The mines, with their tens of thousands of feverish workers of every known nationality, will in time be exhausted, and South Africa will be left, as it was before their advent, a scantily peopled wilderness. The Boers, a far more prolific race than the British, will, by mere weight of numbers, recover their lost ascendency, and our lavish expenditure of blood and treasure in the present war will have been in vain.

LEPEL GRIFFIN.

PROBLEMS OF THE EMPIRE

THE results of the South African War, the death of a great Imperialist, Mr. Rhodes, the assemblage in London of the Colonial Premiers, the very Coronation itself the first coronation of an English Sovereign who has definitely added to his title an official recognition of the extension of his rule over many and vast countries outside the islands of Great Britain and Ireland: these are some of the reasons why the present moment seems opportune to discuss Imperial problems that await solution. Those problems are mainly connected with the relations between forty millions of Englishmen, Irishmen and Scotchmen in the United Kingdom on the one hand, and the self-governing Colonies, Empires, Crown Colonies, Protec-torates, and tutelary States which constitute the rest of the British Empire.

We are just emerging from a war which has cost (or will have cost before it is finished) the fifteen million taxpayers of the United Kingdom 200,000,000l., and the lives of some 20,000 of their fellowcitizens. At one time, indeed, during the first year of the struggle, it seemed quite possible that Great Britain and Ireland would have several worse things to face than the loss of 20,000 soldiers in South Africa and 200 millions of money spent on warfare: we probably ran a distinct risk of hostile action at the hands of a European League (a league which might have attempted-and with not absolutely certain failure-a descent on the British coasts); a rising in Egypt; an insurrection in India; a partition of China with but little regard to British interests; a French protectorate over Morocco; and a Russification of Persia: in all of which events it would have been the forty million inhabitants of the British Islands who would have been the principal sufferers. The wisdom or unwisdom of this nearly terminated war is now only of academicinterest. Mistakes no doubt were made by us in the preceding fifty years alternately of want of tact, of undue lenience, of indifferenceto the value of inner South Africa, of sharp practice when we realised too late the foolishness of past indifference, of hasty grabbing and equally hasty restoration of the ill-digested booty. We refused to take, we took away, we gave back and we hankered after. From 1830 to 1894 we followed no consistent policy in South Africa.

During all this period the sturdy Dutch race, which lived ordinarily a healthier life and bred larger families of children than the British colonists in South Africa, gradually became impregnated with modern notions by university-educated politicians from Holland and Germany. These had conceived and fostered among the Boers and Cape Dutch an idea of driving the British flag out of South Africa and creating, in the place of a congeries of British or British-protected States, a vast Afrikander Federation which might have aspired in time to a position scarcely less important than that reached by the United States of North America. Perhaps during the phases of this struggle there were middle courses to be pursued which might have made the British flag pre-eminent and yet have involved no war with the Dutch. Perhaps there were; it is so easy to be wise after the event.

The Jameson Raid, however, destroyed any prospect of a Federation of South Africa brought about by persuasion alone; by the fusion of commercial interests and the intermarriage of Boer men with British women, and English officers and colonists with the charming, handsome and often talented daughters of the South African Dutch. The Jameson Raid at this distance of time appears to us an egregious blunder; to purists, even a crime. But history will regard it as Rhodes's ineffective counterstroke to Kruger's policy. President Kruger, under the influence of Dr. Leyds, nurtured several projects. One was the carving of a way to the sea through Portuguese East Africa. Another was the invasion of the newly formed. Rhodesian territories, and an attempt to create a Dutch State right across from the Western Transvaal to the German possessions in South-West Africa. Another was the notion-by no means an improbable one-of gradually winning over the indigenous negroes and turning them against the British.1 It may be said that any one of these projects carried into execution would have entailed war with Great Britain; but the Boers were beginning to take our measure, and were rapidly coming to the conclusion that war with Great Britain was not at all unlikely to result in the success of the Boer arms. At any rate Kruger and Leyds, and those who gathered about them, formed an insoluble obstacle to the federation of South Africa under the British flag. Yet as events were turning rapidly towards the unification of interests among all the white men dwelling between the Zambesi and the Cape Peninsula, it was clear that federation of some kind must eventually take place. If it was not under the British agis it would be under the Dutch. Great Britain therefore felt obliged, more in the interests of the

In reciting these charges I do so without any sense of reproach to the persons concerned. Dr. Leyds, at any rate, was not a British subject, and he had a perfect right, without incurring any moral aspersion, to oppose the extension of the British. Empire.

