Читать книгу The British Empire: Its Structure, Its Unity, Its Strength - Стивен Ликок - Страница 5

Table of Contents

Reaction of America on Britain—Revival of Maritime Spirit—Cabot and the Western Ocean—Newfoundland and the Grand Banks—Pilgrims and Virginians—West India Plantations—Loss of the Atlantic Colonies—The New Empire; Australia; The Cape; India—The Great Peace and the Free Trade Era—Expansion of Europe; Partition of Africa—The Twentieth Century; Imperial Federation and Colonial Nationalism—The Great War of 1914—The British Commonwealth of Nations

The rise and development of the British Empire is one of the great features of the world’s history. Its vast extent, its accumulated wealth and latent resources, its close association in language and culture with the United States of America render it a chief factor in the situation of mankind today. In it and in its external associations lie the chief hopes for mankind tomorrow. As seen by many of us, it offers, especially in the light of these outside relations, a basis for an orderly and stable world of justice, peace and plenty.

Nor was this ever so true as now. In our present distressed outlook, all prospect of a world-wide federation is for the time lost. Such a bond of union would be a rope of sand. But there is real hope in the continued unity of the British Empire, associated with the United States and maintaining its alliance with France, already deeply based in common sacrifice and mutual trust. To this fellowship honest men may rally, and from it peace spread about the world. It would seem, therefore, a proper moment to attempt a survey and presentation of the British Empire, designed, in its degree, to present this prospect and to advance this hope.

The discovery of America woke the English people again to their old-time habit of the sea. This reaction of America upon England, as a consequence of their common history, has never been properly emphasized, never truly realized, as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. We always speak of America as the child of England, and of South Africa and Australia and New Zealand as later children of the mother country, without realizing that in a certain sense and to a certain degree modern Britain is the child of America, and at least is largely stamped with the lineaments of its overseas history.

The discovery of America remade English maritime life. Overseas adventure culled and winnowed the nation. English—we may here say British—character was refashioned in outlandish places and on the seven seas. If Clive made India, India first made Clive. Similarly the French in New France christianized the Indians, but the Indians also Indianized the French. Paris taught the world its manners, but Dr. Franklin retaught Paris simplicity. The fate of America was in part settled at Minden and Quiberon and Plassey, but the fate of England and France was in part settled on the Plains of Abraham. The Iroquois Five Nations helped to make the French Revolution, for they blocked the path of French occupancy of the best of America and thus helped to break the monarchy. In a still more subtle sense, unprovable but evident enough, British character responded more and more to the reaction of overseas adventure and overseas interest. The younger sons, with the quickened intelligence that goes with adversity, blew like thistledown over the open fields of opportunity. Navigation stimulated British science. Commerce made a new London, where even the simplest stay-at-home might see from his counting-house the forest of masts in the Thames, or wander, if he would, among the bales and boxes of the cargoes of aromatic spices of the East.

This reaction affected all aspects of national life. The Puritan brought to America his deadly seriousness and his long-winded piety, reimported back to England two centuries later in the chastened form of American humour. The quarrel over liberty and taxation began in America and spread to England, and culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832. A generation of English children stalked warily with Fenimore Cooper through the American forest, fearing to snap a twig. Another generation bedewed the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its tears. After Uncle Tom and the Civil War the Massachusetts public school, founded two and a half centuries before, came home to England in the Education Act of 1870. It had turned out that soldiers who can read and write are better equipped for war than illiterate peasants, and so England, with tardy footsteps, followed America. In our own immediate hour, the Hollywood film of the West, the sheriff’s posse, the Nevada saloon and the pursuit through the sage-brush are bread and meat to the youth of England, while their seniors learn from America to eat Thanksgiving turkey and to suffer oratory at lunch.... All this union and conjunction and reaction would be too obvious for narration if we had not spent about a century in emphasizing differences, imagining grievances, exaggerating our disputes, with a mimic fight of a Genuine Eagle and a Real Lion as a side show to our politics.

People sometimes talk in our own immediate days of the Americanization of England. But England began to be Americanized when John Cabot came back from the Newfoundland seas and the people ran shouting after him in the streets. Told in this way, the history of the British Empire is a story of action and reaction, of what the British Isles did for the world and of what the world did for the British Isles. Told the other way—as it often used to be—as a narrative of how we conquered this, and then conquered that, beat these people and then those, annexed this tribe and then that, with the milestones of succeeding war and peace set up as landmarks of territory, or piled up in heaps as the money-bags of gain—told that way, the chronicle of the Empire sounds but a mean story of success. Thus falsely told, it spread a taint over the word “imperialism”—all too familiar to those whose memory carries half a century back—which is not all obliterated yet. But the true record is better than the false, and with it stands or falls the parallel interpretation of the present Empire, not as force but as union. We can love our history all the better by realizing this complexity of its elements. To cling to the notion of an unchanging Englishman, straight off the shelf from beside Hengist and Horsa, or of a Scot, right out of Ireland or wherever he came from, is as limited as all unmitigated pride of ancestry always is. Admit that we were partly made over by the Iroquois, and it takes us further. Look at London as the child of Calcutta and at Liverpool as the end of the St. Lawrence, and your vision is focused to the truth.

We are saying then that the discovery of America woke the English people again to their old-time habit of the sea. It is proper to say here advisedly the “English,” not the “British.” The British people, in the older sense, meaning the people whom Caesar found in Britain, were not a seafaring people, or not since some lost antiquity of which we have no trace. Boats of skin they had, indeed, to paddle round in backwaters and marshes, but no ships. They fought the Romans with swords and spears and wheeled chariots with cutting blades, but there were no galleys to dispute the passage of the Channel.

But the “English”—the Angles, and their fellow peoples, Saxons and Jutes, the Danes, and Norsemen—these were different. All the world knows the story of their sea flight across the oceans. They passed the North Sea, they settled Iceland, they reached Greenland and, like a flock of birds, came and went awhile to “Vineland,” in North America. Norse ships went “round about” France and Spain and into the Mediterranean. They reached the White Sea and northern Asia.

But as the slow Saxon conquests, in a century and a half, drove the Britons westward, national life changed. The people settled on the land and in the openings of the inland forests. No point in England, it is true, is more than seventy miles from the sea. But there was little movement. Christianity built its parish churches. Generations lived within the sound of their own church bells and seldom saw the sea, some people perhaps never. Peace hushed adventure, and rude plenty bred quiescence. Maritime spirit declined. Our complacent histories tell how King Alfred revived shipping and built a navy, but omit to say that Alfred had to hire foreign pirates as rowers. Yet, in Alfred’s own time, Ohthere of Norway sailed his ships round the North Cape and reached the White Sea. Nor did the Norman Conquest alter this decline. The Conqueror, it is true, was compelled to organize the defence of the coast to prevent a counter invasion. Dover and Sandwich and Romney and Rye and Winchelsea were organized as the Cinque Ports, with privileges and with obligations of service. But their ships never went far; for a century, not beyond the Bay of Biscay or the entrance of the Baltic. They were for defence, and in maritime matters mere defence never carries far. An “English” fleet sailed with Richard Coeur de Lion to the Crusades. History makes much of this. The great scholar known as the learned Selden (1584-1654) says that it began the maritime supremacy of England. But the ships were mostly from the provinces of France, and both officers and men, according to the historian William Lindsay of Middlesex, incompetent and ill-disciplined. A great storm dispersed the fleet off the coast of Sicily; the crew were “sea-sick and frightened”; three ships foundered; the Vice Chancellor of England was washed ashore, drowned, with the Great Seal tied around his neck, a poor sailor but a faithful lawyer.

