Greater Greece and Greater Britain; and George Washington the Great Expander of England

We have come back again to our paradox. What is the “Expansion of England?” Do the words mean simply the expansion of the dominion of England, or do they mean the expansion of England itself? Is it the expansion of England when Englishmen go forth to other lands, among men of other tongues, to toil, to strive, to rule, but not to dwell? The dominion of England may be expanded when men found a counting-house, a barrack, an office of government, a court of judgement, and when they have done their work in one of these, come back to enjoy their wealth or their honours in the land of their birth, the land which they mean to be the resting-place of their bones, the dwelling-place of their children. It is surely the expansion of England only when a new land is won for the English folk as an abiding-place for ever. When men go forth to found, not merely a seat of wealth or a seat of power, but a home where they may live and die, where they may leave their graves and leave their children to guard them, then is England itself expanded. So it was in Kent; so it was in Virginia; so it is at this day on countless shores and islands beyond the Ocean. There is no expansion of a land and its folk in the mere winning of barbaric dominion, or even in holding kindred or neighbouring nations under a rule which they love not. England is not expanded either by keeping “our” dominion over the Green Island that lies beside us to the West or by extending “our” dominion over the Golden Chersonêsos far to the East. Do not mistake me; to annex, to coerce, to hold in bondage, may, in some unhappy state of things, be a solemn and fearful duty; it can never be matter for rejoicing or for boasting. But there is matter of rejoicing, so far as boasting is lawful, there is matter for boasting, whenever the English folk wins a new land, not merely to rule over but to dwell in, a new land in which the speech, the laws, the traditions of England may be as much at home as they are here in this our England in Britain. What is England? The old Teutonic name speaks for itself; it is the land of the English, the land of the English wherever they may dwell. Wherever the men of England settle, there springs to life a new England. There was a day when Massachusetts was not England; there was an earlier day when Kent itself was not England. The elder and the younger land, the land beyond the sea and the land beyond the Ocean, have been made England by the same process. Men went forth from the first England to found a second, and from the second England to found a third. In our onward march we passed from the European mainland to the European island and from the European island to the American mainland. In each case there was a making of England, an expansion of England; John Smith on the shore of Virginia did but go on with the work which Hengest had begun on the shore of Kent. In each case the newer England became the greater; men crossed the sea to found a greater England than the first, and they crossed the Ocean to found a greater England than the second. In each case they expanded England; but they did not in both cases expand the dominion of England. At Ebbsfleet, the Naxos of Britain, men founded a new England in Britain as independent of the older England on the mainland as the new Hellas in Sicily was independent of the older Hellas by the Ægæan. With the second voyage it was not so; the third England beyond the Ocean did not arise free and independent; it needed an after-work, an after-work never needed in the second, to make it so. And that work was surely an expansion, an expansion of England. We come once more to our paradox; may it not be that England herself may be expanded by the very cutting short of her dominion? Again, what is England? Do we mean by it simply the dominions of the Crown of England – or rather the dominion of a Crown of whose kingdom the British England is but a part? Or do we mean by it the land of the English folk, wherever they may dwell? Is there any contradiction in holding that the land of the English folk may be made greater, greater in mere physical extension, greater too in all that makes a folk and an English folk, by changes which cut short the mere dominion of the English Crown, which, in other words, work the dismemberment of the British Empire? May not the œcumenical England, the whole congregation of English people dispersed throughout the world, become greater, as the mere dominion of part of England, the dominion of this second England, this insular England, this British England, becomes narrower? Are we to be told that men of English blood, of English speech, of English law, ceased to be English, because they ceased to be under the rule of the sovereign of the British England? Once more back again to our ancient memories. Call up once more a man of Carthage; ask him if he ceased to be Phœnician, if he threw away the memory and the fellowship of the Phœnician name, because, in his new home on the shore of Africa, he owed reverence only and not allegiance to the mother-city on the shore of Syria? Call up once more a man of Syracuse – I will not say one who helped on one moonlight night to thrust down the Ionian invader from the steeps of Epipolai or who plied his oar for the Dorian city in the last fight in the Great Harbour – throw a veil over the strife of Greek with Greek, as we will throw a veil over the day of shame when men from the second England wrought a barbarian’s havoc on the rising council-house of the third, – let us rather say, call up one who, on the day of Salamis, helped in a work no less than that of Salamis by the side of Gelôn at Himera, call up one who struck the last blow for freedom and Hellenic life amid the breached walls and burning houses of Selinous, one who marched forth with the deliverer from the mother-land to win the wreath of Hellenic victory by the banks of Krimisos – ask such an one if he was less a Greek, if he had less share in the name and brotherhood of Greece, because his city between the two Sicilian havens was a commonwealth as free and independent as the elder city between the two Peloponnesian gulfs? True, the man of Carthage, the man of Syracuse, had, unlike the man of Virginia or Massachusetts, no yoke of the motherland to cast aside; but surely the man of Virginia or Massachusetts was, if anything, less English when he knew dependence, when he had to obey the decrees of an assembly in whose choice he had no part, than he became when he rose to the full age and stature of an Englishman by winning those full rights of freedom which Carthage and Syracuse had from the beginning. We have so strangely passed away from the political conceptions of earlier ages, that the word colony is held to imply dependence. In the old Thirteen lands of America we hear of the colonial period as meaning the time of imperfect freedom; when full freedom is won, the name of colony is cast away. And yet surely a colony of England was not meant to be a mere Roman colonia, a mere Athenian κληρουχία, a garrison to hold down a subject province; it was surely meant to be, like a Greek ἀποικία, a new home of English life and English speech. In that nobler sense of the word, a colony which is not independent has not risen to the full rank of a colony; it is hardly a home for the new folk of the mother-land; it is little more than an outpost of its dominion. Surely the Englishmen of those Thirteen lands, who had unhappily to fight their way to the full rights of Englishmen, did not cease to be Englishmen, to be colonists of England, because they won them. Surely – I have said it already and I may have to say it again – they became in a higher and truer sense colonies of the English folk because they had ceased to be dependencies of the British Crown.

