The press and communications of the Empire

Front matter

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Introduction To The Series

A WORD is necessary as to the origin and object of this series. The Management of the British Empire Exhibition (1924), in the early days of its organisation, approached the Imperial Studies Committee of the Royal Colonial Institute for advice and assistance in connection with the educational aspect of the Exhibition’s work. The Editor of this series, who is a member of that Committee, happened during a period of enforced leisure to be spending a good deal of his time at the Institute, chiefly in its delightful Library. On its shelves he found entrancing reminiscences or records of men who went forth from these islands as Pioneers to brave the perils of uncharted seas and the dangers of unknown lands, inspired more by the spirit of adventure inherent in the race than by any calculated design for personal gain or lust for the acquisition of new territories. From these volumes could be traced the beginnings and gradual growth of remote colonies, through the early stages of awakening public interest, followed perchance by apathy or neglect until the advent of some world movement brought them into the fierce light of economic and international importance.

Though there lay upon the shelves an immense mass of valuable literature on almost every phase of Imperial work, it became apparent to the Editor that there was no series of volumes which gave a complete survey of the history, resources, and activities of the Empire looked at as a whole. He felt that there was need for a 1 iv Introduction to the Series series which would provide the ordinary reader with a bird’s-eye view, so to speak, of these manifold activities.

The time seemed appropriate for such a survey. The Empire had emerged victorious from the greatest of wars. The Dominions which had contributed so magnificently to the victory had sprung, as it were, at a bound not only into the consciousness and acknowledged status of full and equal nationhood with the Mother Country, but also into definite recognition by Foreign Powers as great and growing World-Forces.

The decision to hold in London an Exhibition in which the vast material resources and industries of the Empire would be brought vividly before the public seemed also to demand that there should be a record and survey of the growth and development of this farflung congeries of countries and peoples that are called the British Commonwealth of Nations.

The Editor accordingly consulted some of his friends, and was fortunate in securing their assistance and advice. The Management of the British Empire Exhibition welcomed the scheme as supplementing from the intellectual side what the Exhibition was doing from the material aspect. He has also been fortunate in obtaining the co-operation, as authors, of distinguished men, many of whom have played a foremost part in the public life or administration of the territories concerned, and all of whom have had wide personal knowledge and experience of the subjects which they treat. The Editor’s thanks are especially due to these authors. They have undertaken the work from a sense of duty and from a desire to provide, at an important stage in our history, authoritative information regarding the great heritage that has been bequeathed to us, not only unscathed

Introduction to the Sertes Vv but strengthened by the stern struggle through which it has passed.

Each volume is self-contained and deals with a special aspect of the Empire treated as a whole. The volumes are, however, co-ordinated as far as possible, and give, it is hoped, a comprehensive survey of the Empire.

The writers have had complete freedom as regards the statement of their views, and it is to be understood that neither the Editor nor his advisers are responsible for such individual expressions of opinion.

The late Sir George Parkin was deeply interested in the scheme, and, but for his lamented death, would have contributed a volume to the series.

The Editor, in conclusion, desires to express his thanks to Lord Morris, and to Sir Charles Lucas, especially the latter, for the benefit of their advice and ripe experience.

HUGH GUNN,

General Editor.

Lonpon, April, 1924.

General Editor: HUGH GUNN, M.A.

Late Director of Education and Member of the Legislative Council of the Orange River Colony ; Organiser of Grey University College, South Africa, and of the University of Western Australia, etc.

Advisory Committee : SIR CHARLES P. Lucas, K.C.B., K.C.M.G. (Chairman). Late Head of the Dominions Department, Colonial Office, Author of An Historical Geography of the British Colonies, History of Canada, The Empire at War, etc.

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LorD Morris, K.C.M.G., LL.D. Late Prime Minister of Newfoundland ; Member of the Imperial War Cabinet, etc.

Sir Harry WItson, K.C.M.G., K.B.E. Late Colonial Secretary and Acting Lieutenant- Governor of the Orange River Colony; late Secretary of the Royal Colonial Institute, etc.

