is it a great Mendicity Institute.  England now, instead of “robbing from Pole to Pole,” as John Mitchel once defined her activities, goes begging from Pole to Pole that all and every one shall give her a helping hand to keep the plunder.  Chins, Goorkhas, Sikhs, Malays, Irish, Chinese, South African Dutch, Australasians, Maoris, Canadians, Japanese, and finally “Uncle Sam”—­these are the main components that when skilfully mixed from London, furnish the colouring material for the world-wide canvas.  If we take away India, Egypt and the other coloured races the white population that remains is greatly inferior to the population of Germany, and instead of being a compact, indivisible whole, consists of a number of widely scattered and separated communities, each with separate and absorbing problems of its own, and more than one of them British neither in race, speech, nor affection.  Moreover if we turn to the coloured races we find that the great mass of the subjects of this Empire have less rights within it than they possess outside its boundaries, and occupy there a lower status than that accorded to most foreigners.

The people of India far out number all other citizens of the British Empire put together, and yet we find the British Indians resident in Canada, to take but one instance, petitioning the Imperial Government in 1910 for as favourable terms of entry into that British possession as the Japanese enjoyed.

They pointed out that a Japanese could enter Canada on showing that he held from six pounds to ten pounds, but that no British Indian could land unless he had forty pounds and had come direct from India,—­a physical impossibility, since no direct communication exists.  But they went further, for they showed that their “citizenship” of the British Empire entailed penalties that no foreign state anywhere imposed upon them.

“We appeal,” they said, “and most forcibly bring to your notice that no such discriminating laws are existing against us in foreign countries like the United States of America, Germany, Japan, and Africa, to whom we do not owe any allegiance whatsoever.”

So that outside its white or European races it is clear the Empire has no general or equal citizenship, and that, far from being one, it is more divided racially against itself than are even opposing Asiatic and European nations which have the good fortune not to be united in a common, imperial bond.

The total white population of this incongruous mass in 1911 consisted of some 59,000,000 human beings made up of various national and racial strains, as against 66,000,000 of white men in the German Empire the vast majority of them of German blood.  And while the latter form a disciplined, self-contained, and self-supporting and self-defending whole, the former are swelled by Irish, French-Canadians, and Dutch South Africans who, according to Sir R. Edgcumbe, must be reckoned as “coloured.”