THE UNITED KINGDOM.
To understand the relation of the United Kingdom to the question
of national unity we must try to grasp the main features of the
astonishing and unparalleled change which in the last half or
three quarters of a century has come over the industrial
condition of the British Islands. This change has left them in a
position absolutely unique among the nations of the present day,
a position, moreover, to which history furnishes no parallel.
It has been estimated that when the Queen came to the throne, of
the working population of the country one-third were
agricultural labourers, and one-third were artizans. There has
since been an addition of from 12,000,000 to 15,000,000 to the
whole population, and at the end of this period of remarkable
growth we find ourselves face to face with the overwhelming fact
that of all the working classes of Great Britain only an eighth
are agricultural labourers while three-fourths are artizans.
What this means is in no way more tersely described than when we
say that Britain has become the workshop of the {104} world.
What it involves is the conclusion that never in the history of
the human race has any great nation lived under such artificial
conditions as do British people at the end of this period of
extraordinary industrial development, a period which has its
limit well within the century. All the circumstances of national
existence have been revolutionized.
After the application to the soil of intense culture, of
scientific skill, of abundant capital, of cheap labour, only
about 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 quarters of wheat are produced out
of the 28,000,000 quarters which now represent the annual
consumption. The rest comes from the far distant prairies of the
United States and Canada, from India, South Australia, New
Zealand, the Black Sea and the Baltic. With other cereals it is
the same, the demand for those which cannot be produced at all
in Great Britain, such as rice and maize, being immense.
Cheap ocean freights, which make it possible to transfer a
bushel of wheat by sea from Montreal or New York to London at a
lower price than it can be carried by rail from some English
counties to London, handicap the English producer still more. It
seems as if the dependence upon the outside world for grain
supplies were likely to increase, not merely with the rapid
increase of population which is still going on, but with the
necessity of applying the land to more profitable forms of
production as ocean transit is still further cheapened, and as
increasing prosperity leads to a greater consumption of animal
food.
{105}
As with grain foods so with meat. Hundreds of thousands of live
cattle, many hundred thousand tons of meat, chilled, frozen,
salted, or tinned, pour into the country every year from across
the sea. Canada alone last year sent 123,000 head of cattle; New
Zealand nearly 1,500,000 frozen carcasses of sheep. It has been
estimated that the quantity of meat food in the United Kingdom
at any time is only sufficient to supply the market for three
months; beyond that all must come from without.
So also with cheese, fruit, and other staple articles of
consumption. Still more striking is the dependence on distant
lands for a wide range of articles once esteemed luxuries, but
now reckoned among the comforts, if not the necessities, of
daily life, such as sugar, tea, and coffee. If the massing of
facts into figures best conveys to some minds the nature of the
situation it may be put in the statement that every year the
United Kingdom pays for articles used for food brought from
abroad the sum of £153,000,000 sterling. Or it may be better
illustrated by a comparison. Draw around almost any other nation
or country of modern times--Germany, Italy, Russia, the United
States, Canada, Australia--a barrier preventing the ingress of
any food supply from the outer world. There will be
inconvenience, some measure of restriction of consumption in a
few particulars, but the condition is one which could be endured
not merely for months but for years. Place a like barrier around
the British Islands and {106} in six weeks the pressure of want
will begin to be felt; in six months starvation will be the
prevalent condition of the population.
Such a picture is, of course, imaginary--the fact which lies
behind it is stern reality.
The illustration emphasizes, but does not exaggerate, the
absolutely unique nature of the national position.
For the first time in the course of human history we have had in
the last half century presented to us in the British Islands the
spectacle of a great people depending for its existence upon the
safe and continuous transport from the most remote corners of
the globe of about two-thirds of the chief articles of daily
consumption.
That the outlook of such a people upon the world should differ
fundamentally from that of any other people of past times or of
the present day is manifest. What has been said is not meant to
prove that the situation is one which should necessarily induce
extraordinary anxiety. Difficulties are to be measured by the
resources at hand to grapple with them. Danger only comes when
the sense of proportion between the two is lost.