ARTHUR PERCIVAL NEwTON, M.A., D.Litt., B.Sc., F.S.A. Rhodes Professor of Imperial History in the University of London, etc.

THE LATE SIR GEORGE R. PARKIN, K.C.M.G., LL.D. Late Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, who gave valuable assistance until his death.

vi

Volumes in the Series vii

I. THE DOMINIONS AND DEPENDENCIES OF THE EMPIRE

VIi.

XII.

Foreword H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught. 1. Newfoundland Rt. Hon. Lord Morris. 2. Canada Rt. Hon. Sir George Foster. 3. Australia Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Cook. 4. New Zealand Sir James Allen. 5. South Africa Sir Edgar Walton. 6. India The Rt. Hon. Lord Meston. 7, Rhodesia Sir Lawrence Wallace and

8. Tropical Africa Rt. Hon. Sir Frederick Lugard and J. C. Maxwell. 9. West Indies The Rt. Hon. Lord Olivier. to. Ceylon and Mauritius Sir Montagu Burrows. 11. Malaya Sir Ernest Birch. 12. Pacific Possessions Sir Everard im Thurn.

13. Sea Power and Outposts of the Empire Commander H. T. Dorling.

With Foreword by the Rt. Hon. L. S. Amery.

. THE STORY OF THE EMPIRE Sir Charles Lucas. . THE CONSTITUTION, ADMINISTRATION, AND LAWS

OF THE EMPIRE Prof. A. Berriedale Keith.

. THE RESOURCES OF THE EMPIRE AND THEIR

DEVELOPMENT Evans Lewin.

. HEALTH PROBLEMS OF THE EMPIRE—PAST,

PRESENT, AND FUTURE Dr. Andrew Balfour and Dr. H. H. Scott.

J. Saxon Mills.

THE TRADE, COMMERCE, AND SHIPPING OF THE EMPIRE Sir Charles McLeod and Prof. A. W. Kirkaldy.

. MAKERS OF THE EMPIRE Hugh Gunn. . THE NATIVE RACES OF THE EMPIRE

Sir Godfrey Lagden.

. THE UNIVERSITIES AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS

OF THE EMPIRE Prof. Arthur Percival Newton.

. THE LITERATURE AND ART OF THE EMPIRE

Edward Salmon and Major A. A. Longden.

MIGRATION WITHIN THE EMPIRE Major E. A. Belcher.

Be aacas 4 :

THE PRESS AND COMMUNICATIONS OF THE EMPIRE by J. SAXON MILLS, M.A.

With a Foreword by Tue Ricut Hon. VISCOUNT BURNHAM, C.H.

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL

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Copyright, 1924.

Manufactured in Great Britain

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FOREWORD BY

Tue Ricut Hon. Viscount BurNHAM

WriTincG some forty years ago, Lord Bryce said that the United States of America was the country where public opinion ruled most completely—the public opinion which old Metternich told the Congress of Vienna was a good guide but a bad master. In this country it would not be difficult to show that public opinion counted for at least as much in the self-governing Dominions of the British Crown as in the United States, and it might be plausibly contended that the relative weakness of the political machine in the British Dominions gave even fuller play to the currents of public opinion than in America, to use the term which Americans prefer. In any case, public opinion, if not omnipotent, is very powerful in the British Commonwealth, and all that goes to form and direct it is well worth careful investigation.

The question whether the newspaper press makes public opinion or merely mirrors it, has been discussed, to use the Parliamentary formula, with wearisome reiteration, and every statesman of the last half century has expressed his view of it one way or the other, or not unusually both ways. It seems as difficult to Xill

5964377 answer as the schoolmen’s problem of the ass that is equidistant from two bundles of hay. Probably it passes the wit of man to solve it precisely, or even correctly, in terms of quantity and quality. In Congreve’s brilliant comedy it is said that a man wants an echo in his wife, and owes to an echo the pleasure of hearing himself talk, and this is no less true of public opinion. It is only its echo that can be heard, and the clearest and fullest echo of public opinion is necessarily to be heard in the newspaper press. As newspapers report and repeat the talk of the town and of the country, they not only give it their own tone and colour, but they draw their own conclusions and they point the moral of the story by their own commentary. So that, as day by day they address their public, they are able so to influence the public mind that, nomatter whence came the original impulse, it is driven home and kept there by the unceasing pressure of newspaper publication.

