Economic Prosperity in the British Empire E-Book

Stephen Leacock

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 280

Beschreibung

This book is sent you by the Board of Trade of the town of Orillia, Ontario, Canada in the hope that it may help to draw attention to the opportunities for investment of British capital in the industries of Canada.In "Economic Prosperity in the British Empire" Professor Stephen Leacock discusses the historical causes of its original fiscal disintegration, when Canada and Australia, though politically independent were in fact economically independent through the necessity of raising their own state revenue and the operation of the Free Trade School in England under Peel and Russell.

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ECONOMIC PROSPERITY

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FOREWORD

The proposals for inter-Empire co-operation, trade and investment contained in Dr. Stephen Leacock’s Economic Prosperity in the British Empire connect closely with the present active discussion in Great Britain of the problem of economic unity.

This book is sent you by the Board of Trade of the town of Orillia, Ontario, Canada in the hope that it may help to draw attention to the opportunities for investment of British capital in the industries of Canada.

The town of Orillia is situated at the centre of population of the Dominion, with unusual facilities for cheap power and for the distribution of manufactured products. The Orillia Board of Trade invites your co-operation in developing with British capital and financial experience the abounding resources of this and similar Canadian districts. The Board will welcome correspondence on the subject.

ECONOMIC PROSPERITY

IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

by

STEPHEN LEACOCK

© 2019 Librorium Editions

PUBLISHED BY

Constable & Company Limited

London W.C.2

•

BOMBAY

CALCUTTA       MADRAS

Oxford University

Press

•

First Published 1930

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London

The title of this book was changed to “ECONOMIC PROSPERITY IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE” too late for an alteration to be made in the running headlines.

CONTENTS

PART I. UNTIL NOW

CHAP.

PAGE

I

THE EMPIRE AS A PROPRIETARY ASSET

3

II

THE POSSIBLE EXPANSION OF THE WHITE RACE WITHIN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

29

III

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS WITHIN THE EMPIRE

65

IV

THE MIGRATION OF POPULATION IN THE PAST

92

V

THE EXPORT AND INVESTMENT OF BRITISH CAPITAL

129

PART II. FROM NOW ON

I

A PROPOSAL FOR AN INTEGRATED TARIFF SYSTEM WITHIN THE EMPIRE

149

II

A PROPOSAL OF POLICY FOR THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW COUNTRY

180

III

THE INTEGRATION OF CREDIT, CURRENCY, AND CAPITAL

206

IV

THE INTELLECTUAL UNITY OF THE EMPIRE

223

V

WHAT TO DO AND HOW TO DO IT: THE WORK OF AN ECONOMIC CONFERENCE

241

PART IUNTIL NOW

CHAPTER ITHE EMPIRE AS A PROPRIETARY ASSET

It is the purpose of this book to discuss the economic integration of the British Empire. By this is meant the establishment of a system of mutual co-operation for the development of the vast potential wealth of the Empire and for the expansion of its present limited population.

It is no longer possible to aim at complete economic union. For that the day is past. Such a union is probably no longer even desirable. In each of the great Dominions there has been established a system of manufacture and an urban concentration dependent on it, that cannot now be obliterated. But as towards the outside world a uniformity of economic policy may still be achieved; and the now separated parts of the Empire may co-operate with one another in the use of capital, the movement of population and the development of national resources, with results as yet scarcely imagined. It is within the reach of statesmanship to initiate in the British Empire an era of prosperity and progress such as the world has never yet seen anywhere at any time.

For three generations past, in the name of “political freedom”, British statecraft and colonial aspirations have set themselves to break up the Empire into a series of disconnected parts. The gift of “responsible government” to the colonies, that began in 1840, carried with it a division of resources, a separation of public debts, a repudiation of all common obligations, a complete dislocation of all common action. It was the partition of an estate. Each of the beneficiaries retired with his own, to use it or not as each saw fit. Most of the talents stayed hidden in the ground. The parent source of capital and migration flowed away to enrich the United States and Argentina. In the sixty years from 1840 to 1900, 10,513,000 British emigrants, or seventy-five per cent of the total, moved outside of the bounds of the Empire; only 3,688,000, or twenty-five per cent, migrated to territory under the British Crown.

