The name of Greater Britain is one which of late years has become strangely familiar. It is possible that a generation back the words might have fallen harshly on patriotic ears. We were then used to believe that the Britain in which we lived was so great that there could be none greater. The name of “Great Britain” was perhaps used without any very clear notion of its history; but it was at least accepted as implying greatness of some kind. Whatever may have been the exact meaning with which the name of “Greater Britain” was first brought in, it was, we may be sure, suggested by the seemingly older phrase of “Great Britain.” Those who first spoke of “Greater Britain” perhaps hardly knew that the name is as old as that of “Great Britain,” and, more thanthis, that “Great Britain” and “Greater Britain” are in truth phrases of exactly the same meaning. I would not venture to say how much older the name of “Magna Britannia” may be than its somewhat irregular employment in the royal style by James Sixth and First. But “Greater Britain,” “Major Britannia,” is undoubtedly as old as the twelfth century. We perhaps sometimes forget that, besides this our isle of Britain, there is another Britain on the continent, no other than the land which, by a slight change of ending, we commonly call Britanny. But in Latin and in French the two names are the same,BritanniaandBretagne. The one land isBretagne, the other isGrande-Bretagne; the one isBritannia minor, the other isBritannia major. In short, the Britain of the island, the Great or Greater Britain, was so called simply to distinguish it from the Lesser Britain on the mainland.
Here, be it remarked, the Greater Britain is the older, the Lesser is the younger; the Greater is the mother-country, the Lesser is the colony.The Lesser Britain of the mainland never took that name till it was settled by men fleeing from the Greater Britain in the island. Now in the sense in which we have of late years heard the phrase “Greater Britain,” all this has been turned the other way. “Great Britain” is not simply opposed to a Lesser Britain; it is opposed to a Britain which is confessedly great, but, it would seem, not so great as the Greater. And of these the one which is simply Great is the elder; the Greater is the younger; the Great is the mother-country, the ruling country; the Lesser is the plantation, the dependency, or rather an aggregate of plantations and dependencies all over the world. The change, the contrast, between the old use of “Major Britannia” and the new use of “Greater Britain” is so very singular that one is driven to ask whether those who brought in the new use ever had the old one in their thoughts at all.
But the question becomes more curious still when we bear in mind that there was in a distant age of the world an use of a kindred phrase whichis strikingly like, not the old, but the new use of the phrase “Greater Britain.” As there was a Greater and a Lesser Britain, so there was, perhaps not a Lesser, but assuredly a Greater Greece. And the Greater Greece did not answer to the “Major Britannia” of our older use, but to the “Greater Britain” of our newer. The Greater Greece was not an older Greece from which settlers went forth, as they went forth from the Greater Britain of old, to found a younger and a lesser. The Greater Greece, like the Greater Britain of modern times, was an assemblage of settlements from the elder Greece which were deemed, or deemed themselves, to have become greater than the mother-country. The Great or the Greater Greece (Ἡ μεγάλη Ἑλλάς,Magna Græcia,Major Græcia) became the received geographical name for the Greek colonies in Southern Italy. And they may be thought to have deserved the name in that short and brilliant time when those colonies distinctly outstripped the mother-country, when Sybaris and Tarentum ranked among the greatest cities of the earth, morebrilliant and flourishing, beyond doubt, than Athens or Sparta or Corinth or any other of the cities of the older Hellenic land.
As in the former case the contrast, so in this case the analogy, is so striking that we again cannot help asking whether those who brought in the modern phrase of “Greater Britain” ever had it in their minds? One point of unlikeness however must be mentioned. By “Greater Britain” seems now to be commonly meant the whole aggregate of the scattered colonies and dependencies of the Great or Lesser Britain—those names have in the new use become synonymous—all over the world. But the name Greater Greece by no means took in all the scattered Greek colonies all over the world; it was confined to a single group of them. The name seems hardly to have spread from Southern Italy even to the neighbouring island of Sicily; it was certainly never applied to the Greek settlements in Asia or Libya or any other part of the world. Indeed the name had a peculiar fitness as applied to the Greeksettlements in Southern Italy which it could not have had elsewhere. The geographical structure of the land enabled Southern Italy to put on the character of a second Greece in a way in which none other among the lands in which Greeks settled could put it on. Everywhere else out of old Greece there was merely a Greek fringe along the coast. For the Greek settlements were planted mainly on islands and promontories, along the coasts of solid continents the inland parts of which remained barbarian. Even in Sicily the Greek settlements strictly so called were little more than a fringe; the inland parts of the island did indeed in the end become Greek; but it was not by real Greek settlement, but by the spread of the Greek tongue and of Greek culture among men of other nations who became Greek by adoption. In Southern Italy alone, the shape of the land, branching off into two narrow peninsulas, enabled Greek settlement to become something more than a fringe on the coast, and to spread, as in the older Greek land, from sea to sea.