The British Empire justifies the complaint of the old judge a hundred years ago: “ We are a newspaper-ridden people.” In _ the United States the Press may have more power and the platform less, but the governments of the constituent dominions are the first to admit that the very existence of the Empire as a co-ordinated—it is hardly possible to say consolidated—whole depends more upon newspaper sympathy and support than upon any other factor in its organisation. ‘Testimony

X1V was brought to this in a striking and unexpected manner by the importunate demands of the war years. Speaking with his intimate knowledge of the arcana imperii, Lord Milner, himself of journalistic origin, averred that it would have been impossible to have secured so united an effort from the Overseas Dominions, with all that it meant of sorrow and sacrifice, had it not been for the Imperial Press Conference of 1909, when Lord Rosebery and Lord Roberts revealed to an astonished world the home truths of our unpreparedness amid “so many and great dangers.” Before then, without and to some extent within the old country, the newspaper press had been content to accept the official optimism as a sufficient assurance of what was once called “‘our bagman’s paradise,” and the newspaper men from overseas had been denied all access to first-hand information at the seat of Empire. It is curious to reflect that before the Great War, and even then only after long-drawn protests from the Empire Press Union, no London correspondent of an overseas newspaper could establish contact with the departments of State, or even with the Colonial Office itself. We have changed all that now, and, even if the methods be open to improvement, journalists who supply the news letters of the Dominion Press are able to fulfil their mission in the full light of official confidence. The Empire Press Union was the direct outcome of the first Imperial XV

Press Conference, and it is constituted on a confederated system of autonomous branches in the Overseas Dominions, some of the Colonies, and the Indian Empire, which are all linked up to the parent society and work together for common purpose of public usefulness by personal, not less than by formal, communications. All the London representatives of the Overseas Press have seats on the Council, and form a separate committee for considering matters of general concern, so that we have carried Imperial solidarity to a further point in newspaper affairs than it has as yet been found possible to do in our Parliamentary relations. In the typical British fashion, the Union is broadening itself out from precedent to precedent, and has already established strong ties of comradeship and alliance between the Press interests of the Empire.

England is often called the Mother of Free Parliaments; she can be called with equal truth and hardly less honour the Mother of a Free Press. ‘Through many trials and tribulations, the freedom of the Press was set up and secured by the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, after it had been consecrated, like other public liberties, if not by the blood of its martyrs, at least by their standing in the pillory. In Canada, an effective Press was called into being not long after our own, and had to endure the same sort of persecution. Elsewhere, the later development of the other colonies naturally delayed

XV1 its institution according to their circumstances, It is not quite correct to say that the Press of the Empire has been wholly standardised on the English model, because American predominance has had its necessary effect on the American continent. It is, however, true to say that all over the world the newspaper press of the British Dominions has preserved the British sense of moderation and fair play, and has held with steadfast bull-doggedness to the tradition of integrity and independence of which the British Press can boast with justifiable self-conceit. Curiously to relate, at the present moment the newspapers of Australia and New Zealand seem to remain more English than the English can pretend to be in these hectic and turbulent times. Just as the American Constitution reflects the peculiarities of the British Constitution, when the old colonies, which made up the federal union, first adopted representative institutions, so the newspapers of a great part of the Empire still adhere to the make-up and the appearance of the older sort of English newspaper. It may, perhaps, be justly alleged that until the self-governing Dominions were emancipated by the grant of autonomous powers, the English Press did not pay much attention to their interests, but, at least, there never was any movement in the Press against the Empire such as characterised what was known as the Manchester School in Parliament, nor the callous indifference to their P.C.E. XV B progress and prosperity, which was for so long the settled policy of the old Downing Street, the very name of which grates so harshly on colonial ears. The British Press upheld the Imperial idea some time before it ever appealed to statesmen or permanent officials, and it was often accused of indulging in vulgarities of patriotism from which they were free. The Press has never played the part of the superior person which has always irritated the feelings of our fellow citizens beyond the seas, because where we credited ourselves with caution and common sense, they saw only selfishness and want of vision.

