CHAPTER II
PROBLEMS OF EMPIRE, 1897-1905
If happiness be reckoned by the absence of history, the last few years of the British Empire have been singularly unfortunate. The proceedings at the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 were an overt proclamation that a new idea of the Empire was taking shape, and that, in the future, the Mother Country, as her children attained to manhood, would be content to be prima inter pares. Two years later a war was waged, which had its origin entirely in questions of Colonial policy, and which was carried on by the self- governing Empire as a whole, in a manner which was a revelation to the world. Whatever there may have been which is matter for regret or apology in the incidents of that war, all will agree that it brought to the light of day the vast potential military resources of the British Empire. The extent of these resources led naturally to a demand for their better organisation, and so, in the years after the war, we find a note of hurry and anxiety altogether alien from the slow, cautious procedure of old-fashioned Colonial policy. The same statesman, who, as Colonial Secretary, had done more than all his predecessors to consolidate the Empire, after a journey to South Africa, in which he had boldly emphasised Colonial responsibilities in questions of Imperial defence, on his return, startled the Empire, and indeed the civilised world, by declaring that unless a new departure, or retrogression as it seemed to many, was made in the fiscal policy of Great Britain, sentimental ties might be powerless to hold the Empire together permanently against the disintegrating force of separate material interests. To deal in an adequate manner with these burning topics in the closing chapter of a book, the aim of which is to aid research and not to invite controversy, is of course impos-
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