LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 R:Vc. .,!DE 
 
 Ex Ubris 
 C. K. OGDEN 

 
 THE STORY OF THE EMPIRE. 
 
 Edited by Howard Angus Kennedy.
 
 The Story of the Empire 
 Series. 
 
 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE. 1897. 
 
 By SIR WALTER BESANT. 
 
 THE STORY OF INDIA. 
 
 By DEMETRIUS C. BOULGER. (July 31.) 
 
 THE STORY OF AUSTRALASIA. 
 
 By FLORA L. SHAW. (Sept. jo.) 
 
 THE STORY OF SOUTH AFRICA. 
 
 By E. F. KNIGHT. (Nov. 30.) 
 
 THE STORY OF CANADA. 1898. 
 
 By HOWARD A. KENNEDY. (Jan. 31.) 
 
 Further Volumes will be announced in due course.
 
 THE J*ISE 
 
 OF 
 
 THE EMPIRE. 
 
 SIR WALTER BESANT 
 
 London : 
 
 HORACE MARSHALL & SON 
 
 Temple House, 
 
 E.G.
 
 The Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, M.P., sending 
 every wish for the success of this series, says : " / 
 can conceive nothing more interesting or useful. 
 Ordinary histories of England naturally regard 
 the development of the various portions of the 
 Empire as episodes grouping themselves round the 
 central drama of domestic history. This is quite 
 a legitimate point of view, but it is also a very 
 imperfect one, and it greatly needs to be supple- 
 mented by some such work as that which I under- 
 stand vou have undertaken" 
 
 The Right Hon. H. H. Asquith, M.P., writes : 
 " Your scheme appears to me to be admirably con- 
 ceived, and I wish it all success. It is of the first 
 importance that the people here should understand 
 the growth, and realize the value, of our Colonial 
 Empire." 
 
 The Right Hon.J. Chamberlain, M.P., says: "7 
 hope that your attempt to popularize the history of 
 our colonies may be successful. The gigantic in- 
 crease of the area, population, and prosperity of 
 the Empire is the most noticeable feature of Her 
 Majesty's glorious reign" 
 
 The Duke of Devonshire says : ' : Your scheme 
 appears to be an eminently practical and patriotic 
 one, and I most cordially wish it success. I am 
 the more interested in your undertaking as I have 
 lately accepted the position of Chairman of the 
 British Empire League" 
 
 The Right Hon. James Bryce, M.P., says : " Our 
 people know less than they ought of the history and 
 growth of our greater colonies, and have not yet 
 realized how much of interest the annals of those 
 colonies contain. Nothing will do more to knit the 
 British Empire together than an intelligent appre- 
 ciation on the part of Englishmen and Scotchmen 
 of what has been achieved by those who have gone 
 forth from among us, and nothing gratifies our 
 colonial fellow -subjects more than to know that those 
 achievements are appreciated here"
 
 PROLOGUE. 
 
 THE million-headed emperor known as the 
 British Public is becoming aware that it knows 
 a good deal less than it ought of the empire 
 which it rules. An uneasy sense of enormous 
 responsibility is stirring in the breast of the 
 British Voter. He is beginning to feel that when 
 he marks his ballot he decides how one-fourth 
 of the human race shall be governed, and 
 influences the lives of untold millions more. 
 At the same time, he cannot devote the tired 
 leavings of his hard-wrought day to a serious 
 study of the many and perplexing questions that 
 he directs his Parliament to solve. He must 
 form his opinions on scattered fragments of 
 information gathered in a hasty glance at a 
 newspaper, and on the unstudied and contra- 
 dictory statements of men in the street with no 
 surer knowledge than his own. 
 
 A story, a romance, an adventure, well told 
 and not too long, always finds eager listeners. 
 A drama, full of spirit and action, will rouse
 
 viii. Prologue. 
 
 the interest and hold the attention of any man, 
 however closely imprisoned he may be in his 
 private affairs. He is not so likely to take 
 interest in a story that he knows to be true as 
 in one that is frankly " made up." Perhaps 
 this is because the tellers of true stories insist 
 on putting in a quantity of accurate but super- 
 fluous matter which baulks the easy running of 
 the tale ; perhaps because unbeautiful solemnity 
 of style is reckoned the only proper companion 
 for veracity of matter, like mutes beside a 
 hearse. The first of these faults, which is no 
 fault when the reader is a serious student, is a 
 fatal hindrance when he is an ordinary man 
 with feeble aspirations after fact and surrounded 
 by the enticements of fiction. The other fault 
 is always a fault, and it is not so easy to get rid 
 of. Green performed this feat in England, and 
 Parkman in America: but where are the 
 Greens and Parkman s of to-day? Not every 
 historian can carry his reader sailing smoothly 
 on through the unfamiliar seas of bygone times 
 with never a wish to pause. Few are the artists 
 in ink who can conjure up before the reader's 
 eye the very doing of the deeds, the heroisms 
 and martyrdoms, the breaking down of old 
 things and the building up of new, the ever- 
 varying everyday work and play that formed 
 and still form the life of our race few can 
 conjure these things back from the void and 
 make us see them moving in the sunlight of
 
 Prologue. ix. 
 
 genius on a painted page. But all who write 
 may try ; and those who can only make history 
 dull should stop writing, and do penance in 
 some useful occupation for the wrong they have 
 done to mankind. 
 
 These little books are to form a "Story of 
 the Empire." That is to say, a " Story of Our- 
 selves and our Brothers." Every man and 
 woman in this country has a friend who has 
 gone away, or a child who will go away, 
 to make a home in another part of the 
 Empire ; and everyone has a most practical 
 concern in what happens to those far off 
 countries. No man can live to himself 
 alone ; nor can a country. Famine desolates 
 India : the Manchester cotton-worker earns less 
 wages. The wool clip fails in Australia, the 
 grain crop is short in Canada : the price of food 
 and clothing goes up in England. These are 
 only a few of the more obvious commercial ways 
 in which the interests of one part of the Empire 
 are bound up with the interests of the rest. 
 Some say that men are governed by their com- 
 mercial interests. This is as false as it would be 
 to say that a mother is only kind to her son to 
 gain his support in her old age ; or that a 
 daughter only loves her father while he can afford 
 her food and shelter. In every British colony 
 there is a deep affection for the Mother-land, 
 not felt by all, but glowing so warmly in many 
 hearts that it survives a long course of
 
 x. Prologue. 
 
 unmotherly indifference, and even modifies 
 their view of commercial interests. There are 
 many plain signs, too, that among those who 
 live in the old home a new spirit of brotherhood 
 with their separated kinsmen has sprung up and 
 is gathering strength every day. 
 
 What is it that has awaked the British peoples 
 from their dreamy isolation ? Fast steamers, 
 telegraph cables, cheap postage, popular educa- 
 tion : these have helped us to see and hear 
 more of each other, and to realize how near we 
 are even to the uttermost parts of the earth. 
 And we are being driven as well as drawn 
 together. As we read the extraordinary charges 
 fabricated against us by certain writers in the 
 French, German and Russian press, charges that 
 are not only read but believed by many in the 
 land of their invention, we realize that dangerous 
 things are sometimes done by deluded people. 
 Instinctively we gather closer together, back to 
 back and shoulder to shoulder, ready for an 
 onslaught which sanity would forbid. 
 
 The stories of two-headed giants and ogres 
 with which old women used to frighten children 
 were not true, but they were doubtless built on 
 a modest foundation of fact. The fact under- 
 lying all these monstrous fictions about the 
 British Empire is that the British Empire has 
 been a success. We have not, as you might 
 think from the virtuous indignation of our critics, 
 done what they would be ashamed to do. We
 
 Prologue. xu 
 
 have done what they would have done if they 
 could, and what they are trying to do now. 
 
 We have spread our influence over the globe, 
 as Sir Walter Besant shows, not with any pre- 
 meditated scheme, not from any mere lust for 
 land or greed of greatness, but because it 
 happens to be our nature to go abroad 
 and stay there. As the fluid earth spinning 
 round in new-created space is said to have 
 split and flung off a part of itself to form 
 the moon, so our busy nation has un- 
 consciously scattered scraps of its whirling 
 life to every point of the compass. Where 
 these fragments of Britain alight, there they 
 stick fast, and grow into new Britains as like the 
 old as nature will allow. How like this is, we 
 hardly realize ; and how unlike it is, we hardly 
 realize either. If we did, we should not be 
 torn between two extreme opinions on imperial 
 policy : both would be rejected as founded on 
 imperfect information. 
 
 The people of the Colonies are very like 
 ourselves. A Briton does not change his 
 nature when he changes his latitude. The man 
 whom we hear of roaming over a Canadian 
 prairie with a huge herd of cattle, or hunting 
 for gold in Mashonaland, or reigning over 
 a million of his fellow men in India, is 
 the same sort of man who writes all day at a 
 London desk, or toils from year's end to year's 
 end in a monotonous English factory. He
 
 xii. Prologue, 
 
 wants to " get on," to put himself and perhaps 
 his family into a comfortable position, to win 
 praise and to make money. Is there any class 
 at home that does not ? Both there and here 
 the nobler ambitions are at work ambition to 
 live a Christian life, to do to others what we 
 should like done to ourselves. But even here, 
 with Law plucking us by one sleeve and Gospel 
 by the other, we contrive to do a fair amount 
 of wickedness ; and away in the wilderness, with 
 an " inferior race " offering countless temptations 
 to oppression and other vices, the forces of 
 law and gospel are weaker instead of stronger 
 than at home. Let us, so far as possible, 
 prevent the evils we deplore ; but we should 
 remember two things that the Briton abroad 
 is doing what the Briton at home would 
 probably be doing under the same circum- 
 stances, and even that some lines of policy 
 which would be unsuitable and unjust here 
 may be just and necessary there. 
 
 It is in our dealings with the native races 
 whom we are dispossessing that we feel most 
 compunctions of conscience. Our record is 
 very far from blameless in this respect. We 
 cannot excuse our own misdeeds by proving 
 that greater misdoings and undoings blot the 
 record of another country. Nor can we justify 
 a wrong thing because it happened to be 
 done in pursuance of a right end. In 
 some cases the evils introduced among
 
 Prologue. xiii. 
 
 native races by the commercial greed and 
 uncontrolled animalism of men speaking our 
 language have been worse than anything that 
 existed before our arrival ; and our continued 
 rule can only be justified by a determined effort 
 to undo what we have done. It would be use- 
 less to withdraw, for we could not carry away 
 the evils that we brought. In other cases, and 
 these the great majority, our rule has been 
 already justified by the improvement we have 
 caused. It is surely too late in the history of 
 national thought to argue that any ruler found 
 in possession must be left in possession, no 
 matter how futile or barbarous his rule. The 
 land should be occupied by those who can 
 make the most and the best use of it. 
 
 I have dedicated this series to all who speak 
 the English tongue. Let me enlarge this 
 dedication to compass all who, speaking other 
 tongues, live loyally under the Union Jack or 
 the Stars and Stripes. I cannot forget that 
 among the Celtic races to which I belong, and 
 which have done perhaps more than their share 
 in making and defending the Empire, the 
 musical Welsh and Gaelic tongues are spoken 
 still by thousands, both at home and abroad. 
 But a Celt is capable of recognising facts, and 
 though he prefers the inclusive title " British " 
 to the narrower racial description of " English," 
 he takes an unhesitating place among the 
 nations whom the English language is welding
 
 \iv. Prologue. 
 
 into one. There is room in a single breast for 
 patriotism of every dimension. We love our 
 own town, our own village, more than any 
 other ; we are glad to meet men who hail from 
 the same county ; Scotsman stands by Scots- 
 man, Irishman by Irishman, Welshman by 
 Welshman, and even Manxman by Manxman, 
 all the world over. This is patriotism. It is a 
 greater patriotism which creates a sense of 
 common citizenship in every British heart ; and 
 a greater patriotism still which in England 
 declines to call an American a foreigner, and in 
 America refuses to be childishly stirred up 
 against the sister Empire. In the future an 
 international patriotism will flourish, to the 
 confusion of strife makers and the great content 
 of the peace-loving mass of mankind, whose 
 essential oneness is already a commonplace of 
 science and religion. Till we can have the 
 greater patriotism let us cultivate the less. 
 
 HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY. 
 
 The Queen's Birthday, 
 1897.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHATTER. PACE 
 
 I. THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE i 
 
 II. THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY ... 16 
 
 III. PREPARATION 24 
 
 IV. THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA 41 
 
 V. THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST 56 
 
 VI. THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST 75 
 
 VII. THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH ... 87 
 
 VIII. THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES 98 
 
 IX. THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE ... 105 
 
 X. THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE ... 117
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 MY object in writing this book is to 
 explain the causes and the principal 
 steps which led to the extension of the Anglo- 
 Saxon power, as we can now contemplate it, 
 over every part of the habitable globe. I wish 
 to show how it grew ; how it was able to meet 
 and to overcome all attempts of other nations ; 
 how the race has been singularly favoured by 
 fortune or by providence ; to show my readers 
 what this power actually is, not only the power of 
 the United Kingdom, her colonies and her 
 Eastern possessions, but also the power of the 
 United States of America. These two puissant 
 countries make up what I call the Empire of 
 the Anglo-Saxon, using the term, and that 
 other word " English," as conveniently descrip- 
 tive of all who speak the language in which I 
 write. 
 
 Those who come after me in this series will 
 
 B
 
 3 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 narrate in more detail the story of the various 
 parts of this enormous, perhaps happily divided, 
 Empire. It will be my task, after tracing briefly 
 its growth, to call upon my readers to learn how 
 the existence of this mighty Empire affects each 
 one personally ; what a heritage it is to him, in- 
 dividually; how the Empire and its resources may 
 be used for the advancement of every lad in its 
 vast confines who has an eye to see and a hand 
 to grasp the fruits and treasures which the 
 Empire offers to all her sons. 
 
 The beginning of our race, so far as we are 
 concerned, is the occupation of the greater part 
 of England and the south part of Scotland by 
 successive waves of invasion from the part of 
 Germany lying north and north-west of the 
 modern city of Hamburg. The people who 
 came over were called by various names ; we 
 shall call them, taking them altogether, Anglo- 
 Saxons or English. 
 
 Take them, to begin with, at the point when 
 they have finally driven the Britons from the 
 plains to the mountains, and are, after two 
 hundred years of fighting, practically masters of 
 the island. What do we find? They were 
 essentially an agricultural people ; they lived 
 in the country; they lived in village commu- 
 nities, sometimes in communities formed by 
 one family only ; the villages were scattered 
 about among forests and marshes, inaccess- 
 ible except by tracks ; every village was the
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 3 
 
 centre of a clearing. The people disliked 
 and dreaded towns; behind city walls lurked 
 sorcery ; the old towns, such as London, Sil- 
 Chester, Pevensey, they left waste and desolate. 
 The villages were, in all but a few respects, self- 
 sufficing : not quite, happily, or the history 
 of this country would have been very different 
 For instance, every village had its own oxen, 
 sheep, and swine; grew its own grain of all 
 kinds ; brewed its own beer ; had its hives and 
 made mead ; had its orchards and made cider ; 
 had its patches of peas and beans. Every village 
 had its fowls and geese ; the rivers, the ponds, 
 the marshes, gave their salmon, trout, carp, 
 pike, roach, and eels ; the same marshes at- 
 tracted countless thousands of wild birds ; there 
 were creatures in the forests to be hunted and 
 trapped. The villagers made leather from hides ; 
 they clothed themselves with sheepskins and with 
 wool ; they knew how to build with posts and 
 cross beams; with wattle and daub ; they 
 could thatch; they had fire. What did they 
 want more ? 
 
 Now, in the making of a country, the first 
 thing to be taught the people is the lesson of 
 mutual dependence. It does not seem that such 
 a collection of village communities, each appa- 
 rently self-sufficing, would afford a likely material 
 to work upon. It would seem as if they would 
 tend more and more to separate themselves 
 and to shrink within their own bounds,
 
 4 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 I. If, however, we find that the villages were 
 not after all self-sufficing; if we can discover 
 anything which was absolutely necessary to 
 them, and was not within their own limits 
 obtainable, we shall find that this seclusion 
 could not endure for ever. 
 
 There were, in fact, two things. The first was 
 salt : without salt life is intolerable. The second 
 was iron. But without iron the village would 
 get along somehow. Flint-heads could be made ; 
 slings could be used ; a piece of hard wood 
 hardened in the fire would do for a ploughshare ; 
 without iron for knives, swords, spearheads, 
 ploughshares, and all the other contrivances, 
 life was possible but incomplete : without salt 
 it was impossible. 
 
 Two things salt and iron. Thus the village 
 was not self-sufficing. Then men asked each 
 other where they could find salt and iron. 
 They had to ask of the next village, and they 
 discovered that they must ask courteously, even 
 bearing gifts instead of a club. 
 
 They found that they could obtain both salt 
 and iron, by means of barter. What did barter 
 mean? It meant that they must grow more 
 than they required, and exchange it with the 
 village where salt was made. The same with 
 iron. It could be had, but only by barter. 
 Perhaps some villages tried the simpler way of 
 raid and plunder. But this could not continue. 
 Thus trade began by the discovery of common
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 5 
 
 wants, the creation of new wants, and the 
 growth of superfluous products for exchange. 
 I have exaggerated the Anglo-Saxon isolation : 
 I have, in fact, gone back many centuries ; the 
 people were already advanced to the necessity 
 of trade when they settled here. The point 
 I desire to emphasise and to illustrate is the 
 civilising power of trade. This it is which opens 
 up the world. Trade first induces men to break 
 bread with each other rather than break each 
 other's heads. Trade it is which widens bound- 
 aries, removes hedges, and fills up ditches; 
 trade creates new wants and imparts new ideas ; 
 trade it is which makes it possible for men to 
 understand that they have common wants and 
 must act in common to satisfy those wants ; 
 trade creates and fosters the virtues of loyalty, 
 brotherhood, and discipline ; trade it is which 
 stimulates the study and the practice of the 
 arts; trade is the founder and father of enter- 
 prise, invention, science, travel and exploration. 
 It should be our deepest pride that our race are, 
 and have always been, among the great traders 
 of the world. Phoenicians and Carthaginians, 
 Venetians and Genoese, Dutch and English, 
 have been the great trading peoples, but the 
 greatest of them all are the English. 
 
 II. If trade was the first cause of intercourse 
 between the communities, self-preservation in 
 case of invasion or a hostile attack was the 
 second. There were many enemies of the
 
 6 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon village : the very next village, per- 
 haps; an association of villages making a tribe; 
 the Britons ; the Highland Scotch ; the Danes ; 
 pirates. Looking back upon those centuries of 
 war, when the Kinglet of Northumbria invaded the 
 realm of Mercia, when the Kinglet of Kent held 
 London, when Wessex lay at the mercy of the 
 Dane, we must remember that every war brought 
 with it another lesson, hard but necessary, to the 
 people the duty of union : first, union to their 
 own petty king ; next, union of the whole coun- 
 try. Each war brought also its own rough 
 lessons of discipline, duty, obedience, self-sacri- 
 fice, mercy to captives, respect to women, regard 
 to truce and treaty, and all those virtues is what 
 we are wont to associate with the so-called Age 
 of Chivalry, during which they were so often 
 conspicuously absent. 
 
 III. Given the village communities awakened 
 to the value of the services of the chapman or 
 wandering merchant, and fully impressed with 
 the necessity of turning out to fight at the order 
 of their king : how were they ever to learn 
 something of the outer world ? We may take it 
 that the ordinary villager knew nothing of the 
 outer world. There were no books, no wan- 
 dering minstrels, no traditions of the world 
 beyond his boundaries, except perhaps some 
 spot in England, just like his own, and not far 
 off, to which he had tramped in order to play 
 his part, a valiant part, in a fight.
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 7 
 
 Presently there happened an event which 
 suddenly cleared away the clouds and dis- 
 covered to the English villager the whole of the 
 habitable globe. 
 
 It fell upon him in consequence of his con- 
 version : he became a Christian. And when he 
 was a Christian, he began to go on pilgrimage. 
 
 The discovery of the world to Western Europe 
 is sometimes attributed to the Crusaders. That 
 is not the case. The discovery nay, the ex- 
 ploration of the world had been effected, long 
 before the Crusades, by the Pilgrims. They 
 began to go out from England in the eighth and 
 ninth centuries ; they went by ones and twos ; 
 they went out singly, or in small companies, 
 marching across the dangerous forests of Ger- 
 many ; sometimes murdered, sometimes dying of 
 fevers on the way, living on the charity of the 
 monastic houses; across the deserts of Asia 
 Minor, where the wild Saracens slew them for 
 sport. When one came back, he was a great 
 man indeed. 
 
