November 20, 1915. 
LAISJJ AND WATER. 
THE FORUM. 
A Commentary on Present-day Problems. 
A SALIENT task that confronts us all here 
and noW; in the interests of a fateful 
future, is the thinking out of the pro- 
blems of Empire and of the implications 
of the Greater Commonwealth. It is not a subject 
to which the average man or woman has been 
wont to give much attention. A fairly spacious 
and general ignorance obtains, not only as to the 
special domestic problems of the Dominions, and 
the deeper difficulties and dangers that always 
harass or threaten the dependencies, but as to 
the constitutional structure of the Empire, the 
status of the component parts, and the great 
co-operative task — the contribution towards peace 
and right government which is her, never more 
apparent, destiny. It is an ignorance shared alike 
by breezy Jingoes of the unreflective type and by 
those who tend to look askance at the whole 
expansion of England as a disconcerting adventure 
a little needing apology. The Dominions are self- 
governing national units of one great state — 
the British Commonwealth. They are not, 
though they are frequently termed,- possessions. 
They are no longer England's to do with what she 
will. They exercise a complete control over their 
domestic policy, and submit to a considerable, but 
indeterminate control over their foreign affairs, 
because they freely confess their membership of 
the in>perial family, and recognise the necessity of 
some unified central direction. No other tie than 
free choice and acceptance of the body of laws, 
principles and customs which have moulded and 
conserved the British civilisation, holds them to 
the Mother Country aijd to each other. Secession 
at any moment is open to them, and it is unthink- 
able that any attempt should ever be made to 
coerce any reluctant member by force of arms. 
If the dependencies stand on an essentially 
different basis, it is still broadly true that consent 
of the governed, tacit or expressed, is the real 
power that holds them. It is not to be supposed 
that a resolutely reluctant or widely discontented 
India could be held by the handful of soldiers 
and administrators which laboriously direct her 
destinies. Whatever the British in India are, they 
are certainly not an adequate garrison or army of 
occupation. 
This, then, is the essential truth, that the 
right conception of Empire is expressed no longer 
in terms of possession and power but of respon- 
sibility. It is a conception, that if consciously 
and widely apprehended and developed, would 
modify very materially two unsatisfactory bodies 
of opinion ; a somewhat liu ulent Imperialism 
on the one hand, and what used to be known as 
Little Englandism on the other. 
Perhaps we are most of us more inclined to 
condone the extravagances of the more primitive 
and natural " patriotic " type, which, conscious 
of the power that has been exercised by British 
arms in the past, with an honest pride in British 
blood, not perplexed by subtleties, such as class 
and nationalist aspirations or continental sus- 
ceptibilities and ambitions, accepts with practical 
good sense the outstanding fact of an immense 
lunpire, easily stated' in terms of population 
and territory and natural products, pleasantly 
rubricating. Mercator's projection, an Empire 
meant ,by the .persistent favour of Heaven to 
be guardian of the world, linked, defended ' and ' 
victualled by the two supreme fleets of tfie -j,^ 
world, the British . Mercantile Marine' and thfe- ^■'= 
Royal Navy. * ' ' ^ 
Our other extremists belong to a pattern that ?- 
it is a little more difficult but still necessary to 
suffer patiently. They regret "colonial adven- 
tures and entanglements " as tending to emphasise ■ 
the softer ideas of domination — and thus far they 
may be wis6 ; they are much exercised by our own 
innumerable domestic anomalies, discontents and 
injustices — and here, if they plead their own cause 
they are reaonable, if that of others less fortunate 
than themselves, they are generous ; but when, 
not really approving that institution of the British 
Empire, and not being interested in its external 
problems, they proceed to prescind from or ignore 
what they regret and to focus their vision ex- 
clusively on home affairs, they are guilty of the 
unforgivable sin of politics — the un\varrantable 
simplification of complex issues. It is a sin which 
both types commit, but it is pre-eminently the * 
sin of the intellectualist, of the subtle rather than 
of the plain man. One need not in these tragic 
days labour the point that it is a kind of sin which 
brings its heavy punishment. 
To the practical thinker that can keep himself 
balanced between these extremes, the supreme 
fact is that there exists an entity, the British 
Commonwealth, which, because of its vast size 
and still more of its extended range — it is a com- 
plex of segregate and dissimilar units, not compact 
and homogeneous as the Empires of China and, 
in less degree of Russia — is the most significant 
single factor in the world's task of government and 
civilisation. 
It has always been the fashion of our enemies 
and critics to describe the expansion of our Empire 
in terms of conscious swashbuckling brigandage 
and as an arrogant and oppressive menace to the 
world. And this description, with the substitution 
of conquest for brigandage and the qualification 
of benevolence for arrogance and oppression, is 
accepted with no particular misgivings by our 
patriots of the Jingo type. While, on the other 
hand, our diffident anti-expansionists, where they 
have not preferred to ignore the problem, have 
lent a certain colour to this view by underst^ding 
expansion as synonymous with aggression, and 
most unfairly isolating and emphasising such 
incidents as the deplorable Raid and the Denshawi 
affair. Yet it remains literaliy true, and is no 
gloss of the converted pirate in self-righteous old 
age, that almost every addition of territory, every 
acceptance of governmental responsibility has in 
the past been forced upon a definitely reluctant 
executive, and not consciously planned by 
Machiavellian spiders at the centre of a web. 
Every colonial adventure has been in first instance 
a traders' adventure. Most often that deplorable 
tendency of the trader to exploit, to corrupt, and 
at worst, to ill-treat the unsophisticated native has 
led to the intervention of the central goverritnent. "* ^ 
either to control the white in the interests of the 
native, or to solve problems of defence and 
