XPANSION OF ENGLAND” 
 
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 5 ^ 
 
 J. E. SEELEY M.A. 
 
 (t£0IU8 PROFESSOB OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIYERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM THE 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 ■4 r 
 
 
 
 Hottlyon: 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK. 
 
 1887 
 
 Price One Shilling. 
 
OUK COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
1 
 
r 
 
 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM THE 
 
 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 
 J. K SEELEY M.A. 
 
 BEGIU? PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 HottHon: 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK. 
 
 1887 
 
 \Tlie Right of Translation is reserved.] 
 
Catnbrilip: 
 
 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, 31.A. & SONS, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The Expansion of England is a book which consists of 
 two parts. It treats however of three subjects, which in 
 my eyes were equally important, but which might have 
 been treated separately. 
 
 Our Colonial Empire is the subject of the firso part. 
 Our Indian Empire is the subject—not less interesting, 
 and from a literary point of view far more attractive—of 
 the second part. But both divisions of the Empire are 
 treated less for their own sake than in order to give a 
 specimen of a certain way of handling history, which I was 
 anxious to recommend to students. Accordingly in both 
 parts of the book much space was devoted to explanation 
 and advocacy of this historical method. 
 
 My view of the growth and character of our Colonial 
 Erhpire has attracted the attention of many who are much 
 less interested in India, and of a still larger number who 
 are not curious about methods of study. It has furnished 
 arguments to the Imperial Federation League, and matter 
 for reflexion to the vast multitude, both at home and in 
 the colonies, who of late years have been stirred with the 
 conception of a Greater Britain. 
 
 It has become desirable that the literature of this 
 question should have as wide a circulation as possible. I 
 have therefore extracted from the Expansion of England 
 what relates to it, that is, about a third part of the book. 
 This I now offer to the public, substantially unaltered, 
 but separate and at a lower price. 
 
 J. B. SEELEY. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Tendency in English History . 
 
 » 
 
 • 
 
 PAGE 
 
 . 7 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 "What is Greater Britain? 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 12 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 What is the use of Colonies? . 
 
 • 
 
 o 
 
 . 21 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Old Colonial System .... 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 26 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 The New System. 
 
 
 
 . 39 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 England before Expansion 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 42 
 
 CHAPTER YII. 
 
 Beginning of the Empire .... 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 49 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 A Trade Empire . 
 
 
 
 . 56 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Phases of Expansion . 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 61 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Culmination of England .... 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 70 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Schism in Greater Britain 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 . 78 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 Moral 
 
 87 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 
 
 In what direction and towards what goal is England 
 advancing ? 
 
 The words which jump to our lips in answer are 
 Liberty, Democracy! They are words which want a great 
 deal of defining. Liberty has of course been a leading 
 characteristic of England as compared with continental 
 countries, but in the main liberty is not so much an 
 end to which we have been tending as a possession which 
 we have long enjoyed. The struggles of the seventeenth 
 century secured it—even if they did not first acquire it— 
 for us. In later times there has been a movement to¬ 
 wards something which is often called liberty, but not so 
 correctly. We may, if we like, call it democracy; and I 
 suppose the current opinion is that if any large tendency 
 is discernible in the more recent part of English history, 
 it is this tendency, by which first the middle class and 
 then gradually the lower classes have been admitted to a 
 share of influence in public affairs. 
 
 Discernible enough no doubt this tendency is, at least 
 in the nineteenth century, for in the eighteenth century 
 only the first beginnings of it can be traced. It strikes 
 our attention most, because it has made for a long time 
 
8 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 past the staple of political talk and controversy. But 
 if we stand aloof a little and follow with our eyes the 
 progress of the English State, the great governed society 
 of English people, in recent centuries, we shall be much 
 more struck by another change, which is not only far 
 greater but even more conspicuous, though it has always 
 been less discussed, partly because it proceeded more 
 gradually, partly because it excited less opposition. 
 
 I mean the simple obvious fact of the extension of the 
 English name into other countries of the globe, the 
 foundation of Greater Britain. 
 
 There is something very characteristic in the indif¬ 
 ference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon 
 of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. 
 We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half 
 the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing 
 it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it 
 to affect our imaginations or in any degree to change our 
 ways of thinking; nor have we even now ceased to think 
 of ourselves as simply a race inhabiting an island off the 
 northern coast of the Continent of Europe. We constantly 
 betray by our modes of speech that we do not reckon our 
 colonies as really belonging to us; thus if we are asked 
 what the English population is, it does not occur to us to 
 reckon-in the population of Canada and Australia. This 
 fixed way of thinking has influenced our historians. It 
 causes them, I think, to miss the true point of view in 
 describing the eighteenth century. They do not perceive 
 that in that century the history of England is not in 
 England but in America and Asia. In like manner I 
 believe that when we look at the present state of affairs, 
 and still more at the future, we ought to beware of 
 putting England alone in the foreground and suffering 
 
I.] TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 9 
 
 what we call the English possessions to escape our view 
 in the back-ground of the picture. 
 
 In the last years of Queen Elizabeth England had 
 absolutely no possessions outside Europe. All schemes 
 of settlement, from that of Hore in Henry VIII.’s reign 
 to those of Gilbert and Raleigh, had failed alike. Only 
 in Newfoundland, since 1583, there existed the rudiment 
 of a colony. Great Britain did not yet exist; Scotland was 
 a separate kingdom, and in Ireland the English were but a 
 colony in the midst of an alien population still in the tribal 
 stage. With the accession of the Stuart family commenced 
 at the same time two processes, one of which was brought 
 to completion under the last Stuart, Queen Anne, while the 
 other has continued without interruption ever since. Of 
 these the first is the internal union of the three kingdoms, 
 which, though technically it was not completed till much 
 later, may be said to be substantially the work of the 
 seventeenth century and the Stuart dynasty. The second 
 was the creation of a still larger Britain comprehending 
 vast possessions beyond the sea. This process began with 
 the first Charter given to Virginia in 1606. It made a 
 great advance in the seventeenth century; but not till the 
 eighteenth did Greater Britain in its gigantic dimensions 
 and with its vast politics first stand clearly before the world. 
 
 If this English Exodus has been the greatest English 
 event of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the 
 greatest English question of the future must be, what 
 is to become of our second Empire, and whether or no it 
 may be expected to go the way of the first. 
 
 It is an old saying, to which Turgot gave utterance a 
 quarter of a century before the Declaration of Independence, 
 
 ‘ Colonies are like fruits which cling to the tree only till 
 they ripen.’ He added, ^As soon as America can take 
 
10 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 care of herself, she will do what Carthage did.’ What 
 wonder that when this prediction was so signally fulfilled, 
 the proposition from which it had been deduced rose, 
 especially in the minds of the English, to the rank of a 
 demonstrated principle ! This no doubt is the reason why 
 we have regarded the growth of a second Empire with 
 very little interest or satisfaction. ‘What matters,’ we have 
 said, ‘ its vastness or its rapid growth ? It does not grow 
 for us.’ And to the notion that we cannot keep it we have 
 added the notion that we need not wish to keep it, because, 
 with that curious kind of optimistic fatalism to which 
 historians are liable, the historians of our American war have 
 generally felt bound to make out that the loss of our colonies 
 was not only inevitable, but was even a fortunate thing 
 for us. 
 
 Whether these views are sound, I do not inquire 
 now. I merely point out that two alternatives are before 
 us, and that the question, incomparably the greatest 
 question which we can discuss, refers to the choice 
 between them. The four groups into which our colonies 
 may be divided may become four independent states, and 
 in that case two of them, the Dominion of Canada and 
 the West Indian group, will have to consider the question 
 whether admission into the United States will not' be 
 better for them than independence. In any case the 
 English name and English institutions will have a vast 
 predominance in the New World, and the separation may 
 be so managed that the mother-country may continue 
 always to be regarded with friendly feelings. Such a 
 separation would leave England on the same level as the 
 states nearest to us on the Continent, populous, but less 
 so than Germany and scarcely equal to France. But two 
 states, Russia and the United States would be on an 
 
I.l TENDENCY IN ENGLISH HISTORY. 11 
 
 altogether higher scale of magnitude, Russia having at 
 once, and the United States perhaps before very long, 
 twice our population. Our trade too would be exposed 
 to wholly new risks. 
 
 The other alternative is, that England may prove able 
 to do what the United States does so easily, that is, 
 hold together in a federal union countries very remote 
 from each other. In that case England will take rank 
 with Russia and the United States in the first rank of 
 state, measured by population and area, and in a higher 
 rank than the states of the Continent. We ought by no 
 means to take for granted that this is desirable. Bigness 
 is not necessarily greatness; if by remaining in the second 
 rank of magnitude we can hold the first rank morally and 
 intellectually, let us sacrifice mere material magnitude. 
 But though we must not prejudge the question whether 
 we ought to retain our Empire, we may fairly assume 
 that it is desirable after due consideration to judge it. 
 
 With a view to forming such a judgment, I propose 
 to examine historically the tendency to expansion which 
 England has so long displayed. We shall learn to think 
 of it more seriously if we discover it to be profound, per¬ 
 sistent, necessary to the national life, and more hopefully 
 if we can satisfy ourselves that the secession of our first 
 colonies was not a mere normal result of expansion, like 
 the bursting of a bubble, but the result of temporary 
 conditions, removable and which have been removed. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 WHAT IS GEEATER BRITAIN? 
 
 By Greater Britain we mean an enlargement of the 
 English State, and not simply of the English nationality. 
 
 It is not simply that a population of English blood is 
 now found in Canada and in Australia, as in old time 
 a Greek population was spread over Sicily, South Italy 
 and the Western Coast of Asia Minor. That was an 
 extension of the Nationality but not of the State, an 
 extension which gave no new strength, and did not in 
 any way help the Greek name when it was attacked and 
 conquered from Macedonia. In like manner at present 
 we see a constant stream of emigration from Germanv to 
 America, but no Greater Germany comes into existence, 
 because these emigrants, though they carry with them 
 and may perhaps not altogether lose their language and 
 their ideas, do not carry with them their State. This 
 is the case with Germany because its emigration has 
 happened too late, when the New World is already carved 
 into States, into which its emigrants are compelled to 
 enter, as with Greece it was the result of a theory of the 
 State, which identified it with the City. But Greater 
 Britain is a real enlargement of the English State; it 
 carries across the seas not merely the English race, but 
 the authority of the English Government. We call it for 
 want of a better word an empire. And it does resemble 
 the great empires of history in this respect, that it is an 
 
CIT. IL] what is greater BRITAIN ? 13 
 
 aggregate of provinces, each of which has a government 
 sent out to it from the political head-quarters, which 
 is a kind of delegation from the supreme government. 
 But yet it is wholly unlike the great empires of the 
 Old World, Persian or Macedonian or Roman or Turkish, 
 because it is not in the main founded on conquest, and 
 because in the main the inhabitants of the distant pro¬ 
 vinces are of the same nation as those of the dominant 
 country. It resembles them in its vast extent, but it 
 does not resemble them in that violent military character 
 which has made most empires short-lived and liable to 
 speedy decay. 
 
 We may see now out of what conditions it arose. It 
 is the only considerable survivor of a family of great 
 empires, which arose out of the contact of the Western 
 States of Europe with the New World so suddenly laid 
 open by Vasco da Gama and Columbus. What England 
 did, was done equally by Spain, Portugal, France and 
 Holland. There was once a Greater Spain, a Greater 
 Portugal, a Greater France and a Greater Holland, as well 
 as a Greater Britain, but from various causes those four 
 Empires have either perished or have become insignificant. 
 Greater Spain disappeared and Greater Portugal lost its 
 largest province, Brazil, half a century ago in wars of 
 independence similar to that which tore from us our 
 American colonies. Greater France and a large part of 
 Greater Holland were lost in war, and became merged 
 in Greater Britain. Greater Britain itself, after suffering 
 one severe shock, has survived to the present day, and 
 remains the single monument of a state of the world 
 which has almost passed away. 
 
 At the same time it. differs in a very essential point 
 from some of those Empires. 
 
14 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 The countries which were suddenly thrown open to 
 Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, fall into three 
 classes. Yasco da Gama threw open countries in which for 
 the most part ancient and extensive states existed, such as 
 the adventurers did not for a long time think of subverting. 
 Columbus on the other hand discovered a Continent in 
 which only two such states appeared to exist, and even 
 these were soon proved to have no solidity. The contact 
 which Columbus established, being the most strange and 
 violent which ever took place between two parts of the 
 human family, led to a fierce struggle, and furnished one of 
 the most terrible pages to the annals of the world. But in 
 this struggle there was no sort of equality. The American 
 race had no more power of resisting the European than 
 the sheep has of resisting the wolf. Even where it was 
 numerous and had a settled polity, as in Peru, it 
 could make no resistance; its states were crushed, the 
 ruling families extinguished, and the population itself re¬ 
 duced to a form of slavery. Everywhere therefore the 
 country fell into the hands of the immigrating race, and was 
 disposed of at its pleasure as so much plunder. The im¬ 
 migrants did not merely, as in India, gradually show a great 
 military superiority to the native race, so as in the end to 
 subdue them, but overwhelmed them at once like a party of 
 hunters suddenly assailing a herd of antelopes. This was 
 the case everywhere, but yet the countries of America also 
 fall into two classes. There was a great difference between 
 the regions of Central and Southern America, which fell 
 
 O 
 
 principally to the Spanish and Portuguese, and the North 
 American territories which fell to England. In Mexico, 
 Peru and some other parts of South America the native 
 population, though feeble compared to the Europeans, was 
 not insignificant in numbers; it was counted by millions, 
 
II.] WHAT IS GREATER BRITAIN ? 15 
 
 had reached the agricultural stage of civilisation, and 
 had cities. But the Indians who wandered over the 
 territories of North America, which now belong to the 
 United States and the Dominion of Canada, were much 
 more insignificant. It has been estimated that ‘ the 
 total Indian population within the territory of the United 
 States east of the Bocky Mountains, did not at any time 
 subsequent to the discovery of America exceed, if indeed 
 it even reached, three hundred thousand individuals.’ 
 Accordingly whereas in New Spain the European, though 
 supreme, yet lived in the midst of a population of native 
 Indians, the European in North America supplanted the 
 native race entirely, pushed it ever further back as he 
 advanced, and did not blend with it at all. 
 
 It was ultimately the fortune of England to acquire the 
 most important share both of what Vasco da Gama and of 
 what Columbus laid open. On one side has grown up her 
 Indian, and mainly on the other her Colonial Empire. But 
 of the latter group of countries, the countries wanting in 
 strong states, England occupied those which were com¬ 
 paratively empty, and the Australian territory which has 
 since fallen to her is in the same condition. 
 
 This fact has an all-important consequence. 
 
 I remarked before that Greater Britain is an extension 
 of the English State and not merely of the English 
 nationality. But it is an equally striking characteristic of 
 Greater Britain that nevertheless it is an extension of the 
 English nationality. When a nationality is extended with¬ 
 out any extension of the State, as in the case of the Greek 
 colonies, there may be an increase of moral and intellec¬ 
 tual influence, but there is no increase of political power. 
 On the other hand when the State advances beyond the 
 limits of the nationality, its power becomes precarious and 
 
16 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 artificial. This is the condition of most empires; it is the 
 condition for example of our own empire in India. The 
 English State is powerful there, but the English nation is 
 but an imperceptible drop in the ocean of an Asiatic 
 population. And when a nation extends itself into other 
 territories, the chances are that it will there meet with 
 other nationalities which it cannot destroy or completely 
 drive out, even if it succeeds in conquering them. 
 When this happens, it has a great and permanent difficulty 
 to contend with. The subject or rival nationalities cannot 
 be perfectly assimilated, and remain as a permanent cause 
 of weakness and danger. It has been the fortune of 
 England in extending itself to evade on the whole this 
 danger. For it has occupied parts of the globe which were 
 so empty that they offered an unbounded scope for new 
 settlement. There was land for every emigrant who chose 
 to come, and the native races were not in a condition 
 sufificiently advanced to withstand even the peaceful com¬ 
 petition, much less the power, of the immigrants. 
 
 This statement is true on the whole. The English 
 Empire is on the whole free from that weakness which has 
 brought down most empires, the weakness of being a mere 
 mechanical forced union of alien nationalities. It is some¬ 
 times described as an essentially feeble union which could 
 not bear the slightest shock, with what reason I may 
 examine later, but it has the fundamental strength which 
 most empires and some commonwealths want. Austria for 
 instance is divided by the nationality-rivalry of German, 
 Slav, and Magyar; the Swiss Confederation unites three 
 languages; but the English Empire, in the main and 
 broadly, may be said to be English throughout. 
 
 Of course however considerable abatements are to be 
 made. It is only in one of the four great groups, namely, 
 
WHAT IS GREATER BRITAIN? 
 