 In the tenth and eleventh centuries they went 
 out by bands, troops, and small armies; they 
 went to Rome and visited famous shrines of 
 Southern Europe; they went by sea to the 
 Holy Land ; were taken to the Holy Places, and 
 came back laden with relics. There were pil- 
 grims in almost every village who would while 
 away the long evenings for a whole winter with 
 stories of what they had seen and what they had
 
 8 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 remembered. Many of the pilgrims were quite 
 uneducated rustics, but there were cases where 
 the pilgrim was a man of some education. 
 Imagine a monk one of the monks of the 
 Monastery of Ramsey, the House in the Fens, 
 where never traveller came or breath of the 
 outer world; whose repose was unbroken by 
 visitor or beggar. Picture to yourself this man, 
 accustomed to the dull monotony of the low- 
 lying fen : with the white mists of morning and 
 of evening lying on it, and no beauty but that 
 which wanted the discovery by the poet of its sun- 
 rise and its sunset : going on pilgrimage. This 
 man saw as he tramped along, he and his company, 
 the world growing daily wider, miraculously wider : 
 no end he wanted none to the mountains, 
 woods, streams, castles, monasteries, villages, 
 people : imagine him noting down all he saw, 
 trying to learn the language of the people, in- 
 quiring into their religion was it Christian ? 
 Finally, imagine this man returning home ; he 
 has a thumb of St. Paul, a tooth of John the 
 Baptist, a piece of the cerement of Lazarus, and 
 other precious relics. With these he will adorn 
 the Treasury; but they are as nothing compared 
 to the wonders he will have to tell in the even- 
 ings when he and the brethren are assembled 
 together in the calefactory, sitting round the 
 cheerful wood fire. 
 
 So great was the eagerness to listen to the 
 pilgrim that we actually find, later on, a crafts-
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 9 
 
 man of the City of London assuming the garb 
 of a Pilgrim or a Palmer, and pretending to 
 have visited Rome, Jerusalem, Seville, and I 
 know not what other places. He dressed for 
 the part he assumed the habits of the Palmer ; 
 he had many anecdotes to tell of all these 
 shrines. He lived, in fact, upon these anecdotes 
 for a good many years before he was found out, 
 and forced to return to his original occupation, 
 which was, I believe, that of a cordwainer. 
 
 Three things have we enumerated as necessary 
 at the outset in the making of a nation. They 
 are : trade, springing from the discovery of 
 wants ; war, causing union for self-preservation ; 
 and some knowledge of the outer world. We 
 have seen how these three points were met in 
 the case of the Anglo-Saxon. There remained, 
 however, a fourth point : a common language. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how different 
 was the language used in the early kingdom of 
 England, say, in the sixth century. The North- 
 umbrian hardly understood the Mercian, the 
 Anglian did not understand the man of Kent, 
 the man of Somerset did not understand the 
 man of Essex. Separation and seclusion had 
 widened the differences. Now a nation can 
 never be wholly one until it has one language in 
 common use. Nor can any man regard another 
 as his own countryman unless they both speak 
 a common tongue. Perhaps community of in- 
 terests may create a desire for friendship and
 
 10 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 alliance, but not a common brotherhood, not of 
 kin. 
 
 Differences so great as to render people unin- 
 telligible to each other existed down to the 
 fifteenth century. Caxton relates how a London 
 merchant, detained off the North Foreland by 
 contrary winds, went ashore and found a farmer's 
 wife of whom he wanted to buy some eggs. "I 
 do not understand French," said the woman. 
 This nettled the merchant, because he did 
 not understand French either. Then a by- 
 stander interfered. " He wants to buy eyren," 
 he explained. " Oh ! Eyren ! " the woman 
 replied, " Yes, he can buy eyren." Her 
 English, you see, was largely mixed with 
 Flemish. 
 
 There is reason to believe that the differences 
 of local dialect increased rather than decreased 
 during the middle ages. It is not known for 
 certain how much the Northumbrian speech 
 differed from that of Wessex; we know both 
 Beowulf and Caedmon only from translations 
 or alterations made by the men of the South. 
 Moreover, the Danes certainly left their mark 
 on the speech of the people of the north. A 
 common language was conferred upon the 
 country by the translations of parts of the Bible, 
 the Psalter, the Homilies, the Vision of Csedmon, 
 and other works of a devotional character. A 
 great many years later on, when the Wessex 
 dialect in which they were promulgated was
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. II 
 
 changing, and all the dialects were changing, 
 the Reformation gave the world a new transla- 
 tion of the Bible, a Prayer-book in English, 
 Homilies, and Psalms in verse. The Law, also, 
 and the Universities and the schools, ceasing 
 altogether Norman, French and Latin, suc- 
 ceeded in establishing one common language 
 throughout the land. There was little difficulty 
 in this, because the differences were never more 
 than could be reconciled on the basis of a 
 common language. 
 
 With these four conditions satisfied trade 
 service in war, breaking down of seclusion, and 
 a common tongue the nation was in a fair 
 way towards union when the Norman William 
 arrived. For a time he seemed as a Conqueror 
 only. He was a great deal more. It was by 
 his strong arm, and the strong arms of his 
 successors, that the complete welding of the 
 people became possible, and that not for 
 four hundred years to come. But this question 
 would take us too far. 
 
 Before we go on, there are three points which 
 I would submit as bearing on the future 
 history. 
 
 The first is an illustration of the necessity of 
 a common language in making a nation. The 
 Saxons always ardently desired the conquest of 
 Wales, which they never could effect because 
 these mountaineers not only kept themselves 
 aloof in their inaccessible valleys, but also
 
 12 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 jealously clung to their own language. On the 
 other hand, the Britons who were left in Cum- 
 berland, in Cornwall, in the forests of Sussex, 
 and elsewhere, were speedily absorbed by the 
 Saxons lost their language and lost their 
 individuality. Again, the Saxons never con- 
 quered the Highlanders. They might defeat 
 them in battle probably they did, or the High- 
 landers would have driven them out but they 
 could not conquer them. The Highlanders 
 still clung, you see, to their language. 
 
 The next point bears upon what follows after. 
 It is the power peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon, 
 alone perhaps among nations, of absolutely 
 transforming and absorbing all peoples of what- 
 ever kind who come to dwell within his 
 borders. Here in England we have seen the 
 Saxon absorbing the Briton, the whole remnant 
 of those whom he did not slay with the excep- 
 tion of the Welsh, whom he never conquered 
 the Dane; the Norman; later on, Flemings, 
 Germans, French, Italians, Polish Jews. He 
 receives all, he welcomes all : in the second or 
 the third generation they are Englishmen all, 
 with English hearts and minds, loyal to the 
 English laws. 
 
 The same thing is to-day going on in the 
 United States of America, and in all our 
 Colonies. The newly arrived foreign element 
 is at this moment so strong in the States 
 that the process of absorption is slow, but it is
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 13 
 
 sure. The laws, the institutions of a free and 
 self-governing people compel those who would 
 live under these laws to learn the language in 
 which they are published, in which the parlia- 
 ments are held, the courts hear cases, and the 
 schools are taught. There are at this moment, 
 perhaps, millions in the States who cannot 
 speak English. In twenty years they will all 
 speak English. In the City of Buffalo I once 
 conversed with a child of ten years : he blacked 
 my boots, in fact : he had been in the country 
 for three or four years ; he was a Polish or a 
 Russian Jew; this child spoke excellent English, 
 he went to school, he had ambitions which he 
 confessed to me, he blacked boots before 
 school, and between school and after school. 
 He was horribly poor, but he had acquired, 
 instead of the abject squalor of his native 
 belongings, the erect bearing, the comprehension 
 of freedom, the ambitions of the Anglo Saxon ! 
 Already he perhaps his father too was ab- 
 sorbed. 
 
 The third point is a theory which may, 
 perhaps, be disputed. I maintain that the 
 modern Englishman is the same as King 
 Alfred's Englishman, or King Edward the 
 First's Englishman, or any other Englishman. 
 If, then, we can lay down the leading character- 
 istics of the Englishman of to-day [by Englishman, 
 once more, I include those of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race who speak our tongue] we know those of the
 
 14 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 
 
 Englishman of the past. He is, to begin with, 
 more readily attracted by things practical than by 
 things theoretical ; he prefers a feat of arms to 
 any intellectual achievement ; he would rather 
 hear of things done than of things attempted ; he 
 worships success in everything, because success 
 means battle and victory ; he is combative and 
 aggressive; he likes fighting as much as his 
 ancestors. Whenever there is fighting to be had, 
 whenever the army is creditably engaged, the 
 recruits flock in by thousands. He is subject 
 to restlessness, he cannot be always sitting still ; 
 he will throw up his situation and go roaming 
 about the world ; he likes trade, especially trade 
 across the seas, because it demands enterprise 
 and courage it is a great mistake to suppose 
 that the love of trade denotes a mean and money 
 grubbing spirit. He is profoundly religious, but he 
 will not endure the domination of priests ; he is 
 tender and even chivalrous towards women, he 
 loves children, he sits at home with his wife and 
 children and desires no other society. To the 
 kings who have from time to time attempted to 
 extend the Royal prerogative and to curtail his 
 own liberties, he has always opposed a steady, 
 stubborn resistance in the long run it has 
 been the worse for that king and he demands 
 freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom 
 of faith. He insists on self-government as his 
 inheritance, he enters into combinations and 
 associations with readiness, and understands
 
 THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE. 15 
 
 what is meant by give and take. He is not the 
 most courteous person in the civilised world : 
 he is well satisfied with himself, he seldom 
 troubles himself much about the position and 
 the views of other people. 
 
 Add to all these points that he is fond of 
 sport, of athletics, of open air amusements and 
 occupations; that he requires a large and 
 generous diet, and that he drinks freely, whether 
 of beer, the national beverage, or of wine, or of 
 spirits, or of tea, coffee, and cocoa ; that he is 
 a strong, big and healthy animal; that he is 
 greatly led by his animal instincts ; and that his 
 views on all subjects are influenced by sentiment 
 rather than reason. 
 
 I have drawn the character of the average 
 Englishman. Do not point to this man or to 
 that, who are very far from agreeing with this 
 estimate. My figure is that of the average, not 
 the exceptional Englishman. I present you 
 with the soldier, not the captain ; the rank and 
 file, without whom nothing that has been done 
 could have been done. And we are now going 
 to see what things what very fine things the 
 average Englishman succeeded in doing.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 
 
 WE have seen what goes to the making 
 of a country. We have now to 
 consider how a country may be extended. 
 There are various ways : by settlement, by 
 the establishment of trading stations, by 
 voluntary colonization, even by sending out 
 criminals, by purchase, and by conquest. 
 The history of Europe is a long history of 
 conquest, followed by defeat and expulsion. 
 The Empire of Charlemagne covered the 
 best part of western Europe; it fell to pieces 
 after his death. The Empire of Napoleon 
 covered nearly the whole of Europe ; that, too, 
 fell to pieces, but before his death. Extension 
 by conquest is, in fact, the worst possible way 
 of extension and the most likely to fail ; yet it 
 was always the dream. If conquest is to be per- 
 manent, the conquered people must acquiesce 
 in the new rule : either the new rulers must
 
 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 17 
 
 absorb the people, or the people must absorb 
 the rulers. William, Duke of Normandy, con- 
 quered England, and remained, he and his. 
 Why ? Observe, first, that at the outset he pro- 
 mised confirmation of the old liberties : he was 
 crowned after the Saxon manner. Next, that 
 the changes he introduced were such as were 
 slowly understood. Thirdly, that there were no 
 more waves of invasion. Normans came, but 
 not to eat up the land : they came as traders. 
 The strong king Henry I. married a Saxon 
 princess in order to make his title safer. By 
 this marriage, our Queen is descended from 
 King Alfred. 
 
 The King of England, meantime, had great 
 possessions in France : some of them he in- 
 herited; some he conquered; some he obtained 
 by marriage. And he dreamed of acquiring by 
 conquest the whole of that great country. 
 
 It was a futile dream : once or twice it came 
 true for a brief space ; at other times, it looked 
 as if it was coming true. 
 
 The wars in France which lasted from the 
 Conqueror to Henry VIII., were, for the most 
 part, wars of extension by conquest. They 
 were easily carried on, because there was never 
 any difficulty in getting the Englishman to 
 fight. He was a restless creature ; he wanted 
 movement and excitement; if there was no 
 fighting he must find movement to occupy him. 
 In these days the restlessness of the race in 
 
 c
 
 1 8 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 
 
 America has pushed him west always further 
 west, till the Pacific stops him ; restlessness 
 drives our sons by thousands to South Africa ; 
 restlessness makes the Englishman enlist for 
 India ; restlessness sends him to people deserts 
 in Australia; restlessness made him rejoice to 
 follow the king to Normandy or Gascony. 
 
 But the French possessions were not in the 
 exact sense save that they belonged to the 
 King possessions of the English people. They 
 were not an extension of empire. There was 
 no kind of communication between Yorkshire 
 and Guienne. There were no English trading 
 settlements in Normandy; the French pro- 
 vinces did not pay tribute to England ; they did 
 not acknowledge the authority of the Church, 
 the Lords, the Commons of England only 
 that of the king. Between the French pro- 
 vinces and England there were no common 
 interests ; the institutions differed widely. There- 
 fore, though the heart of England swelled with 
 pride unspeakable after Cregy and Agincourt; 
 though a kind of spurious patriotism lingered 
 round the conquests in France; though there 
 was bitter humiliation when those conquests 
 were all lost ; the whole business, regarded as an 
 attempt at extension, was absolutely futile and 
 doomed beforehand to failure. It was im- 
 possible for England to conquer France and to 
 hold it. For a time she might force submission : 
 but there would be no attempt at amalgamation
 
 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 19 
 
 either of the victors with the conquered or the 
 vanquished with the conqueror. Therefore, the 
 whole of the French wars were foolish and 
 illusory, regarded as attempts of extension. 
 There never was any possibility of extension. 
 At best, there would only be so many French 
 provinces under the rule of the King of 
 England, bound to furnish him with troops for 
 his continental wars. 
 
 For five hundred years, therefore, we carried 
 on a succession of false starts : always suc- 
 ceeding, always beaten back. 
 
 Next, consider Wales. We have very little 
 cause to congratulate ourselves on our success in 
 Wales. The mountains of Wales, as we know, 
 became the last refuge of the Britons in their long 
 struggle with the English invaders. From these 
 mountains they carried on incessant war, with 
 varying fortunes. They were defeated by King 
 Offa, of Mercia, who took from them Shrewsbury 
 and Hereford, but Offa could do no more with 
 them. In the gth century they made an alliance 
 with Alfred ; in the loth century they carried on 
 civil war among themselves; in 1039 Griffith 
 became King of United Wales, and won back 
 Shrewsbury and Hereford ; in 1063 he was 
 murdered, and Wales for a time submitted. 
 
 We need not pursue the story in detail. 
 Every king in succession waged war with them. 
 Sometimes they submitted to break out again. 
 It is a monotonous story : the creation of
 
 20 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 
 
 Edward II. as Prince of Wales did nothing to 
 pacify them ; they only became quiet when, in 
 the person of Henry VIL, King Arthur himself 
 visibly returned to earth, and was ruling again on 
 earth. Henry's eldest son was named Arthur in 
 acknowledgment of the Welsh superstition. 
 
 Now, what have we done with Wales? 
 Although we have imposed our laws upon the 
 country, the people remain still in their 
 mountains, as they have always done ; they 
 maintain their old language, their customs, 
 superstitions, literature, traditions; they do not 
 court the friendship of the Saxon ; they do all 
 they can to keep themselves apart. In other 
 words, extension in the direction of Wales is 
 as illusory as in the direction of France. 
 
 Take, again, the case of Scotland. The low- 
 lands were overrun, like the north of England, 
 by Angles ; their speech was like the speech of 
 the Northumbrians. The "five nations" men- 
 tioned by Bede as belonging to the lowlands were 
 quietly absorbed by the English invader ; for 
 a time the country was part of the Kingdom of 
 Northumbria. But it fell away : a range of 
 mountains, a river, a great stone wall, separated 
 the Lowlands from England; there was no 
 intercourse; there was no trade between Scot- 
 land and England; there was fighting continually, 
 as with Wales. This was a case in which 
 separation brought about enmity between two 
 people of the same origin, speaking the same
 
 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 21 
 
 language ; but the point so obvious is that we 
 were unable to conquer or to annex Scotland, 
 though we were always trying. All attempt at 
 extension in that direction failed. 
 
 In the same way, the Lowland Scots were 
 wholly unable to conquer the Highlands. Scot- 
 land gave a dynasty to the English crown ; she 
 was united with us politically, but she preserved 
 her own laws and institutions ; she joined Eng- 
 land as an ally ; she is still an ally, not absorbed, 
 preserving her own individuality. 
 
 There remains Ireland. We conquered 
 Ireland, it is narrated by the historian. Have 
 we made Ireland our own ? Have we absorbed 
 the Irish race ? Go, ask the millions of Irish- 
 men in America what sort of extension of 
 empire is that where, after six hundred years, the 
 people are as anxious to shake off the English 
 yoke as they were at the outset. In the case of 
 Ireland there has been no extension of empire ; 
 there has been an extension of burden. It is 
 not my business to explain, or to defend, or to 
 accuse in the matter of Ireland. I would only 
 remind you that, after all these years, though 
 the whole of the empire, with all its countless 
 offices, distinctions, honours, chances of wealth, 
 belongs to the Irish as much as to ourselves ; 
 though Irishmen are found in the highest 
 places ; though by their services and their pluck 
 they know how to climb, and do climb the 
 country must still be kept down by a garrison,
 
 22 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 
 
 and the Irish in America never cease abusing 
 us, conspiring against us, embittering the 
 Americans against us. The extension of 
 empire in the direction of Ireland has been one 
 long history of failure. None of the requisites 
 for making a united nation were found. Trade 
 was not encouraged ; there was no communica- 
 tion between the English and the Irish peoples ; 
 the latter spoke another tongue ; there was no 
 absorption possible of the Irish in the small 
 English garrison. 
 
 Lastly, neither to France, Scotland, Wales, 
 or Ireland, has there ever been any real 
 emigration of the English people. 
 
 For the true extension of empire there are 
 wanted trade interests, emigration, absorption, 
 a feeling of brotherhood, a sense of mutual 
 dependence, intercommunication, the senti- 
 ment of the flag. 
 
 All these things are now found as common 
 possessions of the people living in these islands. 
 We fight side by side, we trade side by side ; 
 the sentiment of separate race yet lingers, but 
 I do not suppose that the most ardent Irish, 
 Welsh or Scottish Nationalist, would desire the 
 actual separation of the Irish from the privileges 
 and the possibilities which have led so many 
 of their countrymen to rank and fame and 
 wealth. 
 
 All these examples, France, Wales, Ireland, 
 Scotland, illustrate the same point, that extension
 
 THE EXTENSION OF A COUNTRY. 23 
 
 of empire by means of conquest can only be 
 permanent or stable if the conquest is thorough, 
 leaving no chance for the vanquished to rise, 
 and if it is followed by the absorption of the 
 one race by the other. The Saxon conquest 
 was permanent where they killed all but a 
 remnant j the Norman conquest was permanent, 
 because the conquerors were absorbed by the 
 vanquished. The history of five hundred years 
 is the history of so many blind and futile 
 attempts to extend the power of the country in 
 the belief that seizing a country causes extension. 
 " Ireland is mine," says the King of England, 
 and garrisons Dublin with a little military force. 
 "Wales is mine," says the king, safe in his 
 castle of Carnarvon, on which the free and 
 everlasting mountains look down in scorn. " I 
 am suzerain over Scotland," says the king : 
 alas ! his son, ten years after, is bundled bag 
 and baggage out of the country. 
 
 These are not the real triumphs of English 
 history. These lands are not those which 
 extend the empire.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PREPARATION. 
 
 LEAVING behind us the middle ages, 
 we step into the sixteenth century, 
 where our eyes gaze across the seas upon lands 
 unknown and coasts of which none had yet 
 dreamed. It is remarkable that advocates of 
 the theory that land was to be found on 
 the west of the Atlantic, should really 
 rely on the words of a Latin poet, who had 
 prophesied the coming of a time when ocean 
 should relax her bonds and a new world should 
 lie open beyond. The sixteenth century is the 
 time of eager exploration of new worlds opening 
 out on every side. It was not with the view of 
 acquiring territory, but of gaining knowledge 
 which might help the merchants in their trading 
 expeditions, that English ships put forth from 
 English ports. 
 