I speak of Thirteen lands; and thirteen is as it were a magic number in the history of federations. It is a memorable number alike in the League of Achaia and in the Old League of High Germany. But in none of the three was Thirteen to be the fated stint and bound among the sharers in the common freedom. Thirteen stars, thirteen stripes, were wrought on the banner of the United States of America in their first day of independence, the day of their second birth as truly and fully a second English nation. Look at that banner now; tell the number of those stars and call them by their names, each of them the name of a free commonwealth of the English folk. See we not there the expansion of England in its greatest form? See we not there the work of Hengest and Cerdic carried out on a scale on which it could never have been carried out in the island which they won for us? The dependent provinces of England stretched but in name to the banks of the Father of Waters; from the border ridge of Alleghany, as from the height of Pisgah, they did but take a glance at the wider land beyond. The independent colonies of England have found those bounds too strait for them. They have gone on and taken possession; they have carried the common speech and the common law, beyond the mountains, beyond the rivers, beyond the vaster mountains, beyond the Eastern Ocean itself, till America marches upon Asia. Such has been the might of independence; such has been the strength of a folk which drew a new life from the axe which did not hew it down, but by a health-giving stroke parted it asunder. It may be, it is only in human nature that so it should be, that the fact that independence was won by the sword drew forth a keener life, a more conscious energy, a firmer and fiercer purpose to grow and to march on. The growth of a land free from the beginning might perchance have been slower; let it be so; a slight check on the forward march would not have been dearly purchased by unbroken friendship between parent and child from the beginning.

It is a strange feeling which comes over us as we stand by the southern bank of the Ohio, as we look over the wide stream which once parted French and English lands, as we look from what once was dependent England into what once was dependent France. And as there we muse, we think of the earlier work of the worthy of to-day. We think of the share that he had in changing so large a part of dependent France into what was still for a while to be dependent England. Other names from either side of Ocean press on us as we trace out that old border-land and think upon its history. I found something to muse upon where amid the smoke of Pittsburg the name still dwells of a chief worthy of my own land and of my own college. But his name comes first who was to play his part in a twofold expansion of England, who was first to help in the mere enlargement of her dominion, and then to be foremost in the mightier work of enlarging her very self by snapping the dominion of one part of the English folk over another. Washington, fighting for one King George, did well; Washington, fighting against another King George, did better. Look again at Washington’s own land, and see how healthy is the process of dismemberment to a free commonwealth. Look at Virginia, mother of Presidents, mother of States, the Megalopolis of a new Achaia, worthy of a place even beside the city of Philopoimên and Polybios. If we hold that England is expanded by the dismemberment of her dominion, the old dominion of England was expanded by the dismemberment of herself. The land of the English folk is enlarged as free Virginia throws off free Kentucky, as the Thirteen stars admit a fourteenth member of the constellation. In that starry firmament there is no lost Pleiad; even the Lone Star needed not long to shine in loneliness. The man of this day and his fellows lighted a candle which cannot be put out, a candle which is ever handing on its flame to lesser lights which may one day be the greater. And in the wider view of the English folk, in the wider view of England, it was in truth in and for England that they lighted it.