A hundred years ago De Quincey, in his Suspiria de Profundis, uttered a prayer for ‘“‘ blessings descending from Heaven by education and accelerations of the Press.”’ Undoubtedly we have effected marvellous “accelerations,” and although one may not call them altogether blessed, these accelerations, which wireless telegraphy will assuredly speed up further still, have undoubtedly made for kindliness and good feeling in what Sir Walter Raleigh called “a commonwealth of many families.”

BurNHAM. 1st April, 1924.

XVI

CHAP,

Contents

FOREWORD X11 INTRODUCTORY I RAILWAYS ie RAILWAYS (continued) 31 SEA AND AIR 52

TELEGRAPHS BY WIRE AND CABLE 68 NEWSPAPERS OF THE EMPIRE 103 WIRELESS 132

THE GROWTH OF THE WIRELESS MARI-

Chapter I Introductory

A vivip idea of the modern triumphs over space and time may be obtained by a visit to the Central Telegraph Office in London. Here in the ordinary day’s routine, miracles are being wrought which, a hundred years ago, would have seemed as remote from possibility as the dreams of a Rosicrucian or the fables of fairyland. One becomes more and more impressed on passing along the files of operators in the great telegraphic room. Here, for example, a business wireless message is just coming in from Cologne, where the British army authorities wisely permit this civil use of their service. Here another magician is launching a message along one of the Imperial cables, that creep along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. England, who went into the Great War without the control of a single trans- Atlantic cable, soon came into possession of two—the old German Emden-New York line, running via the Azores to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a line purchased from an American company, which reaches the same terminal via Newfoundland.

Let us follow in fancy this departing message.

From Halifax it flashes to Montreal, then along z the ‘‘ all-red route,” across the broad continent to Bamfield in Vancouver Island. Thence it dives under sea again, this time along the British Pacific cable by way of Fanning Island, Suva (Fiji), and Norfolk Island, from which last station the line bifurcates to Australia and New Zealand. And the transit to Sydney or Auckland takes no longer time than the writing of these last few sentences.

Here again, something still more wonderful, and from a political point of view more significant, is taking place. A British foreign office ‘ communiqué,” giving the most important news of the day, is about to be “ broadcasted ’’ to all points of the compass, and in a few moments from its start, will be picked up in India, South Africa, Australia, and by ships plodding their way along the farthest and loneliest ocean tracks.

Three times a day such an official message is scattered upon all the winds of heaven. It is British news, coming direct from the fountainhead, and is not tainted or perverted, like so much “ British news” that reaches British territory, by passing through foreign channels,

Passing on we come alongside where a Press message of several hundred words is on tiptoe for Karachi in Northern India, whence the land wires will forward it to Calcutta, Bombay, Allahabad, and all India. Soon direct wireless will be available to these great centres. And another such wireless message is off westwards 2 to Halifax, whence by land wires it reaches the newspaper-oflices of Canada and the United States.

These are but examples that cling to the memory of the wizardries daily and nightly performed at the central telegraphic office at St. Martin’s-le-Grand. When we recall the corresponding wonders that have been wrought in the transmission of human beings and materials and goods by land and sea and air within less than a hundred years of time, we may begin to realise what it all means for the development and destiny of an Empire like the British, whose distinctive feature is its dispersion over every continent and ocean of the world’s surface.

To express the results briefly, these triumphs over space and time have made not only possible, but almost inevitable, the cohesion in a single vast political organisation of Dominions and Dependencies sundered by half the world’s girth, and displaying every diversity of race and climate and production.

