Читать книгу The Colonization of Australia : The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building - Richard Charles Mills - Страница 3

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A good book serves many purposes. This book, for instance, gives the first adequate account—from hitherto unpublished sources—of fourteen all-important years in Australian history, and the first adequate analysis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's work. But it also provides the student of political science (and from that point of view I shall now consider it) with an admirable example of the part which may be played in the development of human institutions by conscious political thought.

Sir John Seeley, writing in 1883, told us that the English nation had "conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind." If that had been true, if the settlement of Australia and New Zealand had been directed by nothing except the desire of individual pioneers to make money, or of routine officials to evade difficulties, Australasian history during the nineteenth century would have been a tragedy of wasted opportunity. The period of British convict labour would have been followed by waves of coolie labour, Indian, Chinese, and Papuan. Absentee capitalists from every industrial nation would have scrambled for careless or corrupt grants of land and mining rights, and would have exploited the sheep farms and townsites of Australia, or the forests of New Zealand, as they now exploit the rubber-trade of Borneo or the Congo. Even if Great Britain had retained sovereignty over the whole territory, she would not have granted rights of self-government to a population so gathered. No Australasian "Monroe Doctrine" would have been strong enough to prevent the constant interference, official or unofficial, of the other Powers in the interest of their own concessionaires; and a series of intrigues and risings would have followed, as barren of good result as are the civil wars of Central and South America.

Writing, as I am, in July, 1915, I do not claim that the world system which was developed during the nineteenth century has been conspicuously successful in ensuring human progress and happiness; but I am at least sure that Australia and New Zealand have made a better start in social organization than Cuba or Paraguay, and that they owe that better start largely to the fact that Wakefield and his followers forced the British Government in the critical years of 1830 to 1845 to awake from its absence of mind.

Wakefield was, of course, not the first man to think or write on British colonization, and those who wish to understand what were the qualities in his work which enabled him to serve so effectually the Empire and mankind should begin by comparing, say, his Letter from Sydney (1829) with anything which had appeared on the subject during the preceding twenty years.

I have just re-read James Mill's well-known article on Colonies in the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica (1818-1824). The article is still good reading, if only for its hard Scotch logic and Scotch contempt for English mental slackness—as when Mill says, "Parliament, we have pretty good experience, cannot make things by affirming them. Things are a little more stubborn than the credulity of Englishmen." His summary of Adam Smith's arguments against monopoly, and of the Commons Committee Report on Transportation, could hardly be better done, and his references to "the superstitions of the nursery" about Malthusianism, or to the policy of the "Ruling Few" in England, show us the utilitarian philosophy not grown respectable, but young and fierce.

And yet the most conscientious statesman who should have read Mill's article in the hope of learning how to make a good colony, would have received no help whatever from it. If we exclude India, which he doubtfully brings under his definition, Mill is simply not interested in any colony, present or future. Facts like transportation and monopoly are criticized solely from their effect on the mother country, and the final section headed "Tendency of colonial possessions to produce or prolong bad government" refers solely to home politics, and never hints that it may be important whether the governments of the colonies themselves are good or bad.

A less obvious defect in the article is its abstractedness. Colonists are divided into "delinquents" and the rest, and are thenceforward thought of as "population," consisting of so many identical integers in a simple arithmetical argument. "Territory," "capital," and "labour," are equally abstract.

Mill was already a respected philosopher when he wrote his article. Wakefield, when he wrote his Letter from Sydney, was in Newgate, where after an idle and unsatisfactory youth he was serving a sentence of three years for abduction. One feels, however, that Wakefield wrote under incomparably better intellectual conditions than Mill. Newgate in the early nineteenth century was not, according to our present ideas, a well-managed prison; but it did not condemn men of original genius, as modern prison discipline does, to the daily sterilizing fatigue of useless manual labour. Wakefield wrote, not to make money, but under the sting of personal shame and thwarted ambition. He thought, not of abstract "colonies," and abstract "populations," but of the place where he would probably make his home, and the men and women and children who would be his shipmates and neighbours. He sees with extraordinary vividness the population of Sydney as he supposes it to be. The convicts are his fellow prisoners in Newgate, with their calculated endurance and dumb cunning; the "remittance men," as we should now call them, are the corresponding class with whom he had lived in Florence or Boulogne. The future emigrants whom he hopes for are neither units of abstract "population" nor the results of Mr. Wilmot-Horton's "pauper-shovelling." He gives half a rapid page to a list of the specialized types who go to make up the English middle class, ending with "lawyers, clergymen, singers, milliners, and other female artists; and, at least, one good Political Economist at each settlement to prevent us from devising an Australian Tariff" (p. 187). Above all he thinks of British colonial policy in the light, not merely of its reaction on home politics, but also of its effect on the colonies themselves. His system, he argues, "would tend more than anything else to preserve an intimate connection between the colony and the mother country," for the reason that "the mother country and the colony would become partners in a new trade—the creation of happy human beings." (p. 196).

Even after Wakefield, on his release from prison, became, not a colonist, but a life-long organizer of colonization, his thinking always retained this concrete quality. In his Art of Colonization (1849), for instance, he says: "In colonization women have a part so important that all depends on their participation in the work . . . the women's participation must begin with a man's first thought about emigration, and must extend to nearly all the arrangements he has to make, and the things he has to do, from the moment of contemplating departure from the family home, till the domestic party shall be comfortably housed in the new country . . . You may make a colony agreeable to men and not to women; you cannot make it agreeable to women without being agreeable to men" (p. 155).