Even when the commerce of the Hanse Towns and the Mediterranean began to make London a great seaport, foreign ships carried most of the trade. We may quote it on the high authority of the late Dr. Cunningham, the economic historian, that by the end of the thirteen hundreds (Richard II) “English shipping was in a state of decay and the coasts exposed to attack.” “Rovers of the sea,” such as the English themselves had once been, pillaged the shores of England as late as in the reign of Henry VI. Sandwich and Southampton were burned and plans of defence made for London behind booms and chains. Agnes Paston of the famous Paston Letters, writing in 1450, speaks of people being kidnapped by pirates while walking on the seashore.

English sailors there always were, of course, notoriously fierce and desperate in fighting. Much is made in the history of literature of Chaucer’s Sailor, in the Canterbury Tales, who had “a dagger hanging on a lace about his neck,” who had “no keep of nice conscience” and whose custom it was to “send his enemies home by water”—that is, drown them out of hand. Chaucer assures us that he was “a good felawe,” but there seems reason to doubt it. At best he would belong nowadays on the other side of the North Sea.

But whatever claim the English may have had to be “good fellows” in sea-fight, a thing no one has ever denied, they had but little share in the progress of navigation which rendered possible the great maritime discoveries that opened a new world and rediscovered old ones. Here the honour belong to the rising science of Italy, to the Mediterranean, and to the Portuguese who followed the impetus given by their Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460). It thus remained for the Spaniards, under the Genoese Christopher Columbus, to discover America in 1492, and for the Portuguese, under Vasco da Gama, to double the Cape of Good Hope and to reach the Spice Islands in 1498. The English overseas dominion (it began as English, not British) did not begin till nearly a hundred years after Pope Alexander VI had divided the New World between Portugal and Spain. The Pope’s line of division, a north and south line to be drawn through the Atlantic west of the Azores, was presumed to leave all America to the west of it. Drawn too far west, it sliced off a section of South America (the “Brazils”), and hence to this day impairs that magnificent unity of Spanish-speaking America that otherwise reached from San Francisco to Tierra del Fuego.

The first English overseas dominion is represented by the taking possession of Newfoundland by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583. But long before that, the spell had been broken by the voyage of John Cabot in 1497 to the coast of what was to become later British North America (Capt Breton Island and Newfoundland). King Henry VII issued letters patent “To his well beloved John Cabot, citizen of Venice, to his sons Lewis, Sebastian and Santius” ... “to discover and find. Countries and Regions ... before this time unknown to all Christians.” It is interesting to note that the King sent out the Cabots on the same terms as those on which the Pickwick Club dispatched Mr. Pickwick several centuries later—namely, “upon their own proper costs and charges.” British exploration has been largely conducted on this basis ever since.

Cabot’s voyage made a great stir. On his home-coming to Bristol it was rumoured that he had “found the New Isle.” We learn from a contemporary witness, a Venetian writing from London, that “vast honour is paid to him [Cabot]; he dresses in silk and these English run after him like mad people, so that he can enlist as many of them as he pleases.” The writer tells us also that the King is much pleased, has promised Cabot ten ships, and “at his request has conceded him all the prisoners, except such as are confined for high treason, to man his fleet.” With this begins the long roll of the transported felons, the indentured servants, the condemned rebels, the offending Covenanters and the ticket-of-leave convicts whose sorrows are woven into the texture of our history—out of whose despair often came greatness.

There followed the second voyage, fruitless, in 1498, but John Cabot died without further achievement. The American discovery of 1497 proved a false dawn. Yet it left results. Sebastian Cabot, the son, was invited by Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey to prosecute further English discovery in North America. Cabot, as a Venetian, had a bad conscience about it and declined. Yet he came to England later and helped to found the Company of Merchant Adventurers of 1551 that marks a new epoch. Under this company Richard Chancellor reached the White Sea and opened trade with Russia. But the chief result of the voyages of Cabot and of Cortereal, the Portuguese who followed him in 1500, was the discovery of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as a fishing ground. The fish in those days were inconceivably prolific. The ships, filled to the hatches, could often not carry home the catch. The voyage was tempestuous but at least there was always wind. With good fortune a ship could drive across in two weeks. English and French, Portuguese and Spanish flocked across each summer, leaving no more record than a flight of sea-birds. They landed to salt their fish; they made no settlement. English harbours turned to seaports. Even before Gilbert came, there were said to be 400 vessels in the fishing trade. In Charles the First’s time the Devon seaports alone sent 150 ships to the Banks every year. When Charles Kingsley’s three fishers went sailing out into the west, their ancestors had been doing so for three centuries.

With all this, the maritime spirit in England reawoke. The spirit of the sea sleeps but never dies. You may see this today in British children of western Canada. Two generations from the sight of the sea, brought back to it, they reach for it as by instinct, contriving rafts, plugging up old boats, fashioning docks and harbours from a cell-memory that lies generations back. So with the Elizabethan Age that recaptured its heritage. It was but natural that it should do so. The historian Trevelyan contrasts the square unbroken mass of northern France, which bred feudalism, with the narrow irregular outline and indented coast that marked England for seafaring. In witness of the epoch, take the thought and achievements of Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), one of the founders of the Empire. A scholar and in holy orders, Hakluyt spent his life in dreams of the sea, in aspirations for England’s sake and in collecting the maps and manuscripts from which he compiled his Principal Voyages, Navigation, and Discoveries of the English Nation (1589).

Thus as the age progressed the British Isles shifted their orientation in the world. They were no longer the lost corner, the ultima Thule of Europe. They were changing to the great gateway to America and, by reason of it, presently, the centre of trade and money. The map seems to belie this. Great Britain seems set a long way off from the centre; but not so for the sailing voyages of the Western Ocean. The course lay round about to the north to get the winds. The parallel of sixty was the early path with long summer daylight, beside which the West Indian and southern courses, with belts of dead calm, “horse latitudes” and seas of floating weed, were better for the slave-trade than for the passage of free men. The British ports became the natural points of departure to which European commerce came overland and across the North Sea. Europe changed its front from the Mediterranean to its north-west side. The Mediterranean became the south, and remained, till the Suez Canal, a blind pocket, an eddy in the great winds that blew the British ships to the seven seas.

