distance made the problems of the Empire fluid to an extent unknown in former times.

In estimating what distance has meant to the Empire, whether it has been a difficulty and impediment, or, as in Adam Smith's opinion and in his words, an alleviation of the effect of dependence, the case of Ireland gives food for thought. The union with Great Britain was carried, as the union with Scotland had been carried nearly a hundred years before, in the midst of war with France, but carried by doubtful means and not followed by Catholic Emancipation for many years. However the story may be told and accounted for, there is the plain fact to mark and digest that Ireland had been for centuries a dependency of England, an overseas dependency near at hand; but that proximity in no way tended to better relations between the two countries. On the contrary, it may well be contended that distance would have been in this as in other cases an alleviation of dependence, and that in later and more liberal times the principal outcome of proximity was mischievous vacillation between treating Ireland as a separate unit and treating it as an integral part of the United Kingdom.

India, like Ireland, holds a special place in the study of the Empire, and in connection with the years which followed Waterloo its influence may be traced very specially in two respects. While peace at length returned to Europe, some part or other of India remained constantly at war. Here, therefore, the sword was never allowed to rust. Here were highly trained armies ready to take the field and frequently in action. Here military experience was to be gained, and danger bred responsible leaders of armed men. Even more important has India been as a school for administrators. Perpetually widening areas, with endless diversities of race, custom and creed, were brought under British control; the trading Company which ruled India was gradually divorced from trade and confined to administration; and in the work of administration it was more and more closely supervised by the Government. Conscious of such supervision, adequately paid and no longer eking out small salaries by illicit pickings, appraised and promoted or the reverse on their work as administrators, tested by the well-being of those committed to their charge, the members of the Indian Civil Service found an unrivalled field for the exercise of the worthiest British qualities, initiative, capacity for making the best of the means to hand, uprightness, sense of justice and love of fair play. A very noble record has been that of the Civil Service in India, and from India the training and the tradition has gone forth into all the dependent provinces of the Empire.

The modern history of the British Empire may be taken to begin from Waterloo. The age of Franco-British wars then came to an end, happily for the two neighbour nations, and happily too there has been ever since unbroken peace with the United States. The

expansion of the Empire in the nineteenth century was phenomenal, but there is space to refer only to some of the main features. Much misery followed the return of peace. Apart from the inevitable attermath of prolonged war, the substitution of machinery and factories for handwork and homework caused for the time bitter distress, which led to rioting and repression, while emigration began on a large scale. But it was not in reality a reactionary time. Canning stood for progress and enlightenment, Huskisson guided the country far on the road to free trade, the Duke of Wellington's Government carried Catholic Emancipation. In truth Great Britain has had little cause to complain of the succession of eras in her modern history. If wars can ever be other than an evil to the peoples involved in them, the long war in which Great Britain stood sturdily out against Napoleon, and in which "crowning mercies" attended her arms on sea and land, was assuredly of immense value as a set-off against the American catastrophe which had seemed at the time to mark the decline and fall of the British Empire. Great Britain was thereby reinstated both morally and materially in the forefront of the world. If, again, such a fundamental change as the Reform Bill had been attempted shortly after Waterloo, before time had been given for the return of comparatively normal conditions, it might well have done more harm than good. Coming in due time it was completely successful and became the fruitful parent of other reforms, including immediately the abolition of slavery. Then two or three years later came another most opportune era. Just at the time when the newly enfranchised middle classes of Great Britain had drunk deep of reform, when little cause had been given for attachment to or reverence for the Crown, the succession devolved on a young girl of spotless home life, who, if only by contrast to much that had gone before, attached to the throne the chivalry of her people, and whose mind was from the first attuned to the political aspirations of the new age. During more than sixty years Queen Victoria reigned, and, as the years went on, the sovereign became more and more to the peoples of the Empire which had grown up under her rule, the personal embodiment of imperial unity.

In a reign of many wars it was not to war, but strongly to peace, that the temper of the time inclined; and the interests of Great Britain, the interests of the trading middle classes, called for peace. By the Reform Act the middle classes achieved political freedom and entered on the path of political dominance. Adam Smith noted that commerce and manufactures had, when he wrote, been advancing more rapidly in England than agriculture, but he still placed England in the category of landed nations as opposed to purely mercantile states. But now commerce was becoming all in all. The trader is at best a calculating patriot. The British trader's mother country is an island, in Queen Victoria's reign secure and fully conscious of security, in the

charge of admittedly the strongest fleet in the world. That strength, it was forgotten, had been built up by the Navigation Acts, now being finally swept away. The mineral resources of the island, through modern inventiveness and research, were for the first time being fully developed and applied. Geographical position, climate-for cotton the moist Lancashire climate-the various natural advantages of the island, were now enjoyed in a time in which all those advantages would be multiplied a hundred-fold if only nature were not hindered by man. Peace was demanded from the Government and the removal of artificial restrictions. It was a demand based on consciousness of strength. In all directions the tide set in favour of unlimited freedom, of antagonism to Government interference, of curtailment of Government expenditure. There was to be economic as well as political freedom; humanity combined with interest to abolish the Corn Laws; it became an axiom that there should be no customs duties except for revenue purposes, and a sinister meaning was attached to the word "protection". Self-governing institutions and fiscal freedom were granted to the colonies, which were called upon to provide for their own land defence, and advanced thinkers or politicians of the freetrade school, regarding colonies as expensive encumbrances and as no better customers of the mother country than if they were foreign countries, looked with equanimity to the probability of their severance from Great Britain. This was the revised version of "trade and Plantations". Never, in the palmiest days of the mercantile system, was the trade outlook on the colonies more predominant in Great Britain than when the Manchester school was at the height of its power. Trade did not so much lead Plantations as threaten to elbow Plantations out altogether. They had caused much expense, they would inevitably cause more expense; for trade purposes they would be as valuable outside the Empire as inside; if occasion offered let them go. So argued the Manchester school.

