Produced by James McCormick
{ii}
This Edition is intended for circulation only in India and the
British Colonies
{iii}
Macmillan's Colonial Library
London
1892
No. 143
{iv}
'I tell you that when you study English history you study notthe past of England only, but her future. It is the welfare ofyour country, it is your whole interest as citizens that is inquestion while you study history. How it is so I illustrate byputting before you this subject of the Expansion of England. Ishow you that there is a vast question ripening for decision,upon which almost the whole future of our country depends. Inmagnitude this question far surpasses all other questions whichyou can ever have to discuss in political life.'
{v}
THIS book has been written at the request of many friends whothink that a useful purpose will be served by putting the factsand arguments which it embodies into a connected form, wherethey will be easily accessible to the ordinary reader, and whereeither their fallacies may be exposed or their truth find awider recognition. In most of the chief centres of the Britishworld both at home and abroad I have found men of all classes,and not seldom large masses of men, who agreed on the whole withthe line of thought which I here try to follow; agreed, too,with an intensity of belief and a warmth of enthusiasm whichare, I think, rarely found except in connection with great andtrue causes. This concurrence of other minds has deepened theprofound conviction which I have long felt that the completionof a closer and permanent political unity between the Britishcommunities scattered throughout the world should be a first aimof national statesmanship, and might {vi} become, if itsadvantages were clearly understood, a supreme object of populardesire.
It is essentially a subject for full and free discussion.Permanent national unity for British people can only be based onan agreement of opinion among at least the larger self-governingcommunities that the union is for the common good. That thereshould be an absolute unanimity of consenting opinion among thepopulations of the communities concerned we have no reason tohope. It has never occurred in any large national consolidationhitherto, and it is not likely to do so now. The continued unityof the Empire is a political question involving immense issues,and divergent opinions may be assumed from the start. Indeed, itbecomes more evident from day to day, to those who watchcarefully the current of events, that the end can only begained—as great ends have ever been gained—after a severestruggle between contending forms of thought. The provincialismwhich has uniformly resisted large national organization; thepessimism which sees danger in every new form of politicalevolution; the repugnance to change in an old country with formsof government more or less fixed; the crudeness of politicalthought and want of national perspective in young communities;the ignorance which begets inertia: all these exist and must becombate