The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (58 page)

What made it all the more significant was the vast extension of the franchise for which the wartime mobilisation of men and women had made an unanswerable case. Under the third reform Act of 1918, universal male suffrage and votes for women over thirty tripled the pre-war electorate. Little was known of the new voters’ opinions, though much might be guessed. Lloyd George had made haste in January 1918 to declare his democratic war aims.
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The Conservative party leadership feared a radical tide rolling westward from Russia. When the prospects of a Liberal reunion were shattered in the acrimony of the Maurice debate in May 1918, they embraced coalition with Lloyd George's followers as the best defence against the ‘impact of labour’. Among Conservatives, a spirit of caution, defensiveness and introversion was even more deeply ingrained by the economic turbulence of the aftermath and the fear of a labour ‘revolt’. The war had transformed British politics, but not in the direction for which Milner had hoped.

The dominions: Canada, Australia, New Zealand

The five self-governing states of the Empire (we must not forget Newfoundland) had no choice about entering the conflict. When their head of state, King George V, declared war on the advice of his British ministers, they were in the fight whether they liked it or not. But their contribution to the war effort was another matter entirely. In principle, the dominion governments were free to cheer from the sidelines, or to make only token gestures of support. In practice, their response was astonishing. In Australia, the Commonwealth prime minister promised help ‘to the last man and the last shilling’. In Canada and New Zealand, the sentiment was the same (South Africa was a special case). By the end of the war, over a million men from the dominions had served on its battlefields, the vast majority in the terrible charnel-house of the Western Front. In the two largest, Canada and Australia, over 13 per cent of adult males had served overseas; in New Zealand, the figure exceeded 19 per cent. The proportion who were killed or wounded was appallingly high: nearly 50 per cent of the Canadians, 59 per cent of New Zealanders and 65 per cent of Australians. Over 60,000 Canadians were killed, 59,000 Australians and 16,000 New Zealanders.
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The cost of raising and equipping armies for the imperial war was met (in these three cases) by the dominion governments themselves who incurred, like Britain, a heavy burden of war debt.

Cooperation on this scale and under such stressful conditions was bound to be difficult. As the war went on interminably, and the losses mounted up, the differences between London and the dominion governments grew sharper. In the first two years of the struggle, three factors had mitigated these tensions. The dominion leaders were content (perhaps surprisingly so) to leave the daily conduct of the war to British ministers in London, perhaps on the argument that their own expertise was so limited as to rule out assuming any responsibility for the deployment of their forces. Indeed, it was not until the summer of 1918 that the dominion governments mounted a sustained attack on the deficiencies of the British high command after the disastrous setbacks of the spring. Secondly, for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, where anxiety about local security was greatest, the outbreak of war promised immediate territorial gains in their own backyard: in German New Guinea, Samoa and South West Africa. Thirdly, the economic burdens of war were eased by the large and growing scale of British purchases, and by the general prosperity that came with the booming demand for the commodities the dominions produced. Loyalty and self-interest marched in the same direction. Even so, there was friction. The dominions were infuriated by the British government's initial reluctance to let them borrow in London, fearing that such a stoppage would capsize their credit-based economies. They were determined to keep their volunteer armies together as ‘national’ units and not to see them dispersed among other British troops. And, by 1916, dominion leaders were becoming increasingly anxious to have, and to be seen to have, greater influence over the purposes for which the war was being fought. W. M. Hughes, the Australian premier, spent much of 1916 in London, partly to negotiate the sale of the wool-clip, but also to stake a claim for influence at the imperial centre. The Canadian premier, Robert Borden, an outspoken advocate of dominion influence over British foreign policy before 1914, was enraged by the frigid response of the Colonial Secretary, Bonar Law, to his request for greater participation in imperial policy. Canada had sent 101,000 men overseas, he told his London representative in October 1915, and had just authorised an increase to 250,000. ‘We deem ourselves entitled to fuller information and consultation respecting general policy in war operations.’
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By January 1916, when the Canadian commitment was doubled again, his mood was explosive. Canada could not be expected to put four to five hundred thousand men in the field and be treated like ‘toy automata’, he burst out to Perley. ‘Is the war being waged by the UK alone, or is it a war waged by the whole Empire?’
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Hughes’ opinion ‘as to the future necessity of the Overseas nations having an adequate voice in the Empire's foreign policy’, he told Perley, ‘coincides entirely with my own’.
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Borden and Hughes were determined that the dominions’ contribution to the war should be rewarded by the unequivocal abolition of their ‘colonial’ status in matters of external policy. Unlike Joseph Cook, joint leader of the New Zealand coalition government, they were not interested in imperial federation. Their chance came with the arrival of Lloyd George in Downing Street, and the Milnerites in government. Milnerite enthusiasm for ‘closer unity’ coincided with the grim acceptance that dominion help in the unending war would be increasingly important, and the even grimmer recognition that dominion leaders had to be consulted about the minimum terms of peace acceptable. In late December 1916, the invitations went out to an ‘Imperial War Conference’ that ran from March until May 1917. In the event, Hughes remained in Australia to fight for conscription, and Louis Botha sent his deputy, General Smuts. The dominion delegates were convened with British ministers as the ‘Imperial War Cabinet’. War aims were discussed. London made ambiguous promises about imperial preference after the war. But the main outcome of the meetings was agreement that relations with the dominion governments would have to be adjusted after the war to respect their status as ‘autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth’, with arrangements for ‘continuous consultation’ and an ‘adequate voice in foreign policy and…foreign relations’.
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Smuts, who put the case against imperial federation with crushing force, remained behind as a member of the War Cabinet, but not in any representative capacity. Borden rushed home to deal with the crisis over conscription.

