346 Royal Colonial Institute. 



was an obstacle to our potential progress, and that South America woixld be glad if it 

 could be changed. Having got that additional representation, we felt obUged to go 

 into the question again. In order to guide us into selecting a name, we tried to lay 

 down certain test conditions. It should be a name which should avoid confusion with 

 any existing society ; which should express the scope of the Institute ; which should 

 include the word Royal ; and which should be short and handy. These conditions 

 excluded several of the names which had appeared most popular in the referendum. 

 There are the following Societies with which you have to avoid confusion : Imperial 

 Institute, British Empire League, British Empire Club, United Empire Club, League of 

 the Empire, and Royal Institution of Great Britain. Finally we came down to Royal 

 Britannic Institute as being least objectionable. There is no confusion in the name, 

 it is short and handy, and expresses the scope of the Institute both in regard to member- 

 ship and aims. The word Britannic is taken from the title of the King. It is a good 

 old English word. It was used by no less a person than John Milton, who wrote of 

 " this Britannic Empire." It avoids that party political association with which the 

 word Imperial is sometimes involved, although it ought not to be. The objection on 

 the other hand was that the word was strange and unfamiliar, having gone out of 

 fashion as a word. That no doubt is true, but I think in the last two or three years 

 one can say that the word Britannic is again acquiring a certain vogue. The argu- 

 ment for the change is that the old name is out of date, and rather perhaps prejudicial 

 to our expansion. Against the change, the argument in a nut-shell is " let well alone." 



Dr. Vrooman seconded the motion. He claimed to know something about the 

 feeling of the peoples of the Dominions regarding the whole question involved in the 

 Colonial habit of mind and said the belief was crystallising everywhere throughout 

 Canada, and long before the other Dominions were as old as Canada the belief v/ould 

 be crystallising there also, that we had definitely done with the whole Colonial idea. 

 For himself, he was heartily sick and tired of the Colonial idea as applied to the four 

 great Dominions of the Empire, because they were not Colonies and the citizens of the 

 Dominions were not Colonials. Therefore to have a name which had technically 

 nothing whatever to do with them was insufficient. They wanted something which 

 would not only cover the case of Great Britain and the Colonies, but which was broad 

 enough to connote everything that the whole Empire stood for, including its four self- 

 governing States. It was important to remember that the Dominion of Canada was 

 only a year old when the Institute came into being, while the Commonwealth of 

 Australia was -founded thirty -three years after the Institute, and the Union of South 

 Africa forty-one years after. The establishing of these four great self-governing 

 Dominions had set a new mark in the Imperial imagination, and given a new meaning to 

 the whole Imperial idea, and never more in the history of this Empire should we find any 

 patience on the part of those who lived in the self-governing Dominions with the Colonial 

 habit of mind. In their choice that day, they had to ally themselves with one thing or 

 another, and he held that they should not adhere to a name which, if not utterly empty 

 and meaningless, bore a reproach to every citizen of the self-governing States, because 

 the States were not colonies and the people not Coloniids. He seconded the motion 

 on the broad distinction between the two great ideas held by the two schools of thought 

 — the idea of British ascendancy with Colonial dependency as opposed to the great 

 principle of Britannic unity. 



IVJr. T. Hatton Richards asked wljethej- the motion wag consonant with Article 1 