 17 
 
 IL] 
 
 in the Australian colonies, that the statement is true 
 almost without qualification. The native Australian race 
 is so low in the ethnological scale that it can never give 
 the least trouble, but even here, since we must reckon New 
 Zealand in this group, we are to bear in mind that the 
 Maori tribes occupy the Northern island in some force, 
 much as in the last century the Highland Clans gave us 
 trouble in the northern part of our own island, and the 
 Maori is by no means a contemptible type of man. Never¬ 
 theless the whole number of Maories is not supposed to 
 exceed forty thousand, - and it is rapidly diminishing. 
 When we turn to another group, the North American 
 colonies, included principally in the Dominion of Canada, 
 we find that the nucleus of it was acquired originally, 
 not by English settlement, but by the conquest of French 
 settlements. At the outset therefore the nationality- 
 difficulty, instead of being absent here, was present in 
 the gravest form. The original Canada of the French was 
 afterwards known as Lower Canada, and since the esta¬ 
 blishment of the Dominion it has borne the name of the 
 Province of Quebec. It has a population of nearly a million 
 and a half, while the whole Dominion does not contain four 
 millions and a half. These are Frenchmen and Catholics 
 in the midst of a population mainly English and Protes¬ 
 tant. It is not so long since the inconvenience of this 
 alien population was felt in Canada by discords essen¬ 
 tially similar to those which the nationality-question has 
 created in Austria and Russia. The Canadian Rebellion 
 which marked the first years of the reign of Queen 
 Victoria, was in fact a war of nationality in the British 
 Empire, though it wore the disguise of a war of liberty, as 
 Lord Durham expressly remarks in the opening of his 
 famous Report on Canada: ‘ I expected to find a contest 
 
 2 
 
 s. 
 
10 'A-L ^ 
 
 18 OUE colonial expansion. [chap. 
 
 between a government and a people; I found two nations 
 warring in the bosom of a single state; I found a struggle 
 not of principles but of races.’ It is however to be 
 remarked on the other side that here too the alien element 
 dwindles and is likely ultimately to be lost in the English 
 immigration, and also that its animosity has been much 
 pacified by the introduction of federal institutions. 
 
 In the third or West Indian group also the differences 
 of nationality are considerable. Here almost alone in our 
 Empire are to be traced the effects of the peculiar 
 phenomenon of the history of the New World, negro 
 slavery. Here it first appeared on a considerable scale, as 
 the immediate result of the discovery of Columbus. So 
 long as it lasted, it did not call into existence the 
 nationality-diflSculty, for a thoroughly enslaved nation is a 
 nation no longer, and a servile insurrection is wholly 
 different from the insurrection of an oppressed nationality. 
 But when slavery is abolished, while the slaves themselves 
 remain, stamped so visibly in colour and physical type 
 with the badge of their different nationality, yet now 
 free and laying claim to citizenship, then it is that the 
 nationality-difficulty begins to threaten. But in the 
 West-Indian group such difficulties for the present do not 
 take a serious form, because the colonies are in the main 
 dispersed in small islands and have no community of feeling. 
 
 It is in the fourth or South African group that the 
 nationality-difficulty is most serious. It is here a double 
 difficulty. There have been two conquests, the one super¬ 
 induced upon the other. The Dutch first settled them¬ 
 selves among the native races, and then the Dutch colony 
 was conquered by England. So far the case may seem 
 to resemble that of Canada, where the French settled 
 among the Indians and were then conquered by the 
 
WHAT IS GREATER BRITAIN? 
 
 19 
 
 II.] 
 
 English. But there are two differences. In the first place 
 the native tribes of South Africa, instead of disappearing 
 and dwindling before the whites, greatly outnumber them, 
 and show a power of combination and progress such as the 
 Red Indian never showed. Thus in the census of 1875 
 I find that the Cape Colony had a total population of 
 nearly three-quarters of a million, but two out of the 
 three-quarters were native and only one European. And 
 behind this native population dwelling among the settlers 
 there is an indefinite native population extending without 
 limit into the interior of the vast continent. But secondly 
 the other difiiculty, which arises from the fact that the 
 settlers themselves were at the outset not English but 
 ,Dutch, does not diminish or tend to disappear, as it has 
 done in Canada. In Canada there took place a rapid 
 immigration of English, who, showing themselves in a 
 marked degree more energetic than the French and in¬ 
 creasing much faster, gradually gave the whole community 
 a predominantly English character, so that in fact the 
 rising of the French in 1838 was the convulsion of despair 
 of a nationality which felt itself endangered. Nothing simi¬ 
 lar has happened in South Africa, no rapid English immi¬ 
 gration has come to give a new character to the community. 
 
 These are the abatements which must be made to the 
 general proposition that Greater Britain is homogeneous in 
 nationality. They need not prevent us from laying down 
 this general proposition as true. If in these islands we 
 feel ourselves for all purposes one nation, though in Wales, 
 in Scotland and in Ireland there is Celtic blood and Celtic 
 languages utterly unintelligible to us are still spoken, so in 
 the Empire a good many French and Dutch and a good 
 many Cafifres and Maories may be admitted without 
 marring the ethnological unity of the whole. 
 
 2—2 
 
20 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CH. 11. 
 
 This ethnological unity is of great importance when vve 
 would form an opinion about the stability and chance of 
 duration of the Empire. The chief forces which hold a 
 community together and cause it to constitute one State 
 are three, common nationality, common religion, and 
 common interest. These may act in various degrees of 
 intensity, and they may also act singly or in combination. 
 Now when it is argued that Greater Britain is a union 
 which w^ill not last long and will soon fall to pieces, the 
 ground taken is that it wants the third of these binding 
 forces, that it is not held together by community of 
 interest. ‘ What,’ it is said, ‘ can the inhabitants of 
 Australia and New Zealand, living on the other side of 
 the Tropic of Capricorn, have in common with ourselves 
 who live beyond the 50th degree of north latitude ? 
 Who does not see that two communities so remote from 
 each other cannot long continue parts of one political 
 whole ? ’ Now this is a very important consideration, 
 especially as it is backed by the impressive fact that our 
 American Colonies did in the last century find their union 
 with us intolerable. But, allowing its importance, we 
 may remark that, even if this bond is wanting, the other 
 two bonds which hold states together are not wanting. 
 Many empires in which hostile nationalities and religions 
 have been but artificially united have nevertheless lasted 
 several centuries, but Greater Britain is not a mere em¬ 
 pire, though we often call it so. Its union is of the more 
 vital kind. It is united by blood and religion, and though 
 circumstances may be imagined in which these ties might 
 snap, yet they are strong ties, and will only give way 
 before some violent dissolving force. 
 
chapter hi 
 
 WHAT IS THE USE OF COLONIES ? 
 
 Ancient Greek colonisation, compared with the 
 modern system, might be called in a certain sense the 
 natural system. And yet the modern system might be 
 represented as natural also. The Greeks regard the State 
 as essentially small, and infer that a surplus population 
 can only be accommodated by founding another State. 
 But is there anything necessarily unnatural in the other 
 view, that the State is capable of indefinite growth and 
 expansion? The ripe fruit dropping from the tree and 
 giving rise to another tree may be natural, but so is the 
 acorn spreading into the huge oak, that has hundreds of 
 branches and thousands of leaves. If Miletus among its 
 daughter-cities may remind us of the one, England expand¬ 
 ing into Greater Britain resembles the other. 
 
 And yet surely there must be something unnatural in 
 the system against which our own colonists revolted a 
 hundred years ago and the colonists of Spain and Portugal 
 a few years later. 
 
 The truth is that the simple idea of expansion has 
 seldom been conceived or realised clearly. 
 
 Let us work out a little in our minds the conception 
 of a Greater Britain, of the English State extended in¬ 
 definitely without being altered. The question is often 
 asked. What is the good of colonies? but no such question 
 could possibly be raised, if colonies really were such a 
 simple extension of the mother-state. Whether this ex- 
 
22 OUK COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 tension is practicable may be questioned, but it cannot be 
 questioned that if it were practicable it would be desirable. 
 
 We must begin by recognising that the unoccupied 
 territory of the globe is to thc>se who take possession of it 
 so much wealth in the most absclute sense of the word. 
 The epitaph which said that to Leon and Aragon 
 Columbus ^ave a new world was almost literally true. 
 He conferred upon certain persons a large landed estate, 
 and if, as the result, many poor people did not become 
 rich and many unfortunate people prosperous, the fault 
 must have lain in the distribution or administration of the 
 wealth which he conferred. By his discovery the nations 
 of Europe came in for a landed estate so enormously large 
 that it might easily have converted every poor man in 
 Europe into a landed proprietor. 
 
 But one thing was necessary before all this wealth 
 could be reduced into possession and enjoyment. Property 
 can exist only under the guardianship of the State. In 
 order therefore that the lands of the New World might 
 become secure enjoyable property, States must be set up 
 in the New World. Without the State the settler would 
 run the risk of being murdered by Indians, or attacked 
 by rival settlers of some hostile nationality. On the other 
 hand suppose the reign of law and government established 
 in the New World, as in Europe, so that property is 
 equally secure; then the poor man in Europe who finds 
 life painful and the acquisition of land in these crowded 
 countries utterly beyond his power, has only to transfer 
 himself to the New World, where land is cheaper, and he 
 is at once enriched as much as if he had received a legacy. 
 
 Thus there can be no dispute about the value of 
 organised States in the less crowded parts of the globe. 
 But why should these be our own colonies ? There is 
 
III.] WHAT IS the^PE of colonies? 23 
 
 nothing to prevent the emigrant from settling in a colony 
 belonging to some different European State or in an 
 independent State. Why need we trouble ourselves there¬ 
 fore to keep up colonies of our own ? 
 
 This is a strange question, which would never be asked 
 in England but for an exceptional circumstance. Most 
 people like to live among their own countrymen, under 
 the laws, religion and institutions they are accustomed to. 
 They place themselves moreover most really and practically 
 at a disadvantage by going to live among people who 
 speak a different language. As a matter of fact, we do 
 not find that, the course of emigration being free, any 
 large number of Englishmen yearly settle in those New 
 World States which are really foreign, that is, in the South 
 American Republics or in Brazil or in Mexico. There 
 would be no question at all about the value of colonies, and 
 we should all as a matter of course consider that only by 
 means of colonies was it possible to bring the wealth of the 
 New World within the reach of our population, if it were 
 not for the existence of the United States. But the United 
 States are to us almost as good as a colony; our people 
 can emigrate thither without sacrificing their language or 
 chief institutions or habits. And the Union is so large 
 and prosperous and fills our view so much, that we forget 
 how very exceptional its relation to us is, and also that if 
 it is to us almost as good as a colony, this is only because 
 it was constructed out of English colonies. In estimatinor 
 
 O O 
 
 the value of colonies in the abstract, we shall only confuse 
 ourselves by recollecting this unique case; we ought to 
 put the United States entirely out of view. 
 
 Considered in the abstract then, colonies are neither 
 more nor less than a great augmentation of the national 
 estate. They are lands for the landless, prosperity and 
 
24 OUR COLONl^pEXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 wealth for those in straitened circumstances. This is a 
 very simple view, and yet it is much overlooked, as if 
 somehow it were too simple to be understood. History 
 offers many examples of nations cramped for want of 
 room; it records in many cases how they swarmed irre¬ 
 sistibly across their frontiers and spread like a deluge over 
 neighbouring countries, where sometimes they found lands 
 and wealth. Now we may be very sure that never any 
 nation was half so much cramped for want of room in the 
 olden time as our own nation is now. Populations so 
 dense as that of modern England are a phenomenon quite 
 new at least in Europe. We continually speak of our 
 country as crowded, and, since the rate of increase of popu¬ 
 lation is tolerably constant, we sometimes ask with alarm 
 what will be its condition half a century hence. ‘ The 
 territory,’ we say, ‘is a fixed quantity; we have but 120,000 
 square miles; it is crowded already and yet the population 
 doubles in some seventy years. What will become of 
 us?’ Now here is a curious example of our habit of 
 leaving our colonial possessions out of account. What! 
 our country is small; a poor, 120,000 square miles? I 
 find the fact to be very different. ' 1 find that the territory 
 governed by the Queen is of almost boundless extent. 
 Let us deduct from the vast total India, as not much 
 open to settlement; still the territory subject to the Queen 
 is much greater than that of the United States, though 
 that is uniformly cited as the example of a country not 
 crowded and in which there is boundless room for expansion. 
 It may be true that the mother-country of this great 
 Empire is crowded, but in order to relieve the pressure it is 
 not necessary for us, as if we were Goths or Turcomans, to 
 seize upon the territory of our neighbours, it is not necessary 
 even to incur great risks or undergo great hardships; it is 
 
25 
 
 ''x 
 
 HI.] WHAT IS THE USE OF COLONIES? 
 
 only necessary to take possession of boundless.territories in 
 Canada, South Africa and Australia, where already our 
 language is spoken, our religion professed, and our laws 
 established. If there is pauperism in Wiltshire and 
 Dorsetshire, this is but complementary to unowned wealth 
 in Australia; on the one side there are men without 
 property, on the other there is property waiting for men. 
 And yet we do not allow these two facts to come together 
 in our minds, but brood anxiously and almost despairingly 
 over the problem of pauperism, and when colonies are 
 mentioned we ask, What is the good of colonies? 
 
 Partly no doubt this is due simply to a want of system 
 in our way of thinking on subjects of this kind, but partly 
 also it is evident that colonies have never been regarded 
 in England as a simple extension of the English state and 
 nation over new territory. They have been thought of no 
 doubt as belonging to England, though precariously, but at 
 the same time as outside of England, so that what goes 
 out of England to them is in a manner lost to England. 
 This appears clearly from the argument which is often 
 urged against emigration on any large scale, viz., that 
 it might be good for the emigrants, but that it would be 
 ruinous to England, which would be deprived of all the 
 best and hardiest part of its population— deprived, for it is 
 not imagined that such emigrants could remain English¬ 
 men, or be still serviceable to the English commonwealth. 
 Compare this view of emigration with that taken in the 
 United States, where the constant movement of the popu¬ 
 lation westward, the constant settlement of new Territories, 
 which in due time rise to be States, is not regarded as 
 either a symptom or a cause of weakness, not at all as a 
 draining-out of vitality, but on the contrary as the greatest 
 evidence of vigour and the best means of increasing it. 
 
CHAPTER lY. 
 
 THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 At the beginning a colony was not really thought of 
 as an extension of the mother-state, but as something 
 different. What then was the precise conception formed 
 of a colony ? 
 
 In the sixteeuth century there was no natural over¬ 
 flow of population from Europe into the New World. 
 Europe was not over-peopled; there was no imperious 
 demand for more room. Why then should the con¬ 
 ception, so natural to us in these days, of a territorial 
 extension of the State occur to those who lived at the 
 time of the discoveries? We see on the contrary that 
 contemporary statesmen were puzzled to decide what use 
 could be made, and even doubted whether any use could 
 be made, of the new lands. Sebastian Cabot is encouraged 
 by Henry VII., until it is found that he does not bring 
 back spices; then he is neglected, and abandons England 
 for the Spanish service. Thus the same cause which 
 made it necessary to call in the help of the State led to a 
 peculiarly materialistic view of the work of settlement. 
 What the State wanted was revenue; hence it became 
 necessary to regard the new countries rather as so much 
 wealth to be transported into Europe than as a new seat 
 for European civilisation. 
 
 I spoke before of natural colonisation, intending such 
 colonisation as results from the spread of a race over an 
 
CH. IV.] THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 27 
 
 unbounded territory at a time when political institutions 
 are in their infancy. The colonisation of the sixteenth 
 century is curiously different. It arises from the discovery 
 of remote regions of unknown wealth by nations accus¬ 
 tomed to a limited space and to a rigorous government. 
 As in the former kind the State scarcely appears, but indi¬ 
 viduals or rather tribes accomplish the work, and in making 
 a new settlement make a new state, in the latter kind the 
 State takes the lead, superintends the settlement, recruits 
 for it, holds it in subjection when it is made, and, as a con¬ 
 sequence, looks to make a profit out of it. At first sight 
 this latter system might seem less materialistic than the 
 other, .for it conceives the State as resting not upon mere 
 locality but upon kindred, but it becomes more material¬ 
 istic in practice, because it looks at- the colony purely with 
 the eyes of the Government, and therefore from a purely 
 fiscal point of view. Hence in the first settlement of 
 America the conception of a Spanish colony as an ex¬ 
 tension of Spain was mixed up with a different conception 
 of it as a possession belonging to Spain. And whereas the 
 first conception, though it was formed instinctively, yet 
 answered to nothing in experience,—for who had ever 
 heard of two parts of the same State separated by the 
 whole breadth of the Atlantic Ocean?—the second con¬ 
 ception was less embarrassing in practice because it was 
 by no means new. There had been examples in the 
 Middle Ages of States possessing dependencies separated 
 from them by the sea, and I dare say it might be possible 
 to show that the Spanish Council of the Indies was 
 guided at times by the precedents afforded by Venice 
 in its dealings with Candia and with its dependencies 
 in the Adriatic. The Venetian conception of a depen¬ 
 dency was purely selfish and commercial. So far from 
 
28 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 thinking of it as forming part of the Eepublic, they 
 regarded it as so much live stock forming part of the 
 wealth of the Republic. Thus it was by confounding 
 together two theories radically inconsistent with each 
 other that the modern colonial system, first formed by 
 Spain and adopted with more or less modification by the 
 other powers of Europe, came into existence. 
 
 Now we have this conception more or less distinctly in 
 our minds w*henever we ask the question. What is the 
 good of colonies ? That question implies that we think 
 of a colony, not as part of our State, but as a possession 
 belonging to it. For we should think it absurd to raise 
 such a question about a recognised part of the body politic. 
 Who ever thought of inquiring whether Cornwall or Kent 
 rendered any sufficient return for the money which we 
 lay out upon them, whether those counties were worth 
 keeping? The tie that holds together the parts of a 
 nation-state is of another kind; it is not composed of 
 considerations of profit and loss, but is analogous to the 
 family bond. The same tie would hold a nation to its 
 colonies, if colonies were regarded as simply an extension 
 of the nation. If Greater Britain in the full sense of the 
 phrase really existed, Canada and Australia would be to us 
 as Kent and Cornwall. But if once we cease to regard a 
 colony in this way, if we consider that the emigrants, who 
 have gone forth from us, have ceased to belong to our 
 community, then we must form some other conception of 
 their relation to us. And this must either be the old 
 Greek conception which treats them as grown-up children 
 who have married and settled at a distance, so that the 
 family bond has dissolved away by the mere necessity of 
 circumstances, or if the connexion is maintained, as the 
 modern States insisted on maintaining it, it must change 
 
THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 29 
 
 IV.] 
 
 its character. It must base itself on interest. The question 
 must be asked, What is the good of the colony ? and it 
 must be answered by some proof that the colony considered 
 as a piece of property, or as an investment of public 
 money, pays. 
 