Thus then there were two lands, an older and a newer, in which it might be said, at all events at the first aspect, that the whole land was Greek. No doubt there was this difference, that in the older Greece all was, as far as we can see, Greek in the strictest sense, while in the younger Greece much was Greek only by assimilation and adoption. In the older Greece, if any relics lived on from times and people older than the first Hellenic settlements, they had been assimilated to the Greek mass before recorded history began. The existence in old Greece of any people earlier than the Greeks is matter of legend, of guess, of scientific inference, not matter of direct evidence. In the younger Greece of the Italian colonies, the existence of earlier inhabitants whom the Greeks found in possession, and who long lived on by the side of the Greeks, is as certain as the existence of earlier inhabitants in our own American and Australian colonies. But the earlier inhabitants whom the Greek settlers found in Southern Italy were indeed unlike those whom the English settlers foundin America and Australia. Not very far removed, so some have thought, from the Greeks in blood, in any case belonging to the same great branch of the human family, the nations of the extreme south of Italy, like their neighbours of Sicily, had a special power of adapting themselves to Greek ways, of adopting Greek culture, of making themselves in short Greeks by adoption. They did not die out before the new settlers, like the savages of America or Australia; they were able to rise to the higher civilization of the strangers who settled down among them, and to become members of the same body. This is one of the most marked differences between the old Greek settlements and the settlements of modern Europeans. The settlements of different European nations have taken different courses, but there has been nothing exactly answering to the process by which so large a part of the barbarian neighbours of the old Greek colonies became adopted Hellênes. In the case of our own settlements, the spread of British settlement or dominion hasmeant either the gradual dying out of the native races, as in America or Australia, or else, as in India, their survival as a distinct and subject people. In no case have English settlers mingled to any important extent with the native races; in no case have the natives to any great extent put on the outward seeming of Englishmen. Something more like this result has taken place in the colonies of Spain. There the mingled race, the natives of unmixed race who have adopted at least the Spanish tongue, are important elements which have nothing answering to them in the colonies of England. The nearest approach to these elements to be found in any English colony must be looked for in the grotesque imitation of English ways where real assimilation is impossible. This we see, not on the part of the barbarians whom the English settlers found dwelling in the settled lands, but on the part of another race of barbarians whom they afterwards imported for their own ends. The negro of the Western continent and islands has truly nothinganswering to him in any part of the Hellenic world. And, in the other case, while the process which made Sicily and Southern Italy Greek was mainly the raising of the older inhabitants to a higher level, the process which has made a large part of America in some sort Spanish has been largely the sinking of the European settler to a lower level. In the Greek and in the English case, it has been the higher civilization of the time that has been extended, and that by milder means in the Greek case than in the English. In the Spanish case we can hardly say that the highest civilization has been extended. If one race has risen, the other has fallen. This result nowhere took place in the Greek settlements, even where the Greek settlers, while communicating so much to the older inhabitants, did adopt something from them back again. On the whole, the work was a work of raising, not of sinking; but it is needful to remember that, when we speak of the narrow peninsulas of Southern Italy becoming Greek from sea to sea, we mean that they largelybecame Greek by the adoption of the earlier inhabitants into the Greek body. When we speak of the vast mainland of North America becoming wholly European, mainly English, from Ocean to Ocean, we mean that it has become so, not by the adoption of the earlier people by invaders who were also teachers, but by the gradual vanishing of the earlier people before invaders who to them at least have been destroyers.
Now this difference is one that follows directly from the difference in scale between the world in which the old Greek settlers lived and the world in which modern European nations live. This difference in scale is a thing which we must remember at every step. The Greek, in planting his settlements round the coasts of his own Mediterranean Sea, had nowhere to deal with races of men so utterly unlike his own as the races with whom modern Europeans have had to deal in planting their settlements in the islands and continents of the Ocean. Thoseamong whom the Greek settled were mainly men of the same great family as himself, men capable of being raised, by a swifter or slower process, to his own level. His world did indeed take in, as ours does, nations of ancient and rival civilizations altogether distinct from his own, but it was not among those nations that he planted his colonies. Where the Egyptian had dwelled from an immemorial antiquity, where the Phœnician had planted his abiding colonies in the first dawn of European history, there the Greek in his best days never settled; Egypt did in the end become in some sort part of the Greek world; but it was not by settlement from free Greece, but by the conquests of the Macedonian kings. Egypt under the Ptolemies was like India now, a land conquered but not, strictly speaking, colonized, a land in which the older nation kept on its own older life alongside of the intruding life of the younger settlers. But it marks the narrow area of the old Greek world, that Egypt, in some sort its India, in some sort its China, came within the physicallimits of that world; it was a land whose shores were washed by the same waters that washed the shores of Hellas. This difference of scale must never be forgotten while we are comparing or contrasting the days of old Greece with our days. But while we ever bear in mind the difference, we must ever beware of being led away by the misleading inferences which shallow talkers have often drawn from that difference. The nature of man is the same, whether he has a wider or a narrower sphere for his work; and the narrower sphere has some advantages over the wider. It is in small communities, in commonwealths of a single city, where men are brought closer together than in greater states, where every man has a personal share in the political life of the community, that the faculties of man are raised to the highest level and sharpened to the finest point. It is, from a political point of view, the great merit of modern scientific discoveries that they have enabled the people of a great community, of a kingdom or commonwealth covering a great space, to have thatdirect personal knowledge of the political life of the community of which they are members, that direct personal share in it, which once could not be had save where the state was confined to the territory of a single city. Instead of despising earlier times because they had not printing and railways and telegraphs, let us rather say that printing and railways and telegraphs were needed to raise large states to the level of small ones. By means of those inventions the Englishman of our day has become far more like an Athenian of the age of Periklês than his forefathers were in any earlier time. A hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the utmost the ordinary Englishman could do was now and then to give a vote, if he chanced to have one, at a parliamentary election, and to read or hear the most meagre accounts of what was going on in Parliament and elsewhere in public life. Very few Englishmen ever saw or heard Walpole or Pulteney, Pitt or Fox. Now the whole land has well-nigh become a single city; we see and hear our leading menalmost daily; they walk before us as the leaders of the Athenian democracy walked before their fellow-citizens; they take us into their counsels; they appeal to us as their judges; we have in short a share in political life only less direct than the share of the Athenian freeman, a share which our forefathers, even two or three generations back, never dreamed of. But without the help of modern scientific discoveries, this active share in public affairs on the part of the mass of the inhabitants of a large country would have been simply a dream. Or look at a matter which more directly concerns the immediate subject of this discourse, look at the vast developement of English political life in the great English land beyond the Ocean; can any man believe that a hundred years back Maine, Florida, and California could have been kept together as a political whole by any power short of a despotism? Could those distant lands have acted as parts of one free political body, if they had had no means of intercourse with one another swifter than the speed of a horse? It is by thehelp of modern discoveries that the federal systems of old Greece can be reproduced on a gigantic scale, that a single Union of states can embrace a continent stretching from Ocean to Ocean instead of a peninsula stretching from sea to sea. In short, instead of despising those ancient communities which were the earliest form of European political life, we should rejoice that in many things we have gone back to the earliest form of European political life, that the discoveries of modern times have enabled the free states of old times to arise again, but to arise again, no longer on the scale of cities but on the scale of nations.