As a result of all this, what should have been a united economic commonwealth, comparable to the United States, but immensely greater, is but a group of fragments. The vast totality of resources that is the heritage of all is available to none. A part of the Empire is crowded to the verge of standing room. Two million idle men look across the sea at 2,000,000 square miles of empty land. In some quarters of our disunited commonwealth each single subject of the Crown, as in Western Australia, represents three square miles of land; elsewhere, as in England itself, his share is less than the five-hundredth part of one square mile.

Nor is there any single authority left that can bring the people to the land or the land to the people. Capital accumulates in Lombard Street while the empty fertile spaces of the outer Empire remain, decade after decade, silent. Western Australia, as large as all of Europe west of Warsaw, lies almost motionless under its own weight. Its little handful of people cannot use more than a fraction of it. Canada, portioned off into half a continent in 1867, staggers forward under its burden; alternately it falls prone and rises again: each successive “land boom” is followed by a flat collapse. It has never had money enough and men enough for its development. It has thrown about itself an outline apparatus of 40,000 miles of railways, with vast bridges carrying nothing to nowhere and town sites in the grass of the prairies. The frame is too big for the picture. And those who might help fill it in are warned off in the nature of “responsible government”. In the sixty odd years since the Confederation of 1867 Canada has established in its north-west a population of 2,000,000 people. This feat, if we could rightly use our population, capital and resources, could be duplicated in two years.

The same picture of imperfect development and of relative stagnation for lack of capital resources is reflected throughout the Empire. In the temperate uplands of Africa, such an area as Northern Rhodesia, with over a quarter of a million square miles, supports the white population of a country town. The Pacific Islands on the British Columbia coast represent as large a territory, as rich a heritage of resources as the whole Ægean civilization of Greece. The Queen Charlotte Islands alone have an area (3,780 square miles) that is one-third the size of Belgium. The islands possess a temperate climate, magnificent harbours, anthracite and bituminous coal, large forests, prolific fisheries and the population of an English market town—2,000 as against the 7,500,000 people in Belgium. Yet this island group has been in the possession of British people for over a hundred years, scarcely known and utterly unutilized till a few years ago, while four generations of British people at home looked in vain for food and work for all. South Africa, with its agricultural areas scarcely touched, remains quiescent, a heroic land of sorrows, still making its politics out of history and importing food from Australia.

In the West Indies a white population of 50,000 occupies what were once the treasure islands of the world. Here as elsewhere—almost everywhere—in the British Empire, a principal lively hope is placed in the money of the American tourist, for whom all the world is turned into an hotel.

As with the divided resources of the British Empire so with its population. Migration within the Empire is no longer free. It is no longer co-operative. It is no longer under any single control. Quite apart from all questions of the colour line, of the conflict of oriental civilization with western, quite apart from all problems of political freedom—the white population of the Empire is no longer free to move, except to get out of it. The erroneous doctrine that an empty-handed man is not worth having has carried the day. Economic ignorance has bred legislative restraint: the labour vote helps to shut labour out of its inheritance.

As a result, population in the Empire crowds and congests at the centres. The overcrowding of England begins to be reproduced in the great cities of the Dominions. The gloomy shadow of Malthus falls over the entire scene. The population of Great Britain in each generation of the manufacturing era has been strongly held in check by poverty, by opinion, by lack of economic knowledge and statecraft—in short, by what seemed sheer necessity—at the very period when population was the principal need of the British commonwealth. The unborn British population of the nineteenth century—the children that could have been born from Malthus’ time to ours, with the natural increase of humanity, would have reached now a final total of half a billion. Their little ghosts flutter in the ether of our historic background.

And of those born, 10,980,000 went, needlessly and to our detriment, out of the Empire.