 Now this may be a very good basis for the union of 
 two countries, provided the benefit received from the union 
 is mutual. In this case it constitutes a federation, and there 
 are many instances in which, without any tie of kindred, 
 countries have been held together in such a union simply 
 by the sense of a common interest. Among these instances 
 are Austria and Hungary, the German, French and Italian 
 cantons of the Swiss Confederation. Such would be the 
 case of our own Empire, if not only we ourselves felt that 
 our colonies paid, that is, that we reaped some advantage 
 from them which we should cease to reap if they became 
 independent, but also the colonies felt that the mother- 
 country paid, and that they gained something by the 
 connexion with it. And in the present day it is quite 
 easy to imagine such a sense of common interest existing 
 between us and even the remotest of our colonies, because 
 in the present day distance has been almost abolished by 
 steam and electricity. But in the first ages after the 
 discovery of the New World such a common interest was 
 less possible. The Atlantic Ocean was then for practical 
 purposes a far deeper and wider gulf, across which any 
 ' reciprocal exchange of services could not easily take place. 
 And so the old colonial system in general had not the 
 character of an equal federation. 
 
 It is the custom to describe the old colonies as sacri¬ 
 ficed to the mother-country. We must be careful not to 
 admit that statement without qualification. It is supposed 
 for instance that the revolt of our own American colonies 
 
so OUE COLONIAL EXPANSION. [cHAP. 
 
 was provoked by the selfish treatment of the mother- 
 country, which shackled their trade without rendering them 
 any benefit in return for these restraints. This is far from 
 being true. Between England and the American colonies 
 there was a real interchange of services. England gave 
 defence in return for trade-privileges. In the middle of 
 the last century, at the time when the American quarrel 
 began, it was perhaps rather the colonies than the mother- 
 country that had fallen into arrear. We had been involved 
 in two great wars mainly by our colonies, and the final breach 
 was provoked not so much by the pressure of England upon 
 the colonies as by that of tile colonies upon England. If we 
 imposed taxes upon them, it was to meet the debt which 
 we had incurred in their behalf, and we saw with not un¬ 
 natural bitterness that we had ourselves enabled our colonies 
 to do without us, by destroying for their interest the French 
 power in ^orth America. 
 
 Still it was true of the old colonial svstem in general 
 that it placed the colony in the position, not so much of a 
 state in federation, as of a conquered state. Some theory 
 of the kind is evidently implied in the language which is 
 commonly used. We speak of the colonial possessions of 
 England or of Spain. Now in what sense can one popula¬ 
 tion be spoken of as the possession of another population? 
 The expression almost seems to imply slavery, and at 
 any rate it is utterly inappropriate, if it merely means 
 that the one population is subject to the same Government 
 as the other. At the bottom of it certainly was the idea 
 that the colony was an estate w'hich was to be worked for 
 the benefit of the mother-country. 
 
 The relation of Spain to its colonies had become a type 
 w hich other states kept before their eyes. A native popu¬ 
 lation reduced to serfdom, in some parts driven to compul- 
 
THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 31 
 
 IV.] 
 
 sory labour by caciques turned into state-officials, in other 
 parts exterminated by overwork and then replaced by 
 negroes; an imperious mother-country drawing from the 
 colony a steady revenue, and ruling it through an artful 
 mechanism of division, by which the settlers were held in 
 check by the priesthood and by a serf-population treated 
 paternally that it might be available for that purpose; 
 such was the typical colonial system. It w^as wholly unfit to 
 be a model to such a colony as New England, which paid 
 no revenue, where there were neither subject Indians nor 
 mines of gold and silver. Nevertheless governments could 
 not afford to forget the precedent of profitable colonies, 
 and I find Charles II. appealing to it in 1663. It became 
 an established principle that a colony was a possession. 
 
 Now it is essentially barbaric that one community 
 should be treated as the property of another and the fruits 
 of its industry confiscated, not in return for benefits con¬ 
 ferred, but by some absolute right whether of conquest or 
 otherwise. Even where such a relation rests avowedly upon 
 conquest, it is too immoral to last long, except in a barbarous 
 state of manners. Thus for example we may have acquired 
 India by conquest, but we cannot and do not hold it for our 
 own pecuniary advantage. We draw.no tribute from it; 
 it is not to us a profitable investment; we should be 
 ashamed to acknowledge that in governing it we in any 
 way sacrificed its interest to our own. A fortiori then it is 
 barbaric to apply such a theory to colonies, for it is to treat 
 one’s own countrymen, those with whom we have no con¬ 
 cern at all except on the ground of kindred, as if they 
 were conquered enemies, or rather in a way in which a 
 civilised nation cannot treat even conquered enemies. And 
 probably even in the old colonial system such a theory 
 wais not consciously and deliberately adopted. But since 
 
32 OUR COIONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 in the sixteenth century there was no scruple in applying 
 it to conquered dependencies, and since the colonies of 
 Spain were in a certain sense conquered dependencies, 
 we can understand that unconsciously, unintentionally the 
 barbaric principle crept into her colonial system, and that 
 it lurked there and poisoned it in later times. We can 
 understand too how the example of Spain and the pre¬ 
 cedents set by her influenced the other European States, 
 Holland, France and England, which entered upon the 
 career of colonisation a century later. 
 
 In the case of some of these States, for example 
 France, the result of this theory was that the mother- 
 country exercised an iron authority over her colonies. In 
 Canada the French settlers were subject to a multitude of 
 rigid regulations, from which they would have been free if 
 they had remained in France. Nothing of the kind 
 certainly can be said of the English colonies. They were 
 subject to certain fixed restrictions in the matter of trade, 
 but apart from these they were absolutely free. Carrying 
 their nationality with them, they claimed everyw’here the 
 rights of Englishmen. It has been observed by Mr Meri- 
 vale that the old colonial system admitted no such thing 
 as the modern Crown Colony, in which Englishmen are 
 governed administratively without representative assem¬ 
 blies. In the old system assemblies were not formally 
 instituted, but grew up of themselves, because it was the 
 nature of Englishmen to assemble. Thus the old historian 
 of the colonies, Hutchinson, writes under the year 1619, 
 ^This year a House of Burgesses broke out in Virginia.’ 
 And assuredly the Home Government in those times did 
 not sin by too much interference. So completely were 
 the colonies left to themselves, that some of them, espe¬ 
 cially those of New England, were from the very beginning 
 
THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 33 
 
 IV.] 
 
 for most practical purposes independent States. As early 
 as 1665, only forty years after the first settlement and a 
 hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, I 
 find that Massachusetts did not regard itself as practically 
 subject to England. ‘They say,’ writes a Commissioner\ 
 ‘ that so long as they pay the fifth of all gold and silver, 
 according to the terms of the Charter, they are not 
 obliged to the King but by civility.’ 
 
 Thus our old colonial system was not practically at all 
 tyrannous, and when the breach came the grievances of 
 which the Americans complained, though perfectly real, 
 were smaller than ever before or since led to such mighty 
 consequences. The misfortune of that system was not 
 that it interfered too much, but that such interference as it 
 admitted was of an invidious kind. It claimed very little, 
 but what it did claim was unjust. It gave unbounded 
 liberty except in one department, namely trade, and in 
 that department it interfered to fine the colonists for the 
 benefit of the home traders. Now this was to put the 
 mother-country in a false position. It put her forward as 
 claiming to treat the colonies as a possession, as an estate 
 to be worked for the benefit of those Englishmen who 
 remained at home. No claim could be more invidious. 
 If it was not quite the claim that a master makes upon a 
 slave, it was at least similar to that which an absentee 
 landlord makes upon tenants in whom he takes no further 
 interest, and yet even the absentee landlord, if he gives 
 
 1 Calendar of State Papers; Colonial,'Dec&mber, 1665. He adds: ‘They 
 say they can easily spin out seven yeai’s by writing, and before that time a 
 change may come: nay, some have dared to say. Who knows what the 
 event of this Dutch war may be ? They furnished CromweU with many 
 instruments out of their corporation and college, and solicited him by one 
 Mr Winsloe to be declared a Free State, and now style and believe them¬ 
 selves to be so.’ 
 
 S. 
 
 3 
 
34 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 nothing else, does at least give the use of land which was 
 really his own. But what—a Massachusetts colonist might 
 say—has England given to us that she should have 
 this perpetual mortgage on our industry ? The Charter 
 of James I. allowed us the use of lands w^hich James I. 
 never saw and wdiich did not belong to him, lands too 
 which, without any Charter, w'e might perhaps have 
 occupied for ourselves without opposition. 
 
 Thus this old system was an irrational jumble of two 
 opposite conceptions. It claimed to rule the colonists 
 because they were Englishmen and brothers, and yet it 
 ruled them as if they were conquered Indians. And 
 again while it treated them as a conquered people, it 
 gave them so much liberty that they could easily rebel. 
 
 I have shown how this strange hybrid conception of 
 colonies may have originally sprung up. It is not very 
 difficult perhaps to understand how the English, after once 
 adopting, may have retained it, and may have never seen 
 their way to a better conception. In the then condition 
 of the world, if the English had thought of reforming their 
 colonial system, their most natural course would have been 
 to cast off the colonies altogether. For the analogy of 
 grown-up sons and daughters applies very properly to the 
 case of colonies, when they are so remote from the mother- 
 country that they have come to have wholly different 
 interests. All practical union, and therefore all authority 
 on the part of the mother-country, fall into abe 3 ^ance in 
 these circumstances, and the Greek system is then most 
 appropriate, which gives complete independence to the 
 colony, but binds it in perpetual alliance. Now in the 
 seventeenth century our colonies were, at least in ordinary 
 times, practically too remote for union. This is so true 
 that the difficulty is rather to understand how the seccs- 
 
THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 85 
 
 IV.] 
 
 sion of New England can have been delayed so long; 
 but I imagine the retarding cause was the growth of the 
 French Power in North America towards the end of the 
 seventeenth century. After the great colonial struggle 
 of France and England had fairly begun, the colonies were 
 drawn somewhat nearer to us than before, and we can 
 imagine that if Canada had not been conquered from the 
 French in 1759, and if the struggle with France instead of 
 coming to an end had grown more intense, the colonies 
 would have issued no Declaration of Independence, and 
 our connexion with them might have been put on a 
 better footing instead of being dissolved. As it was, 
 the need of union was at first not felt, it was then felt 
 strongly for a time, and then by a sudden deliverance all 
 pressure was removed, so that the thought of a reformed 
 colonial system gave way at once to the dream of in¬ 
 dependence. 
 
 In these circumstances the old colonial, system would 
 naturally be retained as long as possible by the mother- 
 country, because it was dangerous to touch it, because the 
 least alteration would snap the tie that held the colonies 
 altogether. . The invidious rights were doggedly main¬ 
 tained simply because they existed, and because no altera¬ 
 tion for the better was thought possible. 
 
 Probably also no healthier relation could then be even 
 clearly conceived. I have described colonies as the natural 
 outlet for superfluous population, the resource by which 
 those who find themselves crowded out of the mother- 
 country may live at ease, without sacrificing what ought 
 to be felt as most valuable, their nationality. But how 
 could such a view occur to Englishmen a century ago ? 
 England in those days was not overpeopled. The whole 
 of Great Britain had perhaps not more than twelve million 
 
 8—2 
 
OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 36 
 
 [chap. 
 
 intiabitants at the time of the American War. And if 
 even then there was more diffused prosperity iu the colonies 
 than at home, on the other hand the love of native soil, the 
 dominion of habit, the dread and dislike of migration, were 
 infinitely greater. We are not to suppose that the steady 
 stream of emigration to the New World, which we witness, 
 has been flowing ever since there was a New World, or 
 even ever since we had prosperous colonies. This move¬ 
 ment did not begin till after the peace of 1815. Under 
 the old colonial system circumstances were quite different, 
 and may be illustrated by what we know of the history 
 of the New England colonies. Of these we learn that from 
 their commencement in 1620 for twenty years, until the 
 meeting of the Long Parliament, immigration did indeed 
 flow in a steady stream, but for a quite special reason, viz., 
 because the Anglican Church was then harsh, and New 
 England afforded a refuge for Puritanism and Brownism or 
 Independency. Accordingly we are told that as soon as 
 the Lono^ Parliament met this stream ceased to flow, and 
 that afterwards for a hundred years there was so little 
 immigration into New England from Old England that 
 it was believed not to balance the counter-movement of 
 colonists quitting the colony \ 
 
 These were circumstances in which, though there might 
 be colonies, there could be no Greater Britain. The 
 material basis of a Greater Britain might indeed be laid. 
 
 ^ ‘The accessions which New England henceforward (i.e. after 1640) 
 received from abroad were more than counterbalanced by perpetual 
 emigrations, which in the course of two centuries have scattered her sons 
 over every part of North America and indeed of the globe. The immi¬ 
 grants of the preceding period had not exceeded twenty-five thousand, 
 a primitive stock, from which has been derived not less perhaps than a 
 fourth part of the present population of the United States.’ Hildreth, 
 Hist, of U. S. I. p. 267. 
 
THE OLD COLONIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 37 
 
 IV.] 
 
 that is, vast territories might be occupied, and rival nations 
 might be expelled from them. In this material sense 
 Greater Britain was created in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries. But the idea that could shape the 
 material mass was still wanting. Towards this only one 
 step was taken, namely, in laying down the principle that 
 colonies did in some way belong together with the mother- 
 country, that England did in some sense go with them 
 across the sea, and that they could not cease to be English 
 but through a war. 
 
 And what is true of the English colonies in the 
 eighteenth century is equally true of the colonies of other 
 States. Greater Spain, Greater Portugal, Greater Holland, 
 and Greater France, were all, as much as Greater Britain, 
 artificial fabrics, wanting organic unity and life. 
 
 Consequently they were all short-lived, and Greater 
 Britain itself appeared likely to be short-lived. It seemed 
 indeed likely to be more short-lived than many of its 
 rivals. The Spanish colonies in America, which had been 
 founded a hundred years before the English, did not 
 break off so soon. The Declaration of Independence of 
 1776 was not only the most striking, but also the first 
 act of rebellion on the part of colonies against mother- 
 countries. 
 
 Nor did Greater Britain ultimately escape this danger 
 by any wisdom in its rulers. When the utter weakness 
 of the old colonial system had been exposed, we did not 
 abandon it and take up a better. A new Empire gradually 
 grew up out of the same causes which had called into 
 existence the old, and it grew up under much the same 
 system. We had not learnt from experience wisdom, 
 but only despair. We saw that under that system we 
 could not permanently keep our colonies, but, instead of 
 
38 
 
 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 [CH. IV. 
 
 inferring that the system must be changed, we only in¬ 
 ferred that sooner or later the colonies must be lost. 
 
 Then came, in the forties of this century, the victory of 
 free-trade. Among other restraints upon trade it con¬ 
 demned in toto the old colonial system. This system was 
 abolished, but at the same time the opinion grew up that 
 our colonies were useless, and that the sooner they were 
 emancipated the better. And this doctrine would have 
 been obviously sound, if the general conditions of the world 
 had remained the same in the nineteenth century as they 
 were in the eighteenth and seventeenth. Our forefathers 
 had found that they could make no use of colonies except 
 by extracting trade-advantages from them. What then 
 could remain to the mother-country, when her monopoly 
 was resigned ? 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE NEW SYSTEM. 
 
 There followed a quiet period, in which the very 
 slender tie which held the Empire together suffered no 
 strain. In these favourable circumstances the natural 
 bond was strong enough to prevent a catastrophe. English¬ 
 men in all parts of the world still remembered that they 
 were of one blood and one religion, that they had one 
 history and one language and literature. This was 
 enough, so long as neither colonies nor mother-country 
 were called upon to make very heavy sacrifices each 
 for the other. Such a quiet time favours the growth of 
 a wholly different view of the Empire. This view is 
 founded upon the consideration that distance has now no 
 longer the important influence that it had on political 
 relations. 
 
