The History of England A Study in Political Evolution

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Crimean War. It may be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate part in English history after 1815; so far as England was concerned, it was a period of excurs

intervention assisted the South American colonies to assert their independence of the Spanish mother-country; and British volunteers helped the Liberal cause in Spain and Portugal against reactionary monarchs. Belgium was countenanced in its successful revolution against the House of Orange, and Italian states in their revolts against native and foreign despots; the expulsion of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons from Italy, and its unification on a nationalist basis, owed something

r wars with the Mahrattas, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, had extended up to the frontiers of Afghanistan; but there was always the fear lest another sword should take away dominion won by the British, and in British eyes it was an offence that any other power should expand in Asia. The Russian and British spheres of influence advanced till they met in Kabul; and for fifty years the two powers

the Suez Canal, and by French colonies in the Far East, to which the canal was the shortest route. Rivalry with England for the control of Egypt followed. The Dual Control, which was established in 1876, was terminated by the refusal of France to assist in the suppression of Eg

and Italy produced the entente cordiale between France and Russia in 1890. Fortunately, the dangerous questions between them and Great Britain were settled by diplomacy, assisted by the alliance between Great Britain and Japan. The British and Russian spheres of action on the north-west, and the British and French spheres to the east,

ions, and castes which constituted India; and a Machiavellian perpetuation of these divisions might have eased the labours of its governors. But a government suffers for its virtues, and the steady efforts of Great Britain to civilize and educate its Eastern subjects have tended to destroy the divisions which made common action, common aspirations, public opinion and self-government impossible in India. The missionary, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, and the political reformer have all helped to remove the bars of caste and race by converting Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a common Christianity or by undermining their attachment to their particular distinctions. They have built railways and canals, which made communications and contact unavoidable; they have imposed common measures of healt

Africa under British rule-British East Africa and Uganda, the Nigerian protectorates and neighbouring districts, Rhodesia and British Central Africa-as well as in the Malay States, Hong Kong, and the West Indies. There are great differences of opinion among the white citizens of the empire with regard to the treatment of their coloured fellow-subjects. Australia and some provinces of the South African

ernment-that is to say, of an executive responsible to the popular local legislature instead of to the home Colonial Office; and the third was federation. Canada had possessed the first degree of self-government ever since 1791 (see p. 169), and was rapidly outgrowing it. Australia, however, did not pass out of the crown colony stage, in which affairs are controlled by a governor, with or without the assistance of a nominated legislative council, until 1842, when elected members were added to the council of New South Wales, and it was given the power of the purse. This development was due to the exodus of the surplus population, created by the Ind

lished, with inadequate compensation to the owners; little support was given them in their wars with the natives, which the home government and the missionaries, more interested in the woes of negroes in South Africa than in those of children in British mines and factories, attributed to Dutch brutality; and a Hottentot police was actu

e the causes of discontent, and his report marks an epoch in colonial history. The idea that the American War of Independence had taught the mother-country the necessity of granting complete self-government to her colonies is a persistent misconception; and hitherto no British colony had received a fuller measure of self-government than had been enjoyed by the American colonies before their Declaration of Independence. The grant of this responsible self-government was one of the two principal recommendations of Lord Durham's report. The other was the union of the two provinces, which, it was hop

ry Australian colony, with the exception of Western Australia, had, with the consent of the Imperial parliament, worked out a constitution for itself, comprising two legislative chambers and a responsible cabinet. New Zealand, which had begun to be sparsely settled between 1820 and 1840, and had been annexed in the latter year, received in 1852 from the Imperial parliament a Constitution Act, which left it to Sir George Grey, the Gov

not so near its borders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions. Crowds of cosmopolitan adventurers, as lawless as those who disturbed the peace in Victoria or California, flocked to the Rand. They were not of the stuff of which Dutch burghers were made, and the franchise was denied them by a government which did not hesitate to profit from their labours. The Jameson Raid, a hasty attempt to use their wrongs to overthrow President Kruger's government in 1895, "upset the apple-cart" of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, who had added Rhodesia to the empire and was planning, with moderate Dutch support, to federate South Africa. Kruger hardened

bers are either nominated by the prime minister for life, as in the Dominion of Canada, or for a term of years, which is fixed at seven in New Zealand; or they are popularly elected, sometimes on a different property qualification from the Lower House, sometimes for a different period, sometimes by a different constituency. In the Commonwealth of Australia they are chosen by each state voting as a whole, and this method, by which a big majority in one locality outweighs several small majorities in others, has sometimes resulted in m

in French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old age pensions were in force long before they were introduced into the mother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes, payment of M.P.'s, and powers of local option and prohibition have been for years in operation. Both the Dominion and the Commonwealth levy taxes on land far exceeding those imposed by the British budget of 1909. Australia is, in addition, trying a socialistic labour ministry and compulsory military training. It has also tried the more serious experiment of developing a standard of comfort among its proletariate before peopling the country; and is consequently forced to exclude by

ifferences; and in 1867 the federation called the Dominion of Canada was formed by agreement between Upper and Lower Canada (henceforth called Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Prince Edward Island and British Columbia joined soon afterwards; and fresh provinces have since been created out of the Hudson Bay and North-west Territories; Newfoundland alone has stood aloof. Considerable powers

olonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment. Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government, remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party,

local parliaments as well as a central legislature, and the difficulty of apportioning their powers, determined South African statesmen to sweep away the old legislatures altogether, and to establish a united parliament which meets at Cape Town, a sin

aland, and South Africa has strengthened the claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, with full rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seen whether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, and imperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. Imperial Conferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; no majority in them has power to bind a minority, and no

nt of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. The Imperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results; if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying character and depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians oversea to appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, the dependence of every

ve civilized themselves out of existence in the competition with races which bred with primitive vigour, and had no costly standards of comfort. There are such races to-day; the slumbering East has wakened, and the tide which flowed for four centuries from West to East is on the turn. The victory of Japan over Russia was an event beside which the great Boer War sinks into insignificance. Asiatics, relieved by the Pax Britannica from mutual destruction, are eating the whites out of the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, an