When then we compare the colonial system of modern times, like any other feature of modern political life, with the thing answering to it in the political life of the old Greek city-commonwealths, we must never forget the difference of area on which the political life of the two periods has been acted; but we must never allow ourselves to fancy that difference of area, any more than distance of time, wholly shuts us off from political fellowshipwith those earlier times or makes their experience of none effect for our political instruction. The communities of those days were cities, the communities of our days are nations; but cities and nations alike share in a common political life in which many of the ages that went between their days and ours had no share. The Greek settlements, like the Phœnician settlements before them, were settlements of cities, not of nations, not of kingdoms or of commonwealths on the scale of kingdoms. Till the political needs of a later age taught the Greek that several cities might be combined in a federal union, his whole political life had gathered round the single independent city as its essential unit. Every Greek city was not independent; but every Greek city deemed itself wronged if it was not independent; when its independence was lost, it was, within all Hellenic lands, lost by the rule of city over city. And the rule of city over city, if it took away the independence of the subject city as an equal power among other powers, did notwipe out its essential character as a separate city-commonwealth. The dependent city was not incorporated like an annexed land; it was not held in bondage like a subject province; it remained a city, with more or less of freedom in its local affairs, though bound, as against other powers, to follow the lead of the ruling city. The city was all in all; the smallness of the community, the narrowness of its area, brought every citizen face to face with his fellows and his leaders; it brought with it a fulness of political life, an extension of political power and political interests to every citizen, to which larger states have reached only by painful steps and by help of the inventions which have in some sort made time and distance cease to be. The Greek was before all things a citizen; his political life was wholly local; his powers and duties as a citizen could be discharged only in his own city, on some spot hallowed by old tradition, and hallowed most commonly in the more formal sense by the abiding presence and guardianship of thepatron deity. He felt in the strongest sense the tie of membership of a community, the tie of all the duties which spring from membership of a community. For his city he would live and toil and die, but he would live and toil and die for it, because it was the whole of which he was himself a part. He owed faith and loyalty to his city—loyalty in its true and ancient sense of obeying the law, the law which he might be called on to help to administer, which he might, in some rare case, be called on to help to change. He might keep that faith and loyalty far away from his own city by doing all that he could in foreign lands for the interest and honour of that city. But in no other sense could he carry his citizenship with him beyond the bounds of the territory of his city; elsewhere he might act as a soldier or as an envoy, but hardly in the strictest sense as a citizen. The tie was local; the duty was local; of a personal tie of allegiance binding him to a personal superior, bringing with it personalduties which should everywhere dog his steps, which could not be cast off in any corner of the world—of loyalty in that sense, the old Greek, the old Phœnician, had never any thought in his mind.
The change in the meaning of the word “loyalty” well marks that leading political characteristic of modern Europe which stands out in the fullest contrast to the political thoughts of the ancient commonwealths. Loyalty, once simplylegalitas, obedience to the law, has for ages meant—when it has not meant something far baser—no longer obedience to the law, no longer duty to a community as a community, but faith and duty owed by one man to another man. It may be simply the personal duty of a man to his lord, the tie of chosen or hereditary comradeship, the tie known by the oldest Greek and by the oldest German, an ennobling tie indeed as regards the man himself, a tie which may lead to lofty prowess or to pure self-sacrifice, the tie of the true companions of Brihtnoth on the dayof Maldon, when on the place of slaughter each man lay thegn-like, his lord hard by. Or it may take the less poetic, the more political shape, in which the thought of the commonwealth does come in, but where the commonwealth is perhaps overshadowed by its chief, perhaps only embodied in him. The notion of personal allegiance, a notion which could have been hardly understood by either the aristocratic or the democratic Greek, has been the essence of the political system of Europe for many ages. It is a notion which grows up as naturally in a kingdom as the other notion, the notion of duty to the community, grows up in a commonwealth which knows no abiding personal head. It by no means shuts out the notion of duty to the community; but, as has been just now implied, it has a tendency to overshadow it. In the higher types of the class, in the French nobles, for instance, under the old monarchy, the feeling of personal loyalty, of devotion to the particular man who wore the crown, perhapsreached its highest point since the days of the old Greek and Teutonic comradeship. It was a feeling that was by no means wholly degrading; but it tended to put in the shade, if not wholly to crush out, feelings higher and worthier. Men looked so much to the King of France, they looked so much on France as embodied in his person, that there was small room left in their thoughts for France herself, for France as embodied in her people. Since kingdoms have put on more nearly the practical shape of commonwealths, this extravagant devotion to a single man has been somewhat toned down, and more room is gained for feelings coming nearer to those which were felt in a free democracy of old. But the radical distinction still remains between the leading political ideas of the state which acknowledges a prince as its sovereign and the state which knows no sovereign but the commonwealth itself. The primary and formal duty of the member of a state that acknowledges a prince, a duty to which in many cases he is bound by direct personal promises, is a personal duty to aperson. It is a duty which he cannot throw off under any circumstances of time and place; it follows him wherever he goes; on the most distant foreign soil he remains the subject of the prince in whose dominions he drew his breath. While the active duties of the citizen of a commonwealth can hardly be discharged beyond the territories of that commonwealth, the duties of the subject of a king, the subject, that is, of a personal master, are as binding on one part of the earth’s surface as on another. I have just used words which go to the root of the matter. I have used the words “citizen” and “subject.” The difference between the two conceptions can nowhere put on a more living shape than in the use of those two names. The Greek would have deemed himself degraded by the name of “subject.” To him the word that best translates it expressed the position of men who, either in their own persons or in the person of the cities to which they belonged, were shorn of the common rights of every city, of every citizen. We use the word “subject” daily withoutany feeling of being lowered by it. It has become so familiar that it is assumed as the natural phrase to express membership of a political body, and it is often used when it is quite out of place. I once read, and that in a formal document, of a “Swiss subject,” and I had the pleasure of explaining that there had been no subjects, noUnterthanen, in Switzerland since17981. And the question comes, What are we to say instead? “Swiss citizen,” “French citizen,” “citizen of the United States,” have this awkwardness about them that the community whose membership they express is not a city. The very awkwardness points to the main difference between the world of old Hellas and the world of modern Europe, the difference in scale. Be it kingdom or be it commonwealth, the state with which modern politics have to deal is not a city but something vastly greater.
