The Whigs are responsible for the abolition of slavery in our West Indian Islands (1833);
the importation of slaves from Africa thither had been prohibited as far back as 1807. They can also claim the credit of the “New Poor
Law” (1834), which refused to give food or money to the idle and improvident unless they would come into the “workhouse”; and this law made workhouse life sufficiently unpleasant,
so that lots of idle loafers, who had hitherto
“lived on the rates,” preferred to earn their own living. The same Whig Government in
1835 reformed the town councils of our cities and boroughs in such a way that every householder now gets a vote for the election of his town council. In 1889 a Conservative government extended this plan to the country districts also, and in each shire a “county council”
is now elected, which manages all local business such as the keeping up of roads, bridges,
lunatic asylums, and the police. It was Sir
Robert Peel who created the present magnificent force of policemen, and its members are still sometimes, in sport, called after him
“bobbies” and “peelers.”
Perhaps the most important of all reforms of the nineteenth century was the introduction in 1870 for all classes of the people of a system of schools, supported by the State and paidfor by a rate on each district. Every one is now compelled to attend some kind of school,
and a man may be sent to prison if he refuses to send his children to school. When I was a boy it was quite common to meet people who could neither read nor write; now it is the rarest thing in the world.
There was one burning question all through the first thirty years of this period, of which
I have yet told you nothing; and it was the most serious of all — the question of food.
Great Britain and Ireland could no longer grow enough corn to feed their great and rapidly increasing populations. For the two and twenty years which ended in 1815, governments had been too busy saving the very existence of Britain and of Europe to pay attention to this question. But now followed a period of peace, in which both the bill for the war had to be paid, and this terrible food question faced in earnest.
The bill for the war was an enormous one;
in 1793 the National Debt was not much over
200 millions; in 1815 it was over 900 millions;
the interest to be paid on it annually had gone up from 8 to 33 millions. Taxation had been enormously heavy, and every one cried out for its reduction. To this cry for a reduction of taxes the government was perhaps rightto turn a deaf ear as long as that frightful bill remained unpaid; and, also, during these ninety-five years, very little of that bill has really been paid off; the debt is still over 700
millions, though the interest annually paid on each £100 of it has been reduced to £2 10s. Od.
But there can be no excuse for the deaf ear which the government turned to the question of food. The price of corn still varied with each harvest, and varied enormously. But now it was beginning to be possible to import corn from America, from Russia, and from several other places. And the proper thing to do would have been to put a moderate customs duty on the importation of corn, a duty which should vary with the price of corn in the London market. Instead of doing this,
Parliament in 1815 passed a law saying that no corn should be imported at all until the price in London was 80s. a quarter, which meant that a loaf of bread would cost about 9d.
This was called “protecting” the British farmers and the British landowners, who of course could get high prices and high rents when the price of corn was high; but it came very near to mean starving the British labourer.
Those who upheld this plan were called “Protectionists” ; those who wished to admit cheap foreign corn were called “Free Traders.”
The “Corn Laws” became the subject of an agitation far fiercer than that for Reform of Parliament, and with much more reason.
Over and over again there was danger of a rising of the poor labourers against all who owned or farmed land. Even when there was not a bad harvest, and when the price of corn was far below the 80s. a quarter, it was easy for agitators to persuade the poor that they must be very badly off; and, especially in the days before the Reform Bill, the outcry of the poor against the rich was a most distressing feature of the age. You cannot expect much reason from people who are really hard up for food, or who expect to be hard up for food in a few months. At last, in 1845,
there appeared the most manifest symptoms of a coming famine in Ireland, owing to the failure of the potato crop. Sir Robert Peel,
who was then in power, and who had hitherto been a moderate “Protectionist,” turned right round, and in 1846 abolished the Corn Laws altogether. He was too late to save Ireland from famine, which came in all its horrors in
1847, and, by death or emigration to America,
reduced the Irish people by more than a third of their numbers. But he believed that he had saved any portion of our islands from the chance of such a disaster for the future.
For a long time after the abolition of the
Corn Laws it still paid the farmers to grow corn in Britain. But as the empty lands of
America and Canada came to be more and more peopled and cultivated, and when the introduction of steamships brought down the cost and shortened the time needed to bring corn across the Atlantic, it began to pay them less and less. And now we buy not only almost all our corn, but most of our meat, and a good deal of our wool, fruit and butter, from abroad also. The sad result has been that the land of England is rapidly going out of cultivation, and that our villages are being deserted in favour of our towns, where we cannot expect so strong and healthy a race to grow up as that of our grandfathers who lived by work in the open fields.
