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THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
(Daily Press, 26th August.)
THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS AND
[August 30, 1902/ fall without leaving her mark on all suc- the Gladstonian school of economists pro. ceeding time. She had introduced for the | fessed to hold most sacred. We hear from first time in human history a system of certain quarters the cry of preferential trade, universal law which to the present time as if the internal trade of a country were a survives as the basis of civil law. Nor was thing to be set about with racks and fetters. she less successful in the regions of finance The question now before the country and statescraft, and in her ability of utilis-assumes far wider limits. Is our trade to be ing in the common good the diverse local or imperial? Is it more consonant practises of her constituent peoples.
with the possibility of empire to have duties hampering our increasing trade, say with Canada, or even with Australia, than in the old days that England should urge a protective tariff against Scotland Ireland? Such things have happened, and in those days just the same arguments were made use of towards removing these dis- abilities as we hear nowadays, against what certain people look upon as little less than the service of Baal-an Imperial Zolverein. To get rid of inter-colonial duties is not yet one of the possibilities of finance, either at home or in the colonies themselves; but it is well to remember that every step, however short, taken in this direction brings us so much nearer to the conception of a genuine, instead of a mere pinchbeck, Empire.
The South African war has emphasised the fact that the British Empire must for the future stand or fall together. This fact first presented itself to the nation at the Diamond Jubilee of 1897; but it was not till the nation at large saw the danger to the common interest should South Africa fall under influences other than British that the decisive blow was struck, and the Empire of All The Britains " appeared Minerva-like armed cap-u-pie that the dream took corporeal existence, and was no longer a mere vision of an overwrought imagina- tion. But if the new Empire has assumed in the face of the world at large certain pretensions, it has also pari passu incurred ecrtain obligations; and though a portion of our older politicians would willingly postpone or forget these obligations, there come warning notes from too many quarters that the present is not a time to be taken unawares; but that for good or ill wo urüst be prepared to make good our pretensions as a world-wide Empire. This is the lesson to be learnt from history, ancient as well as modern. Long before the beginning of authentic history we find the. Greck states in Asia Minor, individually feeble as they were through lack of population and the exaggerated value put on merely personal liberty, largely swaying the councils of the huge monarchies of Egypt and Assyria. Their skill and courage in war, and their wisdom in council gave them a position out of all proportion to their strength as a nation. The same feeling which caused the highest political unit of the Greeks to be, not a country nor a people, but a mere city, was evidenced in the Greek colonies, which, orce they had let their mother-home, had no higher ambition than to found separate cities, as often as not hostile to the mother state, and at ro time a source ct greatness or strength. Once partially, but in the event only partially, the Greek states joined their forces against a common enemy, and in the defeat of the great Persian invasion showed what Greece might have been had the only permitted the idea of union to overcome the strife of party. Once a stronger head than that of his fellows did indeed unite the Greeks forcibly in the conquest of Asia, aud the realm of ALEXANDER, under the leadership of that great muster-mind, bid fair to make of Greece a world power; but with the too early death of ALEXANDER the spirit of disruption again prevailed, and his ter- ritory awaited the advent of a wiser if less talented race. Rome, far less brilliant in her early development, from the first day set about to consolidate and assimilate each successive conquest.
Chies and peoples were not overrun for the mere sake of barbarian conquest, but were taught the higher necessity of working together with the common object of founding a great Empire. Roman, law and Roman finance were everywhere introduced, and the honour of being a Roman citizen was appreciated by the farthest dweller in Asia Minor as highly as by the dweller in the Italian cities. The result of all this was that except for her literary culture, the name of Greek, once as famous in arms as in arte, sank down to be the title of a race of literary pedants. Rome fell indeed in the end before the attacks of the northern races, inferior to herself in no way in the scale of mental ability, and far her superiors in those inward graces of truth, honour, and chivalry, which are the main standards of continuing greatness. But Rome did not
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Nor was the lesson once learnt ever forgotten. One by one the rew states t at grew out of the partition of the old Empire adopted its ways and its institutions, and the coronation of the Great KARL in the Basilica of S. Peter in Rome on Christmas day, 800, was the crowning achievement of the old Roman civilisation.