It is natural that the British overseas Empire begins with the generation that defeated the Armada. Newfoundland, where Sir Humphrey landed, on the site of the present St. John’s, in 1583, and took possession in the name of Queen Elizabeth, ranks as the oldest colony.

Gilbert made his claim and was lost at sea. Others followed. An attempt was even made by Lord Baltimore, with the permission of James I, to plant a settlement. But the French worried him out of it. After that the English government forbade all permanent settlement; the idea was to turn the country into a sort of summer fishing station for the good of the British commercial interest.

Settlements gradually followed, legal or illegal. But these were merely fishing stations. There were about 2,000 people living within the Island in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and about 10,000 at the American Revolution. There was no question, as yet, of overseas migration and no real need for it. England at the opening of the Tudor times was still an undeveloped country. There were wolves in the great forests of the centre. Vast marches extended in East Anglia, and, in the north and the south-west, wide and desolate moorland. Coal slumbered in its bed. The population was perhaps two and a half million. Nor for nearly 300 years after Gilbert was there any real basis for migration from over-population. Emigration, when it began, was not economic in its motive. It arose from persecution; it was a means of escape; its essence lay in its farewell. Or it was a movement of adventure, of sea-wandering, with the hope of gold and treasure; in such cases its essence lay in the glad return. The idea of a greater England overseas had to wait for the birth of a greater England at home.

To Newfoundland followed the plantation colonies of the West Indies. This vast and fertile tropical archipelago, the summits of the mountains of a submerged Central America, comprises 100,000 square miles, broken into some thirty considerable islands and innumerable small ones. It fell an easy prey to European conquest. Its native Caribs, feeble with the languor of their own environment, went down before the conquerors. Spain had the first choice, with Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Other nations followed. Islands were to be had for the asking. Great Britain claimed Barbados in 1605 and began settling it and other small islands in 1625. Jamaica was a prize of Cromwell’s war with Spain (1655) and the Bahamas a possession by actual settlement (1665). These were all plantations in the literal sense, native ground for the sugar, the spices, the coffee and tobacco, the oranges, limes and lemons that elevated them to a value rivalling the greater archipelago of the East. Their climate doomed them to the driven labour of an enslaved race. The sugar, rum and slave-trade lured even the Puritans to sin, and tempted the ambition of Europe into war.

Time has had its revenge. In the end the African race has overwhelmed in its increasing numbers its one-time masters. Cuba and Puerto Rico, with a large Spanish influx, stayed relatively white—75 per cent. Haiti is nine tenths negro and one tenth part-negro. Martinique is 99 per cent black, Barbados over 85 per cent, Jamaica 98 per cent. The Carib Indians, except a handful in St. Vincent and Dominica, are all gone.

The Bermudas, 10 degrees north of the tropics, are in a different category. The Europeans learned of them from shipwreck on their sunken rocks. Sir George Somers (1609) turned shipwreck into settlement. No longer plantations, they play a new role in the Atlantic aviation, the tourism and war strategy of a changing world.

Similar in motive to the plantations was the great establishment in India that began with the East India Company of 1600. It reached to undreamed heights of splendour, profit, audacity and rapacity in the days of Clive and Warren Hastings. But its history lies apart from the development of the British peoples, except as in the annals of commerce and the panorama of war.

The first real “home” was made and lost in America. All the world has read the story of the Puritans of the Mayflower and of the Massachusetts Bay Company of 1629. They left England with a noble motive and a good cause, not with “Farewell, Babylon,” but with “Good-bye, England.” Such sorrow as there was at their going seems to have been one-sided. But the defects of their peculiar character were redeemed by the heroism of their endurance. They carried with them, somehow, more than any other group of outgoing emigrants, the seed of a future civilization—the seed of American education in the people’s school, a thing unknown in England; the seed of American efficiency in their native ingenuity and smartness; and, in their regulation of other people’s morals, the spirit of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Separately came the Virginians (1607), a people of a different kind, soon to develop great plantations, chronically half bankrupt and worked with troops of slaves hardly worth having, till the cotton gin and the English factory riveted their chains on their necks. The Virginians and such, till the Stamp Act of 1765, were further, in points of real contact, from Massachusetts than from England. Other colonies followed. Every reader of history knows of the establishment of the “towns” of Connecticut, the foundation of Rhode Island as a place where nobody need agree with anybody; the chartering of Pennsylvania (1681) as the home of brotherly love; the conquest of New York and the absorption of the Dutch; the broad ground plan of the Carolinas and, last in the list, the opening (1730) of a free-for-all refuge for the distressed, named Georgia after George II.

Here begins in true reality the story and the problem of the overseas British Empire. British the provinces were, as no overseas colony ever again except Australia and New Zealand. The emigration was practically all from the British Isles. The exceptions were so few as to leave little trace after the passage of a generation. The migration came in waves, proportionately of great size, at the foundation of each colony. But after the first 100,000 of immigrants and their offspring, the succeeding addition was mainly by the natural increase of population under circumstances favourable as nowhere else. Especially did migration dwindle to a flow of small dimensions in the first half of the eighteenth century. England could at that time utilize its own people. Foreigners were virtually shut out, and, in any case, did not want to come. The cosmopolitan movement of population, irrespective of flag, allegiance and language, was still a hundred years away. From the time when Wolfe overcame Montcalm in 1759, the British had North America to themselves. The Indians, in point of numbers, never mattered. No one ever counted them, but scholars’ estimates assign perhaps one Indian to every six square miles, not more. The Eskimos were a legend. The French-Canadians (60,000) were agricultural prisoners of war in the St. Lawrence Valley. Spanish claims mattered about as much as the Papal Bull of 1493 which defined them. Black slaves were property. There were in America, before the Revolution, 3,000,000 British people with the best continent in the world all their own; ruled, in a nominal way, by an affectionate and kindly King, no stupider than they themselves were, deeply attached to their kindred people in the British Isles, the place which even Washington called “home.”

What a chance! If not for humanity at large, at least for all those who still spoke the common speech and shared the common history of England.

The inhabitants of the United States who are descended from Germans, Russians or Czechoslovaks, naturally cannot see that the American Revolution was a great tragedy. For them it was not. Without it they would probably not be there. No doubt most Americans think of the Revolution as a noble chapter in history, a great forward movement in the world’s progress. Who can blame them if they do? Such great figures as those of Washington and Jefferson, the splendid courage of the farmers and “minute men” of Bunker Hill, and the opening sentences of the Declaration of Independence (no one ever reads the rest) have thrown a halo around the separation of England and America.