Now there is no branch of political life on whichthese distinctions tell with greater force than on the work of planting new homes of any people beyond the sea. The colonies, the settlements, the plantations, of that elder world whose range of settlement was the Mediterranean were settlements of citizens who set forth from cities. The colonies, the settlements, the plantations of the newer world whose range of settlement has been the Ocean have been mainly settlements of subjects who set forth from kingdoms. Hence, while in almost every other point the two systems of settlement are so wonderfully alike, in all those points which immediately follow from this essential deference they stand utterly aloof from each other. The men who planted Greater Greece—whether we mean thereby the land once really so called or any other part of the Greek colonial world—were citizens of cities. The men who planted Greater Britain, if so we are to call it, like the men who planted Greater Portugal, Greater Spain, or Greater France, were subjects of kingdoms. There is but one exception. The colonies of the United Netherlands werecolonies planted by a commonwealth, and of all European colonies they have departed most widely from the old Greek model. But though colonies of a commonwealth, though colonies of a commonwealth in which cities played the chief part, they could hardly be called colonies of cities. They were colonies of a great confederation, of an aristocratic confederation, which had in many things more in common with kingdoms than with independent cities. They were colonies planted in a colonial world in which the colonies of kingdoms had set the model. The kingdom then, and not the commonwealth, has been the essential colonizing element in modern Europe. The colonies of modern Europe have been in the main colonies of subjects, not of citizens. Each alike, citizen and subject, carried with him that form of political life which was natural to each. The Greek colonist, citizen of a city, planted a city. Severed from his native city, severed perhaps by such a world of waters as that which parts Euboia from Sicily or by such a wider world of waters asparts Phôkaia from Gaul, he could no longer remain a citizen of his own city; he could no longer discharge the duties of citizenship on a distant spot; he could no longer join in the debates of the oldagorê; he could no longer join in the worship of the old temple; but he must still have someagorêand some temple; he must still have a city to dwell in, a city in which still to dwell the life of a free Greek, when he could no longer live that life in the city of his birth. So he planted a city, a free city, a city that knew no lord, that knew no ruling city, a city furnished from the first with all that was needed for the life of a Greek commonwealth, a city free and independent from its birth. And he dwelled in the new city as he had once dwelled in the old; he gave himself to make the new worthy of the old, the daughter worthy of the mother. But did he thereby deem that he had ceased to be a Greek? Did he deem that he had severed himself from Greece? Did he even deem that he had broken off from all duty and fellowshiptowards the city from whence he had set forth? No; dwell where he might, the Greek remained a Greek; wherever he went he carried Hellas with him; in Asia, in Libya, in Sicily, in Italy, in Gaul, far away by the pillars that guarded the mouth of Ocean, far away in the inmost recesses of the Inhospitable Sea, wherever he trod, a new Hellas, if we will, a Greater Hellas, sprang into being; on those new shores of Hellas he kept his old Hellenic heart, his old Hellenic fellowship; he still kept the tongue and customs of his folk; he clave to the gods of his folk; he could go to the old land and consult their oracles, he could claim his place in their sacred games, as freely as if he still dwelled by the banks of the Spartan Eurôtas or under the shadow of the holy rock of Athens. And how fared he towards the city of his birth, themetropolis, the mother-city of his new home, the birthplace and cradle of himself and his fellow-citizens of his new city? Political tie none remained; no such tie could remain among a system of cities. Parent andchild were on the political side necessarily parted; the colonist could exercise no political rights in the mother-city, nor did the mother-city put forward any claim to be lady and mistress of her distant daughter. Still the love, the reverence, due to a parent was never lacking. The tie of memory, the tie of kindred, the tie of religion, were of themselves so strong that no tie of political allegiance was needed to make them stronger. The sacred fire on the hearth of the new city was kindled from the hearth of its mother; the parent was honoured with fitting honours, her gods were honoured with fitting offerings; her citizens were welcomed as elder brethren when they visited the younger city. And when the child itself became a parent, when the new city itself sent forth its colonies, the mother-city of all was prayed to share in the work and to send forth elder brethren of her own stock to be leaders in the enterprise of her children.