* * * * *

On this twenty-second day of February I have said but little, I have time left to say but little, of the man by whose birth that day was made memorable. I cannot speak now of the modest virtues of one on whom greatness was indeed thrust, a greatness which consisted, not in the brilliancy of fitful genius, not in the growth of any one gift so as to overshadow and overwhelm others not less needful; but in the equal balance of all, the unswerving honesty, the native dignity, which enabled him to play a worthy part on so many stages, to act wisely and righteously in any post to which the chances of a chequered life might call him. Still less have I time this day to speak of his fellows, of the memorable band of which he was but the foremost, on one of the many sides of his life perhaps hardly the foremost. When we speak of George Washington and his work, the kindred work of Alexander Hamilton must never be forgotten. Shall I, in the course of my office here, ever reach those times? Or shall I keep to my old familiar ground of Sikyôn and Megalopolis, knowing well that there is one among us who can deal better than I can with the federal history of Schwyz and Zürich, that there is another among us who can deal better than I can with the federal history of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island? Be this as it may, we deal this time, this twenty-second of February, with an idea rather than with a man. We look at the man in his work. And we would hold up his work as a model. There are other lands in which his work may again be done, and done more peacefully. No new Bunker Hill, no Saratoga, no Yorktown, would be needed to call into being other independent Englands as free and mighty as either the elder or the younger. Other continents beside Europe and America have become homes of the English folk, and the homes of the English folk in those other lands may not always lag behind the great home of the English folk between the Oceans. The tale of “the English in America” is now in telling, in most worthy telling, here among us. Some other pens in times to come may write the tale of “the English in Australia,” of “the English in Africa,” and they may have to trace the story after the same pattern. Let Federation grow and prosper, so long as no contradictory adjective is tacked on to a substantive so worthy of all honour. Where there is Empire, there is no brotherhood; where there is brotherhood, there is no Empire. I shall hardly see the day; but some of you may see it, when the work of Washington and Hamilton may be wrought again without slash or blow, when, alongside of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United States of America, the United States of Australia, the United States of South Africa, the United States of New Zealand, may stand forth as independent homes of Englishmen, bound to one another by the common tie of brotherhood, and bound by loyal reverence, and by no meaner bond, to the common parent of all.

APPENDIX

IMPERIAL FEDERATION

We have heard a great deal of late about “Imperial Federation.” And the votaries of “Imperial Federation” promise us very wonderful things if the scheme for which they are striving should ever become more than a scheme. Some of the more enthusiastic talkers have told us of the coming union on equal terms of all the English people – it has sometimes even been put, of all the English-speaking people – all over the world. We are not distinctly told whether those who are not English-speaking people are to be shut out from the benefits of the scheme. But the scheme is spoken of as being something specially and intensely English, unless indeed the word “British” is liked better. It is not wonderful that such promises have won over many minds. “Imperial Federation” has a grand sound; it has an air as if it meant something. And if it did mean what it is said to mean, the union, on closer and more brotherly terms, of all men of English descent or of all speakers of the English tongue, it would mean something to the carrying out of which all of us would surely be ready to lend a helping hand. There are however some little points to be thought of on the other side. First, there is the name; then there is the thing. It may be some objection to the name that it is altogether meaningless, or rather that it is a contradiction in terms. It may be some objection to the thing that, whether the results of the scheme should turn out to be good or bad, they could never be the particular results which its votaries, at least its more enthusiastic votaries, tell us that they are aiming at. What is meant might seem to be the closer and more equal political union of all, or a part, of the dominions of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Now that, whether good or bad, possible or impossible, in itself, would be a very different thing from an union of all English-speaking people – and, we must suppose, of none other. It tells a little against the name of the scheme that what is “Imperial” cannot be “Federal,” and that what is “Federal” cannot be “Imperial.” It tells a little against its substance that none can expect the scheme to carry out its professed purpose except those who have forgotten the existence of India and the existence of the United States.