The soil is, for many, too sacred to be treated as controversial ground. Yet nearly all agree that there was in colonial America, till the very heat of the quarrel, no thought of independence. The code of colonial regulation was in reality of no great burden and of no little benefit. The Navigation Acts were as natural as leading-strings. Incidentally they opened to the Colonies the West Indian trade. Prohibition of colonial manufacture made no great difference to farmers and planters; later on, manufacture was to bring the tariff and separate North from South. Nor did the British government see more clearly than the colonists. They were appalled at the growth of the national debt, a new thing since the Stuart times, mistaken for national indebtedness, in reality evidence of the rising finance of London. The Stuarts had banked in their pocket, like the Sultan of Turkey, borrowed at exorbitant rates and paid or not as might be.

The debt under King George III, when Canada was ceded (1763), stood at £132,000,000. The anxious generation little dreamed that their grandchildren would carry the debt easily enough at £800,000,000 and their descendants a century later at £8,000,000,000. Their ignorance mistook rising wealth for impending bankruptcy. They were bound that the Americans should pay their share. The attempt to collect it, with Stamp Taxes (1765) and by customs at colonial ports, led to controversy, to anger, riot, petition under arms, rebellion and finally independence. The old colonial system ended with the separation of 1783.

Having lost one colonial empire, Great Britain set to work in its own haphazard way to make another. The Crown kept French Canada, though at first with doubts and afterthoughts that had the happy result of leaving language and law and the church undisturbed. Only the criminal law, a British specialty, was introduced. The pattern of the settlement is still to be seen stamped on the present isolationist allegiance of Quebec.

But the notable feature was the settlement of Upper Canada, the unused wilderness, the garden of Canada, blocked hitherto by the warlike Iroquois on its flank. Hither came the United Empire Loyalists in a migration that is one of the great pages of our Empire history. Of these Loyalists some were people who refused to live in the American Republic; others didn’t dare to. But our painstaking historians have long since sifted out the sturdy patriots as the large majority. The British government found everything—transport, money, land, implements, seed. British people don’t do things by halves. In all, about 40,000 Loyalists came to British North America, some to Nova Scotia, of which the western part, thus settled, became New Brunswick (1784); others passed on by sea, and up the St. Lawrence to winter at Sorel and thence next spring to settle above French Canada on the St. Lawrence and on Lake Ontario. Others again painfully made their way through the forest country of New York State. For all it was a pilgrimage as to a promised land. The first Loyalists were joined by a steady influx of other settlers from the States, not so much “loyal” as knowing a good thing when they saw it. After the Great War ended with Waterloo, a continuous migration of half-pay offices and former soldiers moved into Upper Canada. There was land and to spare for all.

Then came Australia. Its existence as a legend goes back to ancient times. The Dutch had touched its shores early in the seventeenth century. English sailors had seen it from Dampier’s ship in 1688. But no one claimed it. No one wanted it. The world of the seventeenth century was still inconceivably vast, and few foresaw how rapidly it would shrink to the little globe on which we live. British ownership begins with Captain James Cook’s voyage to the South Seas of 1768-70, undertaken to allow a group of Royal Society astronomers to view the transit of Venus. Cook circumnavigated New Zealand and sailed along the south-east coast of Australia. From a fancied resemblance to a more familiar shore, he named it New South Wales. Cook claimed the land, found a wonderful bay where “great quantity of plants” grew, and named it Botany Bay. The report made by Captain Cook and his companions was favourable, even enthusiastic. The government determined to take up the claim. It seemed necessary. The American colonies had served, among other purposes, as a place for the transportation of criminals. After independence began, the United States had no need, has never since had any need, to import foreign criminals. The colonization began, as all the world knows, with the expedition of 1787-88 in which Captain Arthur Phillip and a fleet of eleven vessels landed at Botany Bay 717 “criminals,” both men and women, convicted of all sorts of offences, great and small, real and imaginary. Within a short time the discovery of the marvellous grazing land behind the barrier of inaccessible mountains that shut in the convict settlement changed the whole character of the colony. Within a generation, a quarter of a million sheep were grazing on the Bathurst plains. A few free settlers had come in within three or four years of Phillip’s landing. But for three decades the colony was mainly made up of “emancipated” convicts. Even in 1821 the “emancipists” and their families numbered over 13,000 as against 2,500 free settlers. But the migration after the Napoleonic wars soon washed out the convict stain.

Thus, by one of the marvels of British good fortune, was secured, unopposed and unquestioned, the control of a continent.

The outcome of the same wars brought with the settlement of 1815 a great accretion of territory to the British Crown. The Cape of Good Hope (276,995 square miles) and Ceylon (25,481 square miles) taken from the Dutch during their eclipse as the Batavian Republic, and, with these, Trinidad and Malta, British Guiana, the Seychelles and Mauritius.

By the time of the close of the Napoleonic wars the British may be said to have definitely annexed the high seas as their peculiar province. The process had begun long before. It is true that the French built better ships than the English did, down to the French Revolution itself, and the Americans, half a century after they ceased to be British, outbuilt Britain in ship-building as having first modelled the clipper ship. But navigation and the exploration of the oceans had become preeminently British as they had once been Portuguese. The quaint London corporation of Trinity House, concerned with setting out buoys and beacons and caring for shipping, dates back to Henry VIII (1514). Its executive of Elder Brethren (naval and merchant service combined) became after 1604 an adjunct to the administration of the Admiralty. The English improved nautical instruments. Halley, the astronomer, invented a quadrant (1730) that turned the “back staff” of John Davis (Elizabethan) and the astrolabe of Chaucer into museum pieces.

Greatest of all was the problem of longitude, the finding of east and west distances. Latitude settles itself; a child can read it off the pole-star. The earth spins on a north and south axis, and every place reveals its own latitude by the height of the polar stars (north or south) above the horizon. For distance in the direction of the spin itself (east and west), the thing is different. Every place spins through every longitude. Greenwich is only called the start by convention. Longitude was first reckoned as from “the westernmost part of Africa,” then from Teneriffe (Dampier’s voyage, 1699), but after about 1779, always, for the British, from Greenwich. But without instruments it could only be found by dead reckoning. In the larger Spanish days Philip III had offered a prize of 6,000 ducats for a “discovery of longitude.” No one got it. In Queen Anne’s time (1713) a parliamentary committee took up the question. Sir Isaac Newton, as a member, gave as the solution the use of a clock set to Greenwich time and compared with a noon observation. The only trouble was to make the clock. Pendulum clocks wobble at sea; clocks with spring balances are too sensitive to heat and cold. The Admiralty offered a prize of £20,000—overbidding Philip by seven to one. The reward went begging for over forty years. It was won at last (1764) by an English carpenter, John Harrison, who contrived a chronometer clock with compensation for heat or cold. It was tried out officially on a voyage to Jamaica, Harrison being taken along. The crucial test came off Porto Santo in Madeira. The ship had run out of beer, land still out of sight. The captain’s dead reckoning put the course one way, the new chronometer put it the other. They trusted the chronometer. They got the beer. Harrison got the reward—£10,000 down, and the remainder about ten years later (1773).