In truth the ordinary story of the relations between a Greek colony and its metropolis,relations that is between a perfectly independent state and another state to which it looks up with traditional reverence, is perhaps the most attractive feature of Greek political life. The history of the relations between Corinth and Syracuse is a pleasing tale throughout. During all the centuries of the joint independence of the two cities, the relations between the metropolis and its great colony are ever fresh, ever friendly. The Syracusan is not a Corinthian; the sea that rolls between Ortygia and the Isthmus forbids that. But he never forgets that he is a child of Corinth, a child of Peloponnêsos; he cleaves with pride to the local speech of his fathers; he cherishes the worship of the gods and heroes of the city of his fathers, their names and their legends live on his lips; Syracuse may grow into a greater and mightier city than her parent; but that Corinth is the parent is a thought that never dies out from any Syracusan heart. Yet the child is free and independent, free and independent from its beginning. Corinth makes not the slightest claim to authorityor superiority over Syracuse; but she is ever ready to step in when any need on the part of Syracuse calls for her help; she steps in as bound to something which to her is dearer and more recked of than the most cherished among allies who are not her children. The mother-city steps in alike when Syracuse is pressed by foreign enemies and when she is torn by domestic seditions. She acts as a mediator between Syracuse and her foes; she shelters alike her banished patriots, her banished tyrant, even the foreign enemy whom Syracuse has spared and has given to her mother’s keeping. And, a gift precious above all, she sends her own deliverer to be in turn the deliverer of his brethren. And this friendship between Corinth and Syracuse is no friendship that stands alone; it is the common tie which binds Greek metropolis and Greek colony to one another. And all this becomes the more striking when we come to compare the tale of Corinth and Syracuse with some really exceptional cases in which the relations of metropolis and colonywere less amiable. Strange to say, we can find them in the history of this very Corinth and this very Syracuse. No War of Independence, no Declaration of Independence, was ever needed between Corinth and Syracuse, because Syracuse was from the beginning independent of her metropolis, and therefore friendly to her metropolis. But perhaps a declaration of independence, certainly a war of independence, was needed between Corinth and Korkyra, between Syracuse and Kamarina. In each of those cases the metropolis did claim some measure of authority over the colony. The fruit of this departure from the common system of Greek settlement was that abiding ill-will between Korkyra and her parent Corinth which stands out among the best known facts of Grecian history. And yet perhaps in the only case where we see Corinth and Korkyra acting together in friendly guise, it shows that something of the better, the more usual, feeling was not wholly banished from Corinthian and Korkyraian hearts; we once see the two cities join to do the duty of a parentand a sister as mediators on behalf of Syracuse against an enemy. As for the other less famous case, we read that Kamarina, a colony of Syracuse, revolted against her metropolis and was swept from the earth as a punishment. The doom was heavy; the fault may have been grave; but between Corinth and Syracuse, between Phôkaia and Massalia, there was no room for revolt or for its penalties.
Thus the old Greek citizen, in his settlements beyond the sea, founded cities, cities free and independent from the beginning. Let us see now what the modern European colonist, subject of a kingdom, has founded. He has founded settlements of very various kinds in different cases; but he has nowhere founded free and independent cities, like the Greek and the Phœnician before him. Cities indeed in one sense he has founded, vast and mighty cities, busy seats of arts and industry and commerce, but not cities in the elder sense, cities independent from their birth, cities that are born the political equals of the mightiestkingdoms. Cities like these the subject of a kingdom, bound wherever he goes to remain the subject of a kingdom, can never found. But what can be found instead? He cannot, in the nature of things, found kingdoms; it is the essence of his being that he and all that he has should remain part of an existing kingdom. His first act on entering an unknown land is to declare it to be part of the dominions of the prince from whose territories he has set forth. Wherever he goes, whatever he does, he is tied and hampered by the necessity of abiding in the allegiance of his original sovereign. It is wonderful to see how near some of the founders of modern European settlements came to the creation of really independent states. A slender line indeed distinguished the elder colonies of New England from states absolutely independent. The interference of the mother-country was, in many times and places, slight indeed. Still the final step was never taken; they were not absolutely and formally independent states, like the old settlementsof Greece and Phœnicia. As all the world knows, even those settlements where local freedom was fullest, those which came most nearly to the level of actual independence, needed a Declaration of Independence, a War of Independence, to raise them to its full level. The settlements of modern Europe have not conformed to the pattern of Syracuse and Massalia; they have followed the exceptional pattern of Korkyra and Kamarina. In Greek Asia then, in Greek Sicily, in the Greater Greece itself on the forked peninsulas of Italy, we see a gathering of Greek settlements, each a free and independent city, each as a free and independent city carrying on its own political life, its questions, its disputes, perhaps its wars, with some fellow city; but all alike Greek, all glorying in the Hellenic name, all looking back to old Hellas as the motherland, each looking to its own mother-city, not with the dread of a subject, not with the helplessness of a child still in tutelage, but with the manly deference of a child of full age, whose reverencefor his parent is none the less because he is no longer a member of the household. By way of contrast to that national life abiding in a new land, we see, in vast regions of the American continent, lands which once were English, which once were Spanish, which are still English and Spanish as far as common blood and speech and history can make them so, but which have ceased to be English or Spanish as political communities, and which grudgingly acknowledge the English or Spanish name. We see lands that parted in wrath from the motherland, and by whom the wrath of that parting has not wholly been forgotten. We see lands whose independence, instead of growing from the beginning with the good will of a watchful parent, has been won by the sword from the grasp of a parent who strove to keep her children in subjection. And all this has been the direct and necessary result of the theory of political life which the founders of those English and Spanish settlements carried with them. Subjects of a kingdom could do no otherwise;the theory of an allegiance which could never be cast aside obliged their settlements to become provinces, dependencies, whatever name is chosen, of the motherland. They could not found an independent kingdom any more than they could found an independent city. Dependence, tighter or slacker, was the necessity of the case. But it was no less in the necessity of the case that a day should come when even the slackest form of dependence could be borne no longer. That these colonies “are and ought to be free and independent states” was a voice which could not fail to be heard some day in Massachusetts and Virginia; there was no need for it ever to be heard in Syracuse or in Sybaris; for no man doubted their freedom and independence from the day of their first founding.