 In the last century there could be no Greater Britain 
 in the true sense of the word, because of the distance 
 between the mother-country and its colonies and between 
 the colonies themselves. This impediment exists no 
 longer. Science has given to the political organism a new 
 circulation, which is steam, and a new nervous system, 
 which is electricity. These new conditions make it neces¬ 
 sary to reconsider the whole colonial problem. They make 
 it in the first place possible actually to realise the old 
 utopia of a Greater Britain, and at the same time they 
 make it almost necessary to do so. First they make it 
 
40 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 possible. In the old time such large political organisms 
 were only stable when they were of low type. Thus 
 Greater Spain was longer-lived than Greater Britain, 
 precisely because it was despotically governed. Greater 
 Britain ran on the rock of parliamentary liberties, which 
 were then impossible on so great a scale, while despotism 
 was possible enough. Had it then been thought possible 
 to give parliamentary representation to our colonists, the 
 whole quarrel might easily have been avoided. But it was 
 not thought possible; and why? Burke gives you the 
 answer in the well-known passage, in which he throws 
 ridicule upon the notion of summoning representatives from 
 so vast a distance. This notion has now ceased at any rate 
 to be ridiculous, however great the difficulties of detail may 
 still be. Those very colonies, which then broke off from us, 
 have since given the example of a federal organisation, in 
 which vast territories, some of them thinly peopled and 
 newly settled, are held easily in union with older com¬ 
 munities, and the whole enjoys in the fullest degree 
 parliamentary freedom. The United States have solved 
 a problem substantially similar to that which our old 
 colonial system could not solve, by showing how a State 
 may throw off a constant stream of emigration, how from a 
 frino^e of settlement on the Atlantic a whole Continent as 
 far as the Pacific may be peopled, and yet the doubt never 
 arise whether those remote settlements will not soon claim 
 their independence, or whether they will bear to be taxed 
 for the benefit of the whole. 
 
 And secondly what is thus shown to be possible appears 
 now to be much more urgently important than in the last 
 century. For the same inventions which make vast poli¬ 
 tical unions possible, tend to make states which are on 
 the old scale of magnitude unsafe, insignificant, second- 
 
THE NEW SYSTEM. 
 
 41 
 
 V.] 
 
 rate. If the United States and Russia hold together for 
 another half century, they will at the end of that time 
 completely dwarf such old European States as France and 
 Germany, and depress them into a second class. They will 
 do the same to England, if at the end of that time England 
 still thinks of herself as simply a European State, as the 
 old United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, such as 
 Pitt left her. It would indeed be a poor remedy, if we 
 should try to face these vast states of the new type by an 
 artificial union of settlements and islands scattered over 
 the whole globe, inhabited by different nationalities, and 
 connected by no tie except the accident that they happen 
 all alike to acknowledge the Queen’s authority. But I 
 have pointed out that what we call our Empire is no such 
 artificial fabric, that it is not properly, if we exclude India 
 from consideration, an empire at all, that it is a vast 
 English nation, only a nation so widely dispersed that 
 before the age of steam and electricity its strong natural 
 bonds of race and religion seemed practically dissolved by 
 distance. As soon then as distance is abolished by science, 
 as soon as it is proved by the examples of the United 
 States and Russia that political union oyer vast areas has 
 begun to be possible, so soon Greater Britain starts up, not 
 only a reality, but a robust reality. It will belong to the 
 stronger class of political unions. If it will not be stronger 
 than the United States, we may say with confidence that 
 it will be far stronger than the great conglomeration of 
 Slavs, Germans, Turcomans and Armenians, of Greek Chris¬ 
 tians, Catholics, Protestants, Mussulmans and Buddhists, 
 which we call Russia. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ENGLAND BEFORE EXPANSION. 
 
 England is now preeminently a maritime, colonising 
 and industrial country. It seems to be the prevalent opinion 
 that England always was so, and from the nature of her 
 people can never be otherwise. In Riickert’s poem the 
 deity that visited the same spot of earth at intervals of 
 five hundred years, and found there now a forest, now a 
 city, now a sea, whenever he asked after the origin of what 
 he saw, received for answer, ‘ It has always been so, and 
 always will be.’ This unhistorical way of thinking, this 
 disposition to ascribe an inherent necessity to whatever we 
 are accustomed to, betrays itself in much that is said about 
 the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. That we might have 
 been other than we are, nay that we once were other, is to 
 us so inconceivable that we try to explain why we were 
 always the same, before ascertaining by any inquiry whether 
 the fact is so. It seems to us clear that we are the great 
 wandering, working, colonising race, descended from sea- 
 rovers and Vikings. The sea, we think, is ours by nature’s 
 decree, and on this highway we travel to subdue the earth 
 and to people it. 
 
 And yet in fact it was only in the Elizabethan age that 
 England began to discover her vocation to trade and to the 
 dominion of the sea. 
 
 Our insular position and the fact that our island 
 towards the West and North looks right out upon the 
 Atlantic Ocean, may lead us to fancy that the nation must 
 
43 
 
 CH. VI.] ENGLAND BEFOKE EXPANSION. 
 
 always have been maritime by the necessity of the case. 
 We entered the island in ships and afterwards we were 
 conquered by a nation of sea-rovers. But after all England 
 is not a Norway ; it is not a country which has only narrow 
 strips of cultivable land, and therefore forces its population 
 to look to the sea for their subsistence. England in the 
 time of the Plantagenets was no mistress of the seas; in 
 fact she was scarcely a maritime state at all. Occasionally 
 in war-time we find medieval England in possession of a 
 considerable navy. But as soon as peace arrives the navy 
 dwindles away again. The constant complaints of piracy in 
 the Channel show how little control England was able to 
 exercise even over her own seas. It has been justly re¬ 
 marked that, as the Middle Ages know of no standing army, 
 so, excepting the case of some Italian city-states, they know 
 of no standing fleet. Over and over again in those times 
 this decay of the navy recurs. Then when a new war broke 
 out, the Government would issue a general licence to all 
 merchant-ships to act as privateers, and the merchant-ships 
 would respond to it by becoming not merely privateers but 
 pirates. In fact, though under the Plantagenets the English 
 nation was more warlike in spirit than it has been since, 
 yet it is observable that in those days its ambition was 
 directed much more to fighting by land than by sea. The 
 glories of the English army of those days greatly eclipse 
 those of the English navy; we remember the victories of 
 Crecy and Poitiers, but we have forgotten that of Sluys. 
 
 The truth is that the maritime greatness of England is 
 of much more modern growth than most of us imagine. It 
 dates from the civil wars of the seventeenth century and 
 from the career of Robert Blake. Blake’s pursuit of 
 Prince Rupert through the Straits of Gibraltar up the 
 eastern coast of Spain is said to have been the first 
 
OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 U 
 
 [chap. 
 
 appearance of an English fleet in the Mediterranean after 
 the time of the Crusades. There are no doubt naval heroes 
 older than Blake. There is Francis Drake, and Richard 
 Grenville, and John Hawkins. But the navy of Elizabeth 
 was only the English navy in infancy, and the heroes 
 themselves are not far removed from buccaneers. Before 
 the Tudor period we And only the embryo of a navy. 
 In the fifteenth century English naval history, except 
 during the short reign of Henry V., shows only feeble¬ 
 ness ; before that too feebleness is the rule and efficiency 
 the exception, until we arrive at the reign of Edward I., 
 who was the first to conceive even the idea of a standing 
 navy. 
 
 And not in maritime war only but in maritime discovery, 
 in maritime activity of all kinds, the greatness of England 
 is modern. In the great unrivalled explorations of the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we did no doubt some¬ 
 thing, but we had no pretension whatever to take the lead. 
 It is true that we made a promising commencement. A 
 ship from Bristol was absolutely the first to touch the 
 American Continent, so that there were English sailors 
 who saw America proper a year or so before Columbus 
 himself. At that moment we seemed likely to rival Spain, 
 for if the commander Cabot ^ was no Englishman, neither 
 was Columbus a Spaniard. But we fell behind again; 
 Henry VII. was unwisely parsimonious, Henry YIII. was 
 caught in the vortex of the Reformation. In the first 
 generation of great discoverers there is no English name. 
 Frobisher, Chancellor and Francis Drake did not appear 
 
 1 John Cabot was an Italian, by citizenship a Venetian, but if his son 
 Sebastian was born after the father settled in Bristol, and if the son not 
 the father commanded the ship, the whole achievement might be made 
 out to be English. The evidence however points the other way. See the 
 discussion in Hellwald, Sebastian Cabot. 
 
ENGLAND BEFOKE EXPANSION. 
 
 45 
 
 VL] 
 
 on the Ocean till Columbus had lain for half a century in 
 his grave. Among nations of maritime renown whether 
 in war, discovery or colonisation, before the time of the 
 Spanish Armada England could not pretend to take any 
 high rank. Spain had carried off the prize, less by merit 
 than by the good fortune which sent her Columbus, but 
 the nation which had really deserved it was beyond dis¬ 
 pute Portugal, which indeed had almost reason to complain 
 of the glorious intrusion of Columbus. Even against him 
 she might urge that, if the object was to find the Indies, 
 she took the right way and found them, while he took the 
 wrong way and missed thernf After these nations, and in 
 quite a lower class, might be placed England and France, 
 and I do not know that England would have a right to 
 stand before France. This is somewhat disguised in our 
 histories owing to the natural desire of the historians 
 to make the most of our actual achievements. In later 
 times, after our maritime supremacy had once begun, we 
 should be surprised at any nation competing with us for 
 the first place, whereas we are content to appear as spirited 
 aspirants venturing to contest the preeminence of Spain 
 after she has enjoyed it for the best part of a century. 
 And even at the end of the sixteenth century, when a large 
 part of the American Continent has been carved out in 
 Spanish vice-royalties, and Portugal has sent out governors 
 to rule in the Indian Ocean,'when Spanish missionaries 
 have visited Japan, when the great poet of Portugal has 
 led a literary career for sixteen years and written an epic 
 
 1 Even if it were answered in his behalf that it is better to be wrong 
 and find America than to be right and find India, Portugal might answer 
 that she did both, since in the second voyage made from Lisbon to India 
 she discovered Brazil, only eight years after the first voyage of Columbus, 
 and would undoubtedly have discovered it, if Columbus had never been 
 born. 
 
46 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CKAP. 
 
 poem in regions which to former poets had seemed 
 fabulous, even as late as this the English are quite begin¬ 
 ners in the maritime career, and have as yet no settle¬ 
 ments. 
 
 But from naval affairs let us turn to manufactures and 
 commerce. Here again we shall find that it is not a 
 natural vocation, founded upon inherent aptitudes, that 
 has given us our success in these pursuits. In manu¬ 
 factures our success depends upon our peculiar relation 
 to the great producing countries of the globe. The 
 vast harvests of the world are reaped in countries 
 where land is wide and population generally thin. 
 But those countries cannot manufacture their own raw 
 materials, because all hands are engaged in producing and 
 there is no surplus population to be employed in manu¬ 
 facture. The cotton of America and wool of Australia 
 therefore come to England, where not only such a surplus 
 population exists, but where also .the great standing in¬ 
 strument of manufacture, coal, is found in abundance and 
 near the coast. Now all this is modern, most of it very 
 modern. The reign of coal began with machinery, that is, 
 in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The vast 
 tracts of production were not heard of till the New World 
 had been laid open, and could not be used freely till two 
 centuries and a half later, when railways were introduced. 
 Evidently therefore the basis of our manufacturing greatness 
 could not be laid till very recent times. The England of 
 the Plantagenets occupied a wholly different economical 
 position. Manufactures were not indeed wanting, but the 
 nation was as yet so far from being remarked for its restless 
 industry and practical talent, that a description written in 
 the fifteenth century says that the English, ‘ being seldom 
 fatigued with hard labour, lead a life more spiritual and 
 
VI.] ENGLAND BEFORE EXPANSION. 47 
 
 refined^! In the main England at that time subsisted 
 upon its lucrative intercourse with Flanders. She pro¬ 
 duced the wool which was manufactured there; she was 
 to Flanders what Australia is now to the West Riding. 
 London was as Sydney, Ghent and Bruges were as Leeds 
 and Bradford. 
 
 This continued in the main to be the case till the 
 Elizabethan age. But then, about the time that the 
 maritime greatness of England was beginning, she began 
 also to be a great manufacturing country. For the manu¬ 
 factures of Flanders perished in the great catastrophe of the 
 religious war of the Low Countries with Spain. Flemish 
 manufacturers swarmed over into England, and gave a 
 new life to the industry which had long had its centre at 
 Norwich. There began what may be called the Norwich 
 period of our manufacturing history, which lasted through 
 the whole seventeenth century. The peculiarity of it was 
 that in this period England manufactured her own product, 
 wool. Instead of being mainly a producing country as 
 before, or mainly a manufacturing country as now, she was 
 a country manufacturing what she herself produced. 
 
 So much for manufactures. But the present industrial 
 greatness of England is composed only in part of her 
 greatness in manufacture. She has also the carrying trade 
 of the world, and is therefore its exchange and business- 
 centre. Now this carrying trade has come to her as the 
 great maritime country; it is therefore superfluous to 
 remark that she had it not in the Middle Ages, when she 
 had not yet become a maritime country. Indeed in those 
 
 ^ Fortescue, quoted by Mr Cunningham, Growth of English Industry 
 and Commerce, p. 217. Besides being indolent and contemplative, the 
 Englishman of the fifteenth century was preeminent in urbanity and 
 totally devoid of domestic affection! See Gairdner’s Paston Letters, 
 vol. III. Intr. p. Ixiii. 
 
48 
 
 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 [CH. VI. 
 
 times a carrying trade can hardly be spoken of. It implies 
 a great sea-traffic, and a great sea-traffic did not begin till 
 the New World was thrown open. Before that event 
 business had its centre in the central countries of Europe, 
 in Italy and the Imperial Cities of Germany. The great 
 business men of the fifteenth century were the Medici of 
 Florence; the Fuggers of Augsburg, the founders of the 
 Bank of St George at Genoa. 
 
 In the Middle Ages England was, from the point of 
 view of business, not an advanced, but on the whole a 
 backward country. She must have been despised in the 
 chief commercial countries; as now she herself looks upon 
 the business-system and the banking of countries like 
 Germany and even France as old-fashioned compared to 
 her own, so in the Middle Ages the Italians must have 
 looked upon England. With their city-life, wide business- 
 connexions and acuteness in affairs they must have 
 classed England, along with France, among the old-world, 
 agricultural, and feudal countries, which lay outside the 
 main-current of the ideas of the time. 
 
 Nor when the great change took place, which left Italy 
 and Germany in their turn stranded, and turned the whole 
 course of business into another channel, are we to suppose 
 that England stepped at once into their place. Their suc¬ 
 cessor was Holland. Through a great part of the seven¬ 
 teenth century the carrying trade of the world was in the 
 hands of the Dutch, and Amsterdam was the exchange of 
 the world. It is against this Dutch monopoly that England 
 struggles in Cromwell’s time and in the earlier part of 
 the reign of Charles II. Not till late in that century 
 does Holland begin to show signs of defeat. Not till then 
 does England decidedly take the lead in commerce. 
 
CHAPTER VIL 
 
 BEGINNING OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 And thus, if we put together all the items, we arrive 
 at the conclusion that the England we know, the supreme 
 maritime commercial and industrial Power, is quite of 
 modern growth, that it did not clearly exhibit its principal 
 features till the eighteenth century, and that the seven¬ 
 teenth century is the period when it was gradually as¬ 
 suming this form. If we ask when it began to do so, the 
 answer is particularly easy and distinct. It was in the 
 Elizabethan Age. 
 
 Now this was the time when the New World began 
 to exert its influence, and thus the most obvious facts 
 suggest that England owes its modern character and its 
 peculiar greatness from the outset to the New World. 
 It is not the blood of the Vikings that makes us rulers of 
 the sea, nor the industrial genius of the Anglo-Saxon that 
 makes us great in manufactures and commerce, but a much 
 more special circumstance, which did not arise till for 
 many centuries we had been agricultural or pastoral, 
 warlike, and indifferent to the sea. 
 
 In the school of Carl Ritter much has been said^ of 
 three stages of civilisation determined by geographical con¬ 
 ditions, the potamic which clings to rivers, the thalassic, 
 which grows up around inland seas, and lastly the oceanic. 
 This theory looks as if it had been suggested by the change 
 which followed the discovery of the New World, when 
 
 1 See Peschel, Abhandlungen zur Erd-und Volkerkunde, p. 398. 
 S. 4 
 
50 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 indeed European civilisation passed from the thalassic to 
 the oceanic stage. Till then trade had clung to the Medi¬ 
 terranean Sea. Till then the Ocean had been a limit, 
 a boundar}^, not a pathway. There had been indeed a 
 certain amount of intercourse across the narrow seas of 
 the North, which had nourished the trade of the Hanseatic 
 League. But in the main the Mediterranean continued to 
 be the head-quarters of industry as of civilisation, and 
 the Middle Age moved so far in the groove of the ancient 
 w'orld that Italy in both seemed to have a natural superi¬ 
 ority over the countries on this side of the Alps. France 
 and England had no doubt advanced greatly, but to the 
 Italian in the fifteenth century they still seemed com¬ 
 paratively barbarous, intellectually provincial and second- 
 rate. The reason of this was that for practical purposes 
 they were inland, while Italy reaped the benefit of the 
 civilising sea. The greatness of Florence rested upon 
 woollen manufactures, that of Venice, Pisa and Genoa 
 upon foreign trade and dependencies, and all this at a 
 time when France and England comparatively were given 
 up to feudalism and rusticity. By the side of the Italian 
 republics, France and England showed like Thessaly and 
 Macedonia in comparison with Athens and Corinth. 
 