The earliest British settlements on island and continental shore had no sooner won a certain degree of strength and stability, than this question of continued union was posed and debated. Long before the days of cables and swift ocean steamers, such men as Chatham, Burke, Adam Smith, Grenville, Barnard and Pownell, in the eighteenth century, had dreamed of a parliamentary union between England and her plantations. ‘Thomas Pownall, who had been Governor and Commanderin-Chief of Massachusetts and South Carolina, had a prevision of a British Oceanic Commonwealth, based on equal partnership rather than on relations of dominion and dependence. A few years before the American rebellion, which revealed the contrary forces in operation and triumph, he had written :

“‘It is the duty of those who govern us to carry forward this state of things . . . that — Great Britain may be no more considered as the Kingdom of this Ile only, with many appendages of provinces, colonies, settlements, and other extraneous parts, but as a grand marine dominion consisting of our possessions in the Atlantic and in America united into one Empire, in a one centre where the government is. . . . The taking leading measures towards the forming of all those Atlantic and American possessions into one Empire of which Great Britain should be the commercial and political centre is the precise duty of the Government at this crisis. (Such a system) must build up this country to a degree of glory and prosperity beyond the example of any age that has yet passed.”

But three thousand miles of “ salt estranging sea’’ damped all such aspirations. “‘ Perhaps,” said Burke of the proposal for parliamentary representation in London of the British plantations, ‘‘ I might be inclined to entertain some such thought ; but a great flood stops me in my course, Opposuit Natura. I cannot remove the eternal barriers of creation.” Alluding to a supporter of the same notion, he exclaimed, “It costs him nothing to fight with Nature, and to conquer the order of Providence, which manifestly opposes itself to the possibility of such a parliamentary union.” These words were uttered in 1769, and that, by a strange and striking coincidence, was the very year in which James Watt took out his patent for his first steam-engine—an invention destined in the course of time to take all the force and virtue out of the great orator’s argument. There was good reason for doubting the possibility of those early proposals. Burke estimated that an election writ would require six weeks to cross the Atlantic. The reader may compute how long it would have taken for the writ to go, the prospective New England or Virginian M.P. to be elected, and to arrive in the Parliament House at Westminster. At this day we can scarcely realise the remoteness of the British oversea dominions from our own shores before the modern developments of mechanical science. Sir George Grey, who made his first voyage to Australia in 1836, took about six months to arrive on the western shores of that country. Just as little can we realise the hardships of those interminable voyages in the ill-equipped sailing-vessels of those days. I am not sure that the prejudice which still surrounds the word “ emigration,” o is not a reminiscence of those early experiences.

But it is important to remember that the foundations of the constitution and destiny of these British settlements were laid under these conditions of extreme remoteness. Distance having made it impossible to give the British settlers representation in the Imperial Parliament at Westminster, these states were necessarily endowed with self-governing institutions. These were given before the effect of modern improvements in locomotion had become effective. ‘The first steamship, of a comparatively primitive type, from England to Australia, sailed in 1852. Direct telegraphic connection between England and Australia began in 1872, between England and New Zealand in 1876, and between England and South Africa in 1879. But the thrill of these newly-developed nerves of communication was scarcely appreciable before the eighties of last century. Then it was that steam and electricity began to influence the course of our Imperial history and politics. ‘This was, no doubt, one of the many converging causes of that great outburst of “Imperialism,” or the sense of Empire citizenship, which has been the most striking feature of British politics of the last half century. It was that decade which saw the creation of the Imperial Federation League (1884), the proud pageantry of the Jubilee, and the meetings of the first Colonial Conference

(1887). 6

But before that time most of the British colonies in temperate climes had received self-governing and responsible constitutions on the home model. Canada received full selfgovernment in 1840, becoming the Dominion in 1867. New Zealand got responsible government in 1852, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia in 1855-6, Cape Colony in 1872. No one will regret that the future Dominions should have made their first steps towards nationhood in these days of isolation. If the new era of swift and regular communications had preceded the birth of selfconscious statehood, the overshadowing and centralising influence of the home-country might have altered the whole course of colonial history, and not for the better.

