JOHN BULL ABROAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 737, 28 August 1953, Page 7

JOHN BULL ABROAD

4 HAT has happened to ‘the population of the world in the 400 years since Columbus. discovered America?" C. E. Carrington asks this question at the start of a BBC talk, An Inquiry Into Empire, which _ introduces The British Overseas, from YC and YZ stations of the NZBS. No one, Mr. Carrington thinks, can. know "just how world population. has grown, but it may. have miultiplied four or five ‘times. "But (he Says)" the "British race . . . has multiplied at least 20 times over, in those years. There were not more than seyen million persons in these islands in the age of Shakespeare and Raleigh; and their direct descendants today in the British Isles, the United

States and the Dominions do not number less’ than 140 million." And _ that, he adds, is.a statistic that has no known parallel im history. This "Empire of Settlement" is one of thé three phases into which ‘Mr, Carrington divides British Colonial expansion.» The second was the "Empire of Trade," which he-boldly asserts had an "almost wholly beneficent" influence on the world; and the third was the "Empire of Finance." Here Mr. Carrington, once more on the offensive, disagrees with Hobson "and his. pupil, Lenin." The Empire of Finance, he declares, did not correspond, geographically, with either the Empire of Settlement or the Empire of Trade-‘British investment overseas . . . was quite unrelated to the annexation of colonies. Most of the money was invested outside the Empire, and most of the colonies suffered from a chronic want of capital." Mr. Carrington sees the Commonwealth of today as made up of a series of concentric circles. "The inner ring, the colonies of settlement, are mature communities with formed characters, as stable as any group of nations in this unstable 20th Century. The second ring, colonies by conquest or cession, are one and all in a period of rapid evolution. Their former status of wardship, to a British trustee, is everywhere dissolving.’ Perhaps some of these colonies may insist. on withdrawing from the second concentric ring, but they can hardly, says Mr. Carrington, withdraw from the third ring, "the indefinable zone. pervaded by. the >...

British tradition, the 'Empire of the English | language. . . Here is an | Empire. which still has /great benefits to offer-freely-to the: world." An M.A. of both Oxford and Cambridge, Mr. Carrington has written several books on the Commonwealth, including An_ Exposition of Empire and The British Overseas. Though born in England, he had his eatly education in Christchurch, New | Zealand. and married a daughter of the late Hon, W. C. MacGregor, a judge of the Supreme Court of New Zealand. Mr. Carrington’s talk will be followed by seven half-hour . programmes on men. who have played an influential part in the development of the Commonwealth. The first of these, about Captain Cook," does not set out

to be a record of achievement so much as to establish the sort of man Cook was. John Thompson, who wrote the script, has built his portrait. mainly on Cook’s own words and. the "opinions of those who knew him well. "Raffles of Singapore" is the story of a man

who raised himself in remarkably few years from an obscure clerk in the East India Company to an administrator who left his mark indelibly on world history, To think, of Raffles is to think of Singapore, and this feature in The British Overseas tells how he pursued his aim of securing a British station that would keep open the seaway to the Far East. Benjamin Franklin was the outstanding Anglo-American of the 18th Century, and the fourth programme is about this American John Bull who was born a British colonia] subject and died an American citizen. Of the Founding Fathers of the American nation he was the only. one to sign all four of the essential American documents-the Declaration of Independence, the alliance with France, the peace treaty. with Britain and the Constitution of the United States. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, like Captain Cook, is a figure in the history of the Commonwealth with whose story New Zealanders should be familiar. Wakefield’s energy and vision led not only to successful colonising in Australia and New Zealand, but to a notable share in the report Lord Durham submitted after his mission to Canada in 1838-a report that refashioned the British Empire. : Lord (Durham ~ himself — "Radical Jack" — is the subject of the next programme. Lord Durham, who lived from 1792 to 1840, was a rarity in his time-a vastly rich landowner who demanded for people generally the right Potten ee SAS? SS, eee ee . ee eae

to vote. His mission to Canada and his famous. report. were the crowning achievements of a notable career. The story of Lotd pDelamere, the white man’s leader in Kenya, is a striking portrait of a dynamic little man who devoted his life and most of his fortune to proving that though the East African Protectorate (as it was first called) was equatorial geographically, it was white man’s country from,the point of view of development, Joseph Chamberlain, whose story is told in the eighth programme, visited the Colonial territories less than any of the other famous men'in The British Overseas, but the influence on the Empire of this colonial reformer in Whitehall was wide and deep, As he himself said in 1906, "the union of the Empire must be preceded and accompanied by a better understanding, by’a closer sym+ pathy. To secure that is the highest object of statesmanship now at the beginning of the 20th Century." The British Overseas will start with a broadcast of* Mr. Carrington’s talk from 2YC on Thursday, September 3, at 8.0 p.m.,.and it will be heard later from other YC and YZ stations,