 Now Columbus and the Portuguese altered all this by 
 substituting the Atlantic Ocean for the Mediterranean Sea 
 as the highway of commerce. From that moment the reign 
 of Italy is over. The relation of cause and effect is here in 
 some degree concealed by the misfortunes which happened to 
 Italy at the same time. The political faU of Italy happened 
 accidentally just at the same moment. The foreigner crossed 
 the Alps; Italy became a battle field in the great struggle 
 of France and Spain; she was conquered, partitioned, 
 enslaved; and her glory never revived afterwards. Such a 
 
BEGINNING OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 51 
 
 VTL] 
 
 catastrophe and its obvious cause, foreign invasion, blinds 
 us to all minor influences, which might have been working 
 to'produce the same effect at the same time. But assuredly, 
 had no foreign invasion taken place, Italy would just then 
 have entered on a period of decline. The hidden source 
 which fed her energy and glory was dried up by the dis¬ 
 covery of the New World. She might be compared to one 
 of those seaports on the coast of Kent from which the sea 
 has receded. Where there had once been life and movement, 
 silence and vacancy must have set in throughout the great 
 city republics of Italy, even if no stranger had crossed the 
 Alps. The Mediterranean Sea had not indeed receded, 
 but it had lost once for all the character which it had had 
 almost from the days of the Odyssey. It had ceased to be 
 the central sea of human intercourse and civilisation, the 
 chief, nay, almost the one sea of history. It so happened 
 that, soon after commerce began to cover the Atlantic, it 
 was swept out of the Mediterranean by the besom of the 
 Turkish sea-power. Thus Banke remarks that the trade 
 of Barcelona seemed to be little affected by the new dis¬ 
 coveries, but that it sank rapidly from about 1529, in 
 consequence of the maritime predominance of the Turks 
 caused by the successes of Barbarossa, the league of 
 France with Solyman, and the foundation of the Barbary 
 States. So clearly had the providential edict gone forth 
 that European civilisation should cease to be thalassic and 
 should become oceanic. 
 
 The great result was that the centre of movement and 
 intelligence began to pass from the centre of Europe to 
 its Western Coast. Civilisation moves away from Italy and 
 Germany; where it will settle is not yet clear, but certainly 
 further west. See how strikingly this change stands out 
 from the history of the sixteenth century. At the begin- 
 
 4—2 
 
52 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 ning of that century all the genius in the world seems to 
 live in Italy or Germany. The golden age of modem art 
 is passing in the first country, but if there are any rivals 
 to the Italian painters they are German, and Michael 
 Angelo is obliged at least to reason with those who prefer 
 the maniera tedesca. Meanwhile the Reformation belongs 
 to Germany. For France and England in those days it 
 seems sufficient glory to have given a welcome to the 
 Renaissance and to the Reformation. But gradually in 
 the latter part of the sixteenth century we become 
 aware that civilisation is shifting its head-quarters. Italy 
 and Germany are first rivalled and then eclipsed; 
 gradually we grow accustomed to the thought that great 
 things are rather to be looked for in other countries. 
 In the seventeenth century almost all genius and great¬ 
 ness is to be found in the western or maritime states 
 of Europe. 
 
 Now these are the states which were engaged in the 
 struggle for the New World. Spain, Portugal, France, 
 Holland and England have the same sort of position with 
 respect to the Atlantic Ocean that Greece and Italy had 
 in antiquity with respect to the Mediterranean. And 
 they begin to show a similar superiority in intelligence. 
 Vast problems of conquest, colonisation and commerce 
 occupy their minds, which before had vegetated in a 
 rustic monotony. I have already shown you at length 
 what an effect this change had upon the English nation. 
 The effect produced upon the Dutch was quite as striking 
 and much more rapid. The Golden Age of Holland is 
 the first half of the seventeenth century. Let us examine 
 for a moment the causes which produced its prosperity. 
 
 The Low Countries which revolted against Philip II. 
 of Spain were, as you know, not merely the seven pro- 
 
VII.] BEGINNING OF THE EMPIRE. 53 
 
 vinces which afterwards made the Dutch Republic and 
 now make the Dutch Monarchy, but those other provinces 
 which now make the kingdom of Belgium. It was the 
 latter group which at the time of the rebellion were 
 most prosperous. They were the great manufacturing 
 region, the Lancashire or West Riding of the Middle 
 Ages. The former group, the Dutch provinces, were 
 then of much less importance. They were maritime and 
 chiefly occupied in the herring fishery. Now the result 
 of the Rebellion was that Spain was able to retain pos¬ 
 session of the Belgian group, which from this time is 
 known as the Spanish Low Countries, but she was not 
 able to hold the Dutch group, which, after a war which 
 seemed interminable, she was forced to leave to their 
 independence. Now during the struggle the prosperity of 
 the Belgian Provinces, as I have pointed out, was ruined. 
 The Flemish manufacturers emigrated and founded the 
 woollen manufacture of England. But the maritime 
 provinces, poorer at the outset, instead of being ruined 
 grew rich during the war, and had become, before it 
 was ended, the wonder and the great commercial state of 
 the world. How was this ? It was because they were 
 maritime, and because the sea was the highway which 
 led to the New World. As they had devoted themselves 
 earlier to the sea, they had the start of the English, and 
 their war with the Spaniards proved actually an advantage 
 to them, because it threw open to their attack all the 
 thinly-peopled ill-defended American Empire of Spain. 
 The world was astonished to see a petty state with a 
 barren soil and insignificant population, not only hold its 
 own against the great Spanish Empire, but in the midst 
 of this unequal contest found a great colonial empire for 
 itself in both hemispheres. Meanwhile the intellectual 
 
54 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 stimulus, which the sea had begun to give to these Western 
 States, was nowhere more manifest than in Holland. This 
 same small population took the lead in scholarship as in 
 commerce, welcomed Lipsius, Scaliger and Descartes, and 
 produced Grotius at the same time as Piet Hein and 
 Van Tromp. 
 
 This is the most startling single instance of the action 
 of the New World. The effects pi'oduced in Holland 
 were nothing like so momentous as those which I have 
 traced in England, for the greatness of Holland, wanting 
 a basis sufficiently broad, was short-lived, but they were 
 more sudden and more evidently referable to this single 
 cause. 
 
 Such then was the effect of the New World on the Old. 
 
 It is visible not merelv in the wars and alliances of the 
 
 «/ 
 
 time, but also in the economic growth and transformation 
 of the Western States of Europe. Civilisation has often 
 been powerfully promoted by some great enterprise 
 in which several generations continuously take part. 
 Such was the war of Europe and Asia to the ancient 
 Greeks; such the Crusades in the Middle Ages. Such 
 then for the Western States of Europe in recent centuries 
 has been the struggle for the New World. It is. 
 this more than anything else which has placed these 
 nations, where they never were before, in the van of 
 intellectual progress, and especially it is by her success 
 in this field that our own country has acquired her 
 peculiar greatness. 
 
 It was in the Elizabethan age, as I showed, that 
 England first assumed its modern character, and this 
 means, as I showed at the same time, that then first it 
 began to find itself in the main current of commerce, and 
 then first to direct its energies to the sea and to the New 
 
VII.] BEGINNING OF THE EMPIRE. 55 
 
 World. At this point then we mark the beginning of the 
 expansion, the first symptom of the rise of Greater 
 Britain. The great event which announces to the world 
 England’s new character and the new place which she is 
 assuming in the world, is the naval invasion by the Spanish 
 Armada. Here, we may say decidedly, begins the modern 
 history of England. Compare this event with anything 
 that preceded it in English history; you will see at once 
 how new it is. And if you inquire in what precisely the 
 novelty consists, you will arrive at this answer that the 
 event is throughout oceanic. Of course we had always 
 inhabited an island ; of course our foreign wars had always 
 begun at least on the sea. But by the sea in earlier 
 times had always been meant the strait, the channel, 
 or at most the narrow seas. Now for the first time it is 
 different. The whole struggle begins, proceeds and ends 
 upon the sea, and it is but the last act of a drama which 
 has been played, not in the English seas at all, but in 
 the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. The 
 invader is the master of the New World, the inheritor of 
 the legacies of Columbus and Vasco da Gama; his main 
 complaint is that his monopoly of that New World has 
 been infringed ; and by whom is the invasion met ? Not 
 by the Hotspurs of medieval chivalry, nor by the archers 
 who w^on Crecy for us, but by a new race of men, such as 
 medieval England had not known, by the hero-buccaneers, 
 the Drakes and Hawkins, whose lives had been passed in 
 tossing upon that Ocean which to their fathers had been 
 an unexplored, unprofitable desert. Now for the first time 
 might it be said of England—what the popular song 
 assumes to have been always true of her—that ‘her march 
 is on the mountain wave.’ 
 
CHAPTER VIIL 
 
 A TRADE EMPIRE. 
 
 Rut there is no Greater Britain as yet; only the 
 impulse has been felt to found one, and the path has been 
 explored, which leads to the transatlantic seats where the 
 Englishmen of Greater Britain may one day live. While 
 Drake and Hawkins have set the example of the rough 
 heroism and love of roaming which might find the way 
 into the Promised Land, Humphrey Gilbert and Walter 
 Raleigh display the genius which settles, founds and 
 colonises. In the next reign Greater Britain is founded, 
 though neither Gilbert nor Raleigh are allowed to enter 
 into it. In 1606 James I. signs the Charter of Virginia, 
 and in 1620 that of New England. And now very 
 speedily the new life with which England is animated, her 
 new objects and her new resources, are exhibited so as to 
 attract the attention of all Europe. It is in the war of 
 King and Parliament, and afterwards in the Protectorate, 
 that the new English policy is first exhibited on a great 
 scale. Under Cromwell England appears, but prema¬ 
 turely and on the unsound basis of imperialism, such as 
 she definitely became under William III. and continued 
 to be throughout the eighteenth century, and this is 
 England steadily expanding into Greater Britain. 
 
 It seems to me to be the principal characteristic of this 
 phase of England that she is at once commercial and 
 warlike. A commonplace is current about the natural 
 
A TKADE EMPIRE. 
 
 57 
 
 CH. VIII.] 
 
 connexion between commerce and peace, and hence it has 
 been inferred that the wars of modern England are 
 attributable to the influence of a feudal aristocracy. 
 Aristocracies, it is said, naturally love war, being in their 
 own origin military; whereas the trader just as naturally 
 desires peace, that he may practise his trade without 
 interruption. A good specimen of the a priori method 
 of reasoning in politics ! Why! how came we to conquer 
 India ? Was it not a direct consequence of trading with 
 India ? And that is only the most conspicuous illustration 
 of a law which prevails throughout English history in the 
 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the law, namely, of 
 the intimate interdependence of war and trade, so that 
 throughout that period trade leads naturally to war and 
 war fosters trade. The wars of the eighteenth century 
 were incomparably greater and more burdensome than 
 those of the Middle Ages. In a less degree those of the 
 seventeenth century were also great. These are precisely 
 the centuries in which England grew more and more a 
 commercial country. England indeed grew ever more 
 warlike at that time as she grew more commercial. And 
 it is not difficult to show that a cause was at work to 
 make war and commerce increase together. This cause 
 is the old colonial system. 
 
 Commerce in itself may favour peace, but when com¬ 
 merce is artificially shut out by a decree of Government 
 from some promising territory, then commerce just as 
 naturally favours war. We know this by our own recent 
 experience with China. The New World might have 
 favoured trade without at the same time favouring war, if 
 it had consisted of a number of liberal-minded States open 
 .to intercourse with foreigners, or if it had been occupied by 
 European colonies which pursued an equally liberal system. 
 
58 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 But we now know what the old colonial system was. We 
 know that it carved out the New World into territories, 
 which were regarded as estates, to be enjoyed in each case 
 by the colonising nation. The hope of obtaining such 
 splendid estates and enjoying the profits that were reaped 
 from them, constituted the greatest stimulus to com¬ 
 merce that had ever been known, and it was a stimulus 
 which acted without intermission for centuries. This vast 
 historic cause had gradually the effect of bringing to an 
 end the old medieval structure of society and introducing 
 the industrial ages. But inseparable from the commercial 
 stimulus was the stimulus of international rivalry. The 
 object of each nation was now to increase its trade, not 
 by waiting upon the wants of mankind, but by a wholly 
 different method, namely, by getting exclusive possession 
 of some rich tract in the New World. Now whatever may 
 be the natural opposition between the spirit of trade and 
 the spirit of war, trade pursued in this method is almost 
 identical with war, and can hardly fail to lead to war. 
 What is conquest but appropriation of territory? Now 
 appropriation of territory under the old colonial system 
 became the first national object. The five nations of the 
 West were launched into an eager competition for terri¬ 
 tory, that is, they were put into a relation to each other 
 in which the pursuit of wealth naturally led to quarrels, 
 a relation in which, as I said, commerce and war were 
 inseparably entangled together, so that commerce led to 
 war and war fostered commerce. The character of the 
 new period which was thus opened showed itself very early. 
 Consider the nature of that long desultory war of England 
 with Spain, of which the expedition of the Armada was 
 the most striking incident. I have said that the English 
 sea-captains were very like buccaneers, and indeed to 
 
A TRADE EMPIRE. 
 
 59 
 
 VITI.] 
 
 England the war is throughout an industry, a way to 
 
 wealth, the most thriving business, the most profitable 
 
 investment, of the time. That Spanish war is in fact the 
 
 infancy of English foreign trade. The first generation of 
 
 Englishmen that invested capital, put it into that war. As 
 
 now we put our money into railways or what not ? so then 
 
 the keen man of business took shares in the new ship 
 
 which John Oxen ham or Francis Drake was fitting out at 
 
 Plymouth, and which was intended to lie in wait for the 
 
 treasure galleons, or make raids upon the Spanish towns in 
 
 the Gulf of Mexico. And yet the two countries were for- 
 
 mallv not even at war with each other. It was thus that 
 «/ 
 
 the system of monopoly in the New World made trade and 
 war indistinguishable from each other. The prosperity of 
 Holland was the next and a still more startling illustration 
 of the same law. What more ruinous, you say, than a long 
 war, especially to a small state ? And yet Holland made 
 her fortune in the world by a war of some eighty years with 
 Spain. How was this ? It was because war threw open 
 to her attack the whole boundless possessions of her anta¬ 
 gonist in the New World, which would have been closed 
 to her in peace. By conquest she made for herself an 
 Empire, and this Empire made her rich. 
 
 These are the new views which begin to determine 
 English policy under the Protectorate. From the point 
 from which we here regard English history, the great 
 occurrence of the seventeenth century before 1688 is 
 not the Civil War or the execution of the King, but the 
 intervention of Cromwell in the European war. This act 
 may almost be regarded as the foundation of the English 
 World-Empire. It was of so much immediate importance 
 that it may be said to have decided the fall of the Spanish 
 Power. Spain, which less than a century before had over- 
 
60 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CH. VIII. 
 
 shadowed the world, is found soon after lying a helpless 
 prey to the ambition of Louis XIV. Perhaps the turning- 
 point is marked by the Revolution of Portugal, which took 
 place in 1640. Then began the fall of Spain. But for 
 twenty years from that time she struggled with her destiny, 
 and the internal troubles of her rival France caused a 
 reaction in her favour. At this crisis then the interference 
 of Cromwell was decisive. Spain fell never to rise again, 
 and no measure taken by England had for centuries been 
 so momentous. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PHASES OF EXPANSION. 
 
 The history of the expansion of England must neces¬ 
 sarily begin with the two ever-memorable voyages of 
 Columbus and Vasco da Gama in the reign of Henry VIL 
 From that moment the position of England among countries 
 was entirely changed, though almost a century elapsed 
 before the change became visible to all the world. In 
 our history this tract of time forms one period, the 
 characteristic of which is that England is gradually finding 
 out her vocation to the sea. We pass by the domestic 
 disturbances, political religious and social, of that crowded 
 age. We see nothing of the Reformation and its con¬ 
 sequences. What we see is simply that England is slowly 
 and gradually taking courage to claim her share with the 
 Spanish and Portuguese in the new world that has been 
 thrown open. There are a few voyages to Newfoundland 
 and Labrador, then there is a series of bold adventures, 
 which however proved not to have been happily planned. 
 Our explorers, naturally but unfortunately, turned their 
 attention to the Polar regions, and so discovered nothing 
 but frozen oceans, while their rivals were making a trium¬ 
 phal progress ‘ on from island unto island at the gateways 
 of the day.’ Next comes the series of buccaneering raids 
 upon the Spanish settlements, in the course of which the 
 English earned at least a character for seamanship and 
 audacity. 
 
62 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 The Spanish Armada marks the moment when this 
 period of preparation or apprenticeship closes. The internal 
 modification in the nation is now complete. It has turned 
 itself round, and looks now no lonsfer towards the Continent 
 but towards the Ocean and the New World. It has 
 become both maritime and industrial. 
 
 In constitutional history the accession of the House 
 of Stuart is thought to mark a decline. The Tudor 
 sovereignty, popular and exercised with resolution and 
 insight, makes way for a monarchy of divine right, 
 pedantic and unintelligent. But in our view there is 
 no decline, there is continuous development. The per¬ 
 sonal unlikeness of James and Charles to Elizabeth 
 is to us a matter of indifference. The foundation of 
 Greater Britain now takes place. John Smith, the 
 Pilgrim Fathers, and Calvert establish the colonies of 
 Virginia, New England, and Maryland, of which the last 
 marks its date by its name, taken from Queen Henrietta 
 Maria. 
 
 Greater Britain henceforth exists, for henceforth Eng¬ 
 lishmen are living on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It 
 received at once a peculiar stamp from the circumstances of 
 the time. Greater Spain had been an artificial fabric, to 
 which much thought and skilful contrivance had been ap¬ 
 plied by the Home Government. Authority, both civil and 
 ecclesiastical, was more rigorous there than at home. This 
 was because the Spanish settlements, as producing a steady 
 revenue, were all-important to the mother-country. The 
 English settlements, not being thus important, were neg¬ 
 lected. This neglect had a momentous result owing to the 
 discord just then springing up in England. Colonies, if 
 not sources of wealth, might at least be useful as places of 
 refuge for unauthorised opinions. Half a century before 
 
PHASES OF EXPANSION. 
 
