266 ENGLISHSAGA

men, British sovereignty over the whole of South Africa from,
the Cape to Lake Tanganyika. His policy of appeasement in the
hour of victory was -a first step towards a new and free South
Africa without racial predominance. He helped to bring about
the long-delayed federation of the Australian colonies.

These achievements were only part of Chamberlain's service
to the Empire. This dapper ex-radical and Brumagemhardware
merchant with the frock coat, monocle and orchid, the art of a
demagogue and the vision of a Roman Emperor, infused a new
spirit into imperial administration. A business man of initiative
and energy, in days when business still required both, he sought
to make the Empire pay by making it efficient. But he took the
long view of efficiency, looking to the interests not merely-of
the living but of the unborn. He regarded the Crown Colonies
as undeveloped estates which could only be developed with
imperial assistance. Some of them, after a hundred years of
British rule, were still in the same state as when they had
been annexed. Britain's stewardship could only be justified if it
conferred active benefits on their peoples and the greater
populations comprised in the imperial union.

Chamberlain set up a Royal Commission to report on the
West Indian sugar islands, derelict and half-ruined after half a
.century of laissez-faire, founded an Imperial Department of
Agriculture in the islands to investigate the causes of insect
pests and stimulate the planting of alternative crops, and granted
loans for colonial transport development at low rates of interest
His Colonial Office fostered the study of tropical medicine and
hygiene, established native colleges and trained a new school of
scientific imperial administrators versed in the laborious arts
of making the wilderness flower. In Africa in particular his
policy produced remarkable results: provinces which for centuries
had been savage areas of vice, fetishism, slavery, filth and
pestilence became in the course of a single generation orderly
and well-governed communities with schools, railways and
hospitals and a most unfamiliar atmosphere of hope.

Hope was, indeed, the dominant .imperial note while Joe
Chamberlain remained at the Colonial Office. His forceful
optimism brushed aside " difficulties: distance, provincial
jealousies, lack of population, non-existent markets, want of
capital to develop and of trade to repay development. There was
talk of imperial federation and of .some grand, nebulous scheme