British settlement

“ Here a settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All seemed to favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there been men like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the map would undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. ”

“ Continuity of English colonization meant little more than that the lands claimed by one colony were coterminous with those claimed by the next, and that no other European nation could plant a settlement between the Alleghanies and the sea without committing a trespass and fighting for its place. There was no continuity of what would now be called effective occupation. Colony was divided from colony by many miles of forest and backwood. ”

“ But the British Empire is not confined to the self-governing colonies and the United Kingdom. It includes a much greater area, a much more numerous population, in tropical climes, where no considerable European settlement is possible, and where the native population must always vastly outnumber the white inhabitants ”

“ How to administer a new domain with equity and sound judgement; how to give to new subjects, acquired by conquest, the privileges enjoyed by the old colonies; how to reconcile the claims of the old colonies, whose inland borders had never been demarcated, with the undoubted rights of native races; how to promote trade and settlement without depriving the Indians of their heritage;—such were the problems which the British Government was called upon to face and if possible to solve. ”

“ Barry, are acquired by conquest; by cession under treaty; or by occupancy. By occupancy where an uninhabited country is discovered by British subjects, and is upon such discovery adopted or recognised by the British Crown as part of its possessions. In case a colony be acquired by occupancy, (he adds) the law of England then in being, is immediately and ipso facto in force in the new settlement. He further states, New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, were acquired by discovery or simple occupation. ”

“ Then we had in London a number of prominent Colonial public men, each of whom regarded his individual colony as his true sphere of public labour, and none of whom desired to be merged in the ordinary ruck of the purely British population. ”

“ Britain was quietly growing in wealth and power, and her colonies in population and importance. By the census of 1754 it appeared that the British colonists, occupying a strip of territory about 200 miles in width along the Atlantic coasts, numbered upwards of a million souls; whereas at that date, the whole white population under the French flag in North America did not exceed 80,000. ”

“ Before the revolution, all the colonies constituted a part of the dominions of the king of Great Britain, and all the colonists were natural born subjects, entitled to all the privileges of British born subjects, and capable of inheriting lands in any part of the British dominions, as owing a common allegiance to the British crown. ”

“ Now I look on the colonies as so many counties gained to Great Britain, and more advantageous to it than if they had been gained out of the seas around its coasts, and joined to its land: For being in different climates, they afford greater variety of produce, and being separated by the ocean, they increase much more its shipping and seamen; and since they are all included in the British empire, which has only extended itself by their means; and the strength and wealth of the parts are the strength and wealth of the whole ”

“ In 1609, after some expensive and not very successful attempts at settlement had been made, a new and more enlarged charter was givne by the crown to the first colony, in which the king granted to the 'Treasurer and Company of Adventurers of the city of London for the first colony in Virginia,' in absolute property, the lands extending along the seacoast four hundred miles, and into the land throughout from sea to sea. ”

“ On the other hand, it must be allowed that the presence of an English settlement anywhere always brings with it a degree of civilisation in many points such as is not always found in towns of much greater size which our countrymen do not frequent. ”

“ The settlement of the English in the conquered land was nothing less than an absolute transfer of English society in its completest form to the soil of Britain. The slowness of their advance, the small numbers of each separate band in its descent upon the coast, made it possible for the invaders to bring with them, or to call to them when their work was done, the wives and children, the læt and slave, even the cattle they had left behind them. The first wave of conquest was but the prelude to the gradual migration of a whole people. ”

“ In conversation with many of them afterwards it was interesting to hear the sons of settlers referring to the England that they had never seen, as "home." That night I realized as never before,—not even amid the agony and sacrifice of the Somme or the Ancre in France,—one reason why the British Empire is great and why, despite all muddling, it carries on. It lies in the feeling of imperial kinship far out at the frontiers of civilization. The colonial is in many respects a more devoted loyalist than the man at home. ”

“ Peculiar complaints of British settlers.Besides those causes of complaint which are common to the whole Colony, the British settlers have many peculiar to themselves. The emigrants who have settled in the country within the last ten years, are supposed to comprise half the population. ”

“ In spite of the oppressive bonds of the East India Company, the young settlement, containing the noblest blood of old Europe as well as its most exalted aspirations, grew so powerfully that in 1806, when the Colony passed into the hands of England, a strong national sentiment and a spirit of liberty had already been developed. ”

“ Anyone who knows English colonies knows that the British Government, wherever it has been possible to do so politically, that is, in all her colonies which are already properly organised and firmly established as British, has always met in a most generous and sympathetic way German, and indeed any foreign, trade or other enterprises. ”

“ If the colonies, in truth, are to be made, or to be kept British, in anything else than in name—if even in name they can long be kept so—it must be by the infusion of the essential elements of British character and British principle into them, by means of British legislation. ”

“ Resolved,⁠That these ^united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved
NH.—— ”

“ But above all this, the state and circumstances of our settlements render such a measure not only proper and eligible, but absolutely necessary. The English settlements, as they are at present circumstanced, are absolutely at a stand; they are settled up to the mountains: and in the mountains there is no where together land sufficient for a settlement large enough to subsist by itself, and to defend itself, and preserve a communication with the present settlements. ”