 63 
 
 IX.] 
 
 the voyage of the Mayflower Coligny^ had given this turn 
 to colonisation. He had conceived that idea of toleration 
 along with local separation of rival religions, which was 
 afterwards realised within France itself by the Edict of 
 Nantes. How different, be it said in passing, would the 
 world now be, if a Huguenot France had sprung up beyond 
 the Atlantic! The idea of Coligny was now realised by 
 Englands As her settlements were made at a critical mo¬ 
 ment of dissension, an impulse to emigration was supplied 
 which would not otherwise have existed, but at the same 
 time there was introduced a subtle principle of opposition 
 between the New World and the Old. The emigrants 
 departed with a secret determination, which was to bear 
 fruit later, not of carrying England with them, but of 
 creating something which should not be England. 
 
 The second phase of Greater Britain was brought on by 
 the military revolution of 1648. After the triumph of the 
 Commonwealth at home, it had to wage a new war with 
 royalism by sea. From our point of view this second 
 contest is more important than the first; for the army 
 created by Cromwell was destined soon to dissolve again, 
 but the maritime power organised by Vane and wielded by 
 Blake is the English navy of all later time. Our maritime 
 ascendancy has its beginning here. ‘At this moment,’ says 
 Banke, ‘England awoke more clearly than ever before to a 
 consciousness of the advantage of her geographical position, 
 of the fact that a maritime vocation was that to which she 
 was called by nature herself.’ Cromwell’s attack upon the 
 
 ^ See an excellent account of his schemes in Mr Besant’s Coligny. 
 
 2 In the charter of Ehode Island, 1663, it is expressed distinctly. 
 Eeligious liberty is granted ‘ for that the same by reason of the remote 
 distances of those places will, as We hope, be no breach of the unity 
 and uniformity established in this nation.’ Charles 11. in his religious 
 policy seems always to keep his maternal grandfather in view. 
 
64 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 Spanish Empire and seizure of Jamaica, the most high¬ 
 handed measure recorded in the modern history of England, 
 is the natural effect of this new consciousness awakening 
 at a moment when England found herself a military 
 State. 
 
 The next phase is the duel with Holland. This belongs 
 most peculiarly to the first half of the reign of Charles II., 
 when it fills the foreground of the historic stage; but it 
 had begun long before at the massacre of Amboyna in 
 1623, and had grown in prominence under the Common¬ 
 wealth. It may be said to end in the year 1674, when 
 Charles II. withdrew from the attack on Holland, which he 
 had made in combination with Louis XIY. That was a 
 great moment of glory for Holland, when in such extreme 
 danger she found a new champion in the family which had 
 saved her before, when a new Stadtholder, a second William 
 the Silent, stood in the breach to withstand the new inva¬ 
 sion. Nevertheless it was the beginning of the decline of 
 Holland. For in this second great struggle of the Dutch 
 Republic, though she showed the old heroism, she could 
 not have all the old good fortune. She could not again 
 positively prosper and grow rich by means of war, as she 
 had done before. This time she was at war not with Spain, 
 the possessor of infinite colonies, which she .could plunder 
 at leisure, but only with France; her fieet did not now sweep 
 the seas unopposed, but was confronted with the powerful 
 navy of England; and the very source of her wealth, her 
 mercantile marine, was struck at by the English Navigation 
 Act. Accordingly, though she saved herself and after¬ 
 wards had another age of great deeds, the decay of Holland 
 begins now to set in; it becomes visible to all the world 
 at the death of her great Stadtholder, the last of the old 
 line, our William III. England, richer by nature, and not 
 
IX.] PHASES OF EXPANSION. 65 
 
 tried by invasion, begins now to draw ahead, and the 
 daXaaaoKpaTLa of Holland terminates. 
 
 The reign of Charles II. stands out in the history of 
 Greater Britain as a period of remarkable progress\ It 
 was then especially that the American Colonies took the 
 character which they had when they attracted so much 
 attention in the next century, of an uninterrupted series 
 of settlements extending from South to North along the 
 Atlantic coast. For it was in this reign that the Carolinas 
 and Pennsylvania were founded and that th,e Dutch were 
 expelled from New York and Delaware. Considered as a 
 whole and judged by the standard of the time, this American 
 settlement begins now to be most imposing. Its distinc¬ 
 tion is that it has a population which is at once large and 
 almost purely European. Throughout the Spanish settle¬ 
 ments the Europeans were blended and lost in an ocean of 
 Indian and half-Indian population. The Dutch colonies 
 naturally wanted population, because the Dutch mother- 
 country was so small; they were generally little more than 
 commercial stations. The French colonies, which now 
 begin to attract attention, were also weak in this respect. 
 Already in the dawn of French colonial greatness might 
 be perceived a deficiency in genuine colonising power, 
 and perhaps also that slowness of multiplication which has 
 characterised the French since. The row of English colo¬ 
 nies on the Atlantic was perhaps already the most solid 
 achievement in the way of colonisation' that any European 
 state could boast, though it would seem insignificant enough 
 if judged by a modern standard. The whole population 
 at the end of Charles II.’s reign was about two hundred 
 
 1 ‘ The spirit of enterprise,’ writes Mr Sainsbury, ‘and the desire for 
 colonisation appear to have been almost as strong at that period as in the 
 days of Elizabeth and James.’ 
 
 S. 
 
 5 
 
66 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 thousand, but it was a population which doubled itself 
 every quarter of a century. 
 
 What now is the next phase of Greater Britain ? It 
 enters now, in conjunction with Holland, upon a period of 
 resistance to the aggressions of Greater France created by 
 Colbert. From our point of view the administration of 
 Colbert means the deliberate entrance of France into the 
 competition of the Western States for the New World. 
 France had not been much, if at all, behind England in her 
 early explorations. Jacques Cartier had made himself a 
 name earlier than Frobisher and Drake, Coligny had had 
 schemes of colonisation earlier than Raleigh. Acadie and 
 Canada were settled and the town of Quebec founded under 
 the guidance of Samuel Champlain about the time of the 
 voyage of the Mayflower. But, as usual, her European en¬ 
 tanglements checked the progress of France in the New 
 World. The Thirty Years’ War had given her an oppor¬ 
 tunity of laying the foundation of a European Ascendancy. 
 All through the middle of that century she was engaged in 
 almost uninterrupted European war. Of the great Spanish 
 estate which is in liquidation she leaves the colonial part 
 to Holland and England, because she naturally covets for 
 herself that which lies close to her frontier, the Burgundian 
 part. In the days of Cromwell therefore she has fallen some¬ 
 what behind in the colonial race. Mazarin seems to have 
 little comprehension of the oceanic policy of the age. But 
 as soon as he is gone, and the war is over, and a tranquil 
 period has set in, Colbert rises to guide her into this new 
 path. He appropriates all the great commercial inventions 
 of the Dutch Republic, particularly the chartered Company. 
 He labours, and for a time with success, to give to France, 
 the State preeminently of feudalism, aristocracy and chivalry, 
 an industrial and modern character, such as the attraction 
 
PHASES OF EXPANSION. 
 
 67 
 
 lx.] 
 
 of the New World was impressing upon the maritime states. 
 He figures in Adam Smith as the representative statesman 
 of the mercantile system, and indeed, as the minister of 
 Louis XIV., he seemed to embody that perversion of the 
 commercial spirit which filled Europe with war, so that, 
 as Adam Smith himself says, ^commerce, which ought 
 naturally to be, among nations as among individuals, a 
 bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile 
 source of discord and animosity.’ 
 
 The seventeenth century is controlled by two great 
 forces, of which one, the Keformation, is decreasing, while 
 the other, which is the attraction of the New World, 
 increases. The student must continually beware of at¬ 
 tributing to one of these forces results produced by the 
 other. Thus under Cromwell, as under Elizabeth before 
 him, the commercial influence works disguised under the 
 religious. When now, later in the century, the duel 
 between the two Sea-Powers is succeeded by their alliance 
 against France, we have once more to unravel the same 
 tangle of causation. This alliance endured through two 
 great wars and through two English reigns, and it seems, 
 when we trace the growth of it from 1674 to the 
 Revolution of 1688, to be an alliance of the two Pro¬ 
 testant Powers against a new Catholic aggression. For 
 in those years there set in one of the strangest and most 
 disastrous reactions that history has to record. The Revo¬ 
 cation of the Edict of Nantes revived the politics of the 
 sixteenth century. Coinciding nearly in time with the 
 accession of the Catholic James II. in England, it created 
 a world-wide religious panic. History seemed to be rolled 
 back just a century, the age of the League, of Philip 11. 
 and William the Silent seemed to have returned, at a time 
 when it was thought that the balance of the Confessions 
 
 5—2 
 
G8 oitr colonial expansion. [chap. 
 
 had been established firmly thirty years before in the 
 Treaty of Westphalia, and when the age had during those 
 thirty years been drifting in the other direction of colonial 
 expansion. The ideas of Colbert seem suddenly to be for¬ 
 gotten, the wealth he has amassed is wasted, the navy he 
 has founded is exposed to destruction at La Hogue. It is 
 against this Catholic Revival that England and Holland 
 first form their alliance. 
 
 But it was only for a moment, and less really than 
 apparently, that the New World was thus pushed into the 
 background. If we trace history upward instead of down¬ 
 ward, if we look from the Treaty of Utrecht back upon the 
 alliance of the Sea Powers which triumphed there, we see 
 an alliance of quite a different kind. There has been no 
 breach of continuity; Marlborough has the same position 
 as William, and the alliance is still directed against the 
 same Louis XIV, But the religious warmth has faded out 
 of the war, which now betrays by the settlement made at 
 Utrecht its intensely commercial character. That war has 
 such a splendour in our annals, and the title ^\e give it 
 ‘War of the Spanish Succession,’ has such a monarchical 
 ring, that we think it a good sample of the fantastic, bar¬ 
 baric, wasteful wars of the olden time. It is of this war 
 that Tittle Peterkin ’ desires to know ‘ what good came of 
 it at last.’ In reality it is the most business-like of all our 
 wars, and it was waged in the interest of English and Dutch 
 merchants whose trade and livelihood were at stake. All 
 those colonial questions, wLich had been setting Europe at 
 discord ever since the New World was laid open, were 
 brought to a head at once by the prospect of a union 
 between France and the Spanish Empire, for such a union 
 would close almost the whole New World to the English 
 and Dutch, and throw it open to the countrymen of Col- 
 
PHASES OF EXPANSION. 
 
 69 
 
 IX.] 
 
 bert, who were at that moment exploring and settling the 
 Mississippi. Behind all the courtly foppery of the Grand 
 Siecle commercial considerations now rule the world as they 
 had never ruled it before, and as they continued to rule it 
 through much of the prosaic century that was then opening. 
 
 In the midst of this war a memorable event befel, 
 which belongs to this development in the fullest sense, the 
 legislative union of England and Scotland. Bead the history 
 of it in Burton; you will see that it marks the beginning 
 of modern Scottish history, just as the Armada that of 
 modern English history. It is the entrance of Scotland 
 into the competition for the New World. No nation has 
 since, in proportion to its numbers, reaped so much profit 
 from the New World as the Scotch, but before the Union 
 they had no position there. They were excluded from the 
 English trade, and the poverty of the country did not 
 allow them successfully to compete with the other nations 
 on their own account. In William III.’s reign they made 
 a great national effort on the plan then usual. They 
 tried to appropriate to themselves a territory in the New 
 World. They set up the Darien Company, which was to 
 carve a piece for the benefit of Scotland out of the huge 
 territory claimed by Spain as its own. This enterprise 
 failed, and it was out of the excitement and disappoint¬ 
 ment caused by the failure that the negotiations arose 
 which ended in the Union. England gained by the Union 
 security in time of war against a domestic foe ; Scotland 
 gained admission into the New World. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 CULMINATION OF ENGLAND. 
 
 In the history of the expansion of England one of the 
 greatest epochs is marked by the Treaty of Utrecht. In 
 our survey this date stands out almost as prominently as 
 the date of the Spanish Armada, for it marks the begin¬ 
 ning of England’s supremacy. At the time of the Armada 
 we saw England entering the race for the first time; 
 at Utrecht England wins the race. Then she had the 
 audacity to defy a power far greater than her own, and her 
 success brought her forward and gave her a place among 
 great states. She had advanced steadily since, but in the 
 first half of the seventeenth century Holland had attracted 
 more attention and admiration, and in the second half 
 France. From about 1660 to 1700 France had been the 
 first state in the world beyond all dispute. But the Treaty 
 of Utrecht left England the first state in the world, and 
 she continued for some years to be first without a rival. 
 Her reputation in other countries, the respect felt for her 
 claims in literature, philosophy, scholarship and science 
 date from this period. If ever, it was after this time that 
 she held the same kind of intellectual primacy which France 
 had held before. Much of this splendour was transient, 
 but England has remained ever since that date on a higher 
 level than ever before. It has been universally allowed 
 ever since that no state is more powerful than England. 
 But especially it has been admitted that in wealth and 
 commerce and in maritime power, no state is equal to her, 
 
CH. X.] CULMINATION OF ENGLAND. 71 
 
 This was partly because her rivals had fallen off in power, 
 partly because she herself had advanced. 
 
 The decline of Holland had by this time become 
 perceptible. So long as William lived, she enjoyed the 
 benefit of his renown. But in Marlborough’s time and 
 from that time forward languor and the desire of repose 
 grow upon her. Her powers have been overstrained in war 
 with France and in competition with England. Never 
 again does she display her old energy. Thus the old 
 rival has fallen behind. The new rival, France, is for the 
 moment overwhelmed by the disasters of the war, and she, 
 whose affairs thirty years before had been set in order by 
 the greatest financier of the age, is now burdened with a 
 bankruptcy she will carry with her to the Revolution. 
 Her bold snatch at the trade of the New World has not 
 succeeded. She has in a sense won Spain, but not that 
 which made Spain valuable, viz., a share in the American 
 monopoly. Some part of the loss was indeed soon to 
 be repaired. France was soon to show much colonial 
 enterprise and intelligence. Dupleix in India, La Galis- 
 soniere in Canada, the Bailli Suffren on the sea, were 
 to carry the name of France high in the New World and 
 maintain for a long time an equal competition with 
 England. But at the moment of the Peace of Utrecht so 
 much could hardly have been foreseen. Fresh from her 
 victories, England seemed at that moment even greater 
 than she was. 
 
 The positive gains of England were Acadie, or Nova 
 Scotia, and Newfoundland (surrendered by France) and 
 the Asiento Compact granted by Spain. In other words, 
 the first step was taken towards the destruction of Greater 
 France by depriving her of one of her three settlements, 
 Acadie, Canada, and Louisiana, in North America. And 
 
72 OUR COLONIAL. EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 the first great breach was made in that intolerable Spanish 
 monopoly, which then closed the greater part of Central 
 and Southern America to the trade of the world. Eno-land 
 
 o 
 
 was allowed to furnish Spanish America with slaves, and 
 along with slaves she soon managed to smuggle in other 
 commodities. 
 
 I must pause here for a moment to make a general 
 observation. You will remark that in this survey of the 
 growth of Greater Britain I do not make the smallest 
 attempt, either to glorify the conquests made, or to justify 
 the means adopted by our countrymen, any more than, when 
 I point out that England outstripped her four rivals in the 
 competition, I have the smallest thought of claiming for 
 England any superior virtue or valour. I have not called 
 upon you to admire or approve Drake or Hawkins or 
 the Commonwealth or Cromwell or the Government of 
 Charles II. Indeed it is not easy to approve the conduct 
 of those who built up Greater Britain, though there is 
 plenty to admire in their achievements, and much less 
 certainlv to blame or to shudder at than in the deeds of 
 the Spanish adventurers. But I am not writing the 
 biography of these men; it is not as a biographer nor as a 
 poet nor as a moralist that I deal with their actions. I am 
 concerned always with a single problem only, that of 
 causation. My question always is, how came this enter¬ 
 prise to be undertaken, how came it to succeed ? I ask it 
 not in order that we may imitate the actions we read of, 
 but in order that we may discover the laws by which 
 states rise, expand and prosper or fall in this world. In 
 this instance I have also the further object, viz., to throw 
 light on the question whether Greater Britain, now that it 
 exists, may be expected to prosper and endure or to fall. 
 Perhaps you may ask whether we can expect or wish 
 
X.] CULMINATION OF ENGLAND. 73 
 
 it to prosper, if crime has gone to the making of it. But 
 the God who is revealed in history does not usually 
 judge in this way. History does not show that conquests 
 made lawlessly in one generation are certain or even 
 likely to be lost again in another: and, as-government is 
 never to be confounded with property, it does not appear 
 that states have always even a right, much less that they 
 are bound, to restore gains that' may be more or less ill- 
 gotten. The Norman conquest was lawless enough, yet it 
 prospered and prospered permanently; we ourselves own 
 this land of England by inheritance from Saxon pirates. 
 The title of a nation to its territory is generally to he 
 sought in primitive times, and would be found, if we could 
 recover it, to rest upon violence and massacre; the 
 territory of Greater Britain was acquired in the full light 
 of history and in part by unjustifiable means, but less 
 unrighteously than the territory of many other Powers, 
 and perhaps far less unrighteously than that of those 
 states whose power is now most ancient and established. 
 If we compare it with other Empires in respect of its 
 origin, we shall see that it has arisen in the same way, 
 that its founders have had the same motives, and these 
 not mainly noble, that they have displayed much fierce 
 covetousness, mixed with heroism, that they have not 
 been much troubled by moral scruples, at least in their 
 dealings with enemies and rivals, though they have 
 often displayed virtuous selfidenial in their dealings 
 among themselves. So far w^e shall find Greater Britain 
 to be like other Empires, and like other states of 
 whose origin we have any knowledge; but its annals are 
 on the whole better, not worse, than those of most. They 
 are conspicuously better than those of Greater Spain, 
 which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity. 
 