Although CHARLES's Empire fell on evil times, the central point has never been forgotten that common law and common finance must ever be the characteristics of abiding Empire; and it is noteworthy that when modern Germany saw the helpless state into which the old empire had fallen, her first instinctive act as a common nation was to establish a toll union, and abolish those petty regulations between the petty states of which she was then composed, which assiduously kept asunder the elements sighing already for union. In the same way it has been the boast of Great Britain that following the example of the old Roman she has introduced in her colonies the elements of a common law and a common system of finance. It is indeed true, superficially at least, that the apparent divisions of the laws are as numerous as the colonies themselves, while to large sections the Common Law of England is a thing unrecognisel. South Africa has adopted for instance the civil law of Rome as developed in modern Holland. Quebec still upholds after its supercession in France itself the old Customary French law, a modification of which is to be found in Mauritius and elsewhere. Yet with these exceptions, more apparent than real, it is nevertheless the fact that the customary law of the British Empire is everywhere funda- mentally the same, and that the English- man, except in the merest matters of detail, finds himself just as confident of receiving justice in any of the dependencies of the British Crown, be it situated in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, or our own contin- ental dependency of Australia: wherever, in fact, the paz Britannica prevails.
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In matters of finance very much the same may be affirmed; the systems, it is equally true, are as diverse as the colonies them selves. Canada and Australia have only within the last few years, not yet teu, entered upon apparcully lifferent paths. Protection, the id I of the one, is in the other coming to be a byword; and yet we are compelled to hold, that however differing be the methods they are all tending to a common end. A certain school of econo- mists would indeed, under the shibboleth of free tra le, still further emphasise the differ- ences which must in all healthy states exist, by making them obstacles in the path of union. The late W. E. GLADSTONE, himself one of the most accomplished Greek scholars of his day, with the Greek language imbibed the centrifugal Greek weaknesses. For him the State was still the city, and the empire which would call for the sinking of the individual in the higher idea of the state was for him an abomination. We are not going to revive the old contests which did not survive his immediate life; but we inay well wonder at the developments which have already rendered obsolete the battle-cries of party but a short fifteen years ago. One of the most marked ambitions of the day is curiously founded on the reversal of all that
RUSSIA AND MANCHURIA.
or
(Daily Press, 25th August.) On the 8th April last a convention was signed at Peking by M. LESSAR, Russian Minister to Peking, on the one hand, and Prince CHING and WANG Wen-shao, on the other, whereby Russia agreed to with- draw in the course of six months after the signature her troops in the south-western portion of Moukden as far as the Liao River, and to restore the railway to China; to withdraw within the next six months her troops from the remainder of Moukden and from Kiriu; and to withdraw the following six months the rest of her troops in Hei- lung-kiang. The terms of this convention as published first from Chinese sources and afterwards in the St. Petersburg Official Messenger coincided, so that there can be no doubt of their accuracy. According to the agreement therefore, the first portion of Manchuria, the south-western part of the
province of Moukdep or Shingking, should be completely evacuated by the 8th October. It is hardly necessary to state that no news of this evacuation proceeding has reached us. We have alluded on several occasions to a ridiculous assurance given at the end of June by Count CASSINI to the Government to which he is accredited as Minister at Washington that Manchuria had then been evacuated. What Count. CASSINI meant, we do not profess to fathom; but for the circumstantial nature of the report we should have been inclined to treat it as an invention. Russia had not bound herself to evacuate Man- churia by the end of June, but only a small part of the whole province by the 8th October; and Russia is not wont to let her performance excced her promises. The tele- gram which we publish from our London correspondent to-day puts a very different complexion ou affairs. According to the London Standard's representative at Odessa, the question of evacuating Manchuria, despite any convention, is looked upon by Russia as quite unsettled. It depends upon whether Russia decides to continue in occupation of the right or southern bank of the Amur River or to abandon it, it being thought that Russia's position will prove perilous if she retires across the Amur. What then, it may be asked, becomes of the Manchurian Convention? It is true that the Peking Government was warned that the conven tion would be voided in event of misbe- haviour on the part of the Chinese, and it was felt that such a warning was intended
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