In fact, there was little agreement among the dominion leaders about the direction of constitutional change beyond the demand for autonomy. Nor was there much sign (apart from the presence of Smuts) that dominion views had more influence over the strategy of the war after May 1917 than before. When the Imperial War Conference reassembled in the summer of 1918, it was against the terrible backdrop of impending disaster: the crisis in Flanders; the risk that Italy and even France might be forced into peace before American help could arrive; the desperate need, as British manpower sagged, for more men from the dominions; the prospect of Milner's ‘new war’ with Germany in control of the Eurasian heartland. Borden, Massey and Hughes raged against the incompetence of the British generals on the Western Front.
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Lloyd George smoothly ‘deduced…the lesson that they should share with the British Government the responsibility for the control of military operations in the future’.
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New arrangements were agreed to allow the dominion premiers to communicate direct with their British counterpart. But the sudden change in the course of the war checked any further experiment. When it came to negotiating an armistice in October, Lloyd George simply ignored his dominion colleagues. It took a fierce protest from Borden, backed by Hughes, to ensure dominion representation in what became the British Empire delegation to the peace conference.
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Why did opinion in the dominions tolerate so unequal a partnership in a war that cost them so dear? Much of the answer lies in the complex emotions of Britannic nationalism. In Canada, the tidal wave of pre-war migration made the sentimental bond with Britain especially close. ‘I am afraid of the element known as the British-born’, confided the Liberal ex-premier Wilfrid Laurier, who saw the magnetic pull of imperial loyalism as the biggest threat to Canadian stability before the war.
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Indeed, some 70 per cent of the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were British-born, and, even in 1918, they made up around half of its manpower.
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But the eager response of recent immigrants was only part of the explanation for Canada's commitment to the war. The Conservative premier, Robert Borden, had long been convinced that Armageddon was coming, that Canada should play its part at Britain's side, and that sharing the burden would clinch her case for an ‘imperial nationhood’ alongside the mother country.
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In much of English-speaking Canada, support for the war and the manpower sacrifice it demanded became the test of Canadian status as a ‘British nation’ rather than a colonial dependency. ‘Canada should do her whole duty’, declared Clifford Sifton who had led the Liberal revolt against the reciprocity bill in 1911.
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Volunteer recruitment became an affirmation of British identity and Protestant conscience, especially in Quebec among the ‘Anglo-Protestant’ elite
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and on the prairies where Europeans and Americans, rather than settlers of British birth or origins, made up much of the population. It was heavily promoted by Protestant clergymen and the Orange Lodges.
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It was no coincidence that the heightened emotion of wartime soon found expression in the attack on bilingualism in Ontario and Manitoba where there were French-medium schools. Abolishing bilingual schools was necessary if Manitoba was not to be a ‘middle-Europe…filled with warring races’, claimed John Dafoe, editor of the
Manitoba Free Press
, the most influential Liberal paper in the West.
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English-speaking Canadians had watched with increasing resentment the apparent indifference of French Canadians to the call of national duty. Proportionately, 150,000 French Canadians should have joined up, not the 15,000 who had done so, said Dafoe, adding for good measure that they were ‘the only known race of white men to quit’.
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Dafoe's savagery was a measure of the chasm between French and English attitudes by the middle of the war. Even Oscar Skelton, an admirer (and later biographer) of Laurier, was critical of the ‘provincialism’ of the French Canadian outlook.
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In Quebec, the reaction was incomprehension and growing bitterness. Henri Bourassa, the tribune of French Canadian opinion, dismissed the conflict as one between ‘Anglo-Saxon mercantilism and love of gold’ and ‘German autocracy and militarism’. They were as bad as each other.
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The war was an affair of ‘agglomerations’, not ‘small nations’.
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Bourassa had been violently opposed to sending a Canadian contingent to the Boer War. In 1910, he had denounced Laurier's naval scheme as a step towards the conscription of French Canadians in Britain's imperial wars and had helped to drive him from office on a tide of French Canadian suspicion. For Laurier, the course of the war threatened deep and lasting damage to his hopes of political recovery, based as they were upon a reconciliation between provincial nationalism in Quebec and the Liberals of English Canada. The closer Borden came to his object of participating in the planning of imperial defence, he feared, the more deeply Canada would be committed to ‘all the wars of the Empire’
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– and the more dangerously French Canadians would be alienated from the rest of Canada. But there was no mistaking the enthusiasm of English Canadian Liberals for Canada's part in the war.