The lack of economic unity that has thus retarded the development of the British Empire appears all the more striking when we place beside it the contrasted picture of the United States. Here was a country which at the outset of the nineteenth century could not be compared to Great Britain and its dependencies, except in hope. Its population in 1800 was only 5,000,000 as compared with the 16,000,000 of the British Isles. Its territory, prior to the Louisiana purchase of 1803, was only half a million square miles as compared with an approximate 10,000,000 under the British Crown. Its accumulated monetary capital was almost negligible beside that of England. Manufacture was only struggling into existence as between independence and the war of 1812. There were water-power mills in New England spinning yarn still woven on handlooms. Anthracite coal had been discovered, but no one could melt it, and the settlers used it to make side-walks. For the furnaces and forges that had sprung up in Western Pennsylvania they used bituminous coal from England. Not till the ingenious Joseph Smith applied a forced draught to the “stone coal” did the first outline of the world’s greatest industry begin to reveal itself. For fifty years after the Declaration of Independence the manufactures of the United States were as nothing compared to the rising glory of Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Yet the United States, after the adoption of the sagacious constitution of 1789, possessed the supreme advantage of economic unity; and after the Louisiana purchase and the exploits of Clark and Lewis and other pathfinders, its territory reached unbroken from sea to sea. Its population could move, could expand, could multiply without limit. Each application of capital, industrial and monetary, opened the way for more. Immigration after 1840 entered in a flood, each successive wave washing farther across the continent.

Meantime the outlying empire of Great Britain remained for the most part empty, with no system, and little attempt at any system, for filling it up. In the fortunate United States Nature and circumstances supplied the system. There was no need of a plan. The western frontier moved of itself, like an industrial skirmish of civilization.

In the earlier half of the nineteenth century it was perhaps scarcely to be avoided that the migratory population of the British Isles should go to the United States rather than to the unoccupied territory of the greater colonies. Australia was still separated from England by a sailing voyage of six months. The Cape was little more than a port of call mid-way on the Australian voyage. The province of Canada, apart from entry by crossing the United States, was cut off from the world for nearly six months in the year. The empty north-west was unapproachable except by the Hudson Strait, and those who best knew its value kept this knowledge to themselves. To alter this situation would have needed an initial effort beyond the foresight of the times.

But the situation by the latter half of the century had altered of itself. Steam navigation, after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), cut even the Australian voyage to less than two months, and presently to one. The Atlantic service became a ferry. Gold opened, in turn, Australia, British Columbia and South Africa. The Canadian North-west came within easy reach of lake steamers and Minnesota railways by 1880. At this point the moving flood of capital and migration could have been—should have been—diverted to the empty empire; the natural expansion of population of the British Isles should have gone unchecked with bread and work for all under the flag, over the seas if not at home. But by this time “responsible government” had done its work. The spiritual insistence on political freedom had dislocated economic unity.

As a result, the increasing wealth and power of the United States foreshadowed with every decade its coming dominance. On the eve of the Civil War the population of the United States (31,000,000) had overtaken and passed that of the British Isles (30,000,000). At the end of the outgoing century it surpassed it as 76,000,000 to 42,000,000.

The economic unity of the United States enabled it to develop its resources in a way unknown in the British Empire. Four transcontinental railways linked up the republic from ocean to ocean, while British North America for hundreds of miles north of Lake Superior had not even a wagon road. Kansas and Nebraska were filling up with farmers, while Alberta, a better country, remained only a game preserve and a buffalo pasture. During all the earlier part, at least, of this development a principal basis for the economic development of the United States was supplied by British capital and by the unending migration from the British Isles. Between the years 1860 and 1900 the United States opened up with railways and land grants the north-west territory represented by the seven northern states that lie between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, an area of 700,000 square miles, and put into it a population of 6,000,000 inhabitants. During that same time the north-west territory of Canada (what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta), a better country with an area almost identical and with higher resources gathered in only 400,000 people. There was no reason for this except our lack of statecraft. With this economic development of the United States has come also a growth of urban population, of manufactures and of wealth that first rivalled, then equalled and then far overpassed, that of Great Britain.

More than that, the American people were earlier to seize the opportunities that arose out of the new environment. They made the motor-car their own. About two-thirds of the 33,000,000 motor-cars in the world belong in the United States, where there is one motor-car for every five people; in the world at large there is about one to every sixty.

Similarly the moving picture was seized and turned into a world industry. The climate of California—which enjoys advantages very similar to those of Cape Town and Western Australia, with an equal variation of scenery and the similarly fortunate proximity of the sea—supplied the first initial advantage that guided the flood of effort and capital. So may a pebble in a stream divert the course of a river.

As a result, the United States, a country of smaller resources, less territory, less capital and without—let us hope—a superiority of intellect—surpassed in its industrial development its greater rival. This never should have been. It is for the present century to reveal whether this condition need continue.

