Cecil Rhodes
Canada’s struggle for existence as a sovereign nation has been caught between two opposing views of mankind represented by the British and American System of social organization. As the great economist Henry C. Carey laid out while he was advancing the policy of Abraham Lincoln, the American System was designed to become a global system operating amongst sovereign nations for the progress and mutual benefit of each and all. By the end of the 19th century, American System thinking was resonating with statesmen and patriots in all corners of the globe who were fed up with the ancient imperial system of British Free Trade that had always strived to maintain a world divided and monopolized.
Although British propagandists had made every attempt to keep the illusion of the sacredness of the British System alive in the minds of its subjects, the undeniable increase of quality of life, and creative thought expressed by the American System everywhere it was applied become too strong to ignore… especially within colonies such as Canada that had long suffered a fragmented, and underdeveloped identity as the price paid for loyalty to the British Empire.
In Germany, the American System-inspired Zollverein (custom’s union) had not only unified a divided nation, but elevated it to a level of productive power and sovereignty which had outpaced the monopoly power of the British East India Company. In Japan, American engineers helped assemble trains funded by a national banking system, and protective tariff during the Meiji Restoration.
In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander II, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.
In Canada, admirers of Lincoln and Henry C. Carey found their spokesman in the great American System statesman Isaac Buchanan (1). Buchanan rose to the highest position of (elected) political office in the Dominion of Canada when in April 1864, the new MacDonald-Taché Ministry appointed him the President of the Executive Council. This put him in firm opposition to the Imperial agenda of George Brown, and the later Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, of whom he and all patriotic co-thinkers counted as bitter enemies to Canada’s independence and progress. (more...)
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