THE NEW WORLD.1

We know how difficult it is to form any true estimate of popular opinion in our own little island, where the area is exceedingly limited, where all shades of opinion are fairly and faithfully represented by an ubiquitous, an independent, and a self-respecting newspaper press mainly intent on recording the facts as they exist, and where, consequently, we have all the appliances for arriving at a reasonable judgment. Yet every general election teaches us how hopelessly even the most knowing ones-the men whose whole function in life is to know-are led astray on great and well-defined issues. We may judge, therefore, how much more difficult it is to 1 Nineteenth Century, March 1891.

arrive at any accurate knowledge of popular opinion among the English-speaking peoples, amounting to double our own numbers, scattered over the vast area of the New World. We run constant risk of attributing to them imaginary states of feeling begotten of our own sentiment and our own egoistic desires, where our wish is father to our thought. A case in point is the confident notion very generally entertained in this country that there is a strong popular feeling in our great colonies in favour of Imperial Federation. Perhaps it is scarcely worth while either to deny or to affirm the existence of this feeling, because the scheme of federation is as yet so formless and so vague—it is still so completely outside the area of practical politics-that no one can possibly have formed an intelligent judgment upon it; but while the project is still in the air it may not be amiss to call attention, in the fewest possible words, to certain general principles which must necessarily underlie it, and which have scarcely yet received all the consideration that they merit. We want fairly to envisage the situation-to face its realities. We are concerned with the growth of a New

World, and we may be sure that it has a natural principle of growth which can only be departed from under pain of retributive penalties. Is this principle of growth the same for Canada and Australia as it is for England? Have we fully considered the question from their point of view? For instance, if we set ourselves to think of the relations between the New World and the Old, what is the first and the most important consideration that arises in our minds? An Englishman, primed by Professor Seeley, will promptly answer, "The expansion of England." But an American will certainly answer, "The predominance of American ideas," and an Australian

will probably answer, "Advance Australia!"

Here then, at the outset, we find that the question is not a simple one, as we get these very different answers from the three parties principally interested. The Englishman's answer is obviously too narrow, the American's is perhaps too shallow, and the Australian's is certainly too callow-if the expression may be used in regard to such a rapidly growing young bird. Yet there is some truth in each answer. It may be said that, in a restricted

sense, the Englishman's is true of the past, the American's is true of the present, and the Australian's may possibly be true of the future.

But to express the full significance of the New World's development, we must find a formula that will combine the three points of view. Perhaps that formula may be "The expansion of the great humanitarian movement," which is broader than the expansion of England, deeper than the predominance of American ideas, and higher than 'Advance Australia!' For if we go back to the birth of the New World and the tradition which it has created, we can trace its descent directly from that movement-a movement which was, in its origin, coincident with the Reformation, which was nourished by the eighty years' struggle of the Netherlands against Spain, and which afterwards received the most quickening impulse from the French Revolution. The movement was based on revolt against tyranny, privilege, and oppression, in favour of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Its ultimate aim was to abolish monarchy, to abolish aristocracy, to abolish the connection between Church and State, and to establish the sov

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ereignty of the people. It profoundly modified all previously existing ideas of religion and politics, and set in motion the great long wave of emigration which has not only been the overflow of population, but has borne onward in its course a continuous protest against many of the ideas, the sentiments, and the methods (particularly the military methods) of the Old World, and landed on the shores of the New World a people determined to try a wholly new system founded on the basis of industrialism.

And here we get to the very kernel of the question. Industrialism, as opposed to militarism, is now the central idea of the New World—the pivot upon which the New World may be said to turn. Here we find a vital principle—not merely a vague aspiration as it still is in the Old World—and we must lay hold of it as an elementary and fundamental consideration if we are to understand rightly the relations between the two worlds. For the full accomplishment of this stage of social development signalises a new departure of immense historical importance. It changes the whole attitude and the ideals of a people—