But the Manchester school had not the whole field to itself. Lord Durham and his group, as democratically minded as their contemporaries of the Anti-Corn Law League, had their eyes on Plantations rather than trade, and they saw in the grant of free institutions to the colonies not a first step towards getting rid of them, but the one and only means of keeping them within the Empire. The first full recognition of responsible government for the colonies in the test case of Canada exactly coincided with the repeal of the last Navigation Laws by an Act of 1849; the colonies obtained or were obtaining what they wanted, the mother country had what she or the classes who claimed to speak for her wanted, the ground seemed to be cleared for amicable parting, but the parting has not come, and the result has been the development of a commonwealth of nations miscalled an empire, the most illogical human structure that the world has seen and very nearly the strongest.

Before they received full freedom, the colonies, like the colonies of the old Empire, were by no means wanting in self-assertion. Transportation was discontinued owing to the opposition offered in Australia and at the Cape of Good Hope. In Canada, before the so-called "Rebellion" of 1837 which called forth Lord Durham's mission, colonial resistance, intensified by the race feeling of French Canadians, had produced a complete impasse in the Lower Province. After selfgovernment had been conceded to the colonies and the right to frame their own tariffs and pass their own laws, it was somewhat disconcerting to free traders to find that they favoured protection rather than free trade, and protection even against the mother country herself. Assuredly they were minded to go their own way, but on the whole they were not minded to travel outside the Empire; instead they remained within and reacted on the mother country and the Empire. Reference to parliamentary papers and debates in the 'fifties and 'sixties of the nineteenth century will show how slow and gradual was the process of clearly distinguishing between colonies and dependencies. In a parliamentary return of 1859, Canada and the West Indies are grouped with Ceylon and the West Coast of Africa under the heading "Plantations and Settlements". What seems to us an obvious difference was not so obvious sixty or seventy years ago, and the reason was that as a matter of fact the difference did not exist in the same degree. The problem of the Empire was a fluid problem. There was more at work than normal increase in the area of cultivation and normal multiplying of numbers. The forces of science were beginning to join great territories to one another, to make small units into large, the future nations of the Empire. By the mere grant of selfgovernment colonies did not cease to be dependencies so long as they were small. The two linked Canadian provinces ran their selfgoverning career and proudly claimed to settle their own tariffs in their own interest, without regard to the interest of the mother country; but at the same time the mother country was left mainly responsible for the defence bill of Canada. There was a world of difference between the disconnected self-governing communities on Canadian soil prior to the British North America Act of 1867, and the State created by that Act when in 1885 the Canadian Pacific Railway had been completed. The Dominion of Canada was not made by an ordinary process of expanding and magnifying; it was a new creation, which had surmounted natural barriers and conquered mountains and deserts, a creation of the railway engineer. In course of time other similar new creations were brought to birth and became the Dominions of to-day.

The territories of the Hudson's Bay Company were bought in 1869 by what was still only the nucleus of the Dominion of Canada, though for purposes of trade the Company still flourishes to-day. The East India Company, on the other hand, passed out of existence when,

after the Mutiny, the Government of India was taken over by the Crown. It seemed that, as a British agency for making an empire, the chartered company had had its day, seeing that, according to the doctrines of the Manchester school, with which the inclinations of the British Government were for many years in accord, further imperial expansion was to be deprecated. But by the year 1880 the Manchester school had spent its force and a counter-current was setting in, to which the self-governing colonies contributed. They resented the apparent indifference of the governing classes in the mother country as to whether their fellow-citizens overseas remained fellow-citizens or not, and they rejected the cold-blooded economic doctrines which had taken root in Great Britain. With the 'eighties of the nineteenth century came a new phase in the evolution of the Empire, expansion on an immense scale was forced upon reluctant British Governments, and once more there was a revised version of “trade and Plantations".

It has been seen that Africa was one of the main fields into which the stream of evangelical missionary enthusiasm poured in the latest years of the eighteenth and in the nineteenth century. One of these missionaries, a Scotsman, David Livingstone, was first and foremost in the final opening up of Africa. So soon as the main geographical features of the continent had been determined, the "scramble for Africa" followed, and the results of the exploitation by European peoples of the vast areas which had been brought to light were on their worse as on their better side reminiscent of what had followed the discovery of America. For good and evil a new chapter was begun in the history of the world; down to the Great War that history largely centred in Africa, and to the remoter causes of the war Africa substantially contributed. From 1880 onward for more than a generation Africa markedly dominated the history of the British Empire. Egypt and the Sudan, South Africa, West, East, Central Africa, all crowded into the story; old features and forces reappeared in somewhat different setting and combined with new features and new forces to produce a new and greatly enlarged edition of the Empire. The trader and the missionary side by side led a forward movement. Traders, apprehensive of being excluded by rival Powers wholly innocent of freetrade leanings and intent on backing their own citizens, betook themselves to their old weapon, the chartered company. Missionaries, apprehensive for the future of mission work in debatable territories, such as Nyassaland and Uganda, pressed for and eventually secured their inclusion in the Empire. Plantations followed where trade and missions led the way. Already in South Africa Empire statesmen were, as they still are, faced with the supremely difficult problem of European colonisation in the midst of outnumbering native races. Rhodesia has presented the same problem, and in Rhodesia, as in Kenya, there is the further problem as to how far for the purposes of permanent European settlement altitude can countervail the effects