“ In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader political conditions under which the first settlers took up their abode here, which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally affected them and their children for two generations, it is necessary, before taking up the narrative of their actual settlement here, to advert briefly to the state of affairs at that time in England, and on the continent of Europe, and in the English, French and Spanish Colonies of North America. ”

“ And in the course of their experience the colonising peoples have gradually worked out certain principles in their treatment of subject peoples, which ought to be of use to us. The fullest and the most varied experience is that of the British Empire: it is the oldest of all the world-states; it alone includes regions of the utmost variety of types, new lands peopled by European settlers, realms of ancient civilisation like India, and regions inhabited by backward and primitive peoples. ”

“ The Colonies, as a whole, owed to Queen Victoria a condition of government which made peaceful [Pg 21] constitutional development possible; which extinguished discontent and the elements or embers of republicanism; which gradually eliminated the separative tendencies of distance and slowly merged the Manchester school ideas of the past into the Imperialism of the present; which made evolution rather than revolution the guiding principle of British countries in the nineteenth century. ”

“ Whereas in England the common lands were being confiscated for the benefit of an aristocracy, and the arable turned into sheep-runs for the profit of the great proprietors, in New England the common lands were re-established with the founding of a new settlement. ”

“ British statesmen have been awakened to the necessity of winning the good-will of their colonists, and within recent years have adopted the policy of inviting the Colonial premiers to London to discuss questions affecting Imperial and Colonial interests. ”

“ The best hope of the English settlement must be, that in the common course of events, the time may arrive when the population will be sufficient to make its own markets; and awaiting that period, they must be resigned to sink their immediate interests in the prospect of laying the foundation of future fortune for their posterity. ”

“ When a nation takes possession of a different country and settles a colony there, that country, though separated from the principal establishment, or mother country, naturally becomes a part of the state equally with its ancient possessions. ”

“ Englishmen could not emigrate to distant parts of the world, and found settlements, without, in many and serious ways, involving the English nation—and that apart from the fact that the soil on which the most populous of the colonies grew up was the unquestioned property of the English Crown. From the very beginning of colonization, therefore, even before any permanent success had been achieved, we find the question being discussed as to what use, if any, to the English people were these distant settlements, with their possible disadvantages and certain responsibilities. ”

“ The local independence, however, of an English colony is hardly more noteworthy than are the devices by which a colony is retained in its place as a subordinate portion of the British Empire, and anyone who would understand the English Colonial system must pay hardly less attention to the subordination than to the independence of a country like Victoria. ”

“ Resolved.—That, in opinion of this council, the numerous free emigrants of character and capital, including many officers of the army and navy, and East India Company's service, who have settled in this colony, with their families, together with a rising generation of native-born subjects, constitute a body of colonists who, in the exercise of the social and moral relations of life, are not inferior to the inhabitants of any other dependency of the British crown, and are sufficient to impress a character of respectability upon the colony at large. ”

“ Whether the British dominions in general have not an extent of territory sufficient to increase and multiply their inhabitants; and whether it is not their own faults that they do not increase them sufficiently to supply their Colonies and Plantations, with Whites instead of Blacks? ”

“ Only, as colonization spread in the long course of years, the dwellers in one province came into contact with the dwellers in another, and both the one and the other came face to face with the French advance. Then the pressure of common danger made for union, and the race instinct gathered strength. The mother country sent out soldiers; colonists were enlisted in royal regiments to supplement the provincial militias; and in clumsy, most imperfect fashion, the English in North America began to shape themselves into a nation. ”

“ This was especially the case with the colonists of Plymouth and Massachusetts. Many of them were educated men, and all possessed their full share, according to their social condition, of the knowledge and attainments of that age. The distinctive characteristic of their settlement is the introduction of the civilization of Europe into a wilderness, without bringing with it the political institutions of Europe. The arts, sciences, and literature of England came over with the settlers. ”

“ Provision in the charter, and in the instructions of the royal council, for the creation of individual estates according to the laws and customs of England, not to mention the guarantee of full legal rights for the inhabitants of the colony and for their children, leave no more room for speculation as to the intended permanence of the settlement than there is doubt as to the expected diversity of its economic activity. ”

“ The composition of the colony shows a serious purpose of settlement, since the trades were mostly represented, but there were too many gentlemen to make it a working colony. And, indeed, the gentlemen, like the promoters of the enterprise in London, were probably more solicitous of discovering a passage to the South Sea, as the way to increase riches, than of making a state. ”

“ To the growth of the plantations Britain is in a great measure indebted for her present riches and strength. As the wild wastes of America have been turned into pleasant habitations and flourishing trading towns, so many of the little villages and obscure boroughs in Great Britain have put on a new face, and suddenly started up and become fair markets and manufacturing towns and. opulent cities. London itself, which bids fair to be the metropolis of the world, is five times more populous than it was in the days of Queen Elizabeth. ”