Food is not all. Britain the workshop of the world, and
three-fourths of its working population artizans! Upon what do
these vast armies of industry, these millions of working men and
women, spend their toil to earn the wages that buy the food thus
brought to them from such great distances and at {107} such
expense? Once more we find the ends of the earth scoured to
furnish them with the raw material upon which they work. Wool
from Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, South America;
cotton from the Southern States, India, Egypt; timber from
Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Honduras; precious metals, ores,
jute, hemp and other fibres, oils, gums, ivory, shells, hides,
furs, precious stones--everything that can be moulded for use or
beauty, all productions of land and sea, are poured forth day by
day from the holds of a thousand ships in the greater ports of
the United Kingdom to be transferred to the centres of British
industry.
The critical character of this dependence for a perfectly steady
supply of raw material is under modern conditions as striking as
the extent of the dependence. The great Yorkshire woollen
spinners tell us that to be cut off even for three or four weeks
from the supplies of Australian wool would mean the closing of
hundreds or thousands of factories and a widespread paralysis of
industry. They point out that when the regularity of sea
transport depended upon wind and weather, or when the home
market supplied a larger share of the material, common prudence
made it necessary to lay in heavy stocks to provide against
contingencies for many months. So fixed has now become the habit
of depending upon the regular arrival of ocean steam-ships from
week to week, the regular sequence of great wool sales at
frequent stated periods, that it is possible {108} in
manufacturing to live as it were from hand to mouth; that, as a
matter of fact, a large proportion of manufacturers do so live,
purchasing only enough for their immediate wants, and renewing
their stock at very short intervals. Thus the effect of any
stoppage of sea-transport would be disastrously felt at once,
reaching in its influence alike the manufacturing capitalist and
the workman in his cottage.
A group of manufacturers at Galashiels, one of the important
Scottish centres of the wool trade, told me that nine out of
every ten pounds of wool they used was Australian. The
proportion can scarcely be less in the Bradford district and
other large areas of Yorkshire. Nor are such illustrations of
the completeness of dependence on supplies abroad exceptional or
confined to wool. Cut off Dundee from its importations of Indian
jute and the collapse of its main industry would be sudden and
general. Lancashire is not likely to forget what it means to
lose control of her ordinary markets for obtaining raw cotton.
We may put together once more the figures which express this
marvellous relation to British industry to the remoter parts of
the world.
For wool last year Britain paid £26,000,000; for raw cotton
£40,000,000; wood £14,000,000; metals £23,000,000; flax, hemp,
and jute £10,000,000; and so on.
But even what has been said of food and raw material of
manufacture exhibits but one side of the national position. To
be the workshop of the world {109} implies access to the markets
of the world. I say nothing of the vast centres of commerce
abroad which serve as the main points of distribution. But go to
the loneliest Australian or New Zealand bush; to the backwoods
and remote prairies of Canada; to distant South African gold and
diamond diggings, and we find the shelves of the humblest shop
filled with the products of the looms of Yorkshire, Lancashire,
or Paisley, of the factories everywhere scattered throughout the
United Kingdom where the vast inflow of raw material is worked
up. To foreign countries, as well as to those inhabited by
British people, to every civilized or uncivilized continent,
district, or island, however remote, these manufactures
penetrate, and must continue to penetrate, if the vast fabric of
British industry is to be maintained.
Once more, the figures which represent the annual aggregate of
export trade are immense: cotton goods £70,000,000; woollen
goods £26,000,000; iron and steel £28,000,000; machinery £
13,000,000.
Between this great inflow of raw material and food, and the
equally great output of manufactured goods, has sprung up yet
another prime factor in Britain's industrial position, her
shipping interests. She has become by far the greatest of ocean
carriers. It is not merely that scores of millions of capital
are invested in ships alone; that 60 per cent. of all the steam
tonnage of the world and a large proportion of its sailing
tonnage are under the British flag; that tens of thousands of
men find employment {110} upon the seas, and tens of thousands
more in the immediate handling of ships and their cargoes around
British harbours and docks. The mere construction of ships and
their equipment for this vast carrying trade gives an impulse to
almost every form of British industry. The shipyards of the
Clyde alone turn out at times a thousand tons or more of iron or
steel shipping for every working day of the year. The vast
aggregate for the whole country forms a large element in the
industrial life of the nation.
Here, then, in roughest outline, is a picture of the unique
position which the British Islands hold in the world today. Let
us remind ourselves once more that the extreme singularity of
this situation has been created well within the span of an
ordinary life, for the sea-borne commerce of the United Kingdom,
which today has an annual value of more than £740,000,000, was,
when the Queen came to the throne in 1837, only £155,000,000.
