III.

To test the strain that Australian attachment to the imperial connection would bear, we have a right to imagine the contingency of Great Britain being involved in a war with a foreign Power of the first class. Leaving Sir Henry Parkes, we find another authority to enlighten us upon the consequences in such a case. Mr. Archibald Forbes is a keen observer, not addicted to abstract speculation, but with a military eye for facts and forces as they actually are, without reference to sentiments or ideals to which anybody else may wish to adjust them. Mr. Forbes has traced out some of the effects upon Australian interests of an armed conflict between the mother country and a powerful adversary. Upon the Australian colonies, he says emphatically, such a conflict would certainly bring wide-ranging and terrible mischiefs. We had a glimpse of what would happen at once, in the organised haste with which Russia prepared to send to sea swift cruisers equipped in America, when trouble with England seemed imminent in 1878. We have a vast fleet, no doubt, but not vast enough both to picquet our own coast-line with war-ships against raids on unprotected coast-towns, and besides that to cover the great outlying flanks of the Empire. These hostile cruisers would haunt Australasian waters (coaling in the neutral ports about the Eastern Archipelago), and there would be scares, risks, uncertainties, that would derange trade, chill enterprise, and frighten banks. Another consideration, not mentioned by Mr. Forbes, may be added. We now do the carrying trade of Australasia to the great benefit of English shipowners (See Economist, August 27, 1881). If the English flag were in danger from foreign cruisers, Australia would cease to employ our ships, and might possibly find immunity in separation and in establishing a neutral flag of her own.

Other definite evils would follow war. The Australasian colonist lives from hand to mouth, carries on his trade with borrowed money, and pays his way by the prompt disposal of his produce. Hence it is that the smallest frown of tight money sends a swift shock, vibrating and thrilling, all through the Australasian communities. War would at once hamper their transactions. It would bring enhanced freights and higher rates of insurance to cover war risks. This direct dislocation of commerce would be attended in time by default of payment of interest on the colonial debt, public, semi-public, and private. As the vast mass of this debt is held in England, the default of the Englishmen in Australia would injure and irritate Englishmen at home, and the result would be severe tension. The colonial debtor would be all the more offended, from his consciousness that 'the pinch which had made him a defaulter would have a purely gratuitous character so far as he was concerned.'

'I, at least,' says Mr. Forbes, in concluding his little forecast, 'have the implicit conviction that if England should ever be engaged in a severe struggle with a Power of strength and means, in what condition soever that struggle might leave her, one of its outcomes would be to detach from her the Australian colonies' (Nineteenth Century, for October 1883). In other words, one of the most certain results of pursuing the spirited foreign policy in Europe, which is so dear to the Imperialist or Bombastic school, would be to bring about that disintegration of the Empire which the same school regard as the crown of national disaster.

It would be a happy day for the Peace Society that should give the colonies a veto on imperial war. It is true that during the Indian Mutiny New South Wales offered to send away the battery for which it paid, but when the despatch actually took place it was furious. Australia has militiamen, but who supposes that they can be spared in any numbers worth considering for long campaigns, and this further loss and dislocation added to those which have been enumerated by Mr. Forbes? Supposing, for the sake of argument, that Australia were represented in the body that decided on war, though we may notice that war is often entered upon even in our own virtuous days without preliminary consent from Parliament, nobody believes that the presence of Australian representatives in the imperial assembly that voted the funds would reconcile their constituents at the other side of the globe to paying money for a war, say, for the defence of Afghanistan against Russia, or for the defence of Belgian neutrality. The Australian, having as much as he can do to carry on from hand to mouth, would speedily repent himself of that close and filial union with the mother country, which he is now supposed so ardently to desire, when he found his personal resources crippled for the sake of European guarantees or Indian frontiers. We had a rather interesting test only the other day of the cheerful open-handedness that English statesmen expect to find in colonial contributions for imperial purposes. We sent an expedition to Egypt, having among its objects the security of the Suez Canal. The Canal is part of the highway to India, so (shabbily enough, as some think) we compelled India to pay a quota towards the cost of the expedition. But to nobody is the Canal more useful than to our countrymen in Australia. It has extended the market for their exports and given fresh scope for their trade. Yet from them nobody dreams of asking a farthing. Nor do the pictures drawn by Mr. Forbes and others encourage the hope that any Ministry in any one of the seven Australian Governments is likely to propose self-denying ordinances that take the shape of taxes for imperial objects. 'He is a hard-headed man, the Australian,' says Mr. Forbes, 'and has a keen regard for his own interest, with which in the details of his business life, his unquestionable attachment to his not over-affectionate mother, is not permitted materially to interfere. Where his pocket is concerned he displays for her no special favouritism. For her, in no commercial sense, is there any "most favoured nation" clause in his code. He taxes alike imports from Britain and from Batavia. His wool goes to England because London is the wool market of the world, not because England is England. He transacts his import commerce mainly with England because it is there where the proceeds of the sale of his wool provide him with financial facilities. But he has no sentimental predilection for the London market.'

IV.

Proposals of a more original kind than those of Sir Henry Parkes have been made by the Earl of Dunraven, though they are hardly more successful in standing cross-examination. Lord Dunraven has seen, a great deal of the world, and has both courage and freshness of mind. He scolds Liberals for attaching too little importance to colonies, and not perceiving that our national existence is bound up with our existence as an empire. We are dependent in an increasing degree on foreign countries for our supply of food, and therefore we might starve in time of war unless we had an efficient fleet; but fleets, to be efficient, must be able to keep the sea for any length of time, and they can only do this by means of the accommodation afforded by our various dependencies and colonies dotted over the surface of the globe. This is a very good argument so far as it goes, but of course it would be met, say in South Africa, by keeping Table Mount and Simon's Bay, and letting the rest go. It might, too, as we all know, be met in another way, namely, by the enforcement at sea of the principles of warfare on land, and the abandonment of the right of seizure of the property of private individuals on the ocean.

Besides that, says Lord Dunraven, the colonies are by far our best customers, and our only chance of