 The history of England during the sixteenth 
 century, looked at from any point of view, is
 
 PREPARATION. 25 
 
 splendid. It was like a release from school, 
 it was like the opening of a prison door, it was 
 like the rolling away of a cloud. What was the 
 world, practically, before the sixteenth century ? 
 The Baltic, the Mediterranean, the land round 
 their shores, Western Europe, with only the 
 southern shores of Norway and Sweden. 
 Only learned men knew something about 
 India, Persia, and Arabia; the rest of the world 
 was shut off from the eyes of Western Europe 
 by a thick, black cloud. 
 
 And now this cloud was rolled away. Quite 
 suddenly, it seemed, the way across the ocean 
 was opened in every direction, north, south, 
 east and west. 
 
 Three nations seized upon the chance of 
 exploration and trade. Portugal led the way 
 to the west coast of Africa ; Spain discovered the 
 land foretold by the Latin poet ; Cabot, in an 
 English ship, discovered the mainland of 
 America, and then for a hundred years and more 
 the annals of navigation and discovery are full of 
 the glories and the achievements of English 
 sailors. 
 
 We have forgotten most of these heroes ; we 
 imagine that the enterprise of England was 
 chiefly directed against the Spaniard in the Gulf 
 of Mexico ; the names of Drake and Raleigh 
 eclipse all other names. 
 
 I am going, here, to revive some of those 
 names. I am going to show that it was not
 
 26 PREPARATION. 
 
 Westward Ho ! only, but to North and South, 
 and East and West, that the English flag was 
 carried the St. George's flag, the red cross on 
 the white ground at the masthead of English 
 ships. 
 
 There were many distinct lines which were 
 attempted by the seamen of that age. They 
 tried the North-east passage, the North-west 
 passage, the Mediterranean : touching at ports 
 never before visited by English crafts, and 
 fighting their entrance against Spaniards, 
 "Portugals," and Moors. They sailed to 
 America and discovered the coasts and creeks of 
 the north ; they attacked the Spaniard wherever 
 they found him; they plundered his towns, 
 took his ships, and lay in wait for his galleons 
 laden with silver. Or they sailed to the West 
 Coast of Africa, where they started trade in 
 slaves. Or they sailed round the Cape of 
 Storms, the Cape of Good Hope. Every ship 
 that put out of London port carried with it new 
 hopes, new plans, new expectations. Every 
 ship that returned came laden with new things, 
 a cargo of new products, plans and charts of 
 newly-discovered ports, stories of newly-found 
 people ; while every sailor had his budget of 
 yarns and strange adventures. An eager time 
 it was, a hopeful time, a time when everything 
 was possible: when the English heart beat 
 high and the English hand was strong : 
 when statesman and merchant and sailor
 
 PREPARATION. 27 
 
 discovered, for the first time, that the world, with 
 all that therein is, belongs to those who can 
 send forth ships and are not afraid to sail in 
 them. 
 
 The thirst for discovery was awakened in this 
 country even before the discoveries of Columbus. 
 As early as 1480 Bristol sent out two ships for the 
 discovery of the " Island " of Brazil ; they were 
 driven back by storms. In 1498 we learn that 
 for some years the merchants of Bristol had 
 been sending out two, three or four ships every 
 year for the discovery of Brazil. In 1494 they 
 sent out John Cabot, who first beheld the 
 continent of America. 
 
 Let us take, first, the attempt to find a north- 
 east passage. The theory was that there was 
 open sea, at all event in the summer, on the 
 north of Lapland and Asia ; that the northern 
 shores of Asia, then most imperfectly understood 
 as to extent, after a while turned southward, and 
 that a ship, after passing along the north coast, 
 would find an easy voyage southward among 
 the islands of Cathay and the Spiceries. The 
 theory had a good deal to recommend it. 
 First, it was known that the land to the north of 
 Norway did bend round in an easterly direction. 
 Then the Portuguese had found a passage 
 round the south of Africa, by which they could 
 sail to India, and the Spanish had found a 
 passage round the south of America. Why 
 should not the English find a passage round
 
 28 PREPARATION. 
 
 the north of Asia in the east, and the north of 
 America in the west ? 
 
 One Robert Thorne wrote a treatise upon 
 the subject. He proved to his own satisfaction 
 that a north-east passage existed ; that it might 
 easily be found by English sailors ; that as soon 
 as it was found the way to the Spice Islands 
 would be 2,000 leagues shorter than that by 
 which the Portuguese or the Spaniards had to 
 navigate. This was in 1527. Thorne seems 
 to have convinced everybody : indeed, every- 
 body wished to be convinced. But it was not 
 until 1553 that a serious attempt was made to 
 put Thome's theory to the proof. 
 
 By this time Sebastian Cabot, who had been 
 for some years in the service of the King of 
 Spain, had returned to England, where he was 
 appointed " Governor of the Mystery and Com- 
 pany of the Merchant-Adventurers for the 
 Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands and 
 Places Unknown." The very title betrays the 
 thirst for exploration and discovery. When the 
 expedition for discovering the north east passage 
 was decided upon, a company was formed it 
 was a private expedition consisting of 240 
 shares at ,25 each. It was decided to send 
 out three ships: the Bona Esperanza of 120 
 tons, the Edward Bonaventure of 160 tons, 
 and the Bona Confidentia of 90 tons. The 
 crews consisted of 116 men, all told; among 
 these were six merchants, no doubt representing
 
 PREPARATION. 29 
 
 this company and anxious to begin trading 
 with the natives. 
 
 The tonnage of the ships was small, but we 
 shall find much smaller ships than these em- 
 ployed on distant voyages. Meantime a tight, 
 well-built boat, such as one of the fishing 
 smacks of Whitby or Penzance would prove as 
 safe a craft in a storm as one ten times her size. 
 The greatest care was taken in building the 
 ships and in fitting them out. Cabot drew out 
 regulations for the conduct of the voyage, and 
 the behaviour of the crew. They were not, for 
 instance, to laugh at the uncouth manners of 
 any natives whom they might meet. There 
 were to be daily prayers. A chaplain went on 
 board the Edward Bonaventure. 
 
 The command of the expedition was entrusted 
 to Sir Hugh Willoughby, a sailor of repute. 
 He went on board the Bona Esperanza. With 
 him were Richard Chancellor, captain of the 
 Edward Bonaventure, and Cornelius Durforth, 
 of the Bona Confidentia. 
 
 The little fleet took 19 days before they 
 arrived in Yarmouth Roads. There the wind 
 proved contrary, and they sailed back to Orwell, 
 where they lay for a fortnight. On board the 
 Edward, the captain, Chancellor, was disgusted 
 about his provisions, which began to go putrid; 
 also his hogsheads leaked. However, there 
 were worse misfortunes to follow. 
 
 On the 1 4th day of July, about seven weeks
 
 3O PREPARATION. 
 
 after sailing, they sighted certain islands on the 
 coast of Norway. On the 2nd day of August 
 they encountered a terrible storm, which caused 
 them to part company, Willoughby and Durforth 
 keeping company and losing sight of Chancellor. 
 They proceeded on their voyage, however, 
 getting as far east as Nova Zembla. There 
 they were forced to sail westward, rinding about 
 the middle of September a good harbour, where 
 they proposed to winter. 
 
 "The next day, being the 18 of September, 
 we entred into the Haven, and there came to 
 an anker at 6 fadoms. This haven runneth into 
 the maine, about two leagues, and is in bredth 
 halfe a league, wherein were very many seale 
 fishes, and other great fishes, and upon the 
 maine we saw beares, great deere, foxes, with 
 divers strange beasts, as guloines, and such 
 other which were to us unknown, and also 
 wonderfull. Thus remaining in this haven the 
 space of a weeke, seeing the yeare farre spent, 
 and also very euill weather, as frost, snow, and 
 haile, as though it had beene the deepe of 
 winter, we thought best to winter there. 
 Wherefore we sent out three men Southsouth- 
 west, to search if they could find people, who 
 went three daies journey, but could find none ; 
 after that, we sent other three westward foure 
 daies journey, which also returned without 
 finding any people. Then sent we three men 
 southeast three dayes journey, who in like sorte
 
 PREPARATION. 3! 
 
 returned without finding of people, or any 
 similitude of habitation." 
 
 The captain's log, which is given in full by 
 Hakluyt, breaks off suddenly. The admiral 
 made his will, which, with the log, was found 
 on his table after his death. As to the manner 
 of his death, and that of the crew, we know 
 not. Their dead bodies were all found by some 
 Russian merchants from Perm. They were dead : 
 perhaps, unused to the precautions necessary to 
 keep out the Arctic cold, they were touched by 
 the frost, and so fell asleep, never to wake 
 again. There is a tradition that this brave old 
 admiral was found sitting at his table, frozen, 
 upright, his dead hand resting on his papers : a 
 strange and ghostly sight ! 
 
 As for Chancellor, his case was, for this 
 occasion, more fortunate. His ship escaped the 
 storm, and he was able to put in at the place of 
 rendezvous, where he waited for his companions. 
 As they did not appear, he made up his mind 
 that they had gone to the bottom, and went on 
 alone. He traversed a sea where there was no 
 night ; he entered a great gulf the White Sea 
 and found upon the shores a monastery ; the 
 brethren told him that this country belonged to 
 the great White Czar, Ivan the Terrible. This 
 was the discovery of Muscovy say the re- 
 discovery, because there had been intercourse 
 in the Anglo-Saxon times, but the people had 
 clean forgotten the Muscovite. Chancelloi
 
 32 PREPARATION. 
 
 resolved to make the long journey to Moscow : 
 he would venture alone upon an unauthorised 
 embassy to the Czar. It is a surprising story of 
 audacity. I cannot give the details. Let it be 
 understood, however, that Chancellor was 
 actually received by the Czar ; that he obtained 
 all that he asked namely, free trade, provided 
 he introduced, by way of the White Sea, com- 
 modities which the Czar could not obtain, 
 except with great difficulty, from Poland. This 
 business happily accomplished it was worth a 
 thousand North-east Passages had he known 
 Chancellor returned to his ship, exchanged his 
 cargo for Russian goods, and sailed homewards. 
 He had rediscovered Muscovy : he had re- 
 opened friendly relations with the Czar. 
 
 As a first consequence of this voyage the 
 Muscovy Company was established. A year 
 later, Chancellor embarked on a second voyage 
 for the Company. He carried with him two 
 accredited agents, who concluded a formal 
 treaty of commerce with the Czar. He also 
 established a permanent factory on the shores 
 of the White Sea. Whether to watch over the 
 factory or to protect it, the Czar built a fort 
 beside it and placed a garrison therein. Houses 
 grew up round fort and factory, and this was 
 the origin of the great Russian port and city of 
 Archangel. The Czar sent an ambassador to 
 England with presents and letters for the 
 Queen. He sailed with Chancellor on his
 
 PREPARATION. 33 
 
 return. Alas ! The voyage was most unfortu- 
 nate. Two of the ships were cast away and 
 lost with all hands on the coast of Norway. 
 Chancellor's own ship was wrecked at Pitsligo 
 in Scotland. He himself and all his ship's 
 company lost their lives. The only persons 
 saved were the Russian Ambassador and half-a- 
 dozen of the crew. Such was the end of as 
 good a sailor and as brave an adventurer as that 
 or any other time has produced. 
 
 This voyage of Chancellor's proved the begin- 
 ning of a long period of amity and open trade 
 between London and Russia. Chancellor was 
 only the first of many travellers and merchants 
 who journeyed up and down the face of the 
 country by license of the Czar : who ventured 
 among the Tartars; who visited Persia and made 
 their way from Archangel to far East India. 
 The names of these early travellers are for the 
 most part obscured : yet they deserve to live. 
 Try to remember at least the names of Henry 
 Lane, Richard Johnson, and, above all, of 
 Anthony Jenkinson. 
 
 The dream of the North-east passage continued 
 to haunt the minds of men : five or six expeditions 
 in search of it were despatched within the next 
 fifty years, succeeding only in laying down the 
 shores of Norway and Lapland, and in landing 
 on Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. 
 
 The North-west Passage was attempted some 
 years after the other ; voyages to the north of 
 
 D
 
 34 PREPARATION. 
 
 America discovered Labrador, Newfoundland, 
 the St. Lawrence, and other parts. Davis, in 
 1585-88, made an attempt, discovering the strait 
 which bears his name. Hudson, Frobisher, 
 Baffin, Button, Fox, and James, one after another, 
 attempted the passage and failed. Since all 
 that their hardships effected was the discovery 
 of frozen seas and icebergs, it might be thought 
 that this was waste of effort. Since, however, 
 their voyages gave the English sailors mastery 
 in the art of navigation and a contempt of 
 danger, they formed part of the long preliminary 
 time which I have called " Preparation." 
 
 Of Drake and his companions there is small 
 need to speak. They are accused of having 
 been little more than pirates. Certainly the 
 thirst for gain would lend additional courage 
 to their hearts, because to hear of the great 
 silver ship being taken and of the division of 
 spoil among all the crew would fire any man's 
 imagination. But in the minds of Raleigh, 
 Drake, and the leaders, there was a great deal 
 more than lust of gold. It was imperative, if 
 the Protestant states were to prosper, to destroy 
 the overwhelming dread of the Spanish power. 
 Therefore Drake destroyed the Spanish king's 
 fleet at Cadiz; the English merchants defied 
 his gallies in the Mediterranean; in times of 
 peace or of war, the English rovers took his 
 ships and burned his towns on the shores of the 
 Spanish Main. Everywhere, before the eyes of
 
 PREPARATION. 35 
 
 the whole world, the Englishman showed that 
 he was not afraid of the Spaniard, that he was 
 willing to meet him and able to beat him. 
 Gradually, therefore, the Spanish terror was 
 beaten down. More quickly the English 
 courage rose with new confidence in themselves 
 and a record of victory growing longer and 
 longer every year. 
 
 If the leaders were such as Raleigh and Drake, 
 what about the lesser men ? Let the story of 
 John Oxenham, or Oxham, serve as an example 
 of the spirit and the audacity of the English in 
 the West Indies. 
 
 The story is told by a Portuguese named 
 Lopez Vaz. 
 
 John Oxenham, hearing of the spoil taken by 
 Drake, resolved to imitate that example. He 
 therefore got possession, somehow, probably by 
 the help of some Devonshire gentlemen, of a 
 ship of 140 tons and 70 men, with which com- 
 pany he set sail for Nombre di Dios. Here he 
 learned that the silver was now brought over the 
 Isthmus. With an escort of soldiers he resolved 
 on attempting a feat which, for sheer audacity 
 and contempt of danger, is certainly the first in 
 the whole annals of English daring. From the 
 beginning it was nothing less than a forlorn 
 hope. For with his 70 men, and no hope of 
 getting any more, he braved the whole of the 
 Spanish force in the town and in the Bay of 
 Panama. First he brought his ship into a creek
 
 36 PREPARATION. 
 
 and covered her with boughs, so that she might 
 not be readily seen. He then buried her 
 cannon, except a few light pieces which could 
 be carried, and with his whole company marched 
 inland to cross the Isthmus. Presently, he 
 came to a stream running through the woods. 
 Here he halted and encamped, while he cut 
 down the trees and built a pinnace, five and forty 
 feet long, and so, slipping down the river, sailed 
 out into the open sea. First of all, being 
 guided by a negro, he sailed to the Island of 
 Pearls, 25 leagues from Panama. There he 
 captured a barque sailing from Quito to Panama 
 with 60,000 pezos of gold. A few days later he 
 took another, with 100,000 pezos of silver in 
 bars. With this booty he thought they would 
 return, so he dismissed his prizes, and with his 
 pinnace loaded with all his gold and silver he 
 returned to the river by which he had come 
 down, and thought to escape. 
 
 Meantime the negroes in the Pearl Islands 
 had informed the Governor of Peru of these 
 proceedings. He, therefore, sent a body of 100 
 armed men in boats after the Englishmen. The 
 pursuers entered the river, but presently came 
 to a place where three streams met, and they 
 knew not which to take. Just as they were 
 about to take the largest stream, some hen's 
 feathers came floating down one of the lesser 
 streams. The feathers betrayed the route of 
 the English.
 
 PREPARATION. 37 
 
 Four days of working up the stream brought 
 the Spaniards to the English pinnace, where were 
 six Englishmen. One of these they killed, 
 the rest ran into the woods. The Spaniards 
 followed, and half a league further they dis- 
 covered all the Englishmen's goods, with the 
 gold and silver. Having secured this, they 
 resolved to trouble themselves no further, and 
 carried off the recovered plunder. 
 
 Three days later they were furiously attacked 
 by the English, who had two hundred negroes 
 with them. The Spaniards, however, had the 
 advantage of position, and killed eleven of the 
 enemy, took seven, and beat off the rest. 
 
 John Oxenham's army was now reduced to 
 52, of whom many were sick. These might 
 still have got off in safety, but for the misfortune 
 that their ship was found, and so escape was 
 impossible. There was but one way : to build 
 canoes, to take to the ocean and to capture 
 a bark. This they proceeded to attempt, 
 but the Viceroy of Peru, not thinking it good 
 that fifty marauding Englishmen should be 
 wandering about the woods stirring up the 
 negroes to mischief, sent a company of one 
 hundred and fifty men in search of them. 
 They were found at work on their canoes : 
 many of them were down with fever, and these 
 were taken. The rest escaped with the negroes. 
 In the end, however, they were all betrayed 
 by their false friends and delivered over to
 
 38 PREPARATION. 
 
 the Spaniards. " Then the Justice of Panama 
 asked the English Captain whether he had 
 the Queen's license, or the license of any 
 other Prince or Lord for his attempt. And 
 he answered he had none, whereupon he and 
 all his company were condemned to die, and 
 so were all executed, saving the Captain, the 
 Master, the Pilot, and five boys which were 
 carried to Lima, and then the Captain was 
 executed with the other two, but the boys be 
 yet living." 
 
 And so we leave the Spanish Main. 
 
 I advise those who would learn with what a 
 steadfast spirit the Elizabethan captains went 
 out, how nobly they would die, to read in 
 Hakluyt's Voyages the story of the last fight of 
 Sir Richard Grenville in the Revenge; the 
 drowning of Sir Humphrey Gilbert on board 
 the Squirrel; the escape of John Fox and his 
 companions from the prisons and the galleys of 
 Alexandria; the gallant fight of a certain 
 English merchantman against the Spanish gal- 
 leys off Gibraltar ; the rash attack of Oxenham 
 upon Panama ; the exploits of Drake, Cavendish, 
 and Raleigh ; the voyages of Sebastian Cabot, 
 Hawkins, Matthew Hore, John Rut, Chaloner, 
 Roger Bodenham, John Lok, Thomas Stukeley, 
 James Lancaster, William Towison, and dozens 
 of others. He who considers and digests those 
 bulky volumes which contain the doings of the 
 Elizabethan sea-captains, will rise with the
 
 PREPARATION. 39 
 
 opinion that at no other time did any other 
 country exhibit a spirit of so much courage and 
 so much tenacity. 
 
 This, I say, was England's Day of Prepara- 
 tion ; in this way did she unconsciously prepare 
 herself for the destinies before her ; in this way 
 she learned her real strength, the strength of 
 her navies, and the true direction in which 
 that strength should be employed. 
 
 You have seen how the English flag, the 
 " George " was carried into the Arctic Circle, 
 North of America and North of Asia ; how an 
 English ship first rounded the coast of America ; 
 how English sailors fought with the Spaniard 
 wherever they found him. There are other 
 shores and other lands which were opened up 
 by English sailors. Not to their credit, they first 
 engaged in the slave trade. They got round 
 the Cape of Good Hope to India, to Burmah, 
 even to Japan. They went round the world. 
 They established their own prestige, and shat- 
 tered the prestige of Spain. Now all these 
 things they did, as yet, with one or two excep- 
 tions, hoping nothing but to humiliate the 
 Spaniard, to capture his plate ship, to establish 
 here and there trading factories of their own. 
 They came into the field fourth first Spain, 
 then Portugal, then Holland but England 
 gained by this delay. As yet, besides, she had 
 no thought of conquest in the east, or of 
 possessions in the west : all was for trade.
 
