English colonization

“ 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 demand made by France, if acceded to, meant the death-blow to English colonization on the American mainland; and yet it was made not without reason. French explorers, missionaries, and fur-traders had, with great enterprise and fortitude, swarmed over the entire region, carrying the flag, the religion, and the commerce of France into the farthest forest wilds; while the colonists of their rival, busy in solidly welding their industrial commonwealths, [pg 307] had as yet scarcely peeped over the Alleghany barrier. ”

“ This does not pretend to be the usual account of all the events attending early colonization; it is rather a history in which the succession of cause and effect is the main topic—a history of the dynamics of colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth century. Who were the beginners of English life in America? What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness? What visions beckoned them to undertake the founding of new states? What manner of men were their leaders? ”

“ Again, I suspect that the circumstances of the Conquest did something to raise the position both of the common freeman and of the King or leader, as compared with the intermediate class of nobles. No two things are more levelling than colonization and successful warfare. The levelling effect of colonization is obvious; the levelling effect of warfare is not so obvious in25 modern times. ”

“ But the colonizing genius which, with the British Isles as centre, has taken up the “white man’s burden” in all quarters of the globe, is universally recognized. In the problems of government raised by the organization of the British dominions beyond the seas the system of colonization has been developed to an extent unknown under any other national flag. ”

“ Measures have been already taken to carry the humane intention here manifested by his majesty's government into effect; and many hundreds who would otherwise have quitted the colony, will now remain there, and thus both the permanency of their reformation will be guaranteed, and the march of colonization greatly accelerated. Generous Britain, not more renowned in arts and arms, than in mercy and benevolence; may thy supremacy be coeval with thy humanity! ”

“ The history of the British colonies in North America is of a very different character from that of British South Africa. We have spoken in an earlier page of the gallant aid which the colonists gave to England in her struggle with the United States during the years 1812-15. When the excitement of this war had died down, there arose a slowly increasing estrangement between the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada; the English settlers of the former and the old French habitans of the latter were separated from each other by race, language, religion, and prejudices. ”

“ See Hindustan, that great and swarming region of usurpations and exactions! Look at the Cape, and ask the Caffres whether the English are tender-hearted and just: ask the same question in New Holland: ask it of the natives of Van Dieman’s Land,—men, transported from the island of their fathers. Ask the New Zealanders whether the warriors whose tattooed heads stare us in the face in our museums, were not delicately treated by us. Go, indeed, into any one spot, of any quarter of the world, and ask—no you need not ask, you shall hear of our aggressions from every people that know us. ”

“ In the old Thirteen lands of America we hear of the colonial period as meaning the time of imperfect freedom; when full freedom is won, the name of colony is cast away. And yet surely a colony of England was not meant to be a mere Roman colonia, a mere Athenian κληρουχία, a garrison to hold down a subject province; it was surely meant to be, like a Greek ἀποικία, a new home of English life and English speech. In that nobler sense of the word, a colony which is not independent has not risen to the full rank of a colony; it is hardly a home for the new folk of the mother-land ”

“ It was not policy, it was not system, which gave North America to the English rather than to the French, and yet there was a certain gain even from the utter absence of both policy and system. Natural forces had more play on the English side than on the French, and in a sense it might be said of the English colonies that their strength was to sit still. ”

“ In ten years after the first settling the population numbered twelve hundred, and this presently doubled and went on to increase. The early times were taken up with the wrestle with the forest, with the Indians, with Spanish alarms, with incompetent governors, with the Lords Proprietaries' Fundamental Constitutions, and with the restrictions which English Navigation Laws imposed upon English colonies. What grains and vegetables and tobacco they could grow, what cattle and swine they could breed and export, preoccupied the minds of these pioneer farmers. ”

“ Three thousand miles away the wealth and power of England was represented by a number of settlements occupying a comparatively narrow strip of territory on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent. The American colonies were the proudest possessions of the British Empire. Through generation after generation, for more than two centuries, English daring and English courage had built up those colonies, reclaiming them from the wilderness and the swamp, wresting them from wild man and wild beast, fighting for them with European power after European power. ”