The simple truth is that the phrase “Imperial Federation” is a contradiction in terms, that what is imperial cannot be federal, and that what is federal cannot be imperial. To make out this proposition we must look a little more closely into the history of the words concerned. One of them at least seems to have greatly changed its meaning of late years, and it would be well to know the exact sense in which it is used.

The word “imperial” is the adjective of the substantive “empire.” Now what is meant by “empire”? Speaking as a “pedant,” I cannot help saying that clearness of thought would have greatly gained if the word Empire had always been sternly confined to what was its strict meaning for ages. It would have been well if the name had never been applied to anything but the Roman Empire and those powers which professed to continue the Roman Empire. Or, if it ever went beyond that limit, it would have been well if it had been used only when it was wished to assert an analogy between one of those powers and some other. In this last way it is true and instructive to speak of the Mogul Empire in India, which supplies so many points of analogy with the Empire of Rome; but, after the vague way in which the word is used now, such an application of it would fail to strike many minds as having any special meaning. The word “empire” in truth has taken to itself a quite new use within a very few years past. At no time that I know of would any one have scrupled to speak, in poetical or rhetorical language, of “the British empire,” “this great empire,” and the like. But I can remember the time when no one would have used those phrases, except in language more or less poetical or rhetorical. That is to say, though the speaker may not have consciously thought of suggesting any analogy with the Roman Empire, yet the traditions of the time when those words could not have been used without implying such an analogy had still left their stamp on language. “Empire” was a word somewhat out of the common; it would not have been found in the dry language of an advertisement or in such notices as in those days answered to a telegram. Now the word is used without any special feeling. It seems to have taken its place quite naturally as the highest term in an ascending scale. As the county is greater than the parish, and the kingdom greater than the county, so the empire is greater than the kingdom. The word “empire” is used as one that comes as naturally to the lips as “parish,” “county,” or “kingdom.” This change of language doubtless comes of a change of facts, or at any rate of a change in the way of looking at facts. But it is none the less an abuse of language, and one that has led to not a few confusions.

When Sir James Mackintosh, in his speech on behalf of Peltier, spoke of Napoleon Buonaparte, First Consul of the French Republic, as “master of the mightiest empire that the civilized world ever saw,” it was a rhetorical flourish, and it may be that the thought of Rome was not wholly absent from the speaker’s mind. When, a little later, Napoleon Buonaparte himself bestowed the title of “empire” on his dominions, by no means as a flourish, but as a formal title and a title full of meaning, the thought of Rome was assuredly fully present to his mind. The use of the phrase “British Empire,” as a technical phrase from which all memory of Rome has passed away, is a good deal later than the use of the phrase “French Empire” as a technical phrase from which all memory of Rome had certainly not passed away. In one use indeed the “Empire of Britain” and other phrases of the like kind are very old indeed. They are common in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and they come in again in the sixteenth. They are rare between the eleventh century and the sixteenth, and they go out of use after the sixteenth. That is to say, they were used when there was a reason for using them, and they went out of use when there was no longer a reason. In the earlier period they were meant to assert two things; that the English King was superior lord over all the other princes of Britain, and that the continental Emperor was not superior lord over him. In the sixteenth century, when, under Charles the Fifth, the continental Empire was again threatening, Henry the Eighth found it needful again to assert with no small emphasis that “the Kingdom of England is an Empire.” I made this remark long ago; it has been set forth with increased force and with fresh proofs in the recent work of Mr. Friedmann. In the seventeenth century, when the continental Emperors were no longer threatening, and when the common King of England and Scotland had no need to assert any lordship over himself, such language naturally went out of use, or sank to the level of an occasional survival or an occasional flourish.