 40 PREPARATION. 
 
 There were two statesmen of this time to 
 whom these voyages meant more than trade. 
 Both earnestly desired to humiliate Spain. Both 
 saw their chances opened up by the new world. 
 Both endeavoured to found colonies. One was 
 Admiral Coligny, greatest of Frenchmen ; the 
 other^was Walter Raleigh, greatest of English- 
 men.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 WHAT did the English nation learn 
 from this period of what I have 
 called Preparation ? They learned confidence 
 in themselves unbounded confidence in 
 themselves unswerving confidence, against 
 any force that might be sent against 
 them. You have seen by what actions and 
 achievements, by what glorious deaths, by what 
 audacity, this spirit was awakened among our 
 people. It was awakened in readiness against 
 the time when they saw what Raleigh and a 
 few like him had understood all along that 
 they must not suffer Spain to become the sole 
 mistress of the New World, not even if she 
 shared her possessions with Portugal ; not even 
 if the Pope arrogated to himself the power of 
 bestowing the New World, and gave it all to 
 these two Powers. Now the Spaniards, whose 
 settlements were in the warm latitudes of the
 
 42 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 Isthmus, had landed here and there on the shores 
 of North America. There they found a climate 
 very different from that of Panama and Car- 
 thagena, a bleak and bitter climate ; they found 
 no gold ; the natives were not like the soft and 
 effeminate people of Central America, but fierce, 
 jealous, brave, and cruel. The Spaniards were 
 not tempted to make new settlements north 
 of Florida. 
 
 A colony, if it is to be successful, must be 
 self-supporting. When a colony remains to 
 the mother country a certain source of expense 
 every year, it can only be retained for military 
 reasons. The French colonies founded by 
 Coligny failed because the colonists would not 
 till the ground ; but man wants more than 
 bread : he wants weapons, clothes, instruments, 
 all kinds of manufactured articles. What a 
 colonist requires, outside what he can grow, he 
 must be able to buy for himself. Therefore, he 
 must produce for export and barter such com- 
 modities as the mother country wants. Thus 
 it is not enough for a colony to be fertile and to 
 grow corn and fruits of all kinds. It must 
 produce exports, or it cannot flourish. Trade, 
 as we have already seen, lies at the foundation of 
 all society. The first attempt at a settlement in 
 America the first step in the extension of 
 empire was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 
 year 1585. His expedition was entrusted to the 
 command of Sir Richard Grenville. Among
 
 THE LKSSONS OF VIRGINIA. 43 
 
 the lagoons of North Carolina, protected from 
 the ocean by low-lying islands and long narrow 
 "Bills" or tongues of land, is a small island 
 called Rcanoke, situated opposite the broad 
 mouth of the Roanoke river. Upon this island, 
 for greater safety, Sir Richard Grenville placed 
 his little colony. It would seem that at first it 
 was designed as a military station, to be kept 
 provided with necessaries from home, and to be 
 constantly reinforced, for there were no women 
 among the settlers. Their instructions were to 
 explore as much of the mainland as they could ; 
 to inquire diligently after the position and 
 distance of the Western coast and the Pacific 
 Ocean, and after the existence of gold and 
 silver and precious stones. The general belief 
 was that America was narrow all the way north, 
 as it was at Darien and Panama, and the hope 
 was to get across, find a port, and to establish 
 for England a new trade route with China. 
 Grenville, having seen that the settlers were 
 provided for, returned to England, leaving one 
 John Lane in his place. When, a year later, 
 Drake arrived to inquire after the colony, he 
 found them much disheartened with their ill- 
 success, and the continued hostility of the 
 Indians. Moreover, there were dissensions ; 
 some of them had been too "nicely brought 
 up," and grumbled at the hard work which, as 
 gentlemen, they thought they ought not to do. 
 Drake gave them a ship, but it was driven out
 
 44 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 to sea in a gale. Finally they returned with 
 Drake, leaving only fifteen of their party behind 
 to keep possession of Roanoke. 
 
 This was the first colony, and it was a failure. 
 Raleigh learned from his failure one or two 
 valuable lessons ; first, that his settlement must 
 be strong enough to face any force that might 
 reasonably be expected to be sent against it, 
 either by Spaniard or by Red Indian ; next 
 he understood that a colony, to be lasting, must 
 be based upon the home life; thirdly, he 
 learned that the country he had seized was 
 possessed of a climate inferior to none in 
 Europe ; that it was, as the settlers claimed, 
 " a very Paradise," where grapes grew wild in 
 the woods, and where anything that was 
 planted or sown took root' and flourished 
 abundantly ; where the summers were never too 
 hot, and the winters never too cold. It must 
 be remembered that in those days the English 
 do not seem to have suffered inconvenience 
 from the heat, whether on the Gold Coast or in 
 the Gulf of Mexico. The colonists also brought 
 home with them the practice of smoking 
 tobacco. 
 
 Raleigh, laying these lessons to heart, sent 
 another expedition. This time it consisted of 
 1 80 men, many of whom took their wives and 
 children with them. The commander was 
 John White, formerly one of John Lane's Com- 
 pany. The settlers returned to Roanoke. Alas !
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 45 
 
 the fifteen men left behind had vanished ! It 
 was a bad omen, if Englishmen of that time had 
 heeded omens. Nothing was left to show that 
 there had been a clearing and a hamlet except 
 the melons they had planted, which now over- 
 ran the whole island and were devoured by wild 
 deer. 
 
 The new-comers settled down, however, and 
 made the best of it. Then they began the old 
 business of exploring, and discovering, and 
 fighting the Indians. There was sickness 
 among them. These low islands are not free 
 from fever. We hear of one child a little girl 
 born among them. They called her after 
 the name of their settlement Virginia. 
 
 After three years it became again necessary to 
 obtain supplies. By this time they wanted tools 
 and instruments of all kinds, weapons, gun- 
 powder, clothes, and a great many other things. 
 John White was sent home to procure them. 
 The colony was by this time reduced to ninety 
 men, seventeen women, and eleven children. 
 Only eleven children was there only one birth 
 among them ? The thing is incredible. Did 
 fever carry off the children ? One knows not. 
 
 John White went away. He returned it was 
 in 1590. To his dismay he found the place 
 deserted ; all were gone : men, women, and 
 children. The cottages were empty ; grass was 
 growing over the floors ; creepers were tearing 
 down the walls : there was not a soul left. It
 
 46 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 was a second and a more mysterious disappear- 
 ance. What became of this unfortunate colony 
 was never discovered. Probably they resolved 
 on moving to some more healthy place : on the 
 way, one surmises, they were attacked by the 
 Indians and all killed men, women, and 
 children, not one left to escape and to tell the 
 tale; then their bodies were left lying in the 
 green forest ; the hemlock and the pine wound 
 their tall branches over them; the tall grass 
 grew up and hid the terrible dead men, and the 
 dead women, and the dead children ; and so they 
 returned to mother earth. Years after there 
 were rumours that some of them were still living 
 with the Indians one hopes that the children 
 had been spared. Little Virginia Dare was then 
 three years of age. Perhaps she grew up in the 
 tents of the Indians, an Indian herself, with 
 strange blue eyes and long fair hair, and desired 
 no better lot than what she obtained : to marry 
 a brave and to bring up her own boys to be 
 braves. 
 
 Another lesson in the art of colonising. The 
 colony must be self-sufficing ; it must make for 
 itself, produce for itself, and be able to live 
 upon what it can produce and make. The 
 first Virginians seem to have produced nothing 
 on their little island swamp. 
 
 The next American settlement was also a 
 failure. The design was due to one Bartholomew 
 Gosnold, a seaman whose name is little
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 47 
 
 remembered at this day : his fame is eclipsed by 
 that of Drake and Cavendish, Davis andFrobisher, 
 Gilbert and Grenville ; but in his time a man of 
 note. It was Gosnold who first laid down on 
 the chart the coast of New England ; and it 
 was Gosnold who first led a colony to that part 
 of America. 
 
 He found an island, the last and most 
 northerly of a group the Elizabeth Islands 
 lying in a straight line south of Buzzard's 
 Bay, Massachusetts, between the mainland and 
 Martha's Vineyard. As the steamer from 
 Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard enters the 
 Bay on her way to New Bedford a lighthouse is 
 visible to the south west. This is the light of 
 Cutty hunk, and it is the site of Gosnold's colony. 
 Their leader was a careful man ; he knew what 
 had happened at Roanoke twelve years before ; 
 he would be secure, at least, against a sudden 
 attack of Indians; he therefore chose Cutty- 
 hunk because it was a safe distance from 
 the mainland, save for the narrow strait which 
 separated it from the next island of Nashawena. 
 He also chose Cuttyhunk because there was 
 on the island a lake and in the lake an islet. 
 He therefore placed his colony on the 
 islet, and constructed a boat to patrol the 
 lake by night. It is evident that Gosnold 
 designed nothing but a trading station. The 
 men traded with Indians for furs. They traded 
 with the Indians on the mainland and the
 
 48 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 Indians on Martha's Vineyard and the other 
 islands. When they quarrelled over the division 
 of profits the colony broke up, and the men 
 returned to England. Then there was not a 
 single English inhabitant in the whole of 
 America; but it was impossible to stay the 
 spirit of enterprise which, by this time, possessed 
 all England, even under the timid and peaceful 
 James. Gosnold came home. He formed the 
 " Virginia Company " among the merchants of 
 London and sent out another colony. They 
 set sail in December, 1606, on board three 
 ships: The Susan, 100 tons; the Godspeed, 40 
 tons ; and the Discovery, 20 tons. 
 
 The early history of Virginia is a long record 
 of suffering and failure. These people, not 
 deterred by the ill success of their predecessors, 
 intended to return to Roanoke. There were 
 about a hundred of them, but most of them 
 were "gentlemen," unfit for work. A colony 
 wants no gentlemen ; it wants men who can culti- 
 vate the soil, it wants craftsmen, and it wants 
 soldiers. The man who is only a soldier is a 
 mere burden in a colony. A storm drove these 
 settlers away from Roanoke and into the mouth 
 of a great river. This river they called James 
 River, in honour of their King. Its mouth is at 
 the entrance to Chesapeake Bay ; on its banks, 
 higher up, is now situated the City of Richmond. 
 
 It was the month of April, when the banks 
 of the river are covered with spring flowers.
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 49 
 
 After the long voyage of four months the 
 sight of this verdure delighted .the settlers, 
 they thought the place was made for them; 
 they landed, looked about, and presently 
 chose for their settlement a low-lying peninsula 
 (which became an island) which looked charm- 
 ing in its spring colouring. It was really a 
 fever-stricken place. However, they landed, 
 built huts, and they called their settlement 
 Jamestown. A hundred of them landed : in a 
 few months half of them were dead, their food 
 was gone, it was too late to grow corn that year, 
 their only drink was the unwholesome water of 
 the river. The " gentlemen " would not work. 
 The Indians were always on the watch for an 
 opportunity : at one time there were not more 
 than five men to defend the place had it been 
 attacked. Among the settlers was a man of 
 great mark as a traveller, adventurer, and nar- 
 rator of travellers' tales. This was John Smith, 
 the hero of Pocahontas' pity. Everybody knows 
 the story : how John Smith was taken by the 
 Indian chief Powhattan ; how he was sentenced 
 to have his brains beaten out ; how, when his 
 head was actually laid upon the block, Poca- 
 hontas ran up to him, laid her arms round his 
 neck, and begged his life. John Smith it was 
 who first explored Chesapeake Bay. It was said 
 that in the cold winter nights he and his men 
 would change the position of their fire three or 
 four times, so as to get some warm ground to 
 
 E
 
 50 THE LtbbONS OF VIRGINIA 
 
 lie upon. He was successful with the Indians, 
 engaging them to trade and to bring in food, 
 and doing a great deal to disarm their jealousy. 
 When more settlers arrived, John Smith left the 
 colony and sailed north to explore the coast 
 north of Cape Cod. 
 
 John Smith went home in 1609, when there 
 were 490 white people in Virginia. Then 
 followed the worst time ever experienced. For 
 there was no food, and the Indians brought 
 none ; nothing was grown ; nor did any of the 
 white men venture into the woods in search of 
 game, for the Indians lay in wait to kill them. 
 They called it afterwards the " starving time." 
 They ate everything, even their own dead. It 
 is a most terrible story ; it is a lesson for colonists 
 of all time to learn. Without agriculture, ham- 
 pered with " gentlemen " who would not work, 
 with a hostile population who would bring in no 
 food, what was there left for such a hapless 
 colony ? Out of 490 people, there were left no 
 more than 60 when Sir Thomas Gates arrived 
 with another shipload of settlers. These had 
 been shipwrecked on the Bermudas, where they 
 lived on wild hogs until they could build two 
 new vessels, in which they came on to James- 
 town. The sight of the wretched survivors 
 terrified the new-comers, who refused to land. 
 Had they arrived only a week later, they would 
 have found all dead. Gates took them all on 
 board his ships and started to return to
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. $1 
 
 England. The third Virginian colony was 
 deserted. 
 
 Before Gates reached the mouth of the river 
 he met a boat rowing up to meet him. It 
 contained Lord De la Warr, who had come out 
 as Governor of the Colony. He had with him 
 more colonists, and plentiful supplies of all 
 kinds. So Gates turned back, and the colony 
 was once more founded. Lord De la Warr 
 seems to have been a ruler of some wisdom, 
 but he did not understand the unhealthiness of 
 the place. Another sickness fell upon the 
 people, by which a large number died. Then 
 De la Warr returned home, and was succeeded 
 by Sir Thomas Dale. 
 
 Dale perceived clearly that there must be an 
 end to shirking work. Gentlemen or no gentle- 
 men, he would make the settlers work. So he 
 began to enforce this rule with a harshness so 
 foreign to the tradition of the time, that one 
 suspects a spirit of insubordination, and a 
 stubborn resolve not to undergo the indignity 
 of manual labour. We may, perhaps, connect 
 something of the modern American's readiness 
 to turn his hand to anything to the necessities 
 of the old colonial days ; and something of the 
 modern English contempt for the craftsman, 
 now fast disappearing, to the bad tradition of 
 gentility. Dale, then, enforced his rule : he 
 flogged his men the "gentlemen too nicely 
 brought up " till they did work ; he flogged
 
 52 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 them if they shirked their work ; he is said to 
 have even burned some alive. One does not 
 defend cruelty, but one does understand that in 
 an infant colony men too proud for work must 
 be cut off from the community, and made to 
 work. A desperate condition of affairs required 
 the strongest remedies. 
 
 The hostility of the Indians was in great 
 measure overcome by the capture of the 
 " Princess " Pocahontas. She was brought into 
 Jamestown, and, being now arrived at woman- 
 hood, was married to one John Rolfe. She was 
 taken to England by Dale, on his return in 1616, 
 and here she died. Her husband, John Rolfe, 
 was the first to discover that tobacco would 
 or m an excellent export. The cultivation of 
 tobacco was immediately successful. 
 
 In 1618 the Virginia Company, partly as a 
 protest against the encroachments of the king, 
 granted the colonists a Charter, by which they 
 were allowed a voice in making their own laws. 
 So that the beginning of free government in 
 America arose out of the exaggerated claims of 
 royal power advanced by the King of England. 
 The Government was to consist of a Governor, 
 a Council of Estate, and a General Assembly 
 in other words, of king, lords, and commons ; 
 a pattern which was afterwards copied by all the 
 American Colonies. Hitherto, the colonists 
 had lived under despotic rule : they were not 
 allowed to have land of their own, everything
 
 THK LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 53 
 
 was held in common. As a natural consequence, 
 they were horribly discontented their one hope 
 was to get back to England. When, however, 
 this regime was changed, when they began to 
 cultivate their own land, when they had a voice 
 in the management of their own affairs, this 
 discontent vanished : they were a free people. 
 Each man could enjoy his own estate; they 
 made their own laws for themselves. Then a 
 new heart arose among the people : there was 
 no thought of returning home ; there was no 
 such liberty, no such holding of land, in 
 England. It has always been the dream of 
 mankind that each man should cultivate his 
 own acre ; it is the dream even in this 
 country, where the yeoman has been either 
 crushed out of existence or has crushed out 
 other yeoman and has become the lord of the 
 land. 
 
 The first proof of contentment was shown 
 when the settlers began to send to England for 
 wives, and to pay, with a hundred and fifty 
 pounds of tobacco for each, for their passage 
 out. 
 
 I have dwelt at length on the history of our 
 first colony in America, because the founders of 
 that often founded settlement committed as 
 many mistakes as they possibly could, and 
 suffered as much punishment, short of exter- 
 mination, as could well follow. More than of 
 any other people can it be said of the Virginians
 
 54 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 
 
 that their sufferings were their lessons. Con- 
 sider some of their blunders : 
 
 (i.) First of all, they sent out gentlemen too 
 proud to work. 
 
 (2.) They chose for their settlement a low- 
 lying, fever-stricken spot. 
 
 (3.) They depended for everything on the 
 supplies from home. 
 
 (4.) They sent out settlers without women for 
 them to marry. 
 
 (5.) They failed to conciliate the Indians. 
 
 (6.) They made no attempt to create an 
 export trade. We do not even hear of their 
 getting furs from the Indians. 
 
 One more disaster befel the colony. It was 
 on March 22nd, 1622, in the forenoon, when 
 all the men were scattered, working on their 
 fields, and unarmed. The Indians, without 
 warning, rose, and began to murder them : men, 
 women, and children. They killed over 300 on 
 that memorable day. One man alone was 
 warned ; he hastened to the Governor, who was 
 able to put part of the colony into a state of 
 defence. 
 
 The Virginia Company was dissolved by 
 James ; it was one of his last acts. He took the 
 government of the colony into his own hands, 
 but promised the colonists the full enjoyment 
 of their liberties. A Stuart's promise as regards 
 the liberties of the people was, indeed, a thing 
 carrying with it much confidence.
 
 THE LESSONS OF VIRGINIA. 55 
 
 Such was the eventful history of Virginia at 
 the outset. Many other histories of our colonies 
 are as eventful, but none so interesting as this, 
 the early history of our earliest colony. It was 
 the work everything great is the work of one 
 man of Sir Walter Raleigh, whose name ought 
 to be revered in the United States as much as 
 that of Washington, and by ourselves as much 
 as that of Wellington and Nelson. The former 
 showed the way for the expansion of the Anglo- 
 Saxon race; the two latter saved the Anglo- 
 Saxon race from the most awful military 
 despotism that ever crushed under its iron heel 
 the freedom, the courage, the heart, the hope of 
 the people where it ruled.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THK WEST. 
 
 THERE were emigrants who went off 
 in search of adventure and war ; 
 emigrants who went to trade ; emigrants who 
 were compelled by poverty to leave their 
 native land ; emigrants who went away for 
 the sake of religious freedom ; and emigrants 
 who were shut out of the country as immoral 
 and malefactors. We have now to do chiefly 
 with the emigrants of religion. 
 
 The famous Mayflower carried to America the 
 first shipload of emigrants for the sake of religion. 
 They were a company of about a hundred ; 
 half the number of these men had been living 
 at Leyden for thirteen years, for the sake of 
 worshipping in their own way. They landed at 
 Plymouth, a harbour so named by Captain John 
 Smith six years before. It was in the depth of 
 winter, on the 2ist of December, 1620, that 
 this little company stepped on shore. The cold
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 57 
 
 was greater than they had ever experienced, 
 even in Holland. They were weakened by a 
 long and stormy voyage : they were imperfectly 
 supplied with provisions ; and it was some 
 time before they could build houses capable 
 of affording shelter and warmth. Like the 
 Virginians, these colonists began with a fiery 
 trial of sickness and of death. Fifty-six of 
 them nearly the half died in the first six 
 months. They were fortunate, however, in 
 securing the friendship of some of the Indians. 
 Others remained hostile; the settlers fought 
 them, under the leadership of the stout Myles 
 Standish. They had actually to live on clams 
 and other shell-fish for a time, and until their 
 first crop was reaped. Their little settlement 
 was fortified by a stockade, and they possessed 
 six small cannon. Their co-religionists from 
 Leyden came out to them, and they were 
 presently joined by others. They were ready 
 to work, and managed to get on as soon as 
 their harvests began. 
 
 Eight years after the arrival of the Mayflower, 
 the Massachusetts Company was formed and 
 controlled by directors of the Puritan party. 
 They intended to make the company the means 
 of sending their own people to America, for 
 freedom of thought and worship. The com- 
 pany had a district assigned to it. They sent out 
 their first settlers to Salem in 1628 ; others 
 followed, and in 1630 they resolved upon
 
 58 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 transferring the head quarters of the company 
 from London to Massachusetts. Their chief, 
 John Winthrop, took out a thousand people in 
 1630. Hesettledat Boston, which has always been 
 considered the chief city of Massachusetts. This 
 colony was regarded as a Land of Refuge by 
 the Puritan party in England. Nor, at first, 
 was it considered as in any way a danger to the 
 mother country that tens of thousands should 
 leave it with bitterness in their hearts for the sake 
 of religious liberty. The memory of religious per- 
 secution, however, is a thing that lingers long 
 and rankles for generations to come. The exiles 
 for the sake of faith regarded themselves as 
 martyrs, and were so regarded by their sons 
 and their grandsons. Massachusetts, however, 
 thanks to the intolerance of Laud and of 
 Charles, became the largest and the most 
 powerful of the American colonies. 
 