From those days on, the Admiralty work of survey, of hydrographic charts, of exploration and investigation has never ceased. Under these auspices Darwin made his famous voyage in the Beagle (1831) and Huxley in the Rattlesnake (1846). The intervals between wars saw polar expeditions seeking the North-west Passage. Such work was supplemented by that of American sailors, the great oceanographer Maury and, in the historical sense, by the master hand of Admiral Mahan.

With the transition from sail to steam, the British tenure of the high seas was assured all the more. For steam itself was, in its early days, another apanage of Great Britain as a part of the industrial revolution. From now on, indeed, the Americans shared and more than shared in each mechanical advance, for in a land short of labour a premium was set on machinery. Robert Fulton was a chief inventor of the steamboat; and later on, the submarine, like the aeroplane, first appeared in America. The Americans, however, were too busy with steam on land to do much with steamships at sea. But with steam appeared the Scottish engineer as a partner in British sea-supremacy. McAndrew’s Hymn, though no one heard it plainly till Rudyard Kipling, was already humming in the engine room half a century before.

The great outgoing emigration of the British and the Irish peoples belongs in this period, the Great Peace (1815-1854). This is no longer a mere emigration of adventure, an ecstasy of religion in the wilderness, a transport of criminals, an exile of political refugees. This is the outgoing of people from a crowded mother country to seek new homes, as like as might be to the homes they left behind. And the numbers of them were such as never were known before. In colonial America, it is very seldom that more than 3,000 immigrants arrived in a year. But in the first five years after Waterloo 98,000 British people went overseas as emigrants. Twenty years later (1835-39) the numbers had risen to 287,000; and fifteen years later still (1850-54), these emigrants numbered 1,639,000. At first more came to British North America than to the United States—in the twenty years 1815-1834, 403,000 as against 269,000. To Australia there set in a rising tide of free immigrants that began with about 500 in 1825 and reached 15,000 in 1840. Trouble, rebellion, and then more trouble, in Canada, as contrasted with the rising glory of the American Republic, presently shifted the balance. In the years 1850 to 1854, of the 1,639,000 British emigrants, 1,158,000 went to the United States and only 186,000 to British North America. The Irish were a case apart. They alone were exiles—of misgovernment, of pestilence and famine. They came with mingled hope and sorrow, and many with a hatred in their hearts that coloured the world’s history till yesterday, if not today. But for a time British emigration to British America went strong. These were the days not of individual homesteaders but of the collective immigration of the Canada Company (1825) and on the foundation of woodland towns—our Guelph and Galt and Peterborough—at a stroke, days of success and of golden opportunity that passed. Yet it may come again, patterned on something the same model, when comes the great outward British migration that must follow the conclusion of what will be called peace in Europe.

It was during this period that was tested and proved the peculiar capacity of British people for overseas “settlement.” It is not well in history to overemphasize psychological causes. But undoubtedly this national characteristic reacted powerfully on the course of events. The English people are by character a people suited for overseas settlement. Other nations either cling too much to home or too readily leave it. Others again seem in their migration to have no middle term between conquerors and coolies. Others become absorbed and disappear. The English, an “indigestible” people, talking no other language but their own, never do that. The French as settlers have never hit the same happy mean as the English. The French in the Sahara, or in a South Sea island, must needs create a little “Avenue de Paris,” if only of three coco-nut trees—with a boulevard somewhere to lounge upon—with a Café de la Paix, if only of bamboo, with fermented coco-nut as apéritif. Or else they must go the other way, go native—turn more Indian than the Indians, wear a scalp lock, live with Algonquins in a wigwam and teach ferocity to their instructors. For proof see the journals of Radisson or La Hontan, or any real authority.

German settlers in America lay like an inert mass, waiting, with beer and music, for someone to turn them into something else. They might have coagulated into Nazis, as nature breeds horse-flies. Luckily they didn’t know it. They turned instead into solid American Republicans and Canadian Liberals, deeply respected and still smoking and arguing. This vanishing picture, smeared with the brutality of two wars, is one of the tragedies of our time. “German” now means something else, and beer-garden means Munich.

The Dutch were “settlers,” like the English, only more so. Their ideal was isolation, as in South Africa—to have one’s neighbour’s smoke just in sight over the hill, but not to see him. Some of us can understand it still. The Dutch started from Manhattan on this plan, moving up the Hudson. They might have strung out all across the American prairies. But the accident of war (1664) put an end to it. South Africa repeated history. In any case there were not enough of them; the land of tulips and canals could hold them all. So the Dutch Empire of Dutchmen has become just a dream of what might have been, like the Swiss Navy, with the reality of counting-houses in Java and profits in Amsterdam.

The Scots one separates here from the English. At times they settled in blocks alone, like the Glengarry people on the St. Lawrence, and the mournful Highlanders of the ’45 wailing on the bagpipes their ocean way to the Southern States. “Lochaber no more” was a sad tune as compared with the “Cheer, boys! Cheer!” of the outgoing English emigrant, hauling up the anchor to the song, leaving home and glad to get out of it. When he got well away, he boasted of it. The Scots also settled themselves in Dunedin and Southern New Zealand, looking for something as bleak as the Highlands—or call it as “stern and wild,” their own name for it.

But the Scots, like their own whisky, were better half-and-half. In this way they penetrated French Montreal and coloured the Hudson Bay Territory and Prince Edward Island. Their trace lies round the world in curling clubs and golf links and in their conception of a drink. But the Scots seldom settle alone. It scarcely pays.

The Irish too, like the Scots needed a larger mixture. Nor had they wanted to leave Ireland, soft and green in the rain. They came as children of adversity, and hence their coming carried with it an account to settle and an ancient grudge elsewhere. But even this had a way of washing out. It is hard to make trouble among decent neighbours; it’s no use being “against the government” when half of all the other people are; and hard to live on history and cry over a shamrock for ever. So the Irishman was odd man out, till he thought of the police force. If this is exaggerated, it is easily re-compressed to truth.

But the English were always the ideal settlers. They could go away and stay there, call England “home,” boast of it, curse at it, and still love it and fight for it. The Englishman carried away with him enough of his home but not too much. He had his tin bath, and his briar pipe and cricket in a bag to teach to the natives. He had his own clothes till an English tailor followed him. But beyond that he accepted the ways of the country. He drank whatever they had till a brewer came out from Burton-on-Trent. He never knew whether he was going “home” or not, and in the end he didn’t. People went “home” from India, not from the Colonies. His children and grandchildren shaded off, less and less distinctive but with the tie unbroken. Thus could the overseas Englishman ride it out on a long hawser, generations through.

This adaptation, this capacity to settle, they had it all of them—Pilgrims, planters and gentleman ranchers, younger sons and half-pay officers, Empire Loyalists, fur-traders and factors—as had also their wives and the flock of little children who came with them, whose only enduring memory of England was to be that of leaving it.

