MODERN ENGLAND

1760-1815.

ENGLAND AND ITS EMPIRE

1760-1767.

NEVER had England played so great a part in the history of mankind as in the year 1759. It was a year of triumphs in every quarter of the world. In September came the news of Minden, and of a victory off Lagos. In October came tidings of the capture of Quebec. November brought word of the French defeat at Quiberon. "We are forced to ask every morning what victory there is," laughed Horace Walpole, "for fear of missing one." But it was not so much in the number as in the importance of its triumphs that the Seven Years' War stood and remains still without a rival. It is no exaggeration to say that three of its many victories determined for ages to come the destinies of mankind. With that of Rossbach began the re-creation of Germany, the revival of its political and intellectual life, the long process of its union under the leadership of Prussia and Prussia's kings. With that of Plassey the influence of Europe told for the first time since the days of Alexander on the nations of the East. The world, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "saw one of the races of the-northwest cast into the heart of Asia new manners, new doctrines, new institutions." With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States. By removing an enemy whose dread had knit the colonists to the mother country, and by breaking through the line with which France had barred them from the basin of the Mississippi, Pitt laid the foundation of the great republic of the west.

Nor were these triumphs less momentous to Britain. The Seven Years' War is in fact a turning point in our national history, as it is a turning point in the history of the world. Till now the relative weight of the European states had been drawn from their possessions within Europe itself. Spain, Portugal, and Holland, indeed, had won a dominion in other continents; and the wealth which two of these nations had derived from their colonies had given them for a time an influence among their fellow states greater than that which was dug-to their purely European position. But in the very years during which her rule took firm hold in South America, Spain fell into a decay at home which prevented her empire over sea from telling directly on the balance of power; while the strictly commercial character of the Dutch settlements robbed them of political weight. France in fact was the first state to discern the new road to greatness which lay without European bounds; and the efforts of Dupleix and Montcalm aimed at the building up of an empire which would have lifted her high above her European rivals. The ruin of these hopes in the Seven Years' War was the bitterest humiliation to which French ambition has ever bowed. But it was far from being all that France had to bear. For not only had the genius of Pitt cut her off from the chance of rising into a world-power, and prisoned her again within the limits of a single continent, but it had won for Britain the position that France had lost. From the close of the Seven Years' War it mattered little whether England counted for less or more with the nations around her. She was no longer a mere European power; she was no longer a rival of Germany or France. Her future action lay in a wider sphere than that of Europe. Mistress of Northern America, the future mistress of India, claiming as her own the empire of the seas, Britain suddenly towered high above nations whose position in a single continent doomed them to comparative insignificance in the after-history of the world.

It is this that gives William Pitt so unique a position among our statesmen. His figure in fact stands at the opening of a new epoch in English history in the history not of England only, but of the English race. However dimly and imperfectly, he alone among his fellows saw that the struggle of the Seven Years' War was a struggle of a wholly different order from the struggles that had gone before it. He felt that the stake he was playing for was something vaster than Britain's standing among the powers of Europe. Even while he backed Frederick in Germany, his eye was not on the Weser, but on the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. "If I send an army to Germany," he replied in memorable words to his assailants, "it is because in Germany I can conquer America!" But greater even than Pitt's statesmanship was the conviction on which his statesmanship rested. He believed in Englishmen, and in the might of Englishmen. At a moment when few hoped that England could hold her own among the nations of Europe, he called her not only to face Europe in arms, but to claim an empire far beyond European bounds. His faith, his daring, called the English people to a sense of the destinies that lay before it. And once roused; the sense of these destinies could never be lost. The war indeed was hardly ended when a consciousness of them showed itself in the restlessness with which our seamen penetrated into far-off seas. With England on one side and her American colonies on the other, the Atlantic was dwindling into a mere strait within the British Empire; but beyond it to the westward lay a reach of waters where the British flag was almost unknown. The vast ocean which parts Asia from America had been discovered by a Spaniard and first traversed by a Portuguese; as early indeed as the sixteenth century Spanish settlements spread along its eastern shore and a Spanish galleon crossed it year by year from Acapulco to the Philippines. But no effort was made by Spain to explore the lands that broke its wide expanse; and though Dutch voyagers, coming from the eastward, penetrated its waters and first noted the mighty continent that bore from that hour the name of New Holland, no colonists followed in the track of Tasman or Van Diemen. It was not till another century had gone by indeed that Europe again turned her eyes to the Pacific. But in the very year which followed the Peace of Paris, in 1764, two English ships were sent on a cruise of discovery to the Straits of Magellan.

"Nothing," ran the instructions of their commander, Commodore Byron, "nothing can redound more to the honor of this nation as a maritime power, to the dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and to the advancement of the trade and navigation thereof, than to make discoveries of countries hitherto unknown." Byron himself hardly sailed beyond Cape Horn ; but three years later a second English seaman, Captain Wallis, succeeded in reaching the central island of the Pacific and in skirting the coral-reefs of Tahiti, and in 1768 a more famous mariner traversed the great ocean from end to end. At first a mere ship-boy on a Whitby collier, James Cook had risen to be an officer in the royal navy, and had piloted the boats in which Wolfe mounted the St. Lawrence to the Heights of Abraham. On the return of Wallis he was sent in a small vessel with a crew of some eighty men and a few naturalists to observe the transit of Venus at Tahiti, and to, explore the seas that stretched beyond it. After a long stay at Tahiti Cook sailed past the Society Isles into the heart of the Pacific and reached at the further limits of that ocean the two islands, as large as his own Britain, which make up New Zealand. Steering northward from New Zealand over a thousand miles of sea he touched at last the coast of the great " Southern Land" or Australia, to whose eastern shore, from some fancied likeness to the districts at home on which he had gazed as he set sail, he gave the name of New South Wales. In two later voyages Cook traversed the same waters, and discovered fresh island groups in their wide expanse. But his work was more than a work of mere discovery. Wherever he touched, in New Zealand, in Australia, he claimed the soil for the English Crown. The records which he published of his travels not only woke the interest of Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti, the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gumtrees and kangaroos of the Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the expansion of the English race.

Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown. Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself " but part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland ; it claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all, without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of whose trade was reserved to the mother-country, a source of boundless wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than half a million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds, whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to the mother-country, became from this moment not only the aim of British statesmen, but the resolve of the British people.

And at this moment there were grave reasons why this resolve should take no active form. Strong as the attachment of the Americans to Britain seemed at the close of the war, keen lookers-on like the French minister, the Duc de Choiseul, saw in the very completeness of Pitt's triumph a danger to their future union. The presence of the French in Canada, their designs in the west, had thrown America for protection on the mother-country. But with the conquest of Canada all need of protection was removed.