 You must not, however, believe that it was 
 a land of religious liberty. The Pilgrim fathers 
 believed that everybody should think as they 
 themselves thought. Had they achieved their 
 own way, they would have sent Laud himself, 
 and all who thought like him, across the ocean 
 with the greatest alacrity. 
 
 This fact is shown by the history of the 
 colony. A few years after the foundation a 
 number of the colonists began to follow after 
 the teaching of a woman named Mrs. Hutchin- 
 son. Her doctrine was not approved by the
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 59 
 
 preachers who ruled in Boston. The woman 
 and her followers were, therefore, expelled from 
 the community. Again, a branch broke off 
 under a minister named Thomas Hooker ; they 
 went south and founded towns which still re- 
 main in the State of Connecticut. Another 
 branch went off with another minister, and 
 settled at New Haven, also now part of Con- 
 necticut. Religious differences caused the 
 foundation of the State of Rhode Island. The 
 governing body of Boston banished one Roger 
 Williams for opinions damnable and heretical : 
 one of these was the principle of religious 
 liberty. He was followed by his friends and 
 settled at the head of Narragansett Bay. Other 
 people banished from Boston had settled there, 
 and in this way was founded the State of Rhode 
 Island. Religious differences also caused the 
 settlement of New Hampshire. 
 
 That part of America which is now called 
 the State of New York, was settled first by the 
 Dutch, after Henry Hudson, an Englishman, 
 had discovered the Hudson River for them. 
 Albany is the place where the Dutch first placed 
 a trading station on the Hudson. They also 
 built a small settlement and town, which they 
 called New Amsterdam, on the site of what is 
 now New York city. The Swedes also attempted 
 a colony in America, on the Delaware River. 
 They were, however, promptly annexed by the 
 Dutch.
 
 fo THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 In 1664 the English claimed the whole of 
 the land, from Virginia to New England inclu- 
 sive ; backed their claims by a flotilla of four 
 ships ; and made the Dutch, amounting to no 
 more than 1,500 persons, surrender. Hence- 
 forward there was no more question of the 
 English rights over the sea-board of North 
 America. 
 
 Next to Virginia, the most interesting of 
 American foundations is that of Maryland. 
 The first Lord Baltimore, who became a Roman 
 Catholic at a time when the prejudice against 
 Roman Catholics, as well as their disabilities, 
 was very strong, tried first to found a colony in 
 Newfoundland. His colony was called Avalon. 
 The climate proving too severe, Lord Baltimore 
 went to Virginia, where he endeavoured to 
 establish a settlement. This, however, the 
 Virginians would not allow unless he acknow- 
 ledged the king as the head of the Church. 
 This he could not do, and so returned to 
 England, when the king granted him a piece of 
 Virginia north of the Potomac. Lord Balti- 
 more died before he could make use of this con- 
 cession. The colony of Maryland was, however, 
 founded by his son, the second Lord Baltimore, 
 who gave the command to his brother, Leonard 
 Calvert, and sent out the first company, con- 
 sisting of twenty gentlemen and a hundred 
 craftsmen. Observe how the lessons of Virginia 
 had taken root only twenty gentlemen, enough
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 6l 
 
 to act as officers. These first settlers appear to 
 have been Roman Catholics to a man. The 
 dominant idea, indeed, of the founders was that 
 Maryland might become for the Catholics what 
 Massachusetts was for the Puritans, but without 
 the intolerance of the latter. Maryland, from the 
 beginning, was a place where all sects were 
 tolerated. They lived side by side and enjoyed 
 equal rights. 
 
 North and South Carolina were the outcome 
 of a scheme and an experiment. There were 
 eight gentlemen in London who had formed a 
 plan of government, which they were enabled 
 to realise by the concession of a large district 
 south of Virginia. Charles II. gave them this 
 territory. It had been known before as 
 Carolana. By altering one vowel it became 
 Carolina, as if from Carolus, the Latin form of 
 Charles. The new owners were called the 
 "Lords Proprietors of Carolina." The first 
 settlement made by these Lords was in 1670. 
 Ten years later the people moved up to the site 
 of Charleston, which they founded. The colony- 
 was largely increased by the arrival of many- 
 French Huguenots. The form of government 
 attempted was mock feudal. The colony was 
 to be ruled by an order of nobility of three 
 ranks, called respectively Palatines, Landgraves, 
 and Caciques. They divided the ground into 
 great square blocks, which the people were to 
 cultivate as tenants. The nobles were to live
 
 62 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 upon the rents, and to send the difference home 
 to the Lords Proprietors. Unfortunately, the 
 projectors did not understand that the people 
 had to be consulted. In this case, it appeared 
 that the people had not crossed the Atlantic in 
 order to work for landlords. They found the 
 land waiting for them : they took it. They 
 refused to occupy the square blocks; they 
 refused to pay any rent ; and, what was worse 
 than all, they derided the Palatines, the Land- 
 graves, and the Caciques. Under these circum- 
 stances, it was a happy thing when the South 
 Carolina people threw off the yoke of the Lords 
 Proprietors this was in 1719 and when the 
 king took over both colonies this was in 1729. 
 
 I return to the emigrants for the cause of 
 Religion. 
 
 The colony of New Jersey, given by the Duke 
 of York to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George 
 Castinet, was peopled largely by Scotch immi- 
 grants, who fled to escape religious persecu- 
 tion. 
 
 But the most considerable immigration for 
 the sake of faith, far more considerable even than 
 that of the Pilgrim Fathers, was the arrival of the 
 Quakers under Penn. This people refused to 
 take off their hats, to take any oath, or to take 
 any part in fighting ; they would have no music ; 
 no art of any kind ; no singing, no poetry ; they 
 would have no finery in dress, no bright colours. 
 They were, I believe, the most unpopular of all
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 63 
 
 the sects, because Presbyterians might tolerate 
 Baptists, and both might tolerate Independents, 
 but none could tolerate Quakers. They were 
 whipped, and fined, and imprisoned ; in Massa- 
 chusetts they were whipped and banished ; they 
 were even put to death in that colony. There- 
 fore, they endeavoured to found a new colony 
 for themselves. This was effected by the 
 exertions of William Penn. 
 
 William Penn was one of the few Quakers of 
 the time who could be called of gentle blood. 
 He was the son of a distinguished naval officer. 
 Like the rest of his brethren he was imprisoned 
 from time to time for his opinions, and his refusal 
 to act in any way against his conscience. Yet he 
 had influence enough at Court to obtain, instead 
 of payment of a debt due to his father from King 
 Charles II., a grant of land on the west side of the 
 Delaware. This country was inhabited by a few 
 Swedes only. Penn sent out his first emigrants 
 in 1 68 1 ; the colony increased more rapidly than 
 any other. It was free to all comers, whatever 
 their religion. With him came the first wave of 
 the Irish emigration : with him came large num- 
 bers of Welsh, and thousands of Germans. 
 The Quakers prevailed in numbers, but there 
 were colonists of all religions. Moreover, there 
 was land free to any who would take it and cul- 
 tivate it : no rent to pay, no taxes, no over-lord 
 except Penn himself and his heirs. The 
 governor of Pennsylvania continued to be
 
 64 THK EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 appointed by the Penn family until the War of 
 Independence. 
 
 Then commences one more early colony, that 
 of Georgia. This colony, the last and youngest 
 of those which formed the first United States, 
 was founded by General James Oglethorpe in 
 the year 1732. He proposed to create a colony 
 which should receive poor and distressed people, 
 especially those whose fortunes had been ruined 
 by the mad speculation of the time. He wanted 
 at the same time to offer a refuge to persecuted 
 Protestants of all countries. He proposed to 
 erect a bulwark against the encroachments or 
 the invasions of the Spanish from Florida. And 
 he refused to allow slaves to be maintained, 
 bought or sold, in his colony. He intended, 
 also, to establish in Georgia an industry in silk. 
 Never was a colony started with more benevolent 
 aims or on more definite principles. Unfortu- 
 nately individual interest often tramples on 
 benevolence, and the exigencies of the moment 
 prove too much for principles. 
 
 The first settlers included a regiment of 
 Highlanders; then came also Germans, and at 
 first a large number of English were attracted to 
 the colony. But the benevolent schemes of the 
 projector, which included measures to prevent 
 the accumulation of riches, were speedily frus- 
 trated. " Let us," said the colonist, " get rich if 
 we can and as we can." In the end the early 
 principles were all abandoned : the silk trade,
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE V/EST. 65 
 
 the surrender of estates at death, the prohibition 
 to hold slaves : and Georgia became just like 
 any other colony. 
 
 We have now learned how each colony was 
 founded and how it grew. The growth of the 
 colonies was greatly accelerated by the accessions 
 of new immigrants every year. Yet, during the 
 last century, comparatively few went out from 
 Great Britain. The Irish emigration was stayed 
 for a time : we read little more about Scotch or 
 Welsh emigrants. The religious tolerations re- 
 moved one great cause of exile : the enormous 
 advance in trade, which continued all through 
 the century, made the merchants and the class 
 which depended upon them easy in their circum- 
 stances : the rise in the value of land and the 
 extension of cultivated land transformed the 
 yeoman into the squire, the squire into the 
 territorial magnate : the wars gave occupation to 
 the younger men and killed off the surplus 
 population. Still the tide of emigration never 
 wholly ceased. 
 
 The case of the Palatines 1709 and 1743 
 shows how America had come to be regarded as 
 a land of refuge. These people belonged to 
 a part of Germany devastated by the French in 
 1688. Unable to endure their wretchedness, 
 they resolved on throwing themselves upon the 
 charity of the English ; they came over twelve 
 thousand of them and landed penniless. First 
 the Queen kept them but the burden became
 
 66 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 too heavy then the country. London sub- 
 scribed nearly .30,000 for them. Some were 
 sent to the north of Ireland, where their 
 descendants still remain ; some to the American 
 colonies it is melancholy to relate that half 
 of the four thousand sent to New York died 
 on the voyage. There was a second invasion of 
 starving Palatines forty years later. These were 
 all sent to North Carolina. 
 
 We have enumerated the voluntary immi- 
 grants into America : English, Scotch, Irish, 
 Welsh, French, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes. 
 We must now speak of involuntary immigrants, 
 those who came against their will, and because 
 they were sentenced to this exile. 
 
 These were, first of all, the waifs and strays 
 of the streets and roads : the boys and girls, 
 picked up and sent out of the country in 
 order to keep them from a life of vice at 
 home. They had to become servants till 
 they came of age. There were next the men 
 or women who were persuaded, or bribed, to 
 sell themselves for a term of years, generally 
 seven. Many thousands of men and women 
 were shipped to the colonies as "indentured 
 servants." Out of these a great many were 
 kidnapped; some were made drunk, and, on 
 recovery, were told that they had signed articles 
 and must now go out to Virginia or South 
 Carolina. The men who did these things were 
 called crimps. The bondservants were taken
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 67 
 
 about and sold like slaves. Also, like slaves, 
 they were liable to be flogged at the will of 
 their masters. This liability, however, existed 
 at home, and was not likely to be considered a 
 special grievance. 
 
 Besides the bondservants and the children, 
 there was a continual flow of convicts, some- 
 times political after the Monmouth Rebellion, 
 the 1714 Rebellion, and that of 1745 and 
 sometimes criminal. The method employed 
 for the transportation of convicts was intended 
 to be humane ; but, like most good intentions 
 of the 1 8th century, in practice it proved 
 anything but humane. The convicts were 
 handed over to a contractor, who received 
 ^5 a head for the passage to America; he 
 gave a receipt for each, and was required to 
 produce a receipt on the other side for each. 
 Their diet was strictly prescribed. It seems a 
 much more liberal diet than is now provided for 
 convicts every man had io| oz. of bread a 
 day ; on two days in the week, 105 oz. of meat ; 
 peas, oatmeal, molasses and cheese, made up 
 the rest of the fare ; once a week a pannikin of 
 gin was served out; no tea, cocoa, coffee, or 
 beer was given. 
 
 On their arrival in Virginia, they were put up 
 for public auction, generally realising 2 IDS. 
 a head and a pound and a half of tobacco. 
 They were sold for seven years, fourteen years, 
 or for life, according to their sentence. Their
 
 68 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 work in the field was exactly the same as that of 
 the negroes, but they became overseers, and 
 very often on their release, or before it, settled 
 down on their own land and became planters 
 on their own account. 
 
 Most of these people, however, were hardened 
 and abandoned villains, who could only be kept 
 in order by the lash. Many of them escaped 
 into the forests. There was a terrible mortality 
 among them on the voyage ; this we must not set 
 down quite to the bad treatment by the con- 
 tractor, though one does not suppose that they 
 were tenderly treated. We must remember 
 that they were mostly the scum and sweepings 
 of the London streets ; they had never worked, 
 they could not work ; they had never learned a 
 trade, they had lived by rapine, and for months 
 before they were put on board ship they had 
 been confined in a foul and fetid prison, their 
 vital powers lowered by bad food, bad drink, 
 bad air, and no exercise. Often they carried the 
 gaol fever on board, where the ship's crew caught 
 it, and where it swept off numbers of the convicts. 
 
 I have before me the lists of three convict 
 ships, belonging to the years 1740 and 1741. On 
 one was placed 153 convicts; during the short 
 voyage of one month 61 out of the 153 died, 
 eight were landed sick, the remaining 84 were 
 put up and sold. 
 
 On the second ship 108 were put on board ; 
 of these 37 died on the passage.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 69 
 
 On the third ship 50 sailed ; of these 15 died 
 before reaching America. 
 
 It is customary to assume that a large number 
 of people in Virginia must trace their ancestry 
 to these convicts. I do not think that this can 
 be the case.' We know what kind of creatures 
 the convicts were, from our own experience of 
 them when transportation to America ceased 
 and work on the hulks took its place. The 
 convicts had never worked ; they could not 
 work ; a spade blistered their hands ; they could 
 not stoop ; they ran away ; they were flogged 
 unmercifully ; they killed their warders ; they 
 were hanged ; they mutinied : everything rather 
 than work. These are not the kind of people 
 whom the Virginian planters would allow to 
 marry white women, who were few in number 
 and very precious. Again, their service was 
 generally for seven years, a longer sentence was 
 the exception. In an immense number of cases 
 the fellow escaped, got to New York, found a 
 ship to take him home, and went back to his 
 friends. I think that the descendants of the 
 convicts must be very few indeed. 
 
 Of course, on the outbreak of the War of 
 Independence, the transportation of convicts 
 ceased entirely. 
 
 Lastly, there were the negro slaves. 
 
 The sale of negroes to the planters began in 
 1619. They were chiefly used in the colonies 
 which had a hot and malarious climate : where
 
 70 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 rice and tobacco were grown. There were con- 
 tinual troubles from the fierce and untamable 
 character of some of these slaves. They rose 
 in rebellion and murdered the whites. These 
 risings were put down with great severity, even 
 cruelty ; but it is difficult to imagine what could 
 be done with them once they had been 
 barbarously brought over except to deter 
 them from rebellion by barbarous punishments. 
 The colonies were by no means united; on 
 the other hand, they had few common interests 
 and no bond of connexion, except that they 
 were all nominally under the Crown of Great 
 Britain. They found out the possibility of 
 union, and the necessity of union, in the manner 
 common to the making of all nations by war. 
 They had to fight the French ; it was a struggle 
 for bare existence. Briefly, the French held 
 Canada ; they claimed the whole of the country 
 west of the Alleghany Mountains and the Missi- 
 ssippi Valley ; they had occupied the mouth of 
 the Mississippi and they commanded the St. 
 Lawrence. Their intention was to erect a line 
 of forts from Canada to New Orleans, and thus, 
 not only to hold the western part of the Conti- 
 nent for themselves, but also to threaten the 
 eastern colonies, which as yet were little more 
 than settlements along the sea-board. If you 
 look in a map, you will see what the French claim 
 meant. They had Canada ; they claimed that 
 huge country now covered by the Middle States,
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 71 
 
 lying between the Rockies and Alleghanies, with 
 one outlet by the Great Lakes and the St. 
 Lawrence, and another by the Mississippi. It 
 was a magnificent dream of conquest, which 
 the union of the Colonists and the English 
 effectually destroyed. 
 
 I wish once more to call attention to the 
 people who formed the population of these 
 colonies in or about the middle of the last century. 
 They were nearly all refugees or exiles for 
 religion : English Puritans, French Huguenots, 
 Scotch and Irish Presbyterians, German Pro- 
 testants, and Quakers from various lands. 
 I think it can hardly be expected that these 
 people and their descendants would regard 
 the mother country without some kind of 
 bitterness. Then they were often in dispute 
 with their Governor, the representative of the 
 mother country. The next point to observe is 
 that, from the very first day of landing, the insti- 
 tutions of the country were always democratic. 
 They were English institutions, it is true, but 
 these adapt themselves with great ease to a re- 
 publican form of government. There were no 
 peers among the colonists, no House of Lords, 
 no Bishops. At home their cousins were 
 constantly reminded of authority. Here there 
 were no such reminders, the colonists were 
 practically republican long before the War of 
 Independence. 
 
 They were made ready for their independence
 
 72 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 by the share they took in the last war with the 
 French, which ended in the Treaty of 1763, 
 when most of the possessions of France in 
 America, not including the shadowy claims of 
 Louisiana, were ceded to Great Britain. This 
 left them free from a foreign invader ; it left 
 them, indeed, stronger than they had known or 
 felt before. In a word, while they still thought 
 themselves loyal, they were ready for the War 
 of Independence which was forced upon them. 
 
 Discontent was no new thing in the Colonies. 
 The Americans were discontented with the 
 laws made by the British Parliament which 
 interfered with trade even with each other. It 
 is, indeed, inconceivable how our statesmen 
 should have consented to these laws ; one can 
 only explain the fact by the supposition that they 
 were totally ignorant which, indeed, was the 
 case of the Colonies, what they were and 
 what they might become. 
 
 The passing of the Stamp Act was the first 
 measure which brought the Colonies together. 
 This Act provided that all business papers, 
 journals, leases, etc., should be stamped, and 
 that these stamps should be sold by Crown 
 Officers in order to produce a revenue for 
 Great Britain. It seemed an innocent step, 
 but, if it was allowed, the Government would 
 simply be able to tax the Colonies as much 
 as they pleased. 
 
 The cry was raised, "No taxation without
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 73 
 
 representation ! " The Colonies rose almost as 
 one man ; the stamp offices were torn down ; 
 the Houses of Parliament were defied. 
 
 The Stamp Act was withdrawn. 
 
 The Houses of Parliament passed another 
 bill asserting their right to tax the Colonies. They 
 tried quartering soldiers on them. They took off 
 all the taxes except one on tea ; the Colonies 
 refused to drink tea : when ships arrived with it, 
 the Boston men boarded them, and poured the 
 chests of tea into the sea. And so and so 
 war began. 
 
 We must remember, in the black story which 
 is here only just indicated, that all the best and 
 clearest sighted people in England ardently 
 espoused the cause of the Colonies. "No 
 taxation without representation ! " Chatham 
 thundered with all his power on that side. 
 Burke followed. The Lord Mayor and Alder- 
 men went in deputation, not once, but a dozen 
 times, to the King, imploring him to consider 
 this principle as one that underlies all liberty. 
 The King was immovable ; the House of Lords 
 and the House of Commons were deaf, and 
 blind, and stupid. The war went on. At its con- 
 clusion, all these possessions the greater part 
 of a continent which had been conceded in 
 1763 by France, were handed over to the 
 United States, except Canada. 
 
 The settlement of Canada must have a few 
 words here.
 
 74 THE EMPIRE OF THE WEST. 
 
 On the conquest of the country and the 
 departure of the French army, land in Canada 
 was very freely offered to soldiers and others. 
 A good many adventurers went there from Great 
 Britain and from the Atlantic coast colonies. 
 After the American War of Independence, 
 30,000 United Loyalists, who were not allowed 
 to stay peaceably at home, came over into 
 Canada and received grants of land, on which 
 many of their descendants are still living, a 
 strong element of loyalty in the country. Towards 
 the close of the century there was a Highland 
 emigration on account of the agricultural 
 distress of Scotland. The close of the long 
 war was the cause of a great many disbanded 
 soldiers finding their way to Canada. A great 
 many Irish, too, were sent out to Upper Canada. 
 
