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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 2 (June 1, 1933)

A South Sea Dream of Empire

A South Sea Dream of Empire.

With that subject as a text he entered upon a fascinating exposition of his long ago scheme for a confederation of the islands of the South Pacific. He went back to the days of the first page 18 Bishop Selwyn, when he and that man of fine courage cruised to the Western Pacific, and he told how it had been his ardent wish that all the Southern groups, from the New Hebrides eastward to Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Rarotonga should be banded together into a kind of oceanic empire, under the British flag, with New Zealand as the administrative centre. It was now over forty years since he had suggested such a federation to the Imperial authorities, but no one in Britain then cared twopence for all the isles of the great South Sea, and Grey learned that he must concern himself only with New Zealand, which was considered quite enough trouble to the Mother Country.

The grey old statesman, his usually low, rather quavering voice strengthening and steadying as he discussed the subject that had always been of great concern to him, spoke of his ideal, of those long-ago days of his first governorship in New Zealand—an all-British expanse of island-dotted ocean, all British except for the French who had already got a footing in the Eastern Pacific; a federated constellation of tropic states in which civilised government should replace political chaos and intertribal bloodshed, in which trade should be stimulated by a fleet of vessels trading from Auckland to every group, and in which the approaches to New Zealand and Australia should be guarded by these chains of coral outposts.

That was the outline of his dream: a dream that had it then won the approval of the British Government, at the beginning of the Fifties, would have saved these colonies, and Britain too, a vast amount of anxiety and international complications and would have improved the condition of all the Island peoples.

This interviewer returned to the office with very vague ideas of Sir George's views on the political situation of the hour—naturally so, for the diplomatic veteran had said not a word that would give a handle to either faction; “a plague o’ both your houses” was no doubt his private opinion. But a far more spacious subject had been opened before him; he had had the rare opportunity of hearing the Pacific Confederation ideal expounded by its originator; a scheme that has been elaborated, in theory at least, by many a later publicist, and that some of our last generation of politicians liked to have the world imagine was quite a clever notion of their own. Grey's fine conception of the oceanic empire has to some extent been given effect to, for New Zealand's mana and flag now cover many Pacific islands; but there would have been a wide-extending homogeneity of government and corresponding peaceful progress among most of the groups south of the Equator had such a man as Grey been enabled to devote his personal influence and statecraft to the execution of such a plan of empire.