These deep divisions reached a crisis in 1917. With the terrible losses on the Western Front, voluntary enlistments were no longer enough to fill and refill the ranks of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The fairness and efficiency of ‘voluntary’ recruitment aroused misgiving. Even Bourassa conceded that conscription might be better than ‘enlistment by intimidation, threat and blackmail’.
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On his return from the Imperial War Conference in May 1917, Borden opened the campaign for compulsion. He pressed Laurier to join a coalition government to carry it through. Laurier refused, and argued instead for a referendum, mindful, no doubt, that in Australia (as we shall see) conscription had failed this test of opinion. But in English Canada his Liberal colleagues abandoned him for a ‘Unionist’ coalition formed under Borden's leadership in October 1917. For them, conscription became the test of Britannic nationhood. The fate of conscription, said Sifton, would show whether or not Canada was ‘[just] a helpless aggregation of sectional communities held together by time-serving interests’.
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When the election came, however, the Unionist government took no chances. The year before, Arthur Meighen, Borden's fixer, had argued that ‘to shift the franchise from the doubtful British and anti-British of the male sex and to extend it…to our patriotic women would be…a splendid stroke’.
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In the Military Voters Act and the Wartime Elections Act, he had his way. Naturalised aliens (i.e. not of British birth) resident for less than fifteen years lost the vote. Every soldier, of whatever age or pre-war residence, gained it, as did nurses and the wives, widows, mothers and sisters of soldiers. With the help of the ‘gag’, whose effects were felt mainly in the prairie provinces, the election was a triumph for the Unionist coalition which took 153 seats against the 82 held by the Laurier Liberals, all but 20 in Quebec. The Conscription Act followed in 1918.