 I have included in this volume a brief history 
 of the American colonies, because the United 
 States form certainly a very considerable part of 
 the extended empire of the race, though not of 
 one country. I also include it here, because 
 I live in the hope that the bitterness of parting, 
 which has survived in America far longer and in 
 a deeper form than it has with us indeed, the 
 people of Great Britain and Ireland bear no 
 ill-will whatever towards the States will before 
 long yield to a reconciliation which shall be as 
 lasting and as indestructible as the friendship of 
 Kent and Sussex.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 / TT V HE Empire of the East was not only 
 X begun by traders, but it was absolutely 
 created by traders without the interference of 
 the Government. The East India Company 
 created the Empire unaided, almost uncon- 
 sciously. It came into existence unnoticed, it 
 grew spontaneously ; it covered Hindostan from 
 North to South while the people at home hardly 
 knew that it had begun. 
 
 The East India Company received its Charter 
 on the very last day of the sixteenth century 
 3ist December, 1600. It was called "The 
 Governor and Company of Merchants of London 
 trading to the East Indies." Other companies 
 were started with similar objects ; all these were 
 before long amalgamated with the original 
 company. 
 
 The first navigator who sailed round the Cape 
 of Good Hope was the Portuguese Vasco da
 
 76 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 Gama, who put in at Calicut on the 2Oth of 
 May, 1498. Vasco did not discover a new 
 country, for India was well-known from the 
 accounts of overland travellers King Alfred 
 once sent an ambassador to the Indies but he 
 discovered the easy route to the country. The 
 Portuguese were never, like the Dutch and 
 the English, a trading community. Hence 
 their disappearance from the countries they 
 might have made their own. They did, 
 however, establish themselves upon the islands, 
 and for nearly a hundred years they carried on 
 the export trade of the islands as far eastward as 
 Celebes. At the end of the sixteenth century 
 the Dutch sent out their first ships and 
 established their East India Company. They 
 found the Portuguese enfeebled by various 
 causes. They had settlements in Brazil, and 
 on the west coast of India; their country 
 was too small to provide emigrants both 
 to the east and to the west; they had 
 foolishly expelled the Jews, formerly their 
 financiers : they had allowed the introduction of 
 the Inquisition, which began at once to exercise 
 its baneful influence on the spirit and the 
 enterprise of the nation. They lost their inde- 
 pendence, and became merged for a time with 
 Spain when Phillip II. obtained the crown of 
 Portugal. Spanish aggression and Spanish cruelty 
 were therefore avenged both by Dutch and Eng- 
 lish by attacks upon Portuguese establishments.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 77 
 
 The Dutch and English began about the 
 same time to make their trading factories in the 
 east. But the Dutch were the stronger : they 
 forced the English to withdraw from the Islands. 
 They could not, however, prevent them from 
 making settlements on the mainland. Thus, 
 the first settlement was at Surat, Madras was 
 founded in 1638, Bombay was ceded by the 
 Portuguese in 1668, Calcutta was founded 
 in 1686. 
 
 The East India Company was governed by a 
 Board of Directors in London. Every share- 
 holder who held ^500 of stock was called a 
 proprietor. From the proprietors the Directors 
 were elected. A director was a holder of not 
 less than 2,000 of stock. Six directors retired 
 every year, but they were, as a rule, re- 
 elected. 
 
 The history of the Company would take too 
 long to relate. It must suffice to explain that 
 as far back as 1689 it was resolved not only to 
 hold trading settlements and factories, but to 
 acquire territories; that the servants of the 
 Company were paid very small salaries, with the 
 object of making them look about for bettering 
 their position by extending the influence and 
 authority of the Company. With this object 
 the Company was made to take part in the 
 quarrels of the Native States, to make itself 
 master of those states, to create an army 
 and navy, to impose taxes, levy tribute, and to
 
 78 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 carry on war. A post in the Company's 
 service was a piece of most valuable patronage ; 
 the directors were besieged with applications : a 
 clever lad going out to India not only had the 
 chance of making a great fortune, but also of 
 providing for his sons the same privilege. 
 Thackeray, for instance, was the son of three 
 generations of the company's servants. 
 
 Meantime it could not be expected that other 
 nations would look on quietly while the English 
 took possession of this great country. The 
 Portuguese, who at the outset controlled the 
 whole of the west coast, gave little trouble, 
 being incapable of defending what they had. 
 The French, however, made as determined an 
 effort to gain possession of India as they did to 
 keep their claims in America. The war between 
 the English and the French in India was 
 prolonged and determined on both sides. It 
 cannot be said, though the victory and the 
 spoils remain with us, that the enemy retired 
 with dishonour. This struggle, in which Give 
 rendered such magnificent services, lasted for 
 many years ; it was fought out by sea and by 
 land. Clive, Lawrence, Warren Hastings, 
 Cornwallis, Wellesley, in turn created, extended, 
 and consolidated the British dominions. At the 
 peace of 1814 nothing remained to the French, 
 once the masters of the Carnatic, except Pondi- 
 cherry and Chandernagore, two unimportant 
 forts; while the Portuguese were reduced to
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 79 
 
 one place, Goa, and the Dutch were gone 
 altogether. 
 
 Thus, in two hundred years, the English East 
 India Company had risen from the possession 
 of a single trading factory to that of the greater 
 part of Hindostan, and the control of the rest. 
 The French had left off even intriguing; the 
 independent states were held down ; there was 
 a Pax Britannica British order established 
 over the whole of this vast country. 
 
 In the year 1857 occurred the Mutiny, a 
 greater danger to the rulers of India than any 
 invasion by a foreign power. At that time the 
 native army consisted of 247,000 men ; of these, 
 30,000 belonged to Bombay and 50,000 to 
 Madras ; to Bengal belonged 167,000, of whom 
 many were irregular troops. The mutineers 
 belonged chiefly to the Bengal army; they 
 numbered 90,000 men ; they were well trained, 
 well armed, well provided ; they had artillery, 
 horses and treasure; what was more, the men 
 were animated with the superstition that it was 
 a hundred years since the Battle of Plassey, and 
 two hundred years since the Mahratta invasion. 
 Therefore, it was concluded, illogically, the time 
 had come for the English rule to cease. The 
 murders and massacres with which the mutiny 
 was begun showed the bitter hatred lying in the 
 hearts of the men who had been thought so 
 loyal. To meet these mutineers we had no 
 more than 40,000 English troops, together
 
 80 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 with the loyal native regiments. It was, 
 however, a military revolt, and not a rising 
 of the people. The native princes remained loyal ; 
 the people themselves never moved. The siege of 
 Delhi, the defence and the relief of Lucknow, 
 the march of Havelock ; these, and the other 
 events of the mutiny, belong to the history of 
 our race, and form a chapter on which the 
 reader lingers with pride. As one who can 
 remember that time, I think that there can 
 never have been any event in history which 
 more thrilled the hearts of our people than the 
 news of this mutiny. At all times, and under 
 all circumstances, a mutiny is an act of black 
 treachery to be justified only under the most 
 extreme provocation. In this case it was 
 accompanied by the murder, torture, starvation 
 and massacre, not only of the officers and the 
 magistrates, but also of the helpless women and 
 children. To us at home came letters with 
 details too dreadful to be published though 
 the accounts actually published were bad 
 enough. We passed the letters from hand to 
 hand ; no one dared to read them aloud ; tears 
 of helpless rage filled the eyes of those who 
 read. If it was revenge we wanted, there were 
 men in India who were taking that revenge. I 
 know not how many of the mutineers were slain 
 in the six months that followed the outbreak, 
 but I remember, also, reading more letters that 
 Q( the vengeance vengeance of God, we
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 8 1 
 
 called it that fell upon these murderers. In 
 the after years I talked with those who had been 
 with Havelock and Colin Campbell. A chap- 
 lain of the force who rode with Havelock in the 
 long march told me how the men tramped on 
 without a murmur all through the nights, 
 anxious only to be nearer the enemy ; how, for 
 the extreme heat, the men had to march three or 
 four feet apart, and how they bore the heat and 
 the fatigue and the thirst without a murmur. I 
 heard how the men were taken to Cawnpore 
 and shown the fair hair of the English girls on 
 the walls with the red splashes of their blood, 
 and how the men went mad with rage. One who 
 had been a private soldier told me I know not 
 whether it is true, but this is what he told me 
 " On our march with reinforcements we were 
 met by three or four Sepoy regiments. They were 
 three to one, but we charged; they dropped 
 their guns and ran. We ran after them ; on the 
 river bank we caught them, and we bayonetted 
 every one. Every one no prisoners just a 
 shove with the bayonet. Oh, yes, we killed 
 them ; every one." 
 
 Since that mutiny India has been quiet. The 
 proportion of native to British troops has been 
 greatly lowered. The important places are held 
 entirely by British. The artillery is mostly 
 manned by British. The Company, in 1858, 
 ceased to exist ; it had long ceased to hold its 
 trading privileges. The Government now 
 
 c
 
 82 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 belongs entirely to the Imperial authority, and 
 the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland is also 
 Empress of India. 
 
 The Empress of India is also Lady of the 
 Eastern Isles and far Cathay. We hold, as part 
 of our Empire, Burmah, Penang, Singapore 
 and the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, Labuan, 
 Hong Kong, Malacca, Mauritius, and the 
 Seychelles. The history of our occupation of 
 these places is mainly one of conquest. Ceylon, 
 for instance, was visited by the Portuguese first 
 in 1505 ; they made a settlement at Colombo 
 in 1517. They held their settlement for nearly 
 150 years, during which time they made them- 
 selves loathed by the people for their fanaticism 
 and intolerance and their ceaseless efforts to 
 convert the natives. In 1658, after twenty 
 years fighting, the Dutch succeeded in turning 
 them out. In 1795, when it seemed as if 
 everything Dutch would become French, an 
 English expedition was sent to Ceylon. Trin- 
 comalee was taken, and Colombo surrendered. 
 By the Peace of Amiens the island remained 
 with the British. 
 
 Singapore was not taken by force of arms ; it 
 was founded by Sir Stamford Raffles, in 1819, as 
 a place for trade. It is now the most important 
 trading city in the South-east of Asia. 
 
 Penang, with its dependencies, Wellesley 
 Province and certain islands was ceded to us in 
 1785 in return for an annual pension of ;6oo.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 83 
 
 Malacca, like Ceylon, belonged first to the 
 Portuguese, then to the Dutch. We took 
 it in 1795, we gave it back to the Dutch 
 in 1818, and they again ceded it to us in 
 1824. 
 
 Labuan, an island six miles north of the coast 
 of Borneo, was taken by us in 1846. 
 
 Hong Kong is a small island on the coast of 
 China, east of the Canton River. This little 
 place, ceded by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, 
 is one of our most important possessions. The 
 trade carried on in this island by Chinese as 
 well as by Europeans by Germans, Dutch, 
 and Americans, as well as by English is 
 enormous. It is a naval station. 
 
 The Mauritius is another place of great 
 importance, though, since the introduction of 
 steam, it has lost much of its strategic value. 
 This island must be added to those taken by 
 fighting and by force. It was discovered by 
 Mascarenhas in 1507, being then uninhabited. 
 The Portuguese occupied it for ninety years, and 
 then abandoned it, as they were abandoning all 
 their eastern possessions. The Dutch seized it, 
 naming it after their Prince Maurice. They in 
 turn abandoned it. The French, in 1710, occu- 
 pied it. Fortunately the island was governed for a 
 time by La Bourdonnaye, who found the place 
 in a bankrupt condition, introduced the culti- 
 vation of the sugar cane, and raised the colony 
 to a most flourishing condition. He also made
 
 84 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 it a place of arms and a naval station of the first 
 importance. 
 
 The English made several attempts to take 
 this island. Under Captain Willoughby an 
 attack was attempted on the Bay and Town of 
 Mahe"bourg, but his ship went ashore and heeled 
 over, so that it was impossible to effect anything. 
 There was, however, a descent made in the 
 year 1 8 1 o which succeeded better : the colony 
 surrendered and has remained ever since in our 
 hands. 
 
 Everyone knows the charming romance of 
 " Paul and Virginia," in which are descriptions 
 of the scenery and the forests of Mauritius. It 
 is, indeed, one of the most beautiful spots on 
 the earth, though not so striking or so grand 
 as the sister island of Reunion. There are 
 three ranges in which the mountains, though 
 none are more than 3,000 feet high, present the 
 most picturesque cliffs, with rivers, ravines, 
 waterfalls and peaks. The forests were formerly 
 most beautiful, with creepers (lianes) of all 
 kinds, mosses, orchids, and underwood of 
 fragrant acacia; all the tropical fruits grew there, 
 most of the temperate fruits, all the English 
 vegetables. The sugar cane is still the staple 
 of the island, but the English planters have 
 mostly sold their estates to Arabs and to 
 coolies. The place has only 700 square miles 
 with a huge population of 400,000, mostly 
 coolies. In 1875 all tne slaves were emancipated;
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 85 
 
 they began to die out immediately, and at the 
 present day number no more than a few 
 thousands. It is significant of their former 
 treatment that not one of them would ever work 
 in a canefield again. They became market 
 gardeners and carpenters. During a residence 
 on this island, now thirty years ago, I found 
 many of these emancipated slaves settled about 
 in the woods and on the hill-sides. They were 
 always ready to talk of the old slave times 
 // temps margosse the bitter time. The in- 
 troduction of coolies began when the blacks 
 were emancipated. The town of Port Louis is 
 filled with as strange a mixture as one will find 
 anywhere. The shops are kept chiefly by the 
 French mulattoes ; the merchants' offices by 
 English and French. The Chinese are carpenters 
 and craftsmen of all kinds ; they also keep the 
 little stores, built out of packing cases, where 
 the coolie gets tobacco, sardines, tapes, string 
 everything. 
 
 The Malay is there, an unsuccessful rival to the 
 Chinaman. There, too, are the Malagasy men, 
 black, with hair in plaits ; there are the Zanzibar 
 Arabs, who are exporters of sugar, and general 
 merchants a noble and handsome race ; there 
 are Mozambique men, negroes of a deep soft 
 black, not a shiny black; there are French 
 Creoles, soft of speech, pale-faced, languid ; 
 there are English sailors and English soldiers ; 
 at the port there is a prevailing smell of guano,
 
 86 THE EMPIRE OF THE EAST. 
 
 and all day long resound the cries of the dock 
 labourers, running up and down the planks with 
 bales. Under the trees sit the merchants for 
 their Royal Exchange is the shady place before 
 Government House and over that House floats 
 the Union Jack; and to think that over all 
 these peoples, in all these islands, and over all 
 this great continent of India, that Union Jack 
 floats, should fill our hearts with pride and 
 gratitude, and should cause us to do and to 
 dare as our forefathers dared, when England 
 was a little place with all her history to make.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 r I "'HE continent of Australia was dis- 
 _L covered at various points and by 
 various navigators. Spanish, French, and 
 Dutch all claim its discovery, and perhaps 
 with equal justice. In 1688 it was seen 
 by Dampier. Nearly a hundred years later, 
 in 1770, Captain Cook explored the whole 
 of the eastern coast, from Gipps' Land on the 
 south-east to Cape York on the north, a work 
 of immense service. The first Englishman to 
 land on the Australian shore was a midshipman 
 named Isaac Smith, afterwards Admiral Isaac 
 Smith, a cousin or nephew of Captain Cook's 
 wife. Years afterwards, when the Admiral had 
 retired, he and the aged widow lived together. 
 Once begun, the survey of these coasts was 
 carried on rapidly, though it was not completed 
 until the voyage of the Beagle, on which was 
 Darwin, in 1837-43
 
 88 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 The first settlement made was in 1788, at 
 Port Jackson. The place was for many years a 
 penal settlement, to which we sent our convicts. 
 The shores explored, it remained to penetrate 
 into the interior. Many travellers have failed, 
 and a few have succeeded, in getting across this 
 vast tract of land, which appears to consist 
 mainly of desert covered with scrub and thorn. 
 The seaboard, happily, presents widely different 
 characteristics. For instance, New South Wales 
 is divided into three distinct areas, in which the 
 climate and vegetation present great differences.* 
 The first is a strip of country, 800 miles long, 
 bounded on one side by the ocean and on the 
 other by a mountain chain. This part of the 
 country varies in width from 30 to 180 miles ; 
 it is watered by fifteen considerable rivers ; there 
 is an average yearly rainfall of 36 to 76 inches. 
 There is an abundance of the best agricultural 
 soil, well watered, with plenty of rain as well as 
 of sunshine, fertile, and for the most part as yet 
 untilled. 
 
 The second division is a highland ranging 
 from 1,000 feet to 7,000 feet, but for the most 
 part from 2,000 to 3,000 feet high. It is well 
 watered ; with less rainfall than on the seaboard ; 
 it is, however, valuable for pastoral purposes, and 
 grows grain and fruit. 
 
 The third division consists of a vast plain 
 
 * "New South Wales :" by Authority ; Sydney, Ch. 
 Potter, Government Printer.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 89 
 
 intersected by rivers, with a small rainfall ; 
 previously, this part of the country was only 
 used for pasture, and in years of drought the 
 country suffered greatly. Of late years tanks 
 have been constructed for the purpose of storing 
 water. Still more recently, the Government, 
 aided by private enterprise, has been following 
 the example of the French in Algeria, and the 
 Americans in Texas, California, and other States. 
 It is boring Artesian wells. This has proved 
 eminently successful ; many stations formerly 
 dependent on the precarious supply of rain, or the 
 stores of the tanks, have now a copious and per- 
 manent flow, springing up in a strong fountain 
 from bores sunk 1,000 feet deep. It is not a cheap 
 undertaking to sink an Artesian well; it costs 
 about i 173. 6d. a foot, and the average 
 depth is 7,420 feet. It is estimated that at the 
 present moment there are 30,000,000 gallons of 
 water a day supplied by these wells. If, as 
 seems likely, the system can be carried further 
 and still further inland, in due course the 
 inland desert of Australia will blossom with 
 orchards and meadows and corn. One 
 foresees a time when the food products of 
 Australia might be equal to the wants of the 
 whole of Europe, while her vast plains would 
 serve for the pasture ground of cattle sufficient 
 for a population of her own far greater than we 
 can imagine, and for Europe as well. Mean- 
 while, Australia has always been a favourite field
 
 90 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 for our emigrants : it is more English in its 
 manners, customs, and ideas, than any other 
 colony, except New Zealand. 
 
 Is the country safe from an invading force ? 
 She would have, to begin with, the help of the 
 British fleets. It might happen, however, that 
 these fleets were disabled or crippled in some 
 great naval disaster. Could Australia defend 
 herself? She is an immense continent, but she 
 has only four millions of people ; she could 
 raise perhaps half a million fighting men on a 
 levee en masse ; she is self-sufficient ; she has 
 railways. I do not think that any European 
 Power would dare to attack her. Above 
 all, she is high of courage and stout of 
 heart : there is no fear that Australia would 
 not fight to the death for her freedom. And 
 every year she increases; to-day she has four 
 millions, in twenty years she may have ten 
 millions. There are children now among us who 
 will live to see Australia with fifty millions. 
 
 Why, one may ask, was Great Britain allowed 
 to become possessor of this great continent, 
 together with New Zealand, the Cape, and so 
 many other places ? Because, while the French 
 were marching from victory to victory across 
 terrified Europe while every day brought them 
 new glories, and every new glory furnished new 
 hatreds our fleets kept command of the sea, 
 and, while engaged in a life and death struggle 
 with a captain who aimed at universal conquest,
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. QI 
 
 we were able to pursue our commerce^ to find 
 out and annex the pleasant places cf the earth, 
 and to prepare for a time when peace would 
 enable us to occupy as well as to claim these 
 places. 
 
 In the midst of war we carried on our 
 communications with New South Wales. The 
 convict ship bore its wretched passengers in 
 safety across oceans where no French ship was 
 ever seen. 
 
 Reports came home of the lovely land which 
 seemed abandoned to the criminal and the prison 
 warder. News came home about these people : 
 prisoners and slaves under the blue sky, the 
 splendid sunshine, and the exuberant fertility of 
 this marvellous country. They were taken there 
 in convict ships, under rules and regulations 
 very much like those of the old transportations 
 to America; they were thrown into the dark 
 lower deck, whose ports were under water. For 
 a short time every day they were brought up 
 in small companies to breathe the pure air. 
 Their diet was scanty ; for small offences they 
 were flogged ; in many cases they mutinied, but 
 never successfully. When they landed at Port 
 Jackson they often tried to escape : either into 
 the bush, in which case they starved or were 
 speared by the blacks ; or by boat, in which case 
 they were never more heard of. In this way a 
 whole boat load once got off, and, after fearful 
 sufferings, reached the island of Timor, when
 
 92 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 the few survivors were put on board an English 
 man of war and taken to England. Finally, of 
 the whole number, but one arrived alive. The 
 last survivor was a woman ; she had lost her 
 husband and her child. They gave her a free 
 pardon. 
 