74 
 
 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 In some pages of these annals there is a real elevation of 
 thought and an intention at least of righteous dealing, 
 which are not often met with in the history of colonisation. 
 Some of these founders remind us of Abraham and Aeneas. 
 The crimes on the other hand are such as have been al¬ 
 most universal in colonisation. 
 
 I make these remarks in this place because I have now 
 before me the greatest of these crimes. England had 
 taken some share in the slave-trade as early as Elizabeth’s 
 age, when John Hawkins distinguished himself as the 
 first Englishman who stained his hands with its atrocity. 
 You will find in Hakluyt his own narrative, how he came 
 in 1567 upon an African town, of which the huts were 
 covered with dry palm-leaves, how he set fire to it, and 
 out of ‘8000 inhabitants succeeded in seizing 250 persons, 
 men, women and children.’ But we are not to suppose 
 that from that time until the abolition of the slave-trade 
 England took a great or leading share in it. England 
 had then, and for nearly half a century afterwards, no 
 colonies in which there could be a demand for slaves, and 
 when she acquired colonies they were not rilining colonies 
 like the first colonies of Spain, in which the demand for 
 slaves had been urgent. Like our colonial empire itself, 
 our participation in the slave-trade was the gradual growth 
 of the seventeenth century. By the Treaty of Utrecht it 
 was, as it were, established, and became ‘a central object 
 of English policy \’ From this date I am afraid we took the 
 leading share, and stained ourselves beyond other nations 
 in the monstrous and enormous atrocities of the slave-trade. 
 
 This simply means that we were not better in our 
 principles in this respect than other nations, and that, 
 
 ^ The phrase is borrowed from Mr Lecky. See History of England 
 in the Eighteenth Century, ii. p. 13. 
 
CULMINATION OF ENGLAND. 
 
 75 
 
 X.] 
 
 having now at last risen to the highest place among the 
 trading-nations of the world and having extorted the 
 Asiento from Spain by our military successes, we acci¬ 
 dentally obtained the largest share in this wicked com¬ 
 merce. It is fair that we should bear this in mind while 
 we read the horror-striking stories which the party of 
 Abolition afterwards published. Our guilt in this matter 
 was shared by all the colonising nations; we were not the 
 inventors of the crime, and, if within a certain period we 
 were more guilty than other nations, it is some palliation 
 that we published our own guilt, repented of it and did at 
 last renounce it. But taken together the whole successful 
 development which culminated at Utrecht secularised and 
 materialised the English people as nothing had ever done 
 before. Never were sordid motives so supreme, never was 
 religion and every high influence so much discredited, as 
 in the thirty years that followed. There has been a 
 disposition to antedate this corruption, and to attribute it 
 to the wrong cause. It was not so much after the 
 Restoration, as after the Revolution, and especially after 
 the reign of Queen Anne, that cynicism and corruption 
 set in. In his well-known essay on ‘the Comic Dramatists 
 of the Restoration’ Macaulay attributes to the Restora¬ 
 tion the cynicism of four writers, Wycherley, Congreve, 
 Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, of which writers three did not 
 write a play till several years after the Revolution! 
 
 We have arrived then at the stage when England, in 
 the course of her expansion, stands out for the first time as 
 the supreme maritime and commercial Power in the World. 
 It is evidently her connexion with the New World that has 
 given her this character; nevertheless she did not yet 
 appear at least to ordinary eyes as absolutely the first colonial 
 Power. In extent her territories were still insignificant by 
 
76 
 
 .OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 the side of those of Spain and much inferior to those of 
 Portugal. They were but a fringe on the Atlantic coast of 
 North America, a few Western Islands and a few commercial 
 stations in India. What was this compared with the mighty 
 viceroyalties of Spain in Southern and Central America ? 
 And, as I have said before, France as a colonial Power might 
 seem in some respects superior to England; her colonial 
 policy might seem more able and likely in the end to be 
 more successful. 
 
 Holland being now in decline, the rivalry of England 
 is henceforth with Spain and France, Powers henceforth 
 united by a Family Compact. But the pressure of it now 
 falls mainly on France, since it is France, not Spain, that 
 is neighbour to England both in America and in India. 
 There begins a long duel of France and England. The 
 decisive event of it is the Seven Years’ War and the new 
 position given to England by the Treaty of Paris in 1762. 
 Here is the culminating point of English power in the 
 eighteenth century; nay, relatively to other states Eng¬ 
 land has never since been so great. For a moment it 
 seems that the whole of North America is destined to be 
 hers, and to make for ever a part of Greater Britain. Such 
 an empire would not have been greater in mere extent 
 than that which Spain already possessed; but in essential 
 greatness and power how infinitely superior! The Spanish 
 Empire had the fundamental defect of not being European 
 in blood. Not only did the part of the population which 
 was European belong to a race which even in Europe 
 appeared to be in decline, but there was another large part 
 which had a mixture of barbarism in its blood, and another 
 larger still whose blood was purely barbaric. The English 
 Empire was throughout of civilised blood, except so far as it 
 had a slave-population. But the .example of antiquity shows 
 
CULMINATION OF ENGLAND. 
 
 77 
 
 X.] 
 
 that a separate slave-caste, discharging all drudgery and 
 unskilled labour, is consistent with a very high form of 
 civilisation. Much more serious is the deterioration of the 
 national type by barbaric intermixture. 
 
 In this culminating phase England becomes an object 
 of jealousy and dread to all Europe, as Spain and afterwards 
 France had been in the seventeenth century. It was 
 about the time when she won her first victories in the 
 colonial duel with France, that an outcry began to be raised 
 against her as the tyrant of the seas. In 1745, just after 
 the capture of Louisburg, the French Ambassador at St 
 Petersburg handed in a note, in which he complained of 
 the maritime despotism of the English, and their purpose 
 of destroying the trade and navigation of all other nations; 
 he asserted the necessity of a combination to maintain the 
 maritime balance. England’s former ally joins in the com¬ 
 plaint, for there appeared about the same time a pamphlet 
 entitled ‘ La voix d’un citoyen d Amsterdam' in which the 
 cry Delenda est Carthago, formerly raised by Shaftesbury 
 against Holland, is now echoed back by a certain Maubert 
 against England. ‘Mettons nous,’ he exclaims, ‘avec la 
 France au niveau de la Grande Bretagne, enrichissons- 
 nous de ses propres fautes et du delire ambitieux de ses 
 Ministres.’ And then he suggests a Coalition for the pur¬ 
 pose of procuring the repeal of the Navigation Act. From 
 this time till 1815 jealousy of England is one of the great 
 motive forces of European politics. It led to the inter¬ 
 vention of France in America, and to the Armed Neutrality; 
 later it became a kind of passion in the mind of the First 
 Napoleon, and lured him gradually on, partly against his 
 will, to make the conquest of Europe. 
 
CHAPTER XT. 
 
 SCHISM IX GREATER BRITAIX. 
 
 So far we have traced a course of uninterrupted con¬ 
 tinuous expansion. Slowly but surely England has grown 
 greater and greater. But now occurs an event wholly new 
 in kind, a sudden shock, proving that in the New World 
 there might be other hostile Powers besides the rival States 
 of Europe. The secession of the American colonies is one 
 of those events, the immense significance of which could not 
 even at the moment be overlooked. It was felt at the 
 time to be pregnant with infinite consequences, and so it 
 has proved, though the consequences have not been pre¬ 
 cisely of the kind that was expected. It was the first 
 stirring of free will on the part of the New World, which 
 had remained, since Columbus discovered it, and since the 
 Spanish Adventurers ruthlessly destroyed whatever germs 
 of civilisation it possessed, in a kind of nonage. But 
 now it asserts itself; it accomplishes a revolution in the 
 European style, appealing to all the principles of European 
 civilisation. This was in itself a stupendous event, perhaps 
 in itself greater than that French Revolution, which 
 followed so soon and absorbed so completely the attention 
 of mankind. But it might have seemed at the moment 
 to be the fall of Greater Britain. For the thirteen colonies 
 which then seceded were almost all the then colonial 
 Empire of Britain. And their secession seemed at the 
 moment a proof demonstrative that any Greater Britain 
 of the kind must always be unnatural and short-lived. 
 
79 
 
 CH. XI.] SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN. 
 
 Nevertheless a century has passed and there is still a 
 Greater Britain, and on more than the old scale of mag¬ 
 nitude. 
 
 Readers of English history underrate the importance 
 of the American War. 
 
 What is the true test of the historical importance 
 of events ? I say, it is their ^pregnancy, or in other words 
 the greatness of the consequences likely to follow from 
 them. On this principle I have argued that in the 
 eighteenth century the expansion of England is historically 
 far more important than all domestic questions and move¬ 
 ments. Look at the great personage who dominates English 
 politics through the whole middle period of that century, 
 the elder Pitt. His greatness is throughout identified with 
 the expansion of England; he is a statesman of Greater 
 Britain. It is in the buccaneering war with Spain that he 
 sows his political wild oats; his glory is won in the great 
 colonial duel with France; his old age is spent in striving 
 to avert schism in Greater Britain. 
 
 Look now at the American Revolution. In pregnancy 
 this event is evidently unique. So it has always struck 
 impartial observers at a distance. But the newspaper 
 politicians of the day had no time for such large views. 
 To them it presented itself only in detail, as a series of 
 questions upon which Parliament would divide. These 
 questions came before them mixed up inextricably with 
 other questions, often of the pettiest kind, yet at the 
 moment not less important as practical questions of party 
 politics. It is well known that the Stamp Act passed at 
 first almost without notice. A Parliament which dis¬ 
 cussed one night the Address, another night listened to 
 declamations on the back-stairs influence of Bute and 
 covert attacks on the Princess Dowager, another night 
 
80 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. • [CHAP. 
 
 excited itself over Wilkes and General Warrants, found on 
 the Order of the Day a proposal for taxing the colonies, 
 and passed it as a matter of course with as little attention 
 as is now given to the Indian Budget. This is deplorable 
 enough, though it may be difficult to remedy. But what 
 excuse can there be for introducing. into history such a 
 preposterous confusion of small things with great? And 
 yet consider whether by our artless chronological method, 
 and by the slavish obsequiousness with which our his¬ 
 torians follow the order of business fixed by Parliament, we 
 do not really make much the same mistake in estimating 
 the American Bevolution that was made by those who pass¬ 
 ed the Stamp Act with scarcely a division. The American 
 question is introduced in our histories almost as irrationally 
 as it was introduced at the time into Parliament; it is 
 introduced without any preparation, and in mere chrono¬ 
 logical order among other questions wholly unlike it. 
 What is the use of history, if it does not protect us in 
 reviewing the past from those surprises which in the 
 politics of the day arise inevitably out of the vastness and 
 multiplicity of modern states ? And yet the American 
 Revolution surprises us now in the reading as much as it 
 did our forefathers when it happened. We too, as we read, 
 have our heads full of Bute’s influence, of the kinof’s 
 marriage, of the king’s illness, of Wilkes and General 
 Warrants, when suddenly emerges the question of taxing 
 the American colonies. Soon after we hear of discontent 
 in the colonies. And then we say, just as our forefathers 
 did, ‘By the way what are these colonies, and how did they 
 come into existence, and how are they governed ?’ The 
 historian, just as a daily paper might do, undertakes to 
 post us up in the subject. He stops and inserts at this 
 point a retrospective chapter, in which he informs us that 
 
SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN. 
 
 81 
 
 XL] 
 
 the country really has, and has long had, colonies in North 
 America! He imparts to us just as much information 
 about these colonies as may enable us to understand the 
 debates now about to open on the repeal of the Stamp 
 Act, and then, apologising for his departure from chrono¬ 
 logical order, he hurries back to his narrative. In this 
 narrative he seems always to watch proceedings from the 
 reporters’ gallery in the House of Commons. You would 
 think it was in Parliament that the Revolution took place. 
 America is the great question of the Rockingham Cabinet, 
 then later of the North Cabinet. The final loss of America 
 is considered very important because it brings down the 
 North Cabinet! 
 
 When he relates the conclusion of the Treaty of 1783, 
 the historian will no doubt pause for a moment and insert 
 a solemn paragraph upon the event, which he will re¬ 
 cognise as momentous. He will explain that colonies 
 always secede as soon as they feel themselves ripe for 
 independence, and that the secession of America was no 
 loss but rather a gain for England. Hereupon he dismisses 
 the subject, and henceforth you hear as little of America 
 from him as you heard before the troubles began. New 
 subjects have cropped up in the House of Commons. He 
 is busy with the stormy debates on the India Bill, the 
 struggle of young Pitt with the Coalition, the Westminster 
 Election, and a little later the Regency Debates. For the 
 English historian is as much fascinated by Parliament, and 
 pursues all its movements with the same reverential at¬ 
 tention, as the old historians of France show in following 
 the personal movements of Louis XIY. When at last he 
 reaches the wars of the French Revolution, and the great 
 struggle of England with Napoleon, then indeed he leaves 
 behind him finally the inglorious campaigns of Burgoyne 
 
OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. 
 
 82 
 
 [chap. 
 
 and Cornwallis, and rejoices once more to have to record 
 really great events and the deeds of great men. 
 
 Now I do not think I risk anything by saying in con¬ 
 tradiction to all this that the American Revolution, instead 
 of being a tiresonie unfortunate business which may be 
 despatched in a very brief narrative, is an event not only 
 of greater importance but on an altogether higher level 
 of importance than almost any other in modern English 
 history, and that it is intrinsically much more memorable 
 to us than our greafwar with Revolutionary France, which 
 indeed only arrives to be at all comparable to it through 
 the vast indirect consequences produced necessarily by a 
 war on so large a scale and continued so long. No doubt 
 it is much more stirring to read of the Nile, Trafalgar, the 
 Peninsula and Waterloo than of Bunker’s Hill, Brandy¬ 
 wine, Saratoga and Yorktown, and this not only because we 
 like better to think of victory than of defeat, but also 
 because in a military sense the struggle with France was 
 greater and more interesting than that with America, and 
 Napoleon, Nelson, and Wellington were greater commanders 
 than those who appeared in the American Revolution. But 
 events take rank in history not as they are stirring or 
 exciting, much less as they are gratifying to ourselves, 
 but as they are pregnant with consequences. 
 
 The American Revolution called into existence a new 
 state, a state inheriting the language and traditions of 
 England, but taking in some respects a line of its own, in 
 which it departed from the precedents not only of England 
 but of Europe. This state was at the time not large in 
 population, though it was very large in territory, and there 
 were many chances that it would dissolve again and never 
 grow to be very powerful. But it has not dissolved; it 
 has advanced steadily, and is now, as I have said, superior 
 
SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN. 
 
 83 
 
 XL] 
 
 not only in territory but in population also to every 
 European state except Russia. Now it is by this result 
 that I estimate the historic importance of the Revolution, 
 since it is with the rise and development of states that 
 history deals. v 
 
 I have called attention to a series of events, the Spanish 
 Armada, the colonisation of Virginia and New England, 
 the growth of the English navy and trade, Cromwell’s 
 attack on Spain, the naval wars with Holland, the colonial 
 expansion of France and decline of Holland, the maritime 
 supremacy of England from the Peace of Utrecht, the duel 
 of England and France for the New World. I have shown 
 that these events taken together make up the expansion of 
 England, that during the seventeenth century this develop¬ 
 ment is necessarily somewhat hidden behind the domestic 
 struggle of the nation with the Stuart kings, but that in 
 the eighteenth century it ought to be brought into the 
 foreground of history. Now in this series the next event 
 is the Schism, the American Revolution, and the historic 
 magnitude of this event is as much above that of most 
 earlier events in our history as Greater Britain is greater 
 than England. For its magnitude is not to be estimated by 
 inquiringwhether Howe and Cornwallis were great generals, 
 or whether Washington was or was not a man of genius! 
 And in universal history it is scarcely less great than in 
 the history of England. The foundation in new territory 
 of a state of fifty millions of men, which before many 
 years will be a hundred millions, this by itself is far 
 above the level of all previous history. No such event 
 had occurred before in full daylight either in the New 
 World or in the Old. Such a state has ten times the 
 population that England had at the Revolution of 1688, 
 and twice the population that France had at the Revo- 
 
 6—2 
 
84 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 lution of 1789. This fact, if it stood by itself, would be 
 enough to show that time has brought us into a period of 
 greater magnitudes and higher numbers than past history 
 has dealt with. But it does not stand by itself. Bigness 
 no doubt is not necessarily greatness, and in Asiatic 
 history, though not in European, much larger figures may 
 be met with, for India and China have a population not 
 less than five times as large as the United States. But 
 the peculiarity of this state lies as much in its quality as 
 in its magnitude. Hitherto, unless we except the im¬ 
 perfectly known case of China, all states that have been of 
 very large extent have been of low organisation. 
 