Mr. Richard Mills brings forward evidence (p. 136-139) to show that Wakefield borrowed more of the details of his theory than has hitherto been recognized from Robert Gourlay. But Wakefield understood as Gourlay never did the "public duty" which, as Burke said, "requires that what is right, should not only be made known, but made prevalent." To convert a promising member of Parliament, to coach a witness before a Committee, to write or inspire an effective pamphlet, was to him an inseparable part of the same "mental strife" as the invention or adaptation of a system of land-sales or responsible government. He created not thought only, but, like an old Greek philosopher, a school of thinkers and statesmen. He and his friends hoped because they believed they knew; and their pursuit of further knowledge was, in turn, the result of their hope.

But Wakefield's career shows that success in political construction requires not only the co-operation, but the free conflict of many minds and wills. The factors in any political problem are so enormously complex that no single man can either realize them all before action, or hope to introduce of his own motion all even of the most essential modifications of his schemes during action. "The subtlety of nature," said Bacon, "is many times greater than the subtlety of the human senses and the human mind." Without a deliberately constructed plan of campaign no general can expect to win; but the best plan of campaign, before it leads to victory, will have to be modified, not by its author only, but by the irritating criticism of the "man on the spot," or the resistance of the enemy. I know nothing in the intellectual history of politics which illustrates this better than the account which Mr. Mills gives of the conflict between Sir George Gipps and the Wakefield theory in 1838-1841 (pp. 290-298). Land sale at a fixed price had by that time become in Wakefield's mind an essential part of his scheme. Gipps forced the Home Government to allow him to sell land in New South Wales by auction; and we can now see that if he had not done so, the whole Wakefield scheme would have collapsed. Gipps was an able Colonial Governor, who compelled the Colonial Office to give way to him and thereby saved the essentials of a scheme which he modified in detail. In another and even more important case the opposition of the colonists themselves, made effective by Wakefield's own plan of colonial self-government, prevented the destruction of Wakefield's hopes by an influx of Asiatic and Polynesian indentured labour. In his Letter from Sydney, Wakefield tolerated convict labour, and argued (p. 204), that "the Chinese are well disposed to emigrate, and that it would be hardly possible to select a more useful description of labour." He afterwards became a convinced opponent of convict labour, but as late as 1852 he urged the importation of indentured Chinese labour (Mills, p. 300, note 2). It was the Australian assemblies and the colonial ministries which the assemblies soon came to control that abolished transportation and prevented Eastern indentured labour; and it was to Wakefield more than to any other single man that colonial self-government owed its existence.

A general, with the roar of cheering crowds in his ears forgets how different what was done proved to be from his original painfully thought-out plan. But political campaigns never come to an end, and political victories are not easy to distinguish from defeats. Wakefield had not only one of the most original, but one of the most elastic and teachable intellects of his time, and there are few political inventors to whom historians would ascribe so large a measure of practical success; and yet when he died in 1862 he must still have felt, as indeed he constantly complained throughout his political life, that his theory had never had "a fair trial," that it had never been really understood, and that no attempt had been made to put it completely into operation. It is we who can see now that a "fair" and "complete" trial of the Wakefield theory would have been fatal both to the theory itself and to Australasian prosperity.

If the British Empire, for which Wakefield toiled, and in which he so resolutely believed, is to survive and play its part in the evolution of a community of nations guided by some higher purpose than that of internecine warfare, a body of organized thought more concrete, more penetrating, more patient even that that of Wakefield and his faithful disciples will be required. That thought must go on in human brains, having their bodily habitation neither at the centre of the Empire only, nor only at its circumference. It must be the work neither of practical statesmen only nor only of theorists, not of a group of friends only, but also of sincere opponents. The question whether enough of such thought can be created to secure in the twentieth century that measure of slow and partial success which history allows us to hope for in the organization of human society is of vital importance to the whole fabric of civilization. Its creation will need many improvements in political machinery, and perhaps the growth of a more serious and responsible press than now exists. But, sometimes, when Mr. Mills brought me, during the early dark days of the war, the final chapters of this book for criticism, I wondered whether an important contribution to that work might not come from an improved organization of the Universities of Greater Britain, and perhaps also of their relation to those of America. The Universities of Europe, when they finally abandoned Latin as the spoken language of learning, gained much from introducing into the lecture-room the speech of ordinary life, but lost much by the difficulty of exchanging ideas across the boundaries of states. To-day the English-speaking Universities are sometimes controlled by literary and philosophical traditions less free and penetrating than those which have grown up in the continent of Europe, and their organization of sub-divided research is often far less thorough. But for the purposes of political science they possess the all-important advantages that they use one language, and draw their intellectual traditions from societies which, with all their variation of type, possess the common factor of a love and understanding of political freedom. The wandering student of the theory of the State, whether he intends to be teacher, or statesman, or official, or writer, or each in turn, can now cross the seven seas as his continental predecessors five hundred years ago crossed the Alpine passes; and in any University in which the English tongue is spoken he will find opportunities for informal intercourse and good-tempered controversy. All that is wanted for the growth of a great school of political analysis and invention is that the Universities themselves should be more conscious of each others' existence, and more ready to organize their joint efforts in a task which no one of them can perform unaided.

Graham Wallas.

The University of London, London, S.W.