The difference between these figures fairly measures the
increased dependence of the country upon its imports, exports,
and the carrying trade.
Now for a nation existing under conditions such as have been
described, where the work and wages and food of the masses of
the people depend on easy and constant access to the remotest
corners of the globe, it seems possible to indicate what must be
the end and aim of national policy--the supreme objects of
statesmanship. Surely the first object must be to {111} secure
the absolute safety for trading purposes of the water-ways of
the world.
Maritime security Britain is bound to maintain, if she is to
retain manufacturing superiority. The only manufacturing rival
which seriously threatens her is the United States. It is a
friendly rivalry, and should remain such. But each country, with
what advantages it has, will play relentlessly for its own hand,
and for the welfare, real or supposed, of its own people.
Britain carries on the contest by means of Free Trade, thereby
cheapening production, and winning the market of the world. The
United States use for their weapon Protection, stimulating
production till it becomes cheap. Britain also, under this
opposing condition, depends for food and material on the outside
world--the United States have the food and most of the material
within themselves. The first serious break in Britain's power to
hold the waterways of the world would place her at a fatal
disadvantage. Safe in a continental isolation the United States
could supply the customers who came to her for manufactured
goods with what they wanted. To be on even terms Britain must
have maritime security, and this she could not have if by the
successive cutting away of her great outlying offshoots she
should lose control of those points of vantage which now are the
secret of her supremacy quite as much as the ships which she
sends forth from her dockyards.
Second only to maritime security seems to me the necessity for a
country in the position of Great Britain {112} to keep as far as
possible the sources from which she draws her food and raw
material within the national domain.
Great Britain has had at least one sharp reminder of the
advantage which would accrue to a country so dependent as she is
on the outside world of having the areas of production under the
national flag. This reminder was one which gave a rough shock to
the generally accepted theory that if the consumer wants to buy
and the producer wants to sell, all the conditions for
satisfactory commercial intercourse between countries are
fulfilled without reference to national relationship. In 1865
the War of Secession broke out in America, and the ports of the
cotton-producing states were blockaded. Millions of bales of
cotton were wasting on the wharves and in the warehouses at New
Orleans, Charleston, and other Southern towns. On the other
hand, in Lancashire millions of spindles were idle, and vast
bodies of people were reduced to extreme need or thrown for a
long period upon the charity of the benevolent from want of the
raw material of their industry. The producers certainly wished
to sell, the consumers to purchase. English manufacturers had
money with which to buy--English shippers had the vessels to
carry--the English Government had the men-of-war which could
easily have forced a way to the supplies which were needed.
Between was the barrier of international law and national
honour, which forbid a neutral nation to interfere with
belligerents. The barrier was respected, {113} and England
passed triumphantly through the moral strain involved in
resisting the temptation to go to war for an industrial end
alone. The lesson to be learned from such an example appears
manifest. The retention of the national right to keep open the
communication between the centre of consumption and the areas of
supply is alike desirable for the industry of the one and of the
other. To give an obvious illustration. The vast woollen
industries of Yorkshire are supplied almost exclusively from
regions now within the Empire--New Zealand, Australia, India,
and South Africa. So long as these countries remain under a
common British flag the working man who produces the wool and
the working man who spins it retain the national right to keep
their industries in touch with each other: the moment they pass
out from under the flag that right is given up. Great Britain
would have no more right to force her way into the ports of an
independent Australia or New Zealand, blockaded by a German,
French, or Chinese fleet, than she had to force her way into the
harbours of Louisiana or South Carolina. The neutral flag may
furnish a way of escape for Britain's industry when she is
herself in direct conflict with another power; it gives no
assistance when a nation with which she is at peace chooses to
close the ports of a country from which she draws her food or
the material of her industry. The reader will find that the
illustration is a far-reaching one if he extends it to the whole
range of Britain's wants either for supply or for markets for
her manufactured {114} goods; and to the whole range of colonial
necessity for a market for their staple products, and a supply
of what they do not produce.
Still more significant is the illustration if he remember that
as regards food supply the Empire might, in an emergency, soon
become entirely independent of foreign countries, while, with
the single exception of cotton, we could tide over an indefinite
period even in the matter of raw material for manufacture.
{115}