Page:The empire and the century.djvu/602

 In these days of strenuous living and severe international competition we cannot afford to remain children.

To many who read these lines the above remarks may seem like the babbling of truisms. But I have made them as a protest against the attitude assumed towards colonization by so large a majority—that it is only a last resource, a sacrifice of all that is dear on the altar of fast money-making, a veritable 'emigration' from all the comforts of civilization into the outer darkness of an alien wilderness. This is not the spirit in which to knit closely the family relation, not the way to teach English children to merge that narrower title in the more glorious name of Britons. It is idle to talk of 'Mother and Daughter Lands' so long as we persist in regarding the Colonies on the same footing as the foreign countries to which alone men of our race may 'emigrate.' If it is such an alarming and melancholy thing to move from Stepney to Rhodesia, from West Ham to Manitoba, then the sooner we give the relationship its true name, and call the Colonies England's step-children, the quicker we shall arrive at actual conditions.

We want to start, or at least very greatly to strengthen, the notion of colonization on its Imperial, as apart from its individual practical, side; to treat it as a change of homes; to bring before every man, woman, and child who migrates from England to other parts of the Empire that he is, indeed, moving within the family; that he is a living, and therefore a most powerful, factor in the continual renewing of the ties sometimes fretted by the strain of mere space distance; that upon him, in the aggregate, and not on statesmen, soldiers, or sailors, falls the responsibility of Empire. As he fulfils his service, so will the Empire grow in virility, or slip gradually into a congeries of nations, whose people will cry, 'I am of Canada,' 'I of South Africa, 'I of England,' as the case may be, and none will be found to make answer, 'We are all of Britain.'