802 REPORT — 1900. 



Governments, separated by vast ocean-spaces from their offshoots, has given origin 

 to new and distinct nations difi'erent from the parent stock in modes of thought 

 and in ways of life, a result due mainly, no doubt, to local physical conditions, 

 but in part also, if only in part, to detachment, to complete and actual severance 

 from the mother country. This brings us to that most interesting and important 

 topic, geographically speaking, of Distance, an aspect of our science which is of 

 the utmost concern to traders and to statesmen ; indeed, an eminent German 

 geoo-rapher defines geography as the Science of Distances. To this subject of 

 Distance I wish in particular to direct your attention, and especially to its 

 bearings upon the British Empire. 



The British Empire is equal in size to four Europes, while its population 

 approximates four hundred millions. Although that may seem a somewhat 

 grandiloquent method of description, it is a fairly accurate statement of fact. Still 

 more interesting to us is another truth — that outside of these islands we have 

 some ten millions of white-skinned English-speaking fellow-subjects. These 

 islands are scarcely more than one-hundredth part of the whole Empire, although 

 we count as four-iifths of its white population ; of the total number of the Queen's 

 subjects we are, however, no more than a tenth. 



British Empire is somewhat of a misnomer, just as the North American and 

 Australian Colonies were never colonies at all in the classical sense of the word. 

 For the colonies are not independent of the mother country. An empire again 

 really means a number of subject peoples brought together, and at first held to- 

 gether, by force. India is an empire for instance. Some new title or phrasft 

 would have to be invented to describe accurately all the possessions of the British 

 Crown from the Government of India through all possible grades of more or less 

 direct control until we come to some colony with representative institutions, and 

 thence to the great commonwealths with responsible legislators and responsible 

 cabinets. Happily, however, there is no need now for any novel designation. 

 The style British Empire has become in time of stress a rallying cry for all the 

 Queen's subjects, and the term has been sanctified by the noble eager devotion 

 shown to her Majesty, both as a beloved and venerated constitutional sovereign, 

 and as the common bond of unity between those great self-governing daughter- 

 nations which we in the past were accustomed to speak of as ' our colonies.' 

 Consequently British Empire has henceforward a clearly defined, a distinct, a national 

 sio-nificance, just as Imperialism has a special and peculiar meaning to all ofns. 

 "VVe understand by British Empire and by British Imperialism a confederacy of many 

 lands under the rule of her Britannic Majesty. This confederacy is dominated by 

 white peoples — Anglo-Saxons, Celts, French-Canadians, and others— knit together 

 in most instances by the ties of blood relationship, but with equal if not greater 

 closeness by common interests, an identical civilisation, and a love of liberty, in 

 addition to that dignified but enthusiastic acceptance, already referred to, of the 

 constitutional sovereignty of the same Queen. We may hope that generous demo- 

 cratic expansiveness and social assimilation will also in time detain willingly within 

 the limits of this British confederacy of white peoples those other Christians and 

 distant kinsfolk of ours in South Africa who are at present so bitterly antagonistic. 

 Kuled and controlled under liberal ideals by the centre of authority there are, 

 in addition, the great subject territories whose non-Christian population are less 

 advanced in moral and material progress. They exhibit indeed every degree of 

 backwarduess, from the barbarism of the savagest tribesman to the intellectual but 

 archaic civilisation of ancient Asiatic nationalities. 



Concerning the British Empire, and comparing it with other empires, ancient, 

 recent or now existing, its two most remarkable features are its prodigious and 

 lonsr-continued growth and the persistency of its power. It cannot to all seeming 

 grow much larger, from lack of expansive possibility. But it is unprofitable to 

 predict. Every step which has been taken in the way of extension, particularly 

 of late years, has been against the wishes and in almost passionate opposition to 

 the views of large sections of the people. Yet the process of enlargement has 

 gone on continually, being often in actual despite of a Government, whose 

 members find themselves powerless to prevent absorptions and concretions which 