The mention of the independent colonies of England, those which, by the necessity of the Colonial system of modern Europe, were driven to win their independence by the sword, suggests one question of no small moment for our presentinquiry. Does this popular phrase of “Greater Britain” take in, or does it not take in, the United States of America? I say the popular phrase, because, as the phrase was first used by the writer who I believe invented it, who certainly gave it its first currency, it undoubtedly did take in the United States. But I am not at all certain whether it does or does not in the vague and lax way in which the phrase is now often used to add a flourish to a period. Now if the phrase “Greater Britain” does not take in the United States, it is certainly somewhat strange to shut out from that name the mightiest offshoot of the English folk. If it is meant to take them in, I am afraid that we may sometimes be met with a little unwillingness on the part of those whom we would fain welcome within our pale. There is the speaking fact, that, while the Greek of Spain or of the Tauric Chersonêsos never doubted as to his being a Greek, the Englishman even of New England sometimes but grudgingly allows himself to be an Englishman. This is the resultof parting in anger; under the Greek system, there was no room for parting at all. To the Greek colonist the names of the motherland from which he had set forth, of the folk from which he did not sever himself in setting forth from that motherland, suggested simple brotherhood, without a thought of subjection or dependence. To the descendant of English settlers in America, citizen, of a vast commonwealth of English blood and English speech, the English name has come to suggest—it is hard to say what, but something which the Greek name did not suggest to the citizen of any Greek settlement beyond the sea. He may accept it; but he accepts it with a kind of effort, with a kind of second thoughts. The fact is that the notion of allegiance has for some centuries taken such root in men’s minds, it has become so thoroughly the leading idea of political life, it has become so largely the definition of a separate political community, that the English name has come, on both sides of the Ocean, to carry with it some lurking flavourof necessary allegiance to the English crown. The Englishman of America shrinks from calling himself an Englishman, lest that name should unwittingly imply an allegiance which his forefathers cast off. The Englishman of Britain shrinks from bestowing the English name on the Englishman of America, lest he should seem to be wounding the national pride of a people the very root of whose political life was the denial of all English political allegiance. Neither side seem able freely to grasp the truth that was so clear to the mind of every Greek, the truth that two or many communities may be wholly distinct for every political purpose, and may yet be members of one nation for every other purpose of national life. I ask again, Do the United States of America come under the definition of “Greater Britain”? If I rightly understand the use of the phrase, “Greater Britain” is sometimes held to have the same meaning as the phrase “British Empire.” If so, then assuredly the United States of Americado not come, and do not seek to come, within such a definition as that. But sometimes the phrase of “Greater Britain” seems rather to be used as bearing the same meaning as another phrase that we sometimes hear, that of “the Federation of the English-speaking People.” Now the people of the United States of America surely form so large a part of the English-speaking people that a federation which is meant to take in all the branches of that people is strangely imperfect if it leaves out a branch so great and so fruitful as that which has spread the English tongue from Ocean to Ocean.
Again, if the phrase “Greater Britain” is held to be equivalent, not to the federation of the English-speaking people but to the “British Empire,” then another difficulty meets us. The Imperial state of all, that Empire of India set alone in its august rank above the mere kingdoms of lowlier Europe, may indeed be looked on as the head and front of the Imperial power of Britain; it can hardly be looked on as itselfa Greater Britain. Greek Kings, at any rate Macedonian Kings, once ruled from Pharos to Syênê, from the shores of the Ægæan to the banks of the Indus, yet no man would ever have applied the name of Greater Greece, or even of Greater Macedonia, to the Greek dominion over Egypt and the East. The Greater Greece in Italy was Greater Greece because it had truly become Greek. The Greek dominion in Egypt and the East could not be said to form a Greater Greece, because those lands never became Greek; they received at most a Greek fringe, a Greek veneer, a slight outer garment of Hellenism spread over an essentially barbarian body. And if Egypt or Asia was not Greater Greece, surely India is Greater Britain still less. There is there no abiding British element drawing to it the science, the learning, the whole art and skill of the British world. For if Asia and Egypt never became Greek, yet within their borders Alexandria and Antioch became renowned as the greatest of Greek colonies, the courts of kings,the universities of scholars, the centres of the intellectual life of Greece when its political life was shrinking up within narrow bounds indeed. Greece looked elsewhere for her greater self, and Britain cannot fail to look elsewhere for her greater self, and not where the influence of Britain takes the shape, so largely of dominion, so slightly of assimilation. All that I am asking for is clearness of speech; I seek to have words well defined, and that is all. I do not profess myself to define the phrase “Greater Britain;” I only remark that, if it is held to be the same as the “British Empire,” it cannot be the same as the “Federation of English-speaking people;” and that if it be either the one or the other, certain consequences would seem to follow which it seems to me are now and then forgotten.
But one thing is certain. If the phrase “Greater Britain” answers to “federation of the English-speaking people,” if it takes in the English-speaking people of the United States of America, it also takes in great communities of English-speaking people in America, Australasia, Africa, and other parts of the islands and continents of the Ocean, which are not in the same political condition as the United States. Herein comes a great political problem, which never presented itself to any mind in the old colonizing days of Phœnicia and Greece, and which never presented itself to any mind in modern Europe till quite lately. The older state of things was familiar with distant and scattered settlements which none the less formed a national whole, but which stood in no political relation either to one another or to the mother-cities from whence they were settled. The later state of things was no less familiar with distant and scattered settlements, perhaps forming a national whole, perhaps not, but in either case united to the mother-country, the ruling country, by a common tie of dependence. The fact that so many European colonies which were held in this relation have parted asunder from the states on which they were dependent, the greatcase of all, the winning of independence by thirteen American colonies of England, the wonderful growth of those colonies in their new character as independent states, has for a long time past drawn men’s minds to the relations between mother-country and colony. The relation once so common in the modern world, the relation of mere dependence, sometimes almost of bondage, is no longer maintained on any hand. In the chief colonies of Great Britain at all events, every care has been taken, while keeping the relation of dependence, to make dependence as little irksome as may be. The fullest local freedom has been given; dependence has in appearance sunk to little more than the retention of a common allegiance to a common sovereign. Of late keener eyes have seen somewhat more clearly what has lurked beneath this, at first sight, very pleasing relation. In its internal affairs the colony is, in all seeming, as free as the mother-country; I say in all seeming, because even in the freestcolonial constitutions there is still a certain hidden power which may ever and anon step forth in a way in which it never can step forth again in the mother-country. And the fullest independence in local affairs cannot wholly put out of sight the fact that in all strictly national affairs the freest of colonies is as dependent as ever. The greatest and freest of colonies may at any moment find itself plunged into a war which may suit the interests or the fancies of the people of Great Britain, but which may in no way suit the interests or the fancies of the people of the colony. It is to meet this difficulty that schemes have been of late largely proposed for bringing about a nearer union between the mother-country and the colonies, and that in some shape other than that of dependence. Mother-country and colonies are to form one political whole, but a political whole in which no member is to claim superiority, or at any rate authority, over any other. I am not now arguing for or against such a scheme;this is not the place to do so. I wish simply, as a matter of accuracy of thought, to put some questions as to what is really meant, so that we may fully understand what it is that we are talking about. And I wish further, by way of historical inference, to point out some facts which may perchance be helpful in making up our minds on the subject which we are talking about.