There is, moreover, a most serious danger behind. If England should ever be defeated in a great war at sea, it would be impossible for us to get our food at all, and our population would simply starve. Therefore, at whatever cost to ourselves, it is our duty to keep our
Navy so strong that it must be forever impossible for us to be defeated at sea.
Big Steamers.
“Oh, where are you going to, all you Big
Steamers,
With England’s own coal, up and down the salt seas?”
“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,
Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples,
and cheese.”
“And where will you fetch it from, all you
Big Steamers,
And where shall I write you when you are away?”
“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and
Vancouver,
Address us at Hobart, Hong-kong, and
Bombay.”
“But if anything happened to all you Big
Steamers,
And suppose you were wrecked up and down the salt sea?”
“Why, you’d have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,
And you’d have no muffins or toast for your tea.”
“Then I’ll pray for fine weather for all you
Big Steamers,
For little blue billows and breezes so soft.”
“Oh, billows and breezes don’t bother Big
Steamers,
For we’re iron below and steel-rigging aloft.”
“Then I’ll build a new lighthouse for all you
Big Steamers.
With plenty wise pilots to pilot you through,”
“Oh the Channel’s as bright as a ball room already,
And pilots are thicker than pilchards at
Looe.”
“Then what can I do for you, all you Big
Steamers,
Oh, what can I do foryour comfort and good?”
“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,
That no one may stop us from bringing you food.
“For the bread that you eat and the biscuit you nibble,
&
nbsp; The sweets that you such and the joints that you carve,
They are brought to you daily by all us Big
Steamers,
And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!”
The principle of “free trade” has been carried into all departments of life. When Sir
Robert Peel took office in 1841 there were over twelve hundred articles on which duty had to be paid when they were imported from abroad. There are now only sixteen such articles, and the only ones of any importance are wine, spirits and tobacco (all of which arek’luxuries,” as opposed to “necessaries” of life). When this policy was first adopted it was expected that all other nations would soon adopt “free trade” also, but they have not done so; and we have even allowed our own colonies to put on customs duties against the importation of British goods to their ports.
Proposals are now on foot, and are maintained by a large party in Britain, to go back upon this principle of “free trade,” and to impose a moderate “tariff” on the importation of goods from all nations which will not admit
British goods to their ports without a duty.
It is not my business to express an opinion as to whether this would be wise or not. No doubt “free trade all round” would be the most splendid thing in the world for all nations if all would agree to carry it out.
The next point to which I must direct your attention is the growth of the British Empire.
Soon after Victoria became Queen a cry for
“self-government” began to be heard from the colonies. There were five and forty
British colonies all told, and the joke went round that they were governed by three and twenty clerks of the “Colonial Office” in
Downing Street, London. This was not quite true, as most of our colonies had little councils of their own, which in some cases were evenelected. It was in Canada that the cry for a more free system first arose. Many of the inhabitants of its two provinces were of old
French descent, and spoke, as they still speak,
French. There were mutterings of rebellion out there, and threats that the Canadians would join the United States of America.
In order to prevent this and to satisfy the Canadians, the experiment was tried in 1840 of giving them the beginnings of a regular Parliament like our own, with a ministry responsible to that Parliament and named by a
Governor representing the Crown.
The gradual extension of the Dominion of
Canada to include the territories known as
Ontario and British Columbia right up to the
Island of Vancouver was the work of the middle period of Victoria’s reign; and during the same period the United States of America were extending westward and ever more westward till they reached the Pacific Ocean.
In “British North America,” Newfoundland now alone remains a colony separated from the “Dominion of Canada” and with a Parliament of its own.
The first of the Australian colonies in point of time was New South Wales, to which, as
I told you, our criminals continued to be sent from 1788 till 1840; West Australia dates from
1829, South Australia and Victoria from 1836,
and Queensland from 1850. These all soon began to cry out for parliamentary governments of their own; and in 1850 a Whig ministry began to give it to them freely. Quite in our own days an Act of the British Parliament has made all the Australian colonies into a single “Federation” of States, with a
“federal” or united Parliament for the whole continent. New Zealand, which was first recognized as a colony in 1840, has got her own Parliament and is not included in this
Federation. The great wealth of both New
Zealand and Australia consists in their vast flocks of sheep; these colonies are to the
British manufacturers of woollen goods what
England was to the Flemish weavers in the fourteenth century, namely, the source of the
“raw material” of their industry. There are also great gold mines in Australia.