Nor is it only such emigrant songs as “Lochaber no more” and “Cheer, boys! Cheer!” mentioned above, that reflect the reaction of overseas migration upon British life. Our literature for two hundred years is stamped with it. It helped to form the boys’ stories of adventure, read by boys of all ages, and remaking the character of the nation. Westward Ho! and Treasure Island are only two among hundreds. Above all, the mingled hope and sorrow of migration from a mother land finds its echo in our poetry. One thinks of Galt’s lines:

From the lone shieling on the misty Islands

Mountains divide us and the waste of seas,

But still the blood is true, the heart is Highland,

And in our dreams we see the Hebrides.

With such enchanted words our vision carries across the Atlantic and sees the misty Scottish coast from the shores of a newer Scotland. Or take the tragedy that lies in Lady Dufferin’s lines:

They say there’s bread and work for all,

And the sun shines always there,

But I’ll not forget old Ireland,

Were it fifty times as fair.

Here is all the tragedy of bereavement and exile, that even fears forgetfulness.

Or take the poignant pathos of Kipling’s throbbing banjo, recalling, to the broken gentleman-ranker in the Egyptian desert, “town” and “all that ever went with evening dress.” Who that reads such pages of our literature can think of our Empire as a mere fruit of conquest, and not realize the enduring bond of kinship and common sacrifice that has bequeathed to us our inheritance and our opportunity?

Meantime the British Empire had to learn to shape its government to meet the altered needs of the epoch. Obviously a change was needed from the old colonial system.

During the brief peace from 1783 to 1793 the new British Empire had been governed much as the lost Empire had been. The British government maintained garrisons and supplied naval defence; it owned and granted the colonial lands; it regulated shipping with navigation laws. But it gave to the white colonies, old ones and new, elected assemblies such as the American provinces had had. Nova Scotia had enjoyed this privilege, admitted as a sort of common law right of British settlers, ever since 1758. Its offshoot, New Brunswick, received it at birth in 1784. In Quebec, while still called “Quebec,” as under the Quebec Act of 1774, and still French, it was held to be not expedient to call assemblies. But with the Loyalists came the division into an Upper and Lower Canada (1791), with an elected assembly in each. The system was later extended to Australasia—New South Wales in 1842, and to Queensland, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand shortly after. Already there was a sort of shadow outline of the Empire to be. India, purely a mercantile possession under the Company’s charter till 1773, received then a government with a certain measure of imperial participation and control.

The period of the Great War of 1793-1815 saw colonial administration carried on as military exigency might best allow. After 1815 ensued the period of peace, industrial expansion and the rising liberalism that presently brought free trade. But the colonial system only partly reflected the individual rights that were becoming common gospel. The popular assemblies, especially in the Canadas, proved a half loaf of freedom—better than no bread, but far from satisfying. Executive control was still in the hands of the Crown and its appointees—a favoured class, a family compact, it was claimed. The situation was complicated by the fact that French Canada showed no sign of becoming British. With ill management and inattention, trouble was bound to come. It came in the form of the Canadian rebellion of 1837, a damp squib in the military sense, but ominous with meaning.

The government, anxious after the event, sent out Lord Durham, to report on what happened. Durham, a typical British Liberal of the period, autocratic in his love of liberty, was as ready with a panacea as a patent medicine pedlar. His report (1839), masterly in analysis but feeble in inference, recommended the union of the two Canadas under responsible self-government—an executive cabinet answerable to the legislature. This was to cure all colonial troubles by giving freedom to the Colonies and by so mixing up the French with the English as to remove “their vain hope of nationality.”

The system went into effect, temporarily under Sir Charles Bagot (1841), and in solid earnest under Lord Elgin in 1849. From Canada it was extended to Australasia, to the Cape and to Natal, and half a century later to the Transvaal, as the Orange River Colony (1907), to dry the tears of war.

Undoubtedly the system worked. The only difficulty was in knowing what it was working for; was it the beginning of a real Empire, or only the beginning of the end? To the sorrowing Tories, it meant the disruption and dissolution of the Empire, as, typically, to the old Duke of Wellington, for whom and his like it was part of that sunset of coming disaster which surrounds old men before they die. “Thunderstruck” was the word used of him. But the thunder never came.

For the colonial reformers such as Robert Baldwin, Prime Minister of Canada (1842 and 1848), British in spirit, responsible government had in it all the colours of the morning. This, and this alone, could hold the Empire together. But to the out-and-out Cobdenites the colours of this bright morning shone to herald the day of separation—the happy disruption of bonds that had lost their meaning, a separation that meant a fusion in the wider union of a world of brotherhood. To the shrewd eye of Disraeli, looking back after years of experience, the system, as applied, was crude and immature, failing to make provision for an inevitable future. Colonies with a mere handful of settlers, still needing garrisons for their protection, had no right to the absolute control of whole continents of land, no right to stifle trade with tariffs, to forbid migration except on their own terms and refuse participation in maritime defence. “Millstones round our necks,” said Disraeli, in a phrase that has hung as a millstone on his memory.

Such was in general the imperial outlook in the days of the great Victorian peace, of the era associated with the optimism of free trade and the gospel of Cobdenism. Much of it was too good to be true. But at least it was free from the aggression of the epoch that was to follow. The Empire seemed large enough; there was no need of addition. Britain let go the Sandwich Islands, once under a sort of control of the navy. The Argentine might have been successfully claimed in the settlement of 1815, on the strength of whatever claim comes from landing and making war on a foreign coast. It also was let go. But any gratitude felt by the Argentine Republic is lost in the fact that Britain kept the Falkland Islands, 250 miles off the coast, taken over from Spain in 1771. The Republic lodged a national protest in 1833, still outstanding. But times have changed. Cobden could see in the Falklands only a wind-swept sheep-run; Britain, today, a key to naval victory.