Empire at large than to benefit the fifteen million taxpayers of the United Kingdom, to run the risk of arousing against her a European coalition, to endanger the value of British funds and in some respects of purely British commercial interests, to commence the expenditure of millions of British money and of valuable British lives in order to frustrate Dutch ambitions and compel Boer States and British colonists alike to join together in a South African Confederation which should remain within the British Empire. The great self-governing Colonies no doubt were sounded beforehand as to the sentiments of their peoples. The whole trend of public opinion in Canada, Australia and New Zealand ran strongly in favour of a war policy; but although these great divisions of the Empire sent us valuable contingents of soldiers, they ran very little risk of eventual disaster, and they contributed nothing but the armament of their soldiers to the war expenditure. All the risks arising from failure or partial failure to subdue the Boers, all the expenditure of hardly earned money, three-fourths of the loss of life have fallen on the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. Yet the advantages to be ultimately derived from this exhausting campaign will be shared alike by the whole of the British Empire, no portion of which outside these two islands has contributed seriously towards the expenditure.

The first problem, therefore, to be considered is: How long can this state of affairs last without serious danger to the welfare of Great Britain and Ireland? Some wild action of the United States authorities in Alaska might threaten serious peril to Canadian interests and independence. The brunt of the appalling struggle between two of the most civilised nations of the world, which might follow, would again fall on the forty millions of these islands, and would affect but remotely the wealth and independence of a federated South Africa, an Australia or a New Zealand. On the other hand, France might conceive herself justified in annexing the New Hebrides; or let us say that a recognition of exclusive French influence in the New Hebrides might be a most valuable asset in negotiations with France for an ' easement' in other directions where French treaty rights press heavily on the development of British commerce. Yet, although Eastern Australia alone would be disagreeably affected by a French annexation of the New Hebrides, an attempt to resist such action on the part of France would, under present arrangements, cause misery and loss to Englishmen, Scotchmen and Irishmen alone; or, on the other hand, refusal to negotiate on the subject of these islands might be prejudicial to the interests of the Empire at large, though it gave a selfish satisfaction to the Eastern Australian States.

The commercial interests of the Australian Commonwealth in India are rapidly growing. A revolted India also would cause indirect damage to the trade of South Africa, and even to the trade of

Canada. Yet if Russia attacked India to punish England for an unyielding attitude in other directions, or if plagues, famines, high taxation and other causes brought about---let us say, unreasonabledissatisfaction with British rule, and another mutiny occurred, on ourselves, the forty millions in these two islands, would fall the whole financial burden and nearly all the blood-tax, the risks-even the risk of utter and irreparable disaster-involved in an attempt to retain India within the control of the British Empire; open to free and unrestricted commerce, and profiting alike the Britisher, Australian, Canadian, Afrikander, Maltese, Aden Arab and HongKong Chinaman. Really in present circumstances there is an excuse for a Little Englander Party. No European or American Power would think of attacking these two islands for the mere wanton pleasure of conquering them, even if such a thing were possible. War would only be declared on Great Britain because of some question connected with her outlying Empire. Dissociated from our self-governing Colonies, no longer pledged to maintain a single soldier in South Africa, we should possess practically the same navy that we have at present and an army quite large enough in its present condition to retain India and the African Protectorates as fields for our commerce, to insure the 'open door' in China, and the independence of Morocco and Persia. The fact that Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand had become independent yet friendly republics-as friendly, at any rate, as the United Stateswould probably not in the long run affect the value of our trade with those countries.

Such a poor ending to all our hopes of a federated Empire would, I admit, be a bitter disappointment; but perhaps to those who live in these two islands it would be preferable to the growth of a taxation which must become eventually intolerable, and to the constant monthly risk of some accident arising in the Pacific or Western Atlantic which might launch us on a world-wide struggle and lead to the invasion of these happy islands by a foreign foe.

Therefore, as our daughter nations are now grown up and have long since cast off their swaddling-clothes-as, happily, a bond of genuine affection links most of them to the Mother Country-is it wise or fair that they should shirk any longer the proper regulation and assumption of their Imperial burden? Is it not time that they dealt no longer in evasive phrases, but prepared to discuss the federation of the Empire (ie. of Great Britain and Ireland, Canada, the West Indies, Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, Newfoundland, Mauritius, South Africa, Malta; possibly later on, Cyprus, Ceylon, India, Hong-Kong and Malaysia) into one equally taxed, equally responsible Unity, so far as the following policies or departments of the King's Government were concerned?

These would be (1) Foreign Policy: namely, the policy of the