Looking forward, then, towards the prospect which now confronts the British Empire, one may best begin with something like an appraisement of the wealth and the potential wealth, the territory, resources and the development of the resources possessed by its people. In doing this the central point of interest for this present essay lies in the question of the expansion of the white race, of the occupation of “white man’s territory” and the outlook for what is called western civilization. It is no part of the present work to discuss the future industrial development of the tropical dependencies of the Empire. Great as is their importance as a source of wealth, they can never be a part of the British commonwealth in the higher sense. In such areas the white race can find no home. They ought in the one course of time to be handed over to races fitted for the climate. Still less is it the present purpose to discuss the future, either economic or political, of the 325,000,000 mixed Asiatics who live in British India. It is quite possible that with advancing industrial technique and with better organization even this huge population may expand in number and increase in prosperity. But this is a problem shared by all crowded industrial countries, whether Asiatics or European, and has little or nothing to do with the theme of this book. The present purpose is to examine the co-ordination of empty fertile spaces and unused national resources with the growth and movement of the white population under the British Crown.

It is proper to begin with a few generalities, familiar, but so imposing as to stand the wear and tear of repetition. The British Empire represents an area of 13,491,977 square miles, or one-fifth of the land surface of the globe. It carries a population of 450,000,000 people, or one-quarter of the human race. In Australia it owns a continent, in Canada the half of one. Both of these, where habitable at all, are “white man’s territories”. In South Africa the Union and its mandate in South-West Africa, with the adjacent country of the two Rhodesias, adds up to 1,250,000 square miles. The uplands of Africa, the cooler regions of the equatorial highlands, Kenya and Uganda, may perhaps also, though perhaps not, turn out to be suitable for permanent white occupation. To all this there is to be added such insular possessions as New Zealand (in area nearly equal to the British Isles), Newfoundland, and, in a sense, the West Indies. But the calculation of the total population under the British Crown is most misleading. Of the grand total of 450,000,000 no less than 325,000,000 belong in British India and Ceylon. Outside of that the population of the rest of the Empire numbers only 125,000,000, and from this we must subtract again the 20,000,000 natives of Nigeria, the 40,000,000 of various African and other dependencies, so that at the end of the count the population of the British Empire, as far as it is white, becomes striking not by its size but by its lack of it. It numbers only 66,500,000—about the same number of people who lived, without overcrowding, in the German Empire of 1914, an area of 208,000 square miles, or rather less than the area of Saskatchewan.

The opportunity for expansion and development thus offered seems at first almost appalling. Here is a population of sixty-six and a half million people with undisputed access to the land and resources of a fifth of the globe. They are recognized by all other Powers, even if with a certain reluctance, as the “owner” of it. They are equipped with the technique of modern production, were themselves the first to invent it, and have control of monetary capital far greater than that of any European nation, as great perhaps indirectly as that of the United States.

The picture becomes still more highly coloured when we turn to enumerate the share of the British peoples in the principal natural commodities that serve as the basis of the world’s production of wealth. Of these the first and the most fundamental is arable land. The ploughshare is the earliest emblem of our Western civilization as it arose slowly out of and from the land. On the entire globe there are calculated to be 52,500,000 square miles of land surface, and of this 13,500,000 square miles are in the Empire. Only a fraction of this is now cultivated, in Australia only one per cent, in Canada three per cent. No estimate has ever been made of all the arable land in all the Empire. But from calculations made in regard to Canada, it is certain that in the great Dominions cultivation could easily be multiplied as five to one.

Next to land is coal. Western civilization was not built upon it and knew and cared little about it for the first two thousand years after the rise of Greece and Rome. Its part in the world’s history only began about the year 1700. But once utilized as a source of power in the industrial revolution and the eighteenth century, it rapidly assumed a major importance in material civilization.

In the year 1700 England mined and used only about two and a half million tons of coal. At the present time the entire consumption of coal in the world for domestic heat, factory power, railway and marine transport amounts to 1,235,000,000 tons per annum. Of this the United States, now the largest producing country in the world, raises 591,720,000 tons. The British Empire mines each year at present an average of 305,000,000 tons, of which 245,000,000 comes from the British Isles. The first warnings of apprehension in regard to the future supply were heard as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, when Professor Stanley Jevons in his Coal Question (1865) prosecuted an inquiry into the probable exhaustion of our coal mines. For two generations already gloomy prognostications have been uttered to the effect that the British coal supply would presently be exhausted. The same apprehension was voiced again by the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies in 1926. “We look forward, says the report of the Commission, to a time not far distant when the rate of increase of output will be slower, to be followed by a period of stationary outputs, another and gradual decline”.