Next in order of importance of our colonies comes South Africa with its wonderful climate,
i Its great importance to us, when we took it from the Dutch in the Great War, was as a station on the road to India; but, since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, we have now got a shorter road thither.
In Canada we had really little difficulty in making good friends with our new French
subjects, for they hated and feared the pushing Americans, whose territory lay to the south, and they knew that we would defend them against these men. In Australia we had nothing but a few miserable blacks, who could hardly use even bows and arrows in fight. In
New Zealand we had a more warlike branch of the same race, called the Maoris, to deal with.
But in South Africa we had not only really fierce savages like Zulus and Kaffirs, but also a large population of Dutch farmers and traders, who had been settled there since the middle of the seventeenth century.
These were called the “Boers”; they thoroughly disliked our rule, and they were continually retiring further and further from
Cape Town into the interior of the Continent.
They treated the native Kaffirs very badly,
and objected when we tried to protect these against them. Besides “Cape Colony” (at the Cape of Good Hope itself), there were
Dutch or half-Dutch States at Natal, on the
Orange River, and beyond the Vaal River.
One by one, in the reign of Victoria, each of these was annexed by Great Britain, and the last years of our great Queen were made sorrowful by the war which we had to fight against these brave, dogged and cunning Dutch farmers of the Transvaal. This war, though
against a mere handful of men, strained the resources of Great Britain to the utmost; it showed us how very badly equipped we were for war upon any serious scale; but it also led to a great outburst of patriotism all over the
Empire, and our other colonies sent hundreds ‘
of their best young men to help us. In the end we won, and peace was signed in 1902; a
“Federation” of all the South African colonies with a central Parliament at Cape Town has recently been concluded, and the hatred between British and Dutch is now almost a thing of the past. South Africa owes its recent prosperity more to the discovery of great gold and diamond mines than to agriculture; but almost anything can be grown there.
The vast territory of Rhodesia, in the centre of the dark continent of Africa, and the British
“Protectorates” of Uganda, British East
Africa, and British Central Africa further to the north, are still, as yet, more or less undeveloped; but great things may be expected of all of them, both as agricultural, commercial and mining colonies. The natives everywhere welcome the mercy and justice of our rule,
and they are no longer liable, as they were before we came, to be carried off as slaves by
Arab slave dealers.
There are other countries, like Ceylon, the
West Indies, the several stations on the northwest African coast, Singapore on the Straits of Malacca, Guiana on the north coast of
South America, and islands too numerous to mention, both in the Pacific and Atlantic
Oceans, which belong to Great Britain. But most of these are called “Crown Colonies” and do not enjoy any form of Parliamentary government nor need it. The prosperity of the West
Indies, once our richest possession, has very largely declined since slavery was abolished in
1833. The population is mainly black, descended from slaves imported in previous centuries, or of mixed black and white race;
lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement, or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate a few bananas will sustain the life of a negro quite sufficiently;
why should he work to get more than this?
He is quite happy and quite useless, and spends any extra wages which he may earn upon finery.
Perhaps the best thing that could happen would be a “Federation” of the whole British Empire,
with a central Parliament in which all the colonies should get representatives, with perfect free trade between the whole, and with animperial army and navy to which all should contribute payments. But where and when shall we find the statesman great and bold enough to propose it?
Our Indian Empire must be treated to a Qur few lines by itself. It is not a colony but a Indian
“Dependency of the Crown.” The extension Empire’
of our rule over the whole Indian peninsula was made possible, first by the exclusion of any other European Power (when we had once beaten off the French there), and secondly by the fact that the weaker states and princes continually called in our help against the stronger.
From our three starting-points of Calcutta,
Madras and Bombay, we have gradually swallowed the whole country; though some states keep their native princes, these are all sworn subjects of King George as “Emperor of India,” just as in feudal times a great feudal
Earl was a sworn subject of his King. Our rule has been infinitely to the good of all the three hundred millions of the different races who inhabit that richly peopled land.
Until 1858 the old “East India Company,” ^growth founded at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, was the nominal sovereign. Its early conquests had been made over the unwarlike races of
Bengal and of the South; next, in the reign of George III, over the gallant robbers who
swarmed over the central plains and were called Mahrattas. Early in Victoria’s time we had to meet those magnificent fighters the
Sikhs of the Punjaub, and the fierce Afghans of the north-western mountains. Both gave us from time to time terrible lessons; but
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 845