The system of Cobdenism ran its course. There was free government and free trade (1846) and free navigation (1849), as there was free competition and freedom of labour at home. It swept as clean as a new broom; only later appeared the gathering heaps of dirt swept into corners—the cry of the children in the factories, the Song of the Shirt, the festering slums, the submerged tenth, and the trampling down of the weak that goes with the survival of the fittest. But the world still lived on hope; these were but the clouds of the morning, left over from the dark of the passing night. Then hope itself clouded and failed. The brotherhood of man went down in a devastation of wars that racked the Old World and the New, from Sebastopol to Delhi, from Gettsyburg to Sedan. And when the war era paused, at the opening of the 70’s, after the Prussian conquests and the creation of Germany in arms, it was realized that Cobdenism was bankrupt. World peace had failed. The Crystal Palace was just a glitter. Universal free trade vanished with it. Labour wanted decent wages, not merely the right to ask for them; bread, not a stone. With that came the realization that for the new age of machinery and power the world’s resources were limited; that machine industry must have raw materials; and that it was the “white man’s burden” to open up the coloured continents, brown, yellow and black. In this struggle only strong nations—Empires—could live; a Russia that could reach the Pacific, a German Empire built on “blood and iron,” an Austria-Hungary, re-cast from a hundred histories, a France that could renew its vigour in Asia and Africa; a Britain that must “carry on.” The whole world was all too small. If Africa was a dark continent, light it up with European civilization! If China was asleep, wake it up with opium. If the Japanese wanted to learn to fight, send them officers to show them how. Only on the coasts of America fell the long shadow of James Monroe. The disasters of our present age obscure with a smoke-screen the mingled colours of the landscape that was—the mingled greed and idealism, exploitation and uplifting, curse and blessing that represented the gift of European religion, European science, machinery and machine-guns to the peoples sitting in darkness; the actors in the drama shade all the way from apostles to oppressors, from Livingston’s hymns to the “red rubber” on the Congo.

In this new expansion of Europe, from about 1880 to 1900, Great Britain got its full share—such vast additions as Nigeria, East Africa, Rhodesia. The opening of the Suez Canal shouldered Britain up against Egypt. To control Egypt it had to take the Sudan. To connect with the Sudan, it needed equatorial Africa, till the “inexorable chain of logic” led to the Cape-to-Cairo idea. But the additions were matched by French expansion that finally included more than 4,000,000 square miles of African territory, by claims on Africa staked out by Germany with the consent of the European powers, and the blank cheque on the Congo basin that presently shadowed the name of Belgium.

The new era of rival European power over Africa and across Asia altered the political outlook of the Empire. There was no room for dissolution now. Hence the government of the Empire, as between the Indian Mutiny and the South African War, was reorganized. The essential goal became that of permanent union; its means of achievement to be found in the principle of federal government, as added to that of responsible freedom already accepted. Here was to be achieved that union of authority, liberty (imperium et libertas) sought since the days of Rome. The principle of federation attained in the nineteenth century an imposing prestige. It had with it the conspicuous example of the United States, the tradition of Switzerland and a certain endorsation of Greek history, dear to scholars. The weakness of federal government lies in its hopeless incompatibility with economic unity, the disruption of jurisdiction which it makes for labour, capital, transportation and social service. But time and industrial growth had yet to reveal all this. Federation was “the thing.” Political scientists, Henry Sidgwick and presently James Bryce, expounded its academic merits. Tennyson, in poetic vision (which shuts one eye), could see already the “parliament of man” and “federation of the world.”

First came Canada. The broken units of British North America were gathered into a Dominion of Canada (1867). Those who wouldn’t come in were dragged in. Newfoundland, half in, slipped out. British Columbia was coaxed in with a railway; Prince Edward Island by buying its railway from it. The new system creaked in its joints but it held together. The Red River Settlement of the West undertook to protest under arms at Fort Garry, mixed up its protest with stark murder, and faded away at the sight of General Wolseley and the redcoats. Nova Scotia accepted better terms, and sobbed its protest half asleep. “The whistle of the locomotive,” to quote Joe Howe’s prophetic phrase, “was heard in the passes of the Rocky Mountains” in 1886. The Dominion of Canada became a fact and soon a glorious reality. The old fear of piecemeal conquest by “the States” faded from a spectre to a bogy, and from a bogy to a scarecrow. Federation in Canada encouraged an unsuccessful movement at federation in South Africa (1878). For Australia, federation as yet was only talk, the obvious advantages of federalism being crossed by internal disputes. The continent seemed safe in its isolation.

But a larger idea arose as the federation of the whole Empire, with a central parliament at London, and representation of all—or at least all of the free. This started the Imperial Federation movement and the League (1884) whose offshoots ran over the Empire like the Vine of Sibmah. The League set up its branches and held its meetings, singing “God save the Queen” in colonial towns, out on the prairies and on the veldt and under the eucalyptus tree. Then suddenly it smashed. It appeared that imperial federation meant taxes. Things were back again to the days of George Washington. Britain again was alarmed over expenditure on defence. The income-tax, traditionally regarded as a temporary war measure, had come back in 1842 and stayed ever since. By the end of the century it had passed sixpence in the pound. This seemed to spell ruin, albeit to a generation whose children have lived to see it at seven shillings and sixpence. But history repeated itself. It was George III’s national debt all over again. So it seemed only reasonable that the colonies, when joined in a federated Empire, should pay taxes for imperial (naval) defence. This broke the League. It dissolved like Canadian ice and blew away like Australian sand. The attitude of the colonies, not altogether unfair, was that they paid their share by opening new territory.

The federal movement, of necessity, left out India. The termination of the East India Company (1858), after the Mutiny, placed the government entirely under British imperial control, with a Council in London. Democracy and self-government only made feeble beginnings, in municipal life, before 1900. The India of the Native States was protected by Britain as a paramount power, not governed in its daily life. There was not, and never has been, any nucleus as between the aspirations and outlook of the peoples of India and those of the Dominions.

Still less could federation include the black subjects of the Queen now multiplying in Africa. These must remain as sleeping partners in the Empire, dreaming of their future heritage, and blessed at least with decent government and fair play. But the federal movement and the new tendency toward a united and permanent Empire at least expressed itself in the great London pageants of the Golden Jubilee of 1887 and the Diamond Jubilee of ten years later. From these grew the Colonial Conferences, that presently—1902, 1907 and on—systematized themselves into the Imperial Conference which for a time almost looked like an authoritative organ of government.

The federal sentiment also ultimately carried Australia into a federation. The rivalry of free trade and protection (New South Wales and Victoria) was a standing difficulty. The sheer distance of Western Australia, a four days’ voyage by sea, with no alternative but a trackless desert, seemed to defy federation. The colony would be like a satellite on a stick, as used in a geography classroom. But what peace cannot accomplish, the mere threat of war compels. The safety of Australian isolation disappeared with the expansion of Japan. Federated as a Commonwealth in 1901 (Imperial Statute of 1900), Australia lined up beside Canada. Western Australia, cast for the role of Rhode Island and of Nova Scotia, as the unwilling partner, hesitated but was squeezed in just in time to be an original State. New Zealand thought twice and stayed where nature put it.