The foundations of self-governing statehood having been thus truly laid, the new inventions came in good time to prevent the separating and disintegrating influences from going too far. The service we may ask of them is to promote by means of common counsels for common ends and by close sympathetic and continuous intercourse, a union based on a free partnership, and to foster the wider sense of Empire citizenship, which need conflict in no way with the more particular loyalty to State and Dominion.

These triumphs over space and time have as yet approached no finality. The developments of aviation and of wireless telegraphy and telephony in these last years, are far more wonderful than the substitution of steam for sails and horses. We can only surmise how the political implications of these increasing wonders may work out. The results, as political writers have pointed out, may not altogether be to the advantage of the Empire. It may not be an unmixed blessing to bring even the British members of the Empire into closer and more continuous contact. Juxtaposition does not always mean agreement, and even relations may see too much of one another.

One effect of these changes must be to bring the great reserves of native population in the Tropics into nearer neighbourhood with settled white communities, and this has already engendered the most baffling problems in South Africa, British Columbia, Kenya, and other parts of the Empire. Free movement along these swift and regular lines of locomotion might seem to be among the common rights of Empire citizenship. Free movement and free settlement within the Empire’s fences ought surely to be a British birthright. Every Briton, regardless of race and creed, ought to feel in a sense at home whether in Calcutta or Cape Town, in Sydney or Vancouver.

_ ‘This, indeed, was the boast and the ideal of the old Roman Empire, with its infinitely slower and less convenient modes of travel. We are familiar with the much-cited words of the Roman poet Claudian, whose date was roughly A.D. 400, in his proud rhapsody on the power and glory of Rome. ‘“ Hers,” he writes, “‘ is that large loyalty to which we owe it that the stranger walks in a strange land as if it were his own ; that men can change their homes ; that it is a holiday affair to visit Thule and to explore remote regions at which we should once have shuddered ; that we drink at will the waters of the Rhone and Orontes; that we are all one people.” “Everywhere,” exclaims the Spanish priest, Orosius, a few years later, “everywhere is my fatherland, my law, and my religion.”

This was a notable achievement, but Rome had no such Empire problem to face as confronts England in her 350 millions of subject races for whose welfare and government she is directly responsible. ‘The march of mechanical science tends rather to accentuate than to ease this problem of the relations between the white and the coloured races.

We need not dwell on all the sacrifices we have to make in return for a great and undoubted blessing. But one more may be mentioned. ‘The inventions which are bringing the constituent parts of the Empire closer together are also bringing the Empire and its parts nearer to the outside world. Foreign nations are developing their communications as well as the British. Let us take, for example,

Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Orontem ;: Quod cuncti gens una sumus, the Panama Canal. That is an American enterprise. The banks of the waterway are virtually a part of the coastline of the United States. Yet this “severing of the waist of the world,” cannot fail to have a profound effect on the internal economy and external relations of the British Empire.

The electric thrill of this new circuit through the Central American isthmus will be specially felt in British Columbia. Already the produce of western Canada, say, from a line drawn vertically a little west of Saskatoon, tends to flow through Vancouver, and to find its way round by the Panama Canal to the eastern American coast, and to England and Europe beyond. ‘This quicker and cheaper transport should mean a bigger value for the wheat of the western prairies and for the fruit and timber of the Pacific province. If this movement establishes itself Vancouver bids fair to become one of the most important commercial entrepéts in the world.

Then the West Indies, which have lain hitherto in what the Americans call a ‘‘ deadend,” will henceforth be thrown along and athwart the main ocean highways between Fast and West. Britain occupies a strong commercial and strategic position in the Caribbean Sea. Kingston, in Jamaica, lies close off the direct track from New York and the Eastern Canadian provinces, through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti, to the

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