Thus Security From Attack, Chartered
Autonomy, And Governing Capacity, With The Absence Of Organised
Pugnacious Tribes, Have Combined To Achieve The Unique Result Of A
Continent Preserved From Aggression, Disruption, Or Bloody Strife For
Over One Hundred And Twenty Years.
There was a brief period, as will presently be related, when this happy
state of things was in some danger of being disturbed.
It certainly would
have been impossible had not Great Britain emerged victorious from her
protracted struggle, first against revolutionary France, and later
against Napoleon, in the latter years of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth.
In those wars colonial possessions "became pawns in the game."* (* The
phrase is Professor Egerton's, Cambridge Modern History 9 735.) There was
no Imperialism then, with its strident note, its ebullient fervour and
flag waving. There was no national sense of pride in colonial Empire, or
general appreciation of the great potentialities of oversea possessions.
"The final outcome of the great war was the colonial ascendancy of Great
Britain, but such was not the conscious aim of those who carried through
the struggle."* (* Ibid page 736.) Diplomacy signed away with a dash of
the quill possessions which British arms had won after tough fights,
anxious blockades, and long cruises full of tension and peril. Even when
the end of the war saw the great Conqueror conquered and consigned to his
foam-fenced prison in the South Atlantic, Great Britain gave back many of
the fruits which it had cost her much, in the lives of her brave and the
sufferings of her poor, to win; and Castlereagh defended this policy in
the House of Commons on the curious ground that it was expedient "freely
to open to France the means of peaceful occupation, and that it was not
the interest of this country to make her a military and conquering,
instead of a commercial and pacific nation."* (* Parliamentary Debates 28
462.)
PART 2.
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