I would therefore ask again, Do “Greater Britain,” “Imperial Federation,” “Federation of the English-speaking People,” mean one thing or two or three? The difficulty is that a great part of what it is fashionable to call “the British Empire” does not consist of English-speaking people, and that a large part of the English-speaking people do not form part of the “British Empire.” The existence of India, the existence of the United States, surround us with difficulties at every step. Then again, What is Imperial Federation? If it is Imperial, how is it Federal? If it is Federal, how is itImperial? Is the present German Empire to be the type? That is in a certain sense an Imperial Federation, because its chief bears the title of Emperor. But then some may think that it is too Imperial to be exactly Federal; some may think that the position of some of its smaller members does not practically differ very much from a position of dependence. One cannot help thinking that the colony of Victoria, though it is still a dependency, enjoys more of practical independence than the duchy of Oldenburg, which is a sovereign state. Does the Imperial Federation take in India or not? Let us be careful how we answer. If the Empire of India is left out of the Federation, how is the Federation Imperial? I am not sure that I always know the exact meaning of the words “Empire” and “Imperial;” but there is one part of the Queen’s dominions, and one only, in which she bears the title of Empress, and it would be strange if, in forming the Queen’s dominions into an Imperial Federation, her one Imperial possessionshould be the only part of her dominions which is left out. But if, on the other hand, the Empire of India is taken into the Federation, if all its inhabitants receive, as surely they must receive, the same federal rights as the inhabitants of other parts of the Federation, then we may be allowed to ask, how the Federation of which the Empire of India is a part will be a Federation of the English-speaking people or a Federation at all. The area and population of the Empire of India are so great that, in its federal aspect, as the state or canton of India, it will hold a place in the Imperial Federation of Greater Britain at least as overwhelming as Prussia now holds in the Imperial Federation of Germany. Where would Great Britain be, where would Australia or Canada or South Africa be, alongside of such a yoke-fellow? It will be a serious question in such a case what is to become of the white-skinned, European, Christian, minority, outvoted, as it must always be, by millions on millions of dark-skinned Mussulmansand Hindoos who can hardly be reckoned among the English-speaking people. I am not arguing for or against all this; it may be the right thing for so small an island as ours to be taught its fitting place in the world. I only ask whether those who talk about “Imperial Federation” have always stopped to think exactly what they mean by the words. And I would ask whether the only scheme which would seem to be correctly described by the name of Imperial Federation could be sung or said, with any degree of harmony, to the tune of “Rule Britannia.”
Of course it may be that the tune of “Rule Britannia” may have come to mean the rule, not of the Great, but of the Greater Britain. Only we are again followed by the difficulty of settling what the Greater Britain is. India and its Empire are, to say the least, a puzzle. But passing by that difficulty for a moment, there is to be in any case a Federation of some kind, a Federation of very scattered members, members which have hitherto looked up to a common parent as their abidinghead, in truth their abiding ruler. And now that head, that ruler, is asked to do what no ruling state in the world has ever been asked to do. I feel certain that not a few of those who talk about an Imperial Federation of the English-speaking people use those words as having, perhaps a high-sounding, perhaps a patriotic ring, but without ever stopping to think what the words which they use, if they imply anything, really do imply. Yet the word “Federation” has a meaning. Different federations may take, and have taken, very different shapes, but, if they are to be federations at all, one thing is of the very essence. The states that unite to make the federation, while they keep certain powers in their own hands, give up certain other powers to a central body, a body which speaks and acts in the name, not of this or that state, but of the whole body of states. And the powers that they give up to this central body are those powers which are strictly national, those in the exercise of which the nation, as such, comes across the other nations and powers of the world.This nation, any other nation, cannot have any dealings with the State of New York; all its dealings must be with the United States of America. Now we, this kingdom of Great Britain, have been for a good while accustomed to hold the same position in the world as the United States of America, and we have been withal accustomed to hold it for a much longer time than the United States of America have. Are we willing to give up this position, and to sink to the position of the State of New York or the State of Delaware? For this is what Federation really means. Some other conceivable form of union may conceivably mean something else; but it is Federation that is talked of, and this is what Federation means. Hitherto the Parliament of Great Britain, that is the King, Lords, and Commons of Great Britain, has been a sovereign assembly, an assembly which knows no superior on earth and which knows no limit to the range of its powers. If Great Britain becomes one member of a Federation alongside of the British colonies in Australia and Canada, theParliament of Great Britain will cease to be all this; it will become a subordinate legislature, like the legislature of the State of Rhode Island or of the Canton of Schwyz, a legislature which can deal only with its own subordinate range of subjects, and may not meddle with that higher range of subjects which it has given over to the Federal power. The question indeed may further arise whether any Great Britain, any Parliament of Great Britain, should be allowed to remain at all. It may be thought fairer, nay, it may even be in the interest of Great Britain itself as getting it more votes in the Federal body, that Great Britain should no more be heard of, and that England, Scotland, and Wales, nay, for ought I know, Wessex and Mercia, Lothian and Gwynedd, should all enter the Union as separate States. I am not arguing for or against all this. I only again ask whether those who talk about Imperial Federation have always weighed all these chances, and also how far any of them is consistent with the tune of “Rule Britannia.”
