The Expansion of England by John Morley

To test the strain that Australian attachment to the imperial connection would bear, we have a right to imagine the contingency of Great Britain being involved in a war with a foreign Power of the first class. Leaving Sir Henry Parkes, we find another authority to enlighten us upon the consequences in such a case. Mr. Archibald Forbes is a keen observer, not addicted to abstract speculation, but with a military eye for facts and forces as they actually are, without reference to sentiments or ideals to which anybody else may wish to adjust them. Mr. Forbes has traced out some of the effects upon Australian interests of an armed conflict between the mother country and a powerful adversary. Upon the Australian colonies, he says emphatically, such a conflict would certainly bring wide-ranging and terrible mischiefs. We had a glimpse of what would happen at once, in the organised haste with which Russia prepared to send to sea swift cruisers equipped in America, when trouble with England seemed imminent in 1878. We have a vast fleet, no doubt, but not vast enough both to picquet our own coast-line with war-ships against raids on unprotected coast-towns, and besides that to cover the great outlying flanks of the Empire. These hostile cruisers would haunt Australasian waters (coaling in the neutral ports about the Eastern Archipelago), and there would be scares, risks, uncertainties, that would derange trade, chill enterprise, and frighten banks. Another consideration, not mentioned by Mr. Forbes, may be added. We now do the carrying trade of Australasia to the great benefit of English shipowners (See _Economist_, August 27, 1881). If the English flag were in danger from foreign cruisers, Australia would cease to employ our ships, and might possibly find immunity in separation and in establishing a neutral flag of her own.

Other definite evils would follow war. The Australasian colonist lives from hand to mouth, carries on his trade with borrowed money, and pays his way by the prompt disposal of his produce. Hence it is that the smallest frown of tight money sends a swift shock, vibrating and thrilling, all through the Australasian communities. War would at once hamper their transactions. It would bring enhanced freights and higher rates of insurance to cover war risks. This direct dislocation of commerce would be attended in time by default of payment of interest on the colonial debt, public, semi-public, and private. As the vast mass of this debt is held in England, the default of the Englishmen in Australia would injure and irritate Englishmen at home, and the result would be severe tension. The colonial debtor would be all the more offended, from his consciousness that 'the pinch which had made him a defaulter would have a purely gratuitous character so far as he was concerned.'