 Such memories as these clung to Port Jackson. 
 Where are these memories now? They are 
 clean gone and forgotten ; the descendants of 
 the convicts some of whom were political 
 prisoners, not criminals are merged with the 
 rest, and the sins of the fathers are no more 
 visited upon this, the third generation. On the 
 site of the convict settlement stands a city : rich, 
 splendid, full of courage and of hope, perhaps to 
 become the capital of this continent of Australia. 
 
 The advance of Australia is truly marvellous 
 in our eyes. Put it into figures, though millions 
 mean nothing to most of us ; sixty, seventy, 
 eighty years ago the whole population of 
 Australia was forty or fifty thousand. The 
 people looked for nothing, and expected nothing, 
 but to be allowed to remain a peaceful 
 agricultural settlement, very far from Europe, 
 very little known, increasing very slowly. They 
 desired only the simple life of a self sufficing 
 community. What has Providence given them? 
 Their population is over four millions; their 
 two principal towns are like Manchester and 
 Liverpool for numbers ; their trade has risen to 
 ;i 20,000,000 a year ; their shipping amounts to
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 93 
 
 20,000,000 tons; they have 15,000 miles of 
 railway ; they have 9,000,000 acres under 
 cultivation ; they have 800,000 children under 
 State school instruction. 
 
 How are we to account for this unparalleled 
 advance ? At first, the immigrants arrived slowly. 
 There was no great wave of emigration from the 
 British Isles and Australia did not attract Ger- 
 mans. Undoubtedly the discovery of the gold 
 mines was the making of Australia. All the ad- 
 venturers ; all the rovers ; all the prodigals ; 
 all the men who belong to the fringe of society; 
 all those who had no occupation ; all those who 
 hated regular work ; many of those who had 
 dropped down, for reasons; all those who 
 ardently desired to make a fortune in a few 
 days, sent their representatives by thousands 
 to the gold mines. I believe there were 
 fortunes made in rare cases; numbers of 
 lucky finds and big nuggets ; but for the 
 most part the diggers found that, week in 
 week out, they made very little more than 
 the others who worked on farms. I have 
 conversed with many who went out with the 
 great rush of 1851 ; to the best of my recollec- 
 tion they had come out of it just as poor as they 
 went in, and rejoicing in the acquisition of 
 incurable rheumatism, and, in one or two cases, 
 of insatiable thirst. 
 
 The discovery of gold, therefore, gave the 
 first impetus to the expansion of Australia ;
 
 94 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 the gold mines continue to be a source of wealth 
 and an attraction to emigrants ; they are now 
 worked by companies, and the yearly output of 
 gold is about ^8,000,000. There is always, 
 therefore, a stream of new arrivals pouring into 
 the country ; the demand for food and everything 
 continues to increase ; the area under cultivation 
 widens every year ; the numbers by themselves 
 seem to become wealth. 
 
 This great possession, then, is due, first to 
 Captain Cook, who surveyed its coasts and 
 added them to the map ; next, to the fact that 
 we were looking out for some place where we 
 could send our criminals, out of our own way; 
 and, thirdly, to the fact that the only people 
 who would have opposed us in taking over these 
 settlements, the French, were for twenty-five 
 years pursuing an illusory career of victory 
 marching from one triumph to another, con- 
 quering the whole of Europe, except the two 
 Powers of the east and west glutting themselves 
 with la gloire which would leave them broken, 
 shattered, and weaker than when they began. 
 We, who kept the command of the seas, carried 
 on, meanwhile, our trade with comparatively 
 little loss, and continued to find out and to 
 annex the pleasant places of the earth. 
 
 Nearly all that has been said of Australia can 
 be said of New Zealand. The name applies to a 
 group of three islands with small islets, covering 
 an area about one-eighth less than that of
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 95 
 
 Great Britain and Ireland. The climate is much 
 milder than ours, but not so warm as that of 
 Victoria. Everything grows there. The place 
 is the healthiest in the world. It is one of the 
 colonies acquired by Great Britain since the 
 accession of the Queen : it was ceded by the 
 Treaty of Waitangi in the year 1840. In the 
 year 1837 there were two or three white men 
 in the islands. The population of New Zealand 
 then, excluding the natives, who are now about 
 40,000 in number and dying out, has been literally 
 created in sixty years. It now reaches very nearly 
 the total of one million. It is an agricultural 
 country which manufactures a great many 
 things of daily consumption. It is, in fact, 
 except for luxuries, almost self-sufficient. There 
 is coal in abundance; there are also mining 
 operations for gold, silver and lead. The 
 colonists export wool, grain, and frozen sheep in 
 large quantities. 
 
 Tasman discovered the islands in 1642. 
 Cook surveyed the coast in 1769 and following 
 years. Missionaries were the first settlers. 
 
 South Africa must be included in the Empire 
 of the South. It might be called the Empire 
 of the South West, while Australia would be the 
 Empire of the South East. Nothing is more 
 extraordinary in the whole history of the Empire 
 than the sudden and amazing expansion of 
 British Africa. We now have settlements along 
 the West Coast, which we share with France ;
 
 96 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH. 
 
 and the enormous territory ruled by the Royal 
 Niger Company; we have the Protectorate 
 of Zanzibar; we administer Egypt; and we 
 hold the whole of South Africa except the 
 Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the 
 Portuguese Delagoa Bay and Mozambique. 
 How far the British power extends at the 
 present day it is hard to say; new countries 
 have come into existence : Mashonaland; Mata- 
 beleland; Griqualand; Bechuanaland. New 
 towns such as Salisbury, have sprung up; hamlets 
 have become large towns, such as Johannesburg. 
 Meantime, South Africa is the land of adventure 
 and hope ; there is more " making " in progress 
 there than anywhere else ; there are dangers, it 
 is true, but where the English youth are flock- 
 ing there the dangers lessen. There is the same 
 kind of stimulus at the Cape that was found in 
 India : the presence of a race, fierce and war- 
 like, which has to be controlled. There are the 
 same rewards that existed in Australia of count- 
 less acres waiting for the cultivator. Africa is a 
 land of romance ; for a hundred years travellers 
 have tried to penetrate into its depths. Al- 
 ways something new was coming out of Africa. 
 Livingstone spent his life there, unable to leave 
 it; Burton returned again and again; Stanley 
 plunged into its dark forests and found the 
 pygmies. 
 
 The names of Bruce, Mungo Park, Burck- 
 hardt, Moffat, Speke, Grant, Sir Samuel Baker,
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE SOUTH 97 
 
 Du Chaillu, Joseph Thomson, and a hundred 
 others, are remembered as those of men who ven- 
 tured their lives into the depths of Africa and, 
 in too many cases, lost those lives. Anyone who 
 has a map of Africa of, say, fifty years ago may 
 compare it with the map of the present day in 
 order to observe the vast tracts of land which 
 have been recovered for the knowledge and the 
 use of civilized man. 
 
 Tracts of country do not make an empire; 
 we are not greatly advanced by possessing the 
 scrub of Central Australia. In the same way we 
 are little advanced by the addition of Rhodesia 
 and Eechuanaland. When these tracts are 
 peopled and settled ; when the land is covered 
 from north to south, and from east to west, by 
 Anglo-Saxon clearings, hamlets, and towns, 
 then we shall be in a position to judge of our 
 inland African possessions. At present it 
 is a land of promise. Let us so regard it. Let 
 us encourage our young men to try their fortunes 
 where fortune is most easily conquered, in a 
 young and thinly-settled country. As regards 
 the older part of South Africa, Cape Colony and 
 Natal, they have long since been settled ; they 
 are prosperous; they enjoy a magnificent 
 climate ; they desire nothing more than the 
 development and the settlement of the newly 
 acquired country in their rear.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 
 
 IT must be confessed that the sovereignty 
 of the Thousand Islands over which the 
 Union Jack flies in every sea confers little 
 material benefit upon either the Islands or 
 the Mother Country. They pay no tribute 
 or Imperial tax, which is something for 
 them ; and they look for protection against 
 a foreign enemy which is also something. 
 They have no advantages in trade or tariff; 
 they are not " protected " by our Customs 
 duties. They do not offer, as a rule, a field for 
 the immigrant ; they are mostly tropical islands 
 in which white men cannot work out of doors. 
 Except those like Malta, Ascension, Hong Kong, 
 and Singapore, which are places of strategic im- 
 portance, most of the islands are not necessary 
 or useful for the defence of the Empire. 
 
 Comparatively little trade or communication 
 is now carried on between this country and the
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 99 
 
 West Indies ; very few young men go out there ; 
 the old industries are decaying ; the old West 
 Indian families are dying out. Yet every one of 
 these islands has its history, sometimes its stirring 
 history. Jamaica is full of history ; the story of 
 the conquest is good to read ; the story of the 
 negro rebellion, of the Maroons, of the long 
 wars between rebels and whites, is interesting 
 at least. The buccaneers had their quarters in 
 the West Indies; sometimes in "the pleasant 
 Isle of Aves," sometimes on one of the 
 Keys, sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes on 
 the Honduras coast. The Gulf of Mexico 
 is full of stories about English adventurers 
 such as Drake and Raleigh pirates and 
 rovers. The islands are beautiful exceedingly ; 
 their climate is such that in the immediate 
 future they will most certainly become the 
 winter resort for the people of the cold 
 north. The white people are indolent, soft, 
 and kindly ; the negroes are indolent also, and 
 kindly, if not soft ; there are still living, in one 
 or two of the mountain retreats, small tribes of 
 Caribs. In the Bahamas, already, the hotels 
 are filled in winter with Americans ; in the 
 Bermudas, also, to which few English ever 
 find their way. Indeed, to English people the 
 West Indies are, as a rule, utterly unknown ; 
 they make no noise in the world ; nobody writes 
 books about them ; their garrisons, when they 
 have any, are negro troops.
 
 TOO THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 
 
 From Newfoundland southwards, the line ot 
 islands, Newfoundland, Bermuda, St. Helena, 
 Ascension, and the Falklands, stand like places 
 of refuge, places of arms, fortresses, harbours, 
 storehouses, outposts. By these islands Eng- 
 land garrisons the ocean. In the Mediterranean 
 her forts and storehouses are Gibraltar, Malta, 
 Cyprus. In the far east, Penang, Singapore, 
 Labuan, Hong Kong, are also advanced posts 
 strongholds barbicans. In the Pacific we 
 have the splendid colony of New Zealand, 
 another Britain under our feet, with the same 
 climate, but better. Tasmania, which belongs 
 to Australia, is a land of the greatest fertility, 
 waiting for more hands. In the Indian Ocean 
 we own Mauritius, of which I have already 
 spoken ; Rodriguez, which may possibly be- 
 come important; that strange atoll of Diego 
 Garcia, whose coral harbour could hold all the 
 navies in the world ; and the wonderful group 
 of the Seychelles, most mystic, most exquisitely 
 lovely of all the world's isles. There the steep 
 green hills covered with hanging forests descend 
 to the transparent waters, the cocos di mer lapped 
 and washed by the waves ; there the sky is of 
 a deeper blue than the sky of Naples or the sky 
 of Africa ; islands of a beauty so ethereal that 
 only to gaze upon them uplifts the soul ; so 
 spiritually lovely that Gordon, when he saw them, 
 concluded that these islands truly must be the 
 Earthly Paradise, long sought here and there.
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. IOI 
 
 He wrote a paper about it, proving to his own 
 satisfaction that in this garden of gardens, this 
 Island of Mahe, in the group of the Seychelles 
 were placed Adam and Eve ; that it was from 
 this place, and none other, that they were driven 
 out ; and that it was here actually here that 
 the angel stood with the flaming sword which 
 forbade their return. The world has other 
 places of loveliness, but none, so far as tra- 
 vellers have spoken, so entirely beautiful as the 
 Seychelles. 
 
 There are the islands of the Pacific, too, 
 whither my wandering feet have never led me 
 it is now, I fear, too late and more especially 
 the Fiji group, garden of the Pacific. 
 
 Among all these islands these green islands 
 of the sea one could wander a whole lifetime. 
 Nay, there are men who get the love of the 
 islands so burnt into their souls that they do so 
 wander. They are found now on one for awhile, 
 now on another ; they are restless ; they must 
 move on ; they have no settled occupation ; 
 they love not work ; they meditate, but give 
 no utterance to their speculations; they sit 
 and watch the ocean beating over the 
 coral reef; they love to go fishing, because 
 it is work but not labour, and because they 
 catch strange creatures ; they work fitfully ; 
 they like to be alone ; the sad whisper of the 
 filhao in the evening breeze soothes them. 
 They have no knowledge of the outer world ;
 
 102 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 
 
 they care nothing for the strife of men ; they do 
 not want to get rich; they never read ; they 
 speak little ; we know not what they think ; the 
 beauty, and the silence, and the warmth, and 
 the peace, and the simplicity of the islands 
 somehow sink into their minds. This is their life ; 
 they want no other ; at the close of it they lie 
 down with a sigh because it is over, not with 
 any regret or wish that they had spent their 
 term to better purpose. 
 
 I can conceive no voyage so delightful as to 
 sail from island to island. It is a voyage which 
 one might begin at five and twenty, after some 
 experience of home, and might continue, say, 
 for sixty years. 
 
 In the course of such a voyage, with long 
 stopping places, lingerings, returnings, one might 
 pass, I say, a life time. For each island has its 
 history ; perhaps its monuments ; often a 
 strange and romantic history, as that of the 
 " vexed Bermoothes," or that of Providence 
 Island in the Bahamas ; in almost all the 
 islands memories of fights, defences, achieve- 
 ments in wars of the past you may be sure the 
 islands have not forgotten the part they played; 
 there is national history of every kind to be 
 studied, there are strange people to study no 
 one knows how many and how strange, for 
 instance, are the people in the Island of 
 Mauritius. 
 
 It may be that there are many travellers there
 
 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 103 
 
 making the most of life. They are living in the 
 poetical parts of the Empire. Among these 
 islands there reigns the Pax Britannica ; for the 
 most part their fortifications are grass-grown, 
 their cannons rusted ; there are no garrisons ; 
 only a sleepy policeman represents the force and 
 the regulations on which all society rests. But 
 I think that a traveller returning from the 
 voyage which I have indicated would carry 
 home with him a greater sense of the peace, 
 order, and prosperity of the Empire, than he who 
 went to count the ships in Sydney Harbour, or 
 the bales upon the wharves of Melbourne. 
 
 I cannot but think that the decay of these 
 islands might, in some way, be arrested or 
 changed into progress if their resources, their 
 climate, their powers, generally, in the way of 
 labour, wages and products were better known. 
 At present they are not known at all. The 
 most enterprising London merchant never turns 
 his thoughts to the possibilities of St. Kitts or 
 Tobago; they are words, and only words, to him. 
 Some day, perhaps, we shall go back to the old 
 method ; we shall found a West India Company 
 or a Polynesian Company ; we shall ascertain 
 what we ought to try, and with what chance of 
 success ; we shall make these islands an open- 
 ing for our young men, and a road once more to 
 comfort if not to fortune. 
 
 In order to do this, we must get information 
 not from encyclopaedias, but from the people of
 
 104 THE EMPIRE OF THE ISLES. 
 
 the day ; the people on the spot. We must send 
 our agents to an island say, Tobago and 
 learn what can be attempted. It is perfectly 
 impossible that an island, fertile, wooded, 
 watered, under a tropical sun, should be incap- 
 able of producing whatever a tropical sun will 
 permit. Here is a new field. It will be 
 developed when our people have grasped the 
 meaning of the Empire and are led to examine 
 for themselves what every part of the Empire 
 may mean, developed and fostered by Imperial 
 capital, directed by agents from London, as the 
 Levant Company, the Muscovy Company, the 
 African Company, were formerly managed by 
 agents and factors sent out by their directors. 
 In this way there may be there must be a great 
 field for the future of the Islands, and a great 
 opening for the administrative powers of our 
 young men.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 WE have seen how the Empire of the 
 Anglo-Saxon race began, and how it 
 has developed. I want now to make, so to 
 speak, a personal application of this most 
 marvellous achievement, and to show how it 
 should concern every man among us. 
 
 Before doing this, let me subjoin a table of 
 the whole possessions of the Anglo-Saxon race, 
 with the area in square miles and the population. 
 
 . Population. 
 
 THE UNITED KING- 
 DOM 
 
 THE UNITED STATES - 
 IN THE MEDITER- 
 RANEAN 
 Gibraltar, Malta, 
 Cyprus - 
 
 IN THE GULF OF 
 ADEN 
 Aden, Sokotra, &c. 
 
 121,411 
 3,501,409 
 
 3,703 
 
 1,480 
 
 42,000,000 
 70,000,000 
 
 412,561 
 
 52,094
 
 io6 
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 IN THE INDIAN 
 
 
 
 OCEAN 
 
 
 
 Mauritius, Seychelles, 
 
 
 
 &c. ... 
 
 1,055 - 
 
 394,220 
 
 IN ASIA 
 
 
 
 India and Burma 
 
 1,560,160 - 
 
 287,223,431 
 
 Ceylon ... 
 
 25,365 - 
 
 3,008,466 
 
 Straits Settlements - 
 
 25,000 - 
 
 964,000 
 
 Borneo & Labuan 
 
 31,031 - 
 
 155,853 
 
 Hong-Kong 
 
 32 - 
 
 221,441 
 
 IN THE PACIFIC 
 
 
 
 OCEAN 
 
 
 
 Australia - 
 
 3,031,169 - 
 
 4,500,000 
 
 Tasmania - - , - 
 
 26,375 - 
 
 180,000 
 
 New Guinea 
 
 88,460 - 
 
 489,000 
 
 New Zealand 
 
 104,235 - 
 
 744,000 
 
 Fiji, &c. - 
 
 8,050 - 
 
 129,853 
 
 IN AFRICA 
 
 
 
 South Africa 
 
 747,854 
 
 3,053,348 
 
 Do. Company's Land 
 
 750,000 - 
 
 ? 
 
 West Africa 
 
 558,291 
 
 27,250,000 
 
 Central Africa Pro- 
 
 
 
 tectorate 
 
 ? 
 
 1,200,000 
 
 Uganda ... 
 
 90,000 - 
 
 300,000 
 
 Zanzibar - 
 
 760 - 
 
 250,000 
 
 East Africa Pro- 
 
 
 
 torate ... 
 
 1,000,000 - 
 
 ? 
 
 Somali Protectorate - 
 
 80,000 - 
 
 ? 
 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 
 
 Canada 
 
 3,456,383 
 
 5,021,046 
 
 Newfoundland 
 
 162,200 - 
 
 202,100 
 
 British Honduras 
 
 7,562 - 
 
 32,900 
 
 British Guiana - 
 
 109,000 - 
 
 280,900 
 
 IN THE ATLANTIC 
 
 
 
 OCEAN 
 
 
 
 West Indies, Falkland 
 
 
 
 Islands, &c. - 
 
 22,275 
 
 1,469,635
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. IO? 
 