From the newest use of the word “empire” and the still newer use of the adjective “imperial,” all memories of this kind have passed away. It is hard to say whether the phrase “Imperial Parliament” was the last use in the old sense or the first use in the new. I suspect that it is not in strictness either the one or the other. It was meant to express the union of three kingdoms into a greater whole; but it was certainly not a protest against any continental empire; nor did it carry with it all the meaning which the word “imperial” has lately taken to itself. And this use of the word is singularly isolated. It is not applied to anything else in the same formal way²; nor is it our custom to apply any adjective in the same way. On the continent adjectives like “Imperial,” “Royal,” “Grand-ducal,” are employed at every moment. The post-office, the police-office, anything else that has to do with any branch of public administration, has the K., the K. K., the R., the I. R. or anything else of the kind, prominently put forward. We do not write up “Royal Post-office,” though we may mark it with the more personal badge of V. R. The reason may be that on the continent we have sometimes to ask whether it is empire, kingdom, or grand-duchy that we are in. Here no man ever doubted about being in the Kingdom of England, the Kingdom of Great Britain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But there is no reason to think that the phrase “Imperial Parliament,” when it was first used, meant anything more than “Parliament of England, Scotland, and Ireland.” That that Parliament could legislate for any part of the dominions of the King of Great Britain and Ireland no man doubted; but it is not likely that anything beyond Great Britain and Ireland was consciously in the minds of those who devised the title. It is only in quite late times, in times within my own memory, that the word “empire” has come into common use as a set term for something beyond the kingdom. It is only in times later still that the adjective “imperial” has come into common use, in such phrases as “imperial interests,” “imperial purposes.” At the beginning of the present century those phrases would certainly not have been used as quasi-technical terms, though something like them might at any time have been used as a rhetorical figure.

In the present use of the words there is always a latent ambiguity. What is the Empire? The whole of the Queen’s dominions, some one will answer, as distinguished from the mere Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. But in what sense is this an Empire? The word is clearly not used in the old sense anywhere but in India. To the title of “Empress of India” there were good objections on other grounds; but it cannot be denied that it accurately expresses the nature of the Queen’s power in India. The Empress of India is Lady over dependent princes and nations in India, just as the “totius Britanniæ Basileus” once was lord over dependent princes and nations in Britain. But this sense does not in the same way apply to the Queen’s dominions in America and Australia; it hardly applies to her dominions in Africa. In what sense do these last form parts of an empire? Is the word meant to imply or to deny any superiority on the part of the seat of empire, that is, on the part of the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland? Or is it, by that odd confusion of thought and language which is by no means uncommon, meant somehow to imply that there is such a superiority, but that such superiority ought to exist no longer? As long as the word was a mere figure or flourish, designed simply as a vague name for a great extent of territory, it was needless to ask its strict meaning; it had no strict meaning, and could not mislead anybody. But now that it has become a technical term, we have a right to ask its strict meaning. It adds to the difficulty that we are dealing with an Empire without an Emperor. The Queen is not Empress anywhere but in India; the title may not even be used in the United Kingdom. Otherwise the natural meaning of the phrase “imperial interests” would seem to be the interests of the Emperor, as opposed to any other. It would mean the interests of the imperial power, as opposed to the interests of the states which are dependent on the imperial power. The word as now used seems intended to mean the interests of the whole of the Queen’s dominions, as opposed to the interests of any particular part of them. But this is an odd use of the word “imperial.” We should never speak of “royal interests,” to mean the interests of the whole kingdom, as distinguished from the interests of any particular part of it. “Royal interests,” if the words had any meaning, would mean the special interests of the King. “Imperial interests” would as naturally mean the special interests of the Emperor. Only, as there is no Emperor, it is possible for the word to go about and pick up for itself less obvious meanings.

When then we hear of “Imperial Federation,” we first wish to know the meaning of the word “imperial;” next we wish to know the meaning of the word “federation.” I once defined “a federal government in its perfect form” as “one which forms a single state with regard to other nations, but which consists of many states with regard to its internal government.” And I have seen that definition quoted with approval by advocates of Imperial Federation³. It has been argued that a federation that answers my definition is already formed – perhaps not by the whole of the Queen’s dominions, but by “the United Kingdom, the Dominion of Canada, the different Australian colonies, New Zealand, and the Cape.” From such a list I could not have left out the Kingdom of Man and the Duchy of Normandy – that part of it I mean which clave to its own dukes and remained Norman, when the rest submitted to a foreign king and became French. Nor are we told whether India, Heligoland, Gibraltar, and a few other places, are parts of the federation or not.

Now the singular thing is that some of those who look upon the connexion of the United Kingdom with the other parts of the Queen’s dominions as being already a federal union are fully sensible of the fact which at once shuts out the federal relation. “The United Kingdom,” it has been well put, “keeps to itself, and absorbs within itself, the foreign policy of the whole realm.” The word “realm,” commonly used as equivalent to “kingdom,” seems here to be used as equivalent to “empire,” and the relation here described may be fairly called Imperial. The same fact has been put yet more strongly;