But as far as the world at large, or even the Empire at large is concerned, this apprehension need not be of a lively character. It resembles somewhat the astronomical alarm at the distressing slackening in the motion of the earth, calculated sooner or later to have disastrous consequences for mankind but at present involving only the loss of one second every two or three thousand years. It is probable that long before the exhaustion of world coal occurs, the world will have ceased to use coal.

Here are the facts. The coal beds of the earth are estimated to contain 7,863,556,000,000 metric tons of coal. At the present rate of use it would take humanity many centuries to burn the truly available part of it, and 6,000 years to burn it all if it could be reached. The United States, fortunate above all other nations, possesses a potential supply of 3,536,000,000,000 tons, of which great areas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and elsewhere are of anthracite, the coal of highest quality and heating power. In other places, as in the Mesabi range in Minnesota, the coal lies so close to the surface that it does not need to be “mined”; it has only to be shovelled out. In the British Isles, as already said, the total known coal area contains still a supply of 166,000,000,000 tons. But there is no sooner talk of its exhaustion than hope springs up anew with the reports of possible new beds of great potential value under the quiet countryside of South-east England. If the possibility of running out of coal were the chief of England’s worries, the country would be happy indeed.

In Canada are vast beds of coal. But it is ill situated. It lies in the extreme east and in the far west and is lacking, pending further discoveries, in Central Canada, the principal area of population and manufacture. The coal beds of Nova Scotia are estimated to contain 2,639,000,000 tons, those of Alberta 12,000,000,000. The dependence of Central Canada upon American coal, of which it imports yearly 16,500,000 tons, is one of the weak spots in the self-protective mechanism of the imperial system. Promising discoveries of coal, in the uninhabited littoral of the James Bay, reported officially by the Government of Ontario in 1929, may prove of vital value as an economic link in a broken chain.

Of the metals one turns first to gold as that of the greatest prestige, the history of which has helped to govern the expansion of Europe. Many modern economists assure us that we could do nicely without it, and that its use as the basis of currency is as antiquated as the stage coach. But public opinion at large still values its possession. Here the British Empire, starting among the last, has become easily the first in production. The discovery of America presently brought to Europe the gold of Mexico and Peru. There was but little of it, as we count our gold now. But in the world of Christopher Columbus’s day, with perhaps no more than the coin equivalent of $160,000,000 of gold and silver in all, and with older sources of supply washed out, it appeared as fabulous wealth. Spain, as between 1500 and 1600, drew about $5,000,000 of gold per annum from the mines of Central and South America. By the middle of the nineteenth century gold production reached $118,000,000 a year, and the accumulated supply, perhaps $200,000,000. Then came the discovery of the California gold which ran soon to an annual output of $56,000,000 and which at the present day still amounts to $12,000,000. The Australian gold fields of Victoria (1851) soon rivalled those of California, and reached in 1853 a maximum output of $60,000,000. Australia, including the gold diggings of Victoria, Tasmania, and Western Australia, produced (1909) only a little more than this total, and has since sunk to an output of $10,000,000, almost nine-tenths of it from Western Australia.

But South Africa presently eclipsed all other gold fields and still leads the world. The Witwatersrand, a great ridge of buried gold ore on a plateau in the Central Transvaal, is estimated to have produced, up till 1926, a total gold value of about $4,500,000,000, and at present produces annually about $200,000,000, or more than half of all the gold mined in the world. In Canada the gold produced until recent years was negligible in the world’s supply. British Columbia, where gold was discovered in 1858, represented at its highest point (1913) an output of $6,149,027. The discoveries in the Yukon Territory turned the eyes of the world to the Gold Rush to the Klondyke in 1898, and built up Dawson “City” to a temporary population of 20,000 inhabitants. The gold boom passed as it came, pending further good fortune in the Arctic wilderness still only partly explored. But the gold of Northern Ontario, lying in the Lake Temiskaming district, has become a rising factor in the world’s supply. Beginning with $42,000 in 1911, it has reached an annual output of over $32,000,000.