 The part of this Empire politically connected 
 with Great Britain is scattered over the whole of 
 the globe, the colonies lying widely apart from 
 each other. They represent every kind of climate 
 that exists. The heat of the tropics in India, 
 the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, the West Indies, 
 West Africa ; the sub-tropical climate of Natal, 
 the Bahamas, Queensland ; the warmer belt of 
 the temperate zone, as at the Cape, and in New 
 South Wales ; the purely temperate climate in 
 Tasmania, said to have the most delightful of 
 all climates in the world, and New Zealand ; the 
 semi- Arctic winter with a semi-tropical summer as 
 in Canada. In this vast collection of colonies 
 everything is grown that the earth will produce ; 
 everything is dug up that the bowels of the earth 
 contain ; everything is made that the ingenuity of 
 man has devised ; everything is wanted that is 
 made. None of these colonies, except the West 
 Indian Islands, are filled up; in some the best 
 land has been taken up, but there is always land 
 left ; wherever the climate is healthy, hands are 
 always outstretched for more comers more com- 
 ers. I do not say that all kinds of new comers are 
 wanted : I do say that agriculturists, craftsmen 
 of all kinds, women who understand a dairy and 
 a poultry farm, women who are ready to be- 
 come settlers' wives, men who do not mind 
 work, are welcomed in almost every one of these 
 colonies. There are exceptions : on the West 
 Coast of Africa no settlers are wanted, for white
 
 108 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 men cannot settle there, but soldiers ; in Ceylon, 
 in North-west India, in places where sugar, 
 coffee, tea, indigo are cultivated, not craftsmen 
 but men with capital are wanted ; above all, the 
 lazy and the vicious, should they change their 
 sky without changing their habits, will find in a 
 colony that the path of destruction is only 
 steeper, swifter, and more certain than at home. 
 Here, then, we have the problem. Given 
 these splendid possessions, all crying aloud for 
 men and women to work in the development of 
 the country : given, also, too crowded a popu- 
 lation at home ; good workmen out of employ- 
 ment by the hundred thousand ; the cities full 
 of idle hands ; the streets, the police courts, the 
 reports of parish clergy, bearing mournful testi- 
 mony, day and night, especially at night, to the 
 evils produced by poverty, low wages, and 
 sweated work. What have our statesmen done 
 to bring together the classes which ought to go, 
 and the colonies which want these classes ? I 
 have called this chapter our " Heritage." Yes, 
 but a heritage only for the better sort ; the 
 skilled, and the sober, and the industrious. 
 What, I repeat, have our statesmen done to 
 bring the people to these colonies ? They have 
 done NOTHING. It is a most wonderful thing, 
 an almost incredible thing, that in the work of 
 strengthening the Empire by filling up the agri- 
 cultural colonies our statesmen have done 
 nothing. No other nation ever had such
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 109 
 
 chances. And nothing has been even 
 attempted. 
 
 Stay, there have been one or two feeble 
 attempts. There was formerly an Emigra- 
 tion Board, under the Colonial Office. I 
 do not know what work was done by 
 this Board ; but from the Colonial Office 
 itself has never come any scheme or project 
 whatever for the direction and the control 
 of emigration. Passengers' Acts have been 
 passed which provide for the proper accom- 
 modation of emigrants, and there is now 
 an office at Westminster which promises to 
 provide information on application. Bills are 
 put up in the Post Offices it is beautiful to 
 see the trust which the Government always con- 
 fides in the Post Office. If a bill is put up in 
 the Post Office, it is supposed to be read by all 
 the world. As a matter of fact it is read by 
 nobody ; certainly not by the class for whom it 
 is intended. They do not go into a Post Office 
 to read the bills on the walls, but to buy stamps 
 and postal orders. But it is said people may 
 obtain information at the Westminster office. 
 What do they know about this office? We 
 might as well put this office at the North Pole 
 for any use it is likely to be. 
 
 I say that practically nothing whatever has 
 been done to show our people what is waiting 
 for them in any part of the Empire, and who 
 and what are the emigrants wanted. Consider
 
 110 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 the figures : they are most eloquent figures ; 
 they speak for themselves. Between the years 
 1853 and 1888 there were 
 
 8,675.475 
 
 emigrants from British ports (Chambers' Ency- 
 clopaedia, 1 889). Of these, some were foreigners 
 who came here in order to embark on English 
 ships. Of English, Scotch, and Irish there 
 were 
 
 6,650,055. 
 Of whom, 
 
 49 per cent, were English. 
 
 41 Irish. 
 
 10 Scotch. 
 Of the whole number, 
 
 912,477 went to British North America. 
 1,324,018 went to Australasia. 
 426,937 went to all other parts of the British 
 
 Empire. 
 
 BUT, to the United States, there went no fewer 
 than 
 
 6,012,043. 
 
 In other words the sheer stupidity and incom- 
 petence of our Governments allowed the loss of 
 six millions of our best blood our country 
 lads, chiefly. There were boundless plains of 
 fertile land in Canada, Australia, and New 
 Zealand ; vast areas in South Africa our 
 own our own waiting, longing, praying for 
 immigrants; not an effort was made to direct 
 the vast human stream of our own people into
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. Ill 
 
 our own lands ! We suffered them to go, as we 
 suffered the Irish to go in 1847-1850, in huge 
 multitudes, without even offering them land of 
 their own to cultivate in possessions which 
 they had helped to gain their own inheritance ; 
 we let them go, to develop the resources of the 
 United States, and to nourish revengeful thoughts 
 on the cruel elder sister who drove them out 
 into the wilderness. I believe the only ex- 
 planation that can be offered as to the supine 
 condition of our Government is the humiliating 
 one that during the whole of that time there 
 was not a single statesman in office who 
 had a statesmanlike understanding of what the 
 colonies mean. We sent six millions away. In 
 a hundred years, according to the increase in 
 new and fertile countries, those six millions 
 will be sixty millions. Yet we hold up our 
 hands in wonder and contempt when we 
 read of the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes and the banishment of the Huguenots 
 from France. Then those fugitives came to us 
 by the hundred thousand ; we all know what an 
 accession of strength they have proved : our 
 people exiled themselves to a foreign country by 
 the million, and we know what an accession of 
 strength they have proved to that country. 
 They have, happily, not gone beyond the 
 borders of the Anglo-Saxon Empire; but as 
 long as one part of the empire is separated from 
 the mother-land and other parts are not, there is
 
 112 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 no question as to the direction in which the 
 mother-land should look for the new homes of 
 her people. In this chapter I must write as a 
 citizen of the British, not merely of the English- 
 speaking, Empire. 
 
 We still await the statesman who will cope 
 with the question of emigration and will help 
 the people to take their share in their own 
 inheritance. As yet, not one English statesman 
 since Sir Walter Raleigh seems to have grasped 
 the full meaning and possibilities of the colonies, 
 at least, not one has proved his grasp by 
 putting this question in the place its importance 
 deserves. 
 
 How can we bring the colonies to the people ? 
 
 In the first place, by the daily or weekly issue 
 of a paper ; it might be part of the London 
 Gazette, containing the state of the labour mar- 
 ket in every part of our possessions. A sheet 
 stuck up behind the door in the Post Office 
 will not do ; it conveys no information to the 
 people ; the Post Office girls do not understand 
 it and cannot explain it. There must be a large, 
 important, responsible newspaper, containing 
 full details and particulars as to the wants of the 
 moment over the whole Empire. It will not do 
 to publish this in St. Martin's Lane, and then 
 sit down ; the document must be brought before 
 the people, who certainly will not, of their own 
 accord, go after it. Therefore, it must be laid 
 out in all Public Libraries, Village Clubs,
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 113 
 
 Reading Rooms, County and Parish Councils, 
 School Boards, Vestry Halls, Schools, and in 
 every public place. Further, there must be 
 appointed agents in every place to explain and 
 to keep on explaining the meaning of the papers 
 to the rustics. This kind of work might be, in 
 many cases, entrusted to girls, who would be 
 more conscientious than men. Every one of 
 these agents would be Secretary of a County 
 Emigration Council. The paper itself would 
 be connected with the central Department of 
 Emigration. 
 
 In some such way as this, emigration may be 
 diverted from foreign countries and turned 
 into our own. Have we not given enough 
 away? 
 
 A method was suggested to me some fifteen 
 or twenty years ago by my late friend Mr. A. J. 
 Duffield, who had travelled in most of the 
 colonies, by which he thought we might secure 
 a lasting bond of union between the colonists 
 and ourselves. It was in its main features, 
 something like the following : There are, let us 
 say, 26,000 parishes and villages in this island. 
 He proposed to unite every parish and every 
 village with some colony, some town, some 
 district in a colony. Thereafter, this village or 
 this parish would be only concerned with that 
 one colony. For instance, taking the colony of 
 British Columbia, perhaps 250 villages and 
 parishes might be, so to speak, affiliated with 
 
 i
 
 114 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 that colony. They would say, " our share in the 
 inheritance of the people is in British Columbia." 
 Among the mines, in the forests, in the fisheries, 
 there will be employment found for the sons of 
 these village sons. The lands of British Columbia 
 would be their's in a special sense. We should 
 not drain the mother country, for this reason : 
 though a colony may want an indefinite number 
 of settlers, it does not want them all at once. 
 Seldom does a colony spring up by leaps and 
 bounds. Though the forests are unequalled and 
 the timber magnificent, though the salmon are 
 thick in the streams, though the country is full 
 of minerals, the colony can only advance at a 
 certain rate of increase ; it lives not on what it 
 wants, otherwise it might take all comers, but 
 on what it has to offer, and on what its markets 
 will take; and the markets will only take a 
 certain quantity ; so that when we speak of the 
 resources of a new country, we must remember 
 that they are resources for the future. If you 
 go down to the riverside of London, you will see 
 what is surely the most shocking and miserable 
 spectacle that the world has to offer. There are 
 thousands of stout country-bred lads, hanging 
 their hands, waiting for a casual job. If one 
 could go among these fellows and say, " Come ! 
 in British Columbia there are wanted for forest 
 work lads like you ; it is a splendid country ; 
 you shall have a wage which here you cannot 
 dream of."
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 115 
 
 Suppose they understood what was offered 
 a thing possible suppose these poor fellows 
 jumped at the proposal ; what good would it be ? 
 None none whatever because they would 
 have no money to take them there. 
 
 Which brings me to the next point ; that if 
 emigration is to be controlled and directed, it 
 must be, not assisted, but free. If a thousand 
 young fellows are eager and willing to give their 
 labour for the development of one of our 
 colonies, we must take them there for nothing. 
 The machinery is ready to hand; we have 
 plenty of ships ; we must carry out our emigrants 
 free in these ships, land them free, provide them 
 with tools, give them money to tide them over 
 the first few weeks and leave them there. 
 
 In this way, by an intelligent, unceasing 
 acquisition and publication of the labour market 
 in each colony ; by bringing the facts home to 
 the people, not by letting the people find them 
 out ; by free passages, and by free gifts of tools ; 
 by the employment of emigration agents, whose 
 duty it will be to extend the knowledge of the 
 colonies, and to enlist the superfluous ; by the 
 affiliation of colonies with home counties, after 
 Duffield's plan ; we should for the first time 
 enable our people to enter fully upon their 
 inheritance. 
 
 I may dismiss the other part of this inherit- 
 ance that which belongs to the other branch 
 of Anglo-Saxon without further comment. At
 
 TT6 THE HERITAGE OF THE RACE. 
 
 present it is by far the richer part, and more 
 populous. In fifty years time, when our colonies 
 have had time and help to develop, the position 
 will possibly be reversed.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 
 
 expansion of Great Britain during 
 the last sixty years has been for 
 the most part an expansion of population, 
 trade, wealth, and resources, rather than of 
 territory. Yet, in territory alone we have 
 made great advances. Very much has been 
 acquired in Africa ; much in Burmah ; in 
 North and South America, nothing. We 
 have taken over a few islands, such as the 
 Fiji group ; we have acquired Cyprus ; we 
 hold the predominant position in Egypt. We 
 have ceded Heligoland, chiefly as a measure 
 calculated to win the friendship of Germany 
 the Germans accepted the island, but they 
 still continue to revile us. We handed the 
 Ionian Islands to Greece, without even asking 
 the people if they desired annexation to Greece ; 
 it appears that they did not wish for annexation 
 then, and that they deplore and resent it now.
 
 Il8 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 
 
 Gifts of islands, therefore, do not seem always 
 desirable from sentimental motives. 
 
 The immense territory claimed and held by 
 Great Britain would have melted away long 
 since, just as the Portuguese settlements in the 
 east melted away, for want of a population large 
 enough and to spare for emigration, for conquest, 
 and for settlements of a permanent kind. 
 
 Every year that the Empire holds together it 
 grows stronger. What strength did Australia 
 or Canada confer upon Great Britain in 1809? 
 None, except the loyalty of the handful of 
 Canadians. Consider, however, the position of 
 the Dominion regarded as an ally of ourselves. 
 Canada has opened up new provinces : Mani- 
 toba, Assiniboia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, British 
 Columbia, which are attracting settlers by thou- 
 sands. In a few years Canada will possess a 
 population of twelve millions, while now she has 
 less than six. In case of need there would be a 
 recruiting ground for the defenders of the flag. 
 Africa is receiving emigrants by thousands every 
 year. The British populations of Africa will, 
 before long, number four or five millions. New 
 Zealand, which might support thirty millions 
 and has only one, is increasing rapidly. 
 Australia, as we have seen, has become already 
 four millions. Fortunately, of late years, we 
 have been able to send out every year thousands 
 of emigrants to this country or to that ; we are 
 not like the Portuguese, who failed for the lack
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 1 19 
 
 of men, nor are we like the Dutch, who, for the 
 like cause, could not maintain their indepen- 
 dence. 
 
 In a word, there are now six countries 
 formerly we should have said six kingdoms 
 namely : Great Britain and Ireland, the United 
 States of America, the Dominion of Canada, 
 South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, with- 
 out counting the islands which speak the same 
 language, practically claim the same religion, 
 have the same ancestry, obey the same institu- 
 tions and read the same literature. They are 
 settled on the most favoured parts of the globe, 
 they occupy the most fertile parts, and they are, 
 one and all, unassailable by other nations except 
 by sea. Two of these nations are extremely 
 wealthy and powerful more wealthy and more 
 powerful than any other countries in the world 
 the remaining four enjoy a prosperity and a 
 standard of living unequalled anywhere else. 
 Of five of these it may be said, without fear of 
 contradiction, that they are firmly united, so far, 
 in bonds of kinship and affection. The one 
 country which is outside that bond is at present 
 the richest and most populous of the six. It is 
 probable that it is going to become much richer 
 and much more populous. So, however, are 
 the other five. 
 
 Now the one thing needful is so to legislate, 
 so to speak and write of each other, so to 
 encourage each other, that this bond
 
 120 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 
 
 may be strengthened and not loosened. 
 We want, should a time of parting arrive, to 
 separate only in form ; we want an everlasting 
 alliance, offensive and defensive, such an 
 alliance as may make us absolutely free from 
 the fear of any other alliance which could 
 crush us. We do not want to go on conquer- 
 ing ; on the contrary, we want no extension of 
 territory, but to develop our own. The sixth 
 of the nations may, perhaps, continue to stand 
 aloof; if so, there is all the more reason for the 
 five to stand together. 
 
 It may be that such an alliance will not be 
 made. In that case we should see, perhaps, 
 Australia carrying on war with South Africa, 
 and New Zealand with Canada. The colonies, 
 I say, may fail to see the advantage of such an 
 alliance ; they may fly at each others' throats, 
 like Germans and French. In that case one 
 would despair of humanity ; one would desire 
 death rather than the loss of so splendid a chance 
 for the advancement of humanity and the peace 
 of the world. Alas, such wars would be as 
 determined, as long reaching in their evil effects, 
 as civil wars always are. We can understand, 
 again, that if Australia and New Zealand became 
 enemies, the weaker might make an alliance with 
 a third power, and perhaps reward Russia or 
 Japan with what could be torn from Australia. 
 For my own part, I have great hopes that these 
 things will not happen. We desire a permanent
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 121 
 
 Union of Five Sovereign States, not one being 
 before or behind the other ; the Federation of 
 Australia ; the Federation of the Cape ; the 
 Federation of Canada and Newfoundland ; the 
 Federation of New Zealand ; the United King- 
 dom of Great Britain and Ireland. We have to 
 rely partly upon our common ancestry ; partly on 
 the common love of the Mother Country; on 
 the possession of the same institutions, liberties, 
 history, literature and art ; on the prevalence of 
 our religion. We have also to rely on easy 
 communication between the states ; on the inte- 
 rests created by trade ; and on the growing habit 
 of travel. We have to face estrangement from 
 ignorance, neglect of travel ; and misrepresenta- 
 tion by sections of the Press ; from the intro- 
 duction of tariffs, and the erection of artificial 
 barriers. Again, we have to rely very largely 
 upon time. As time advances, and prosperity 
 increases with it, there comes a better under- 
 standing of history and the situation ; people 
 begin to realize the meaning of the common 
 possessions ; they begin to understand, in quiet 
 chambers, and away from the crowded Bourse, 
 the great and glorious future possible nay, 
 certain for a United Federation of the English- 
 speaking States. 
 
 I can see no boundary or limit to the power 
 that will be possessed by such a Federa- 
 tion. It will be a power exerted altogether 
 in the interests of peace: of that there can
 
 122 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE 
 
 be no doubt. Where the centre of the five 
 nations will be I cannot prophesy. London 
 may be considered central : perhaps Cape 
 Town may be more central. In any case, 
 the congress of the future Federation will pass 
 no laws interfering with the absolute sovereignty 
 of each state; no one country will have 
 authority over another. 
 
 It may be urged that this federation cannot 
 take place yet. The colonies are not yet 
 strong enough or powerful enough. South 
 Africa is as yet unsettled : there are one or two 
 things which have to be done in South Africa 
 before she will become ready for her indepen- 
 dence. Surely, however, the only reason why 
 Australia and New Zealand cannot stand alone 
 is the want of a fleet. In such an alliance as 
 I contemplate there would be but one fleet. 
 However, it cannot be too soon to place before 
 ourselves the necessity of united action, and to 
 prepare for what must, before long, be deliber- 
 ated solemnly. 
 
 For my own part, I venture to hope for more 
 than this. No one can doubt that there exists 
 in the minds of the American people not so 
 much in the cultivated class, but among the 
 great mass of the American people an un- 
 reasoning, dull animosity against ourselves. It 
 is a prejudice which has been carefully planted 
 in their minds, and is still fostered by many of 
 the orators, the histories, the school books and
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 123 
 
 the newspapers of the country, and by prejudice. 
 Now, since the time has passed when the United 
 States had the least fear of being attacked by 
 this country ; since there is not a single question 
 at present unsettled which may renew hostilities ; 
 since the better sort of the people in all classes are 
 loudly calling for arbitration ; surely it is possible 
 to hope that the time is nigh at hand when the 
 orator will cease to misrepresent us ; when the 
 school books will cease to teach the children 
 perversions of our history ; when the great- 
 ness and the glory of the United States of 
 America will not require, even on Independence 
 Day, to be inflated with froth and gas about the 
 wickedness of Great Britain ; when it will be 
 understood that it is beneath the dignity of a 
 Great Power to rail at one equally great, which 
 receives the insults without making any sign or 
 reply in a word, with the dignity belonging to 
 a Great Power ; when at last the Great Recon- 
 ciliation shall take place, and we may be proud 
 of each other, as we ought to be and as we 
 deserve to be. 
 
 Of India and the East I have not here spoken. 
 They form a part of the Empire that is outside 
 the Five Nations. The complete amalgamation 
 of the conquering race which holds India with 
 the Hindoos is impossible ; it seems equally 
 impossible that the various races of India should 
 themselves amalgamate. We are, therefore, 
 forced to the conclusion that unless India can
 
 124 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 
 
 be abandoned to the intestine wars which would 
 certainly follow, or unless it is ceded to or 
 conquered by some other power, our occupa- 
 tion of India must remain, as it is, a strong, just 
 hand, restraining and leading, but the hand of 
 a foreigner. I can understand an educated 
 Hindoo admiring the strength and the justice of 
 his conqueror, but I cannot understand his 
 affection for any conqueror. For the sake of 
 the people alone we must continue to hold 
 India ; but the rule which began by conquest 
 and exists by force is not the same kind of rule 
 which holds together five of the six great 
 countries of the Anglo-Saxon Race. 
 
 We must not lose sight of the fact that in 
 every single colony, every independent colony, 
 the people have refused to establish even the 
 semblance of an aristocratic caste. Here and 
 there a judge or a statesman has received a 
 knighthood, but not a peerage. Of the two 
 Canadian peers, one has simply been confirmed 
 in the title worn by his ancestors in the old 
 French regime, and has no privileged position in 
 the Colony ; the other lives in England. There 
 can be no doubt that all the communities, with- 
 out consultation or framing constitutions, have 
 become democracies ; save for their name, they 
 are all republics. We have at home swept 
 away all but the shreds of aristocratic privilege. 
 A few things remain perhaps more than people 
 think; but they are not felt. Aristocratic
 
 THE FUTURE OF THE HERITAGE. 125 
 
 privilege, even with us, with the old intolerable 
 aristocratic insolence, is defunct. Across the 
 seas they would have none of it. Why, we have 
 seen how the founders of Georgia tried to 
 impose a kind of feudal system, which the 
 infant settlement brushed aside. No such 
 attempt has been made in Australia or New 
 Zealand. They will tolerate no aristocracy, no 
 privileged class ; in this respect all the colonies 
 are alike. The six Anglo-Saxon nations are 
 already, and will always remain, republics.
 
 R. O. HEARSON, LTD. 
 
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