As a matter of fact, no real Federation was ever formed in this fashion—for I cannot look on the modern German Empire as a Federation in more than form. The chief Federations of the world have been formed in quite another way. A number of small states, in face of some greater power that threatened them, each needing the help of its fellows against the common enemy, have agreed, while still keeping each one its separate being, to become one state for all purposes that touch their relations to other powers. This description suits all the main federations of the world, old and new. In forming such federations, it is plain that each member gives up somewhat of its formal rank as an absolutely independent state. But this small self-lowering is more than outweighed by the far greater security that it gains for preserving independence in any shape. It is quite another case when a great power, an ancient power, a ruling power, is asked to come down from its place, to rank for the future simply as onemember alongside of its own dependencies, even though most of those dependencies are its own children. For this, it must be remembered, and nothing else, is what Federation really means. And it is what no ruling power on earth has ever yet consented to, and what we may suspect that no ruling power ever will consent to. This process must not be confounded with another form of union, which is perfectly conceivable, but which is wholly different, and which is not Federation. Though a ruling state is not likely to stoop to the level of its dependencies, yet many a ruling state has found it wise to incorporate its dependencies in its own body. The growth of the Roman Empire, by gradually admitting one class of dependencies after another to the full Roman franchise, is the great example of all. By this process the ruling state gives up nothing; it simply admits others, not so much to its own level as into its own substance. The ruling state does not sink; the dependencies, as separate communities, neither rise nor sink; as communities they cease to exist; but their citizensor subjects are raised to the level of citizens or subjects of the ruling power. If any one should propose, not that Great Britain and her dependencies should enter into a Federation, but that the United Kingdom should absorb its dependencies, that their inhabitants should all be represented in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, any objection to such a scheme as this would be objections of quite another kind from the objections which beset the scheme of Federation. The difficulty of carrying out such a scheme is almost wholly a physical one. Can such distant and scattered elements be thus joined together in a political body one and indivisible? Have those scientific discoveries of which I spoke earlier in this discourse advanced so far as to annihilate time and distance on such a scale as this? I say nothing either way; I simply wish to point out the difference between two utterly distinct proposals which are likely to be confounded. I add only one warning. Vast territories have been united, both on the Federal system, as in the United States, and on the systemof more thorough union into a single body, as in the Empire of old Rome. But hitherto they have always been continuous territories. Provinces and states, however distant, have been physically one; they shade off gradually into one another; it is possible to walk from the furthest point at one end to the furthest point at the other. It seems another thing to unite in the same way a mass of territories, not only at vast distances from one another, but utterly isolated. Carthage, Venice, Genoa, have held a scattered dominion of this kind; but it has been merely a dominion. With them there was no federal tie, no political communion of any kind; there was simply the uncontrolled authority of the ruling city. The question is whether federation or any other form of political union is possible among members so widely scattered. It may be true that it takes no longer time now to go from New Zealand to Westminster than it took to go from Shetland to Westminster at the time of the Union of Great Britain. But Shetland and Westminster, though not parts of one continuousterritory, are parts of one geographical whole. There are no foreign waters to cross, no foreign lands to pass by, on the road between them.
I am not, I must end by again saying, here either to recommend any practical course or to dissuade from any practical course. My business is a lowlier one. One part of it is the pedantic business of calling attention to a process which is very needful before we begin to discuss any practical course, the process of finding out exactly what it is that we have to argue for and against. I am not arguing for or against federation or any other scheme; I simply point out what federation is, and what are the difficulties about it. I am trying to show what is the real meaning of that or of any other word, and thereby to avoid the confusion of thought and often of action which follows when a name which has been long used to mean one thing is suddenly turned about to mean something else. Another part of my business is to suggest real analogies and to warn against false ones. I have referredlargely to the experience of political communities in ages very distant from our own time and on a scale very different from the political communities of our own time. I wish to point out the real, instructive, practical, likeness which, with a little pains, may be seen through much real and more seeming unlikeness. Above all, I wish to point out that some of the great inventions of modern times, which might at first sight seem to sever us more utterly than ever from those small and ancient commonwealths, have really brought us nearer to them. The great lesson of history is that the nature of man, at any rate of civilized European man, is the same in all times and places, and that there is no time or place whose experience may not supply us with some teaching. But free states naturally supply the best lessons for free states. The difference in scale between the free states of various ages is after all only an accidental difference which does not go to the root of the matter. The difference is largely part of that extension of the area of history whichfollows on the advance of civilized man, that advance in which the creation of Greater Greece in one age and of Greater Britain in another were alike steps. The great thing to remember in these matters is that the men of the earliest days of civilized Europe, the elder brethren of the great historic family of which we ourselves are members, were neither, as men seemed to think a few generations back, beings of a race above us, nor yet, as some seem inclined to think now, beings so far below us, or in a position so unlike our own, that their experience can be of no use to us. Either of these mistakes is alike fatal to a general grasp of that unbroken history of the world of which the earliest days of Greece are one stage and the most modern days of England are another. Above all, instead of despising those days of small communities because of their ignorance of modern inventions which they needed far less than we do, let us rather rejoice that those inventions have brought us who do need them nearer to the political level of those early times. To me atleast it is some satisfaction that the England in which I now live is palpably more like the Athens of the days of Periklês than was the England in which I was born. And it is beyond doubt the great scientific discoveries of modern times which have largely helped to make it so.