March i6, 1916. 
LAND AND WATER 
AN AMBASSADOR OF EMPIRE. 
By Neoimperialist. 
IT is well, as notable occasion serves, to turn from 
-tudies to living facts, to note how fast the war 
is doing the work of those who, here and in the 
Dominions, have laboured for the creation of an 
effectively organised Greater Britain which shall be a 
Commonwealth founded on free brotherhood, rather than 
an Empire based on tragically futile ideas of dominion. 
Progress was slow, studies and researches were 
judged, and, even to those engaged in them seemed to be, 
largely academic. But now transparently clear implica- 
tions of the Etate of war have tiooded all our world with a 
new vision. In normal times people alter their con- 
ceptions slowly. They continue to use terms of which 
the significance has evaporated, and this prevents con- 
\ersipn to necessary reforms or even the serious discussion 
of them. In some such way as this on the eve of war 
many still spoke of colonies and possessions with a half- 
friendly contempt or an air of futile pride. The war has 
shown them as nations banded in a free and glorious 
alliance for a conception of liberty and a theory of govern- 
ment on which their national and their personal lives 
liavt' been built. In truth the grandiose German plan was 
inevitably wrecked when Botha and Smuts, Borden and 
Laurier, Fisher and Hughes, Massey and Ward declared 
for England and for Belgium in the nam.es of the peoples 
that they represented. 
Never was there such a glorious testimony in epitome 
(out of enemy mouths) to the British as against the 
Prussian Imperial idea as was involved in that patheticalK' 
eager question addressed to a Canadian prisoner of war by 
his German captors: "What did the English say to 
Canada to make her fight for them ? " 
Unique Significance. 
Witiiin the last week has happened an event rightly 
hailed by the Press as of unique significance. The 
Premier of Australia, after formal conference with the 
Premiers of New Zealand and Canada, attends a meeting 
of the Cabinet in l^ondon. It is for the peoples of these 
islands to ponder and to understand the full measure of 
that significance, fie comes more definitely than has 
ever been apparent in any former visit of a Dominion 
representative, as an ambassador of three of the five 
free nations to the central executive ; as a stranger indeed, 
and by concession rather than by the right which should 
be his, but still welcomed, trusted and accredited in a 
quite new sense. 
An Ambassador carries more than his credentials ; 
or, rather, a salient part of those credentials is his 
capacity, his temper, his discretion. Mr. Hughes is 
believed by his fellow countrymen to possess vigour and 
initiative, a forceful personality ; indeed, the high quality 
of leadership. An old and loyal member of Mr. Fisher's 
government, he is judged to have a wider outlook than 
his former chief. Mr. Fisher was primarily a Labour 
statesman, not indeed of so narrow a complexion as we 
are accustomed to note in our leaders of Labour at home 
wlio, it is to be said, light against so much heavier odds, 
but still necessarily preoccupied with the task of carrying 
what seemed to him vital social and economic reforms in 
the teeth of a still powerful opposition. Of that high 
(juality of an ambassador, tact, the best testimony in 
Mr. Hughes' favour is his happy expression, to which Mr. 
Bonar Law gave charming tribute, of the splendid for- 
bearance of Australia and New Zealand in regard to the 
(iailipoli failure, forbearance hardly less magnificent 
than the courage of the Anzac battalions, ancl withal 
a rare phenomenon in political life and of most happy 
augury. 
This ambassador of Empire, then, sees further than 
the mere immediate questions of military co-operation, 
of the organisation of the supplies of wheat and of metals, 
which he has ostensibly come to discuss. He sees with a 
clear eye the vision of Imperial unity ; but, a member 
of a powerful Labour government, he' sees it from a new 
angle. He sees as a \vide-eyed man cannot fail to see the 
outstanding fact that the Empire is no mere contrivance 
of tariffs and agreements, no mere vast fanfily business 
so to speak, but a bulwark of liberties won bv our race 
through centuries of persistent contest against arbitrary 
power and privilege, a barrier against the old, bad con- 
ceptions of the imposing of tyrannical will which are now 
revived in the later Prussianism. 
Chamberlain and Rhodes. 
You may say that he completes the visions of our 
Chamberlain and our Rhodes, or makes explicit the 
deductions implicit in their imaginative Imperial 
philosophy. It is surely impossible that the more per- 
ceptive and liberal-minded of our Labour leaders can fail 
to be deeply impressed by this Labour Minister, whose 
zeal springs from no suspected source, to {)ut it in hostile 
terms, of capitalist megalomania or expansionist jingoism. 
It is almost impossible that even our detached 
philosophers of pacificism should be able to escape the 
conviction that a Minister of such traditions is em- 
phatically not a militarist. The military virtues of the 
Australians all the world knows, but the thought of 
militarism in their connection would be a rich joke to 
those who know their habits and their temper. 
And then there are those honest men of Radical 
mould, whose preoccupations have been too exclusively 
with domestic troubles and the real disabilities and 
grievances of the unfortunate, and who, after the danger- 
ous fashion of the idealist, believed what they wished to 
believe, that the great war would never come and was a 
mere phantasm of the alarmist sabre-rattlers this side the 
North Sea. These fundamentally honest and admirable 
folk have been rightly shocked into a consideration of 
those external issues of the stable settlement on which, 
as they now find, their domestic problems are ultimately 
based. They have seen their world in ruins, their careful 
retrenchments dissipated in the waste of a day's battle, 
their reforms jeopardised for a generation. They will 
surely listen to such a messenger and take their new 
conception of the Imperial Task from such untainted 
lips. They will surely learn that peace is not merely to 
be had by rationalising — though rationalism may be the 
slow ultimate way to the great end. 
The New Imperialism. 
Mr. Bonar La\V, in the recent gathering in the House 
of Commons to welcome Mr. Hughes, phrased the high 
hope of the new imperialism in terms intelligible enough 
to those who read between the cautious lines of our 
publicists' utterances on this matter : 
" There is one thing I hope and believe we may gain from 
the war and that is that as the war has shown the whole 
Empire is one in spirit and in action, so some means may 
be found for making it one in structure for all the time 
that is to come "... adding the hope that both here 
and in the Dominions statesmen will realise " that the 
war has made a great difference, that it has made every- 
thing plastic, that things which were impossible before 
are perhaps easy now, and above all that it may be found 
that perhaps a big step is not more difficult to take than 
a small one." 
One in structure . . . the big step not more 
difficult to take than the small one— that is the pith of 
the utterance. In the big step many prejudices will 
have to be sacrificed, many vague phrases re-examined, 
many conflicting interests adjusted. The supreme 
passion for liberty, the supreme necessity of adequate 
defence, these will prevail to carry the Great Settlement, 
to build the Five Nations into one indissoluble sovereign 
state. The details are a matter of laborious enquiry 
and conference, but the essence of the case is made. 
The Australian Premier has taken but another significant, 
step along the appointed path. He is a discreet and a 
knowledgeable ambassador and he should speak with a 
convicticm, such as no imperialist of the popular school 
can command, to those isolationists among us to whom 
the word " Empire " has been synonymous with a 
challenging aggression, and the splendid thing neither 
studied nor believed in. 
Let them listen to Mr. Hughes and the while turn 
over in their minds the salient cpiestion ' What clid the 
English say to the nations t(j make them fight for her ? 
