, i.e., based on a theory fundamentally erroneous. The view which I believe page 307to be the right one is that when a part of the people of an old country voluntarily "swarms" to a new one, there is neither justice nor policy in permitting the emigrants to throw on those whom they leave behind the responsibility and charge of keeping the new society together, and defending it against the dangers to which its own act has exposed it. And I must again point out, speaking generally, no colonising country, except England, and England only in comparatively modern days, has ever done so. The Colonies of all other nations, ancient and modern, and English Colonies till we quarrelled with America, have either defended themselves or paid their full share of the expenses of the common defence. Between a Greek metropolis and her Colonies there was a bond of amity, amounting virtually, though not in express terms, to an offensive and defensive alliance; but the obligation was strictly reciprocal: if Athens considered herself bound to assist the Ionian cities against the Persian king, on the other hand the Syracusan triremes fought in a Peloponnesian quarrel, as part of the Corinthian contingent, at Ægos-Potamos. We cannot deal in this way with our Colonies, because they were formed with the understanding that they were to remain "part of the empire," and have a right, so long as they choose to assert it, to the fulfilment of this virtual compact. But it is desirable, both for our sakes and theirs, to reduce to the minimum the incidents of their dependence; for ours, because we have a right to discharge ourselves, so far as justice and honour permit, of the material burdens caused by a relation which does not bring us any corresponding material advantages; for theirs, because in proportion as they learn to provide for their own wants and to assert their own rights, instead of leaning on others, their national character will be elevated and strengthened, and they will be prepared for the day when their independence shall become inevitable. It is on this view that the plan of military defence suggested in the Report is based, inasmuch as, by throwing on the Colonies the primary respon-page 308sibility of their own defence, and confining the assistance of the mother country to a contribution or a contingent, it involves the smallest amount, consistently with the circumstances of the case, of interference with their freedom and independence of action.