 It had been the boast of England to show how liberty, 
 such as had been known in the city-states of Greece and 
 Italy, might be maintained in a nation-state of the modern 
 type. Now the new state founded in America inherited 
 this discovery, both the theory and the practice of it, and 
 has devised all the modifications that were necessary for the 
 application of it to a still larger territory. The consequence 
 is that this new large state, while in extent it belongs to 
 the same class as India or Bussia, is in point of liberty at the 
 opposite end of the scale. Hegel described the history of 
 the world as a gradual development of human free will. 
 According to him there are some states in which only one 
 man is free, others in which a few are free, others in 
 which many. Now if we were to arrange states in a 
 series according to the extension of the spirit of freedom, 
 we should put most of the very large states of the world 
 at the lower end of such a scale. But no one would 
 hesitate to put this very large state, the United States, at 
 the opposite end, as being beyond question the state in 
 which free will is most active and alive in every in¬ 
 dividual. 
 
XI.] SCHISM IN GREATER BRITAIN. 85 
 
 Here is a result which is great, and not merely big! 
 But to Englishmen the American phenomenon ought 
 to be infinitely more interesting and important than to 
 the rest of mankind because of the unique relation 
 in which they stand to it. There is no other example 
 in history of two great states related to each other as 
 England and the United States are related. True, 
 the South American Republics have sprung from Spain, 
 and Brazil from Portugal, in the same way, but they 
 cannot be called great states; and besides, as I have 
 said, the South American population is to a very large 
 extent of Indian blood. But this great state, sprung from 
 England and predominantly English in blood, is not 
 practically separated from us, as their former colonies are 
 separated from Spain and Portugal by remoteness of 
 space, but by reason of the immense expansion and ubi¬ 
 quitous activity of both nations is always close to us, always 
 in contact with us, exerts a strong influence upon us by the 
 strange career it runs and the novel experiments it tries, 
 while at the same time it receives from us a great influ¬ 
 ence in many ways, but principally through our literature. 
 
 There is no topic so pregnant as this of the mutual in¬ 
 fluence of the branches of the English race. The whole 
 future of the planet depends upon it. But if so, what 
 are we to think of the treatment which the American 
 Revolution receives from our historians? One would 
 think that the importance of the event in English 
 history and in universal history were no concern of 
 theirs. They despatch it very summarily. They treat 
 us to a constitutional discussion of the right of taxation 
 and to some glowing descriptions of Chatham’s oratory; 
 in due time they describe the war, apologise for our 
 defeats, make the most of our successes, tell some anec- 
 
86 OUK COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CH. XI. 
 
 dotes of Franklin, estimate the merits of Washington, and 
 then dismiss the whole subject, as if it were tedious and 
 did not interest them. A very minor question in the long 
 Stuart controversy would occupy them longer, the adventures 
 of Prince Charles Edward would rouse their imaginations 
 more, the inquiry who was the author of Junius would 
 excite a more eager curiosity. 
 
 Is there not something wrong here ? Is it not evident 
 that we have yet to learn what history is, that what we 
 have hitherto called history is not history at all, but ought 
 to be called by some other name, perhaps biography, 
 perhaps party politics? History, I say, is not constitu¬ 
 tional law, nor parliamentary tongue-fence, nor biography 
 of great men, nor even moral philosophy. It deals with 
 states, it investigates their rise and development and 
 mutual influence, the causes which promote their pros¬ 
 perity or bring about their decay. 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 MORAL. 
 
 But in this book the American Revolution is to be 
 discussed in one aspect only, viz., as the end of our first 
 experiment in expansion. Like a bubble, Greater Britain 
 expanded rapidly and then burst. It has since been ex¬ 
 panding again. Can we avoid the obvious inference ? 
 
 It is constantly repeated, as if it were beyond dispute, 
 that the secession of the American colonies was an 
 inevitable result of the natural law which prompts 
 every colony, when it is ripe, to set up for itself, and 
 that therefore the statesmen of George III.’s time who 
 are responsible for it, George Grenville, Charles Town- 
 shend, and Lord North, can be charged with nothing 
 more serious than hastening perhaps by a little an un¬ 
 avoidable catastrophe. Now on this head I need add but 
 little to what I have said already. So long as a colony is 
 regarded as a mere estate out of which the mother-country is 
 to make a pecuniary profit, of course its allegiance is highly 
 precarious, of course it will escape as soon as it can. In 
 truth the illustration drawn from the grown-up son is not 
 half strong enough for such a case. On that system a 
 colony is not treated as a child but as a slave, and it will 
 emancipate itself from such a yoke, not with gratitude as 
 a grown-up son may do, but with indignation that it 
 should ever, even in its weakness, have been treated so. 
 The secession of the American colonies therefore was 
 
88 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 ^ t 
 
 perhaps inevitable, but only because, and so far as, they 
 wer^held under the old colonial system. 
 
 I have explained how difficult it was at that time to sub¬ 
 stitute a better system,but a better system exists, a.better 
 system is practicable now. There is now no reason why a 
 colony after a certain time should desire emancipation; nay, 
 even in that age the practice of our colonial government 
 was much better than the theory. We are not to suppose 
 that the colonies rebelled against English rule simply as 
 such. The Government against which they rebelled was that 
 of George III. in his first twenty years; now that period 
 stands marked in our domestic annals too for the narrow¬ 
 -mindedness and perverseness of Government. There was 
 discontent at home as well as in the colonies. Mansfield 
 on the one side of politics and Grenville on the other 
 had just at that time given an intei-pretation of our 
 liberties which deprived them of all reality. It was this 
 new-fangled system, not the ordinary system of English 
 government, which excited discontent everywhere alike, 
 which provoked the Wilkes agitation in England at the 
 same time as the colonial agitation beyond the Atlantic. 
 But the malecontents in England had no such simple 
 remedy as lay at the command of the malecontents of 
 Massachusetts and Virginia. They could oot repudiate 
 the Government which roused their sense of injury. 
 
 It was not then simply because they were colonies that 
 our colonies rebelled. It was because they were colonies 
 under the old colonial system, and at a moment when 
 that system itself was administered in an unusually narrow¬ 
 minded and pedantic way. But I observe next that any 
 general inference drawn from the conduct of these colonies 
 is open to objection, because they were not normal but verv* 
 peculiar colonies. 
 
MORAL. 
 
 89 
 
 XII.] 
 
 The modern idea of a colony is that it is a community 
 formed by the overflow of another community. Over¬ 
 crowding and poverty in one country* causes, we think, 
 emigration to another country which is emptier and richer. 
 I have explained that this was not the nature of our 
 American colonies. England^ on the one hand was then 
 not overcrowded. On the other hand the eastern coast 
 of North America, where the colonies were settled> was not 
 specially attractive by its wealth. It was no Eldorado, no 
 Potosi, and in the northern part it was even poor. 
 Why then did colonists settle in it ? They had one 
 ■predominant motive, and it was the same which Moses 
 alleged to Pharaoh for the Exodus of the Israelites. ‘ We' 
 must go seven days’ journey into the wilderness to offer a 
 sacriflce unto the Lord our God.’ Religion impelled them. 
 They wished to live on beliefs and to practise rites which 
 were not tolerated in England. This indeed was not the 
 case everywhere alike. Virginia of course was Anglican. 
 But the New England colonies were Puritan, Pennsylvania 
 was Quaker, Maryland was Catholic, while of South 
 Carolina we read^ that ‘the Churchmen were not a third 
 part of the inhabitants ’ and that ‘ many various opinions 
 had been taught by a multitude of teachers and ex¬ 
 pounders of all sorts and persuasions.’ Thus the old 
 emigration was a real exodus, that is, it was a religious 
 emigration. Now this makes all the difference. The 
 emigrant who goes out merely to make his fortune may 
 possibly in time forget his native land; but he is not likely 
 to do so; absence endears it to him, distance idealises it; 
 he desires to return to it when his money is made, he 
 
 1 Compare the chapter in Adam Smith ; Of the motives for establish¬ 
 ing new colonies. 
 
 2 Hildreth ii. p. 232. 
 
90 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 would gladly be buried in it There is scarcely more than 
 one thing that can break this spell, and that is religion. 
 EeHgion indeed may turn emigration into exodus. Those 
 who leave Trov cairvinsr their ^ods with them can resist 
 no doubt the yearning that draws them back; they can 
 build with confidence their Lavinium or their Alba or 
 even their Rome in the new territory unhallowed before. 
 For I alwavs hold that religion is the great state-building 
 principle; these colonists could create a new state because 
 they were already a church, since the church, so at least I 
 hold, is the soul of the state; where there is a church a 
 state grows up in time; but if you find a state which is 
 not also in some sense a church, you find a state which is 
 not long for this world. 
 
 Xow in this respect the American colonies were very 
 peculiar. How is it possible to draw from their history 
 any conclusion about colonies in general ? In particular 
 how can vou argue from their case to the case of our 
 present colonies which have grown up since ? In those 
 colonies there was from the outset a spirit driving them to 
 separation from England, a principle attracting them and 
 conglobing them into a new union among themselves. I 
 have remarked how early this spirit showed itself in the 
 Xew England colonies. Xo doubt it was not present in 
 all. It was not present in Yirginia. But when the colonial 
 discontents, heated by the pedantry of Grenville and Lord 
 Xorth, burst into a flame, then was the moment when 
 Virg ini a went over to Xew England, and the spirit of the 
 Pilgrim Fathers found the power to turn offended colonists 
 into a new nation. 
 
 But what is to be found similar to this in our present 
 colonies? They have not sprung out of any religious 
 exodus. Their founders carried no gods with them. On 
 
MORAL. 
 
 91 
 
 XII.j 
 
 the contrary they go out into the wilderness of mere 
 materialism, into territories where as yet there is nothing 
 consecrated, nothing ideal. Where can their gods be but 
 at home ? If they in such circumstances can find within 
 them the courage to stand out as state-builders, if they 
 can have the heart to sever themselves from English 
 history, from all traditions and memories of the island 
 where their fathers lived for a thousand years, it will 
 indeed be necessary to think that England is a name which 
 possesses sadly little attractive power. 
 
 I think then that we mistake the moral of the 
 American Revolution, when we infer from it that all 
 colonies—and not merely colonies of religious refugees 
 under a bad colonial system—fall off from the tree as soon 
 as they ripen. And in like manner perhaps we draw a 
 wrong inference, and omit to draw the right inference, 
 from the prosperity which the United States have enjoyed 
 since the secession. I suppose there has never been in 
 any community so much happiness, or happiness of a kind 
 so little demoralising, as in the United States. But the 
 causes of this happiness are not political. They lie rooted 
 much deeper than the political institutions of the country. 
 If a philosopher were asked for a recipe to produce the 
 greatest amount of pure happiness in a community he 
 would say: ‘Take a number of men whose characters have 
 been formed during many generations by rational liberty, 
 serious religion, and strenuous labour. Place these men in 
 a wide territory, where no painful pressure shall reach 
 them, and where prosperity shall be within the reach of 
 all. Adversity gives wisdom and strength, but with pain; 
 prosperity gives pleasure, but relaxes the character. Ad¬ 
 versity followed after a time by prosperity, this is the 
 recipe for healthy happiness, for it gives pleasure without 
 
92 OUK COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 speedily relaxing energy. And it is a better recipe still if 
 the prosperity at last given shall not be given too easily 
 and unconditionally’. Now these are the conditions which 
 have produced American happiness. Characters formed in 
 a temperate zone, by Teutonic liberty and Protestant 
 religion; prosperity conferred freely but in measure, and 
 on the condition not only of labour but of the use of intel¬ 
 ligence and ingenuity. 
 
 This recipe will produce happiness, but only for a time, 
 only as long as the population bears a low proportion to the 
 extent of territory. For a long time it was supposed that 
 America had some magic secret by which she avoided all 
 the evils of Europe. The secret was simple; prosperous 
 conditions of life and strong characters. Of late years 
 the Americans themselves have awakened from the dream 
 that their country is never to be soiled with the crimes and 
 follies of Europe. They have no enemies, but yet they 
 have had a war on a scale as gigantic as their territory, 
 which Mr Wells reckons to have cost in four years a million 
 lives and nearly two thousand millions of pounds sterling. 
 They have not kings, and yet we know that they have had 
 regicide. Nevertheless the reputation and the greatness of 
 the United States stands now perhaps higher than ever. 
 But insensibly their pretensions have taken a new charac¬ 
 ter. Now it is said that no state was ever so powerful, 
 that it is or will be the dominating state of the world; in 
 other words it is classed among other states, but at the 
 head of them. Its pretension used to be wholly different. 
 It used to claim to be unique in kind; to be a visible 
 proof that the states of Europe with their vaunts of 
 power, their haughty governments, their wars and their 
 debts, were on the wrong road altogether; that happiness 
 and virtue hold a more modest path; and that the best 
 
MOKAL. 
 
 XII.] 
 
 93 
 
 lot for a state is not to be great in history, but rather to 
 have no history at all. 
 
 American happiness then is in no great degree the 
 consequence of secession. But does America owe to 
 secession her immense greatness ? 
 
 When we look back over the stages of her progress we 
 are able easily to discover that she has been in several 
 points remarkably favoured by fortune. Imagine for in¬ 
 stance that the original colonies, instead of lying in a com¬ 
 pact group along the coast, had been scattered over the 
 Continent, and had been separated from one another by 
 other settlements belongiog to other European states. 
 Such a difference might have made the growth of the 
 Union impossible. Imagine again that the French colony 
 of Louisiana, instead of failing miserably, had advanced 
 steadily in the hundred years between its foundation and 
 the American Revolution. This colony embraced the' val¬ 
 ley of the Mississippi. Had it been successful it might 
 easily have growm into a great French state, held together 
 through its whole length by its immense river. Or again 
 suppose it had passed into the hands of England ! It was 
 Napoleon who, by selling Louisiana to the United States, 
 made it possible for the Union to develop into the gigantic 
 Power we see. 
 
 Still it is evident that America has found the solu¬ 
 tion of that great problem of expansion on a vast 
 scale, which we have seen all the five Western nations 
 of Europe in succession failing to solve. We saw them 
 starting with the notion of an indefinite extension of the 
 state, but we saw them almost in a. moment lose their 
 hold of this conception and take up instead an extremely 
 opposite conception, out of which grew the old colonial 
 system. .We saw them treat their colonies as public estates, 
 
94 OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CHAP. 
 
 of which the profits were to be secured to the population 
 of the mother-country. We saw at the same time that 
 this system could never be represented as anything but a 
 makeshift, so that under it there always lurked the despair 
 of any permanent possession of colonies. We saw, from 
 this cause and from others, empire after empire in the 
 New World dissolve. Our own first empire was among 
 these. But we have since come into possession of a new 
 one. In the management of this we have been careful 
 enough to avoid the old error. The old colonial system is 
 gone. But in place of it no clear and reasoned system has 
 been adopted. The wrong theory is given up, but what is 
 the right theory ? 
 
 There is only one alternative. If the colonies are 
 not, in the old phrase, possessions of England, then they 
 must be a part of England; and we must adopt this 
 view in earnest. We must cease altogether to say that 
 England is an island off the north western coast of 
 Europe, that it has an area of 120,000 square miles and a 
 population of thirty odd millions. We must cease to think 
 that emigrants, when they go to colonies, leave England or 
 are lost to England. We must cease to think that the 
 history of England is the history of the Parliament that 
 sits at Westminster, and that affairs which are not discussed 
 there cannot belong to English history. When we have 
 accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole Empire 
 together and call it all England, we shall see that here too 
 is a United States. Here too is a great homogeneous 
 people, one in blood, language, religion, and laws, but dis¬ 
 persed over a boundless space. We shall see that, though 
 it is held together by strong moral ties, it has little that 
 can be called a constitution, no system that seems capable 
 of resisting any severe shock. But if we are disposed to 
 
MORAL. 
 
 95 
 
 XII.] 
 
 doubt whether any system can be devised capable of holding 
 together communities so distant from each other, then is 
 the time to recollect the history of the United States of 
 America. For they have such a system. They have 
 solved this problem. They have shown that in the present 
 age of the world political unions may exist on a vaster 
 scale than was possible in former times. No doubt our 
 problem has difficulties of its own, immense difficulties. 
 But the greatest of these difficulties is one which we make 
 ourselves. It is the false preconception which we bring to 
 the question, that the problem is insoluble, that no such 
 thing ever was done or ever will be done; it is our 
 misinterpretation of the American Revolution. 
 
 From that Revolution we infer that all distant colonies, 
 sooner or later, secede from the mother-country. We 
 ought to infer only that they secede when they are held 
 under the old colonial system. 
 
 We infer that population overflowing from a country 
 into countries on the other side of an ocean must needs 
 break the tie that binds them to their original home, 
 acquire new interests, and make the nucleus of a new 
 State. We ought to infer only that refugees, driven across 
 the ocean by religious exclusiveness and carrying with them 
 strong religious ideas of a peculiar type, may make the 
 nucleus of a new state. This remark is confirmed in an un¬ 
 expected manner by the history of the secession of Southern 
 and Central America from Spain and Portugal. Here, to 
 be sure, there was Catholicism on both sides of the ocean; 
 but Gervinus remarks that in reality the religion of those 
 regions was Jesuitism, and that accordingly the suppression 
 of the Jesuits gave a moral shock to the population, which 
 he reckons among the leading causes of disruption. 
 
 Lastly, we infer from the greatness of the United 
 
■ 
 
 96 OUK COLONIAL EXPANSION. [CH. XII. 
 
 States since their secession that the division of states, 
 when they become overlarge, is expedient. But the 
 greatness of the United States is the best proof that a 
 state may become immensely large and yet prosper. The 
 Union is the great example of a system under which an 
 indefinite number of provinces is firmly held together 
 . without any of the inconveniences which have been felt in 
 our Empire. It is therefore the visible proof that those 
 inconveniences are not inseparable from a large Empire, 
 but only from the old colonial system. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.