The first stage of the era of expansion witnessed at the close of the century the tragedy of the South African War. The circumstances of the present hour have reopened again the wounds of that historic land of sorrow. There is all the less need here to dogmatize upon the right and wrong of half a century ago. South Africa (the Cape) came into British possession as a prize of war (1795), its Dutch occupants having become, by a shake of the kaleidoscope of history, allies of France, as under the Batavian Republic. At the settlement (in 1815), the Cape was retained as a British Colony. Its value had been realized as a half-way stop on the sailing voyage to India. A few settlers came. A second Colony, Natal, was presently founded by British settlers (1824). But their separation from one another was in keeping with the vast distances of South Africa, a feature seldom realized. Cape Town to Durban by sea is over 800 miles. There was thus no friction. Nor was there tyranny at the Cape. But the Dutch farmers were restive under alien rule. Free slave-holders are apt to resent control. They resented it still more when Britain bought out their slaves (1834). Many claimed they were cheated on the bargain. There followed the Great Trek, one of the heroic episodes of the nineteenth century. A large section of the Boers, with their ox-wagons, families and furniture, cattle and Kaffirs, moved out into the wilderness, far, far away—beyond the Vaal River. Two generations later it was to turn out that far, far away, in a changed world, meant close at hand. But for the time the isolation of the veldt closed over them. There was no thought of calling them back. It was the period of laissez-faire. The Empire was large enough. The Dutch who remained British subjects settled down in peace in the unending summer of the sea winds of Cape Town and the vineyards of Stellenbosch. British settlers came, and to Natal—never many. South Africa settled into a long sleep, with now and then the brief awakening of a Kaffir war. The Dutch villages of the Cape seemed to take on, under their elm trees, an immemorial antiquity. Animosities died low, life moved at the pace of an ox-cart and politics dozed on the stoep. Such little back eddies of peace and quiet, such Stellenbosches and Acadias, does the irony of history form at times in the turgid current of its course—only to obliterate them later.

The passing of the sailing-ship and the opening of the steam route by the Suez Canal removed the first reason for the British occupation of South Africa. But it remained. Responsible government gave freedom and British rule guaranteed peace. Without it, South Africa could have been overwhelmed in a night by the vast shadow of the black race. There were those who said, who still say, that it some day must be. Ex Africa semper quid novi. The expansion epoch of the later century brought an ill-starred movement (1878) to reannex the Transvaal Boers. Their government was rickety, jeopardized with native quarrels, almost bankrupt. The case of federated Canada seemed to point the way. Complacent ignorance vanished when the annexed Boers revolted and defeated the British in the heroic victory of Majuba Hill (1881). Great Britain, meaning, at the moment, Mr. Gladstone, gave back the Transvaal without first wiping out Majuba in blood—a triumph of magnanimity or of a disaster due to idiocy, as one will, according as one reads British politics and judges British imperialism. The ashes of controversy in South Africa still fan easily to a flame. Britain kept over the Transvaal the shadowy claim of a paramount power. (Convention of London, 1884.) No one knew what it meant. No one cared. Side by side with the Transvaal, its sister Dutch republic, the Orange Free State, lived undisturbed, uncoveted.

Then came the Devil with diamonds in Griqualand and round Kimberley, in places as who should say “no man’s land” in South Africa. Arbitration showed they belonged to Great Britain. Right. And with that the Devil waved away the mists from the rolling upland and showed a great reef of over fifty miles of gold ore and asked whose was that? And with that came the Rand Mines, and the city of Johannesburg and a babel of all the world. The Dutch republic, with its little capital of Pretoria, fast asleep round its ox-cart market square, looked as ill suited to the change as the Old Testament wrapped around the West Side of Chicago. Anger, greed, controversy and patriotism struggled together. Yet the British never hated the Boers nor the Boers the British. They got on well together, always have, all those who know South Africa will agree. They have never known the mutual exclusion which keeps the French and English as far apart, in Montreal, as the two shipwrecked gentlemen of Gilbert’s ballad—never introduced.

But the situation forced quarrels. Should the newcomers, the Uitlanders vote? Did they really want to be citizens, or just want money? Was it fair for a handful of Dutch farmers to tax dynamite, sweep off profits, sell railways? Yet was this influx really British expansion overseas, or was this just the clamour of the stock exchange for Kaffir stock? But even if it was for the moment capitalism, did it not show far away the green hills of a future union under the Empire? People must judge for themselves. Few witnesses speak alike.

Mimic revolt seethed in the Rand Club of Johannesburg over Scotch and seltzer. Rifles came in piano cases. Was this a storm in a tea-cup, or was this the ground swell of a great tempest? A brave man called Dr. Jameson undertook to bet that it was in a tea-cup. He betted wrong. His raid into the Transvaal (New Year’s, 1895-96) and his capture set all the world in tumult. Angry winds blew from every cave. The German Emperor, in a famous telegram of congratulation to old Paul Kruger, President at Pretoria, opened the Great War eighteen years before it started. The raid was followed by a feverish four years of conference and armaments. Whose was the fault? Did the British declare the war inevitable and then start it? Or did the Boers refuse every last and reasonable overture, and mean to drive the British into the sea, clearing out the Cape and all? At least the struggle of the Boers under arms, against overwhelming odds, for three years, is unsurpassed in the world’s record of patriotic heroism. The tragedy of it is, as seen by many of us, that all that was ever gained by the war would have come naturally enough anyway, with patience and a lapse of time. People cannot, not even Dutch farmers, live forever on memories of Great Treks and kraals and assegais. Life must go on, and would have, and Dutch and British union under the Empire would have come as easy and welcome destiny. It came another way. The forced treaty of Vereeniging (1902) gave generous terms to the conquered—magnanimous and almost divine as compared with what we see at this hour of the mercy meted out by conquerors. Four years later the triumph of common sense and magnanimity in granting self-government to the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony went far to healing wounds that nature was trying to close. The Union of South Africa (1909), brought about by conferences in which shared the leaders of both sides so recently under arms, seemed to crown the work. It would have done so, but for the war of 1914 that seemed to many of the Dutch a release from a forced oath and an opportunity for freedom. The suppression of the rebellion, Dutch by Dutch, left but little animosity. After which, South Africa its clouds drifting away waited for what should come next, and now the next has come.

Thus stands the Empire aligned, dressing its ranks, as the onslaught of war comes upon it. Behind it, since Gilbert first claimed Newfoundland, are three and a half centuries of the expansion of the British people overseas, of decent government and fair play, of faults redeemed and bygone angers mellowed into friendship. From the myriad graves that mark where courage lies, on land or under sea, or mark at least the spot where a life of honest effort ended in rest, its spirit speaks. It is a great heritage.

If there is guidance to the world, and not mere devil’s chance, the ordeal of war will show what it has been worth.

Some Books for Reference

Trevelyan, G. M. History of England (1926).

Morison, S. E. Oxford History of the United States. 2 vols. 1927.

Lecky, W. H. England in the Eighteenth Century.

Egerton, H. E. British Colonial Policy. 8th ed. 1928.

Seeley, J. R. The Expansion of England (1883).

Dilke, Sir C. Greater Britain (1890).

Hall, W. P. Empire to Commonwealth. 1928.

King-Hall, S. Our Own Times (1913-1934).

Robinson, H. The Development of the British Empire. 1922.

BRITAIN AND AMERICA in the NORTH ATLANTIC