ON IMPERIAL CITIZENSHIP. 425 



In such a medley any common standard of civic consciousness or 

 rights or duties is clearly unthinkable. And the most distant avenues 

 of approach to a common platform are barred by obstacles which at 

 present appear unsurmountable. There are antipathies of all sorts, 

 some natural and inevitable, others unworthy, which debar two types 

 of civilisation from assisting each other to a common civic status. 

 There is sheer prejudice — the huhris, it may be, of a conquering race, 

 or ignorance and insularity. There is often the natural resentment of 

 a community, weak either in itself or in comparison with the task it 

 has undertaken, for example, in settling a new country — its natural 

 resentment against the competition of another community. Among 

 the higher and older types of culture there is a horror of miscegenation 

 and an instinctive erecting of barriers against it. In a hundred tangible 

 and intangible ways the opportunities of working towards communal 

 standards of life are refused, even if the capacity for achieving them 

 were much greater than in fact it is. But the essential truth to which 

 we must always return is that the uniform and universal status of 

 Imperial citizenship is unattainable so long as there are grave 

 divergencies of civilisation applied to the ordinary observances of life. 



All this, it may be said, is merely wrapping up in abstract phrases 

 the concrete fact that certain white communities in the Empire will 

 not permit members of other or coloured communities to live alongside 

 them on terms of civic equality. I agree ; but its purpose is to emphasise 

 the radical nature of the problem of the extension of Imperial Citizen- 

 ship, and the futility of any ready-made solution. For the contrary 

 view appeal is still made occasionally to the edict of Caracalla, in which, 

 by a stroke of the pen, he conferred the Eoman citizenship upon 

 all the free-born inhabitants of the Eoman Empire. Historians have, 

 of course, long discounted the value of that theatrical coup, whicli 

 apparently had for its sole object the replenishment of the Emperor's 

 treasury by making the provincials amenable to taxation from whicli 

 as subjects they had been free; Gibbon, with his usual insight, describes 

 it as conferring ' the vain title and the real obligations of Eoman 

 citizens.' This is clearly not a precedent for us to follow. Nor is 

 there any permanent value in a more modern solution, adopted by our 

 own Imperial Conference in 1917, the principle of reciprocity. It was 

 put forward to meet the grievances of Indians regarding their position 

 in the self-governing Dominions ; but, apart from the fact that it breaks 

 down when applied to the Crown Colonies, it is obviously a mere tem- 

 Ijorary palliative, and a dangerous palliative inasmuch as i^eciprocity 

 may at any time degenerate into retaliation 



And yet the problem, I would repeat, is of high importance. It is 

 also of considerable urgency, for claims to civic status are constantly 

 being pressed by or for communities from whom it has been withheld. 

 Such claims are likely to become more insistent as calls are made on 

 those communities for common services or for conformity with common 

 standards. And they have now a permanent basis in the growth of 

 racial consciousness, in what Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls the rising 

 tide of colour. Urged frequently, it may be, with more appreciation of 

 the rights than of the duties of citizenship, they are meant primarily 



