254 ENGLISH SAGA

century Harrington's dream of an English "commonwealth for
increase . . . embraced in the arms of ocean.*' It described a
voyage to the Cape, Australia and New Zealand, and compared
the freedon and opportunity of a young country like Australia
—an England set free from limitations of space where he never
met a hungry man or saw a discontented face—with the slums
which every year were engulfing a larger part of the English
race—"-miles upon miles of squalid lanes, each house the duplicate
of its neighbour; the dirty street in front, the dirty yard behind,
the fetid smell from the ill-made sewers, the public-house at the
street corner." Posing the age-long question that the utili-
tarians had ignored, he asked what sort of men and women
urban England was breeding to succeed the generations who
had made her great?

The English could not survive only as factory drudges forced
by hunger to be eternally manufacturing shirts and coats, tools
and engines for the happier part of mankind. Like a tree a
a nation had to breathe through its extremities. " A mere manu-
facturing England, standing stripped and bare in the world's
market-place and caring only to make wares for the world to
buy," was a pollard tree. The life was going out of it.

The colonists were already Britain's best customers, buying
from her in proportion to their tiny population three times
more than any stranger. They would not always be a mere
ten and a half millions, weak and scattered. The Prime Minister
of Victoria predicted in 1885 that in half a century at its present
rate of development Australia alone would have a population of
fifty millions.1 Should danger ever come to England, the
colonists' response would be unquestioning and automatic.

Froude did nof advocate imperial federation. The time was
not ripe for it. Nor was it needed. What mattered was that the
patriotism of the colonies,should be reciprocated. It was because
they valued the imperial tie so much that they felt the sting in the
suggestion of parting. Their attachment might not always be
proof against contemptuous hints from frigid aristocrats and
civil servants to take themselves away. Indifference might
produce indifference.

England was refusing her destiny. There might be no
second chance. "Were Canada and South Africa and Australia

1 Because that development was not maintained, it is to-day only 7 millions, out of
which Australia is sending Britain in her need the finest soldiers and pilots in the world.