Taken all in all, the civilized world is estimated to possess in coin and gold a quantity that is equivalent to about 17,000,000,000 gold dollars. The annual production, averaged for the ten years since the war, amounts to $412,000,000. The output of the year 1927 was $410,000,000. For the same ten years the British Empire averages seventy per cent of the total. For the year 1927 the total Empire output was $290,000,000; and that of the rest of the world, $120,000,000; South Africa, $209,000,000; Canada, $38,000,000; Australia, $13,000,000. The production of the United States was $46,000,000. Thus over seventy per cent of the world’s gold is provided by the British Empire, a percentage which in all likelihood is destined to a further and continuous increase.

Iron comes next. Here the world at large is blest with one of the few supplies which we still dare call “inexhaustible”. Vast deposits of iron ore exist all over the globe, many of them, such as those of inland Brazil, as yet untouched, and beyond the present reach of man. From those in use the world extracts each year about 146,000,000 tons. From the Mesabi Range in Minnesota, where the ore lies close to the surface, about 35,000,000 tons are shovelled up every year. Altogether 780,000,000 tons have been taken out. The geological department of the state of Minnesota estimates that there are still 1,250,000,000 tons left. From the great iron deposits of the Franco-German borderland a similar quantity, at present about 37,000,000 tons of ore, is raised annually. In the iron deposits that underlie the North of England, north of a line drawn from Yorkshire to Dorset, there are said to be 3,400,000,000 tons of workable ore. But when all these resources are gone the world, at large, has no occasion to worry. Geologists tell us that the workable ore beds of the globe comprise 30,000,000,000 tons. With a present annual utilization of 146,000,000 tons, we can see our way ahead for about two hundred years. After that—but that is far enough.

For the first hundred years of the modern industrial era Great Britain led the world in the production of iron. Indeed the rise of the iron and steel industry was one of the largest features of the industrial revolution. In Queen Anne’s reign England only produced each year a few thousand tons of iron. About 18,000 tons of pig iron were produced by 1740. In 1820 the entire world production ran to a million tons; in 1850 about four and three quarter million tons. Of these Great Britain produced two and a quarter million and the United States only 630,000 tons. But between the years 1880 and 1890 the United States industry, stimulated by the protective tariff and organized on a basis of mechanical transport and manufacture never seen before, overtook the British with giant strides, passed it and left it presently in relative insignificance. In 1890 the United States produced 9,000,000 tons of pig iron and Great Britain less than 8,000,000. In 1928 the figures stood at 37,800,000 against 6,500,000.

It is not necessary to deal with the other minerals in the same detail. But a glance at the table of the world’s mineral output which is here appended will illustrate the general position. In certain cases the British Empire enjoys an overwhelming superiority in the possession of mineral resources. Extreme cases are those of cobalt, asbestos and nickel. Cobalt is a metal, unknown till yesterday to the industry and commerce of the world, but now of great utility for advanced forms of steel manufacture and for the making of pigments for the linoleum manufactures. The entire world’s supply is in the Empire, the greater part of it coming from the deposits of Northern Ontario.

In asbestos, Quebec and South Africa supply ninety-five per cent of the world’s consumption; in nickel, the northern districts of Ontario and Saskatchewan enjoy an overwhelming advantage: in the last ten years Canada has produced from eighty-seven to ninety per cent of the world’s output. With certain other minerals and metals, though to a lesser degree, the advantage is all the other way. Of copper the British Empire only produces four and one half per cent of the annual supply, though there is every prospect of a great wealth of copper ore being discovered between the Hudson Bay and the Copper Mine River in Arctic Canada. Almost the whole of the world’s quicksilver (99·8) per cent comes from Spain; sulphur and phosphates from the United States and the world’s nitrate from Chile.

But the case of extreme importance is that of petroleum, the basis of the now universal gasolene, without which, under present conditions, the industrial life of any nation comes to a full stop. It seems strange now to look back to the despised “rock oil”, which was about a hundred years ago oozing out on the surface of the marshlands of the Pennsylvania valleys and floating on the ponds. The early settlers could find no use for it except as a liniment for sores and burns. Then a certain Mr. Ker purified it enough to burn it in a “coal oil” lamp as “kerosene”. Chemists distilled it. Naphtha, benzine and paraffin flared upon the market. Industrial capital sank wells and pumped it out. The 2,000 barrels of 1857 had become 150,000,000 barrels at the end of the century. Then came the invention of the explosive engine, making possible the aeroplane and the motor-car. Rock oil became the most conspicuously important product in the world. All the world was ransacked to find it, and up to now it is the hard fate of the British Empire to be away behind in the supply. The whole world produced in 1927 a total of 1,254,145,000 barrels, of which 905,000,000, or seventy-two per cent, came from the United States. Next stood Russia with 5·77 per cent, Venezuela with 5·12 per cent. British India is set down at 8,200,000 barrels, or less than half of one per cent of the world’s supply, and beyond that the Empire is clean out of it. Canada, with half a million barrels, makes only an insignificant contribution.

The case, however, is not as bad as it seems. Our present dependence on the outside world may easily lessen and disappear. There are various fields within the confines of the British Empire which may prove of great wealth in oil. It would be strange if it were not so. The province of Alberta lies over a vast bed of coal: natural gas exists in great quantities. All geological indications point to the presence of oil-bearing strata as yet unrevealed. Even now oil is produced in promising quantities in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and it is likely that far to the north of the Alberta in the valley of the Mackenzie River the small discoveries of oil already made will prove only a beginning. Australia still seeks petroleum in vain. But there is oil in British Borneo, most probably in Papua, certainly in New Zealand (but with the quantity in doubt), and undoubtedly, and in large quantities, in the West Indian island of Trinidad. Another generation, another decade, may alter the entire outlook.

Another commodity, like petroleum of little significance to the world till yesterday, is rubber. Though known and used for a century, it had little place in the greater manufactures. Even in 1910 the world’s annual consumption was only about 3,000 tons. Goodyear’s discovery of “hot vulcanization” goes back as far as 1839, but it is only of late years that processes have been devised for combining rubber with other materials (fabrics, metals, glass, wood, etc.) so as to secure both elasticity and strength. The development of the motor-car both stimulated and utilized these processes. The production of rubber in 1927 reached over 622,000 British tons, an increase which is not an end but apparently only a beginning. Almost the whole of the rubber supply at present originates from rubber trees; the manufacture of synthetic rubber, as in Germany, from lime and coke by a complicated chemical process is yet of small commercial importance. The principal natural forests are in the valley of the Amazon, with lesser sources of supply in Central America and the East Indies, Siam, French Indo-China and Siberia. But the world’s rubber supply no longer comes to any great extent from the natural forests. About ninety-five per cent of it is drawn from “plantations” of rubber trees, the greater part of them grown in Malaya and other British tropical dependencies. The Empire produces about seventy-five per cent of the world’s rubber. But when it comes to the manufacture of rubber, into motor tyres and other goods, the situation is reversed. The Empire is relatively out of it. The United States uses about seventy per cent of the world’s rubber, which thus becomes the basis of one of its greatest industries, with an output valued at over one and a quarter billion dollars.

A most imposing asset of the British Empire which seems to carry in the very sound of it the voice of the future is the asset of the waterfall, the rapid and the river—the tremendous potentiality of water-power. Coal and petroleum are sources of power, but the present industrial world looks more and more to the electrical energy to be developed from falling water.

Statistics of potential power are often of little meaning to the ordinary reader from the want of an elementary understanding of the units concerned. It is customary to estimate the actual and potential use of falling water in terms of “horse-power”. This method of calculation originated with Mr. James Watt of the eighteenth century, inventor and patentee of the first practicable steam engine. By a “horse-power” he meant the amount of work performed by a first-class cart-horse, which he set as equivalent to raising 33,000 pounds through one foot in one minute. A cart-horse which could really do this and keep on doing it would be a rare and valuable beast indeed. But that is of no consequence. The unit, once established, is as good as any other. In the measurement of electric current and power, as applied and sold commercially, the mechanical horse-power unit is changed for the technical electric unit the watt, of which 746 equal one horse-power. In all general estimates of water-power, actual and potential, the horse-power unit is the common form of calculation. It is estimated that at the present time the world demands for power represents about 120,000,000 horse-power—the amount of energy needed for all the industries, all the transport, both on land and sea; in short, all the work of the world to which mechanical power is applied. All the factories of all the world are computed to use 75,000,000 horse-power.