“ What an indescribable and monstrous crime must it be in the eye of the English to possess a beautiful and fertile island,—that the possessors shall be transported as convicts to make way for the convicts from this kingdom who have been pronounced by our laws too infamous to live here any longer! To such a pass are we come, that the Jezebel spirit of our lawless cupidity does not merely tell us that it will give us a vineyard, but whatever country or people we lust after. ”

“ But the fact that such things took place, affords a very simple explanation of the difficulties which had already arisen and which subsequently arose in the history of European colonization between a mother country and her colonies. Men could put two and two together in those days as in ours. If colonists saw the rulers of the ruling land treating high offices in the colony as a matter of individual profit and public indifference, they could only come to the conclusion that they had better take care of themselves ”

“ In addition to the home-land, England ruled, as colonies, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, sea fortresses, such as Gibraltar and Malta, Asiatic possessions, including in India an empire twenty times as populous as the ruling country, Canada, Jamaica, the Barbadoes, the Thirteen Colonies, etc. Our own thirteen colonies, which were not united among themselves and which were not different in the eyes of an Englishman from any other of the colonies, formed a small part geographically of the empire and had for their peculiar distinction only the larger proportion of English residents. ”

“ The Government refusing to acknowledge this principle, the colonists took up arms in defence of those liberties which their fathers had won with so hard a struggle from English kings on English soil. The result of the war was the separation from the mother-land of the thirteen colonies that had grown up along the Atlantic seaboard,—and a Greater England began its independent career in the New World. ”

“ It is to be hoped that the present awakening on the subject of past failures of our government to enforce respect for its own principles may be a warning to all concerned against any transgression of those principles.
Continental friends with whom I have conversed on the subject of the British Colonies have sometimes appeared to me to leave out of account some considerations special to the subject. They regard British Colonization as having been accomplished by a series of acts of aggression, solely inspired by the love of conquest and desire for increased territory. ”

“ They succeeded because their trade was war not peace, because they were roving adventurers who had only their lives to lose, ravening among quiet men of substance who had homes and wives and children to be plundered and slain. It was as certain that in course of time the cause of the English colonists would prevail, as that the Highland clans, who in Scotland marauded their southern neighbours, would eventually be broken, or that the Five Nations themselves, if left to fight alone, would eventually go down before the settled life of Canada. ”

“ At more than one period, English colonists have been accused of believing that “it is the undoubted right of every Englishman to settle where he likes, to behave as he sees fit, and to call upon the Mother-Country to foot the bill.” [759] This, however, is not merely a colonial characteristic: it is the spirit developed upon every frontier, as the later history of American westward expansion may be called upon to illustrate; and, as we have pointed out, the whole chain of colonies formed the long encircling frontier of England. ”

“ The English colonies were separate, jealous of the crown and of each other, and incapable as yet of acting in concert. Living by agriculture and trade, they could prosper within limited areas, and had no present need of spreading beyond the Alleghanies. ”

“ Had the work of colonization here by Great Britain been as brisk and vigorous as that of her own American offspring, we should have seen lively times on the north and northwest of this continent. As it is, from the acknowledgment of our independence to this day, whenever we have had border troubles with the savages, they have invariably found aid and comfort, arms and supplies, from our brethren on the other side of that border. ”

“ It occurred to me, and I said it then, that Great Britain has more than thirty colonies in different quarters of the globe, in which the numbers of civilized men are increasing, and the native tribes are wasting away—that the march of civilization is everywhere, as it is in America, a war of extermination, and that of our own species. ”

“ In wealth, in population, the American Colonies far surpassed all that remained of her Empire; and the American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of ruin, or that the Bourbon Courts believed her position as a world-power to be practically at an end. ”

“ Though they counted among them many hardy backwoodsmen and fur-traders, who had explored all the waterways of the West, they could not back these pioneers up with solid masses of population. There were not more than 180,000 Pg 521 French emigrants in America, while the English colonies boasted at this time nearly 2,000,000 sturdy settlers. ”

“ The social and economic condition of the people is described, and attention is paid to the political characteristics of the several colonies both in the conduct of their local affairs and in their relations with each other and the mother-country. It is shown that the causes of the Revolution were deep-seated in colonial history. Attention is also called to the fact, generally overlooked, that the thirteen mainland colonies which revolted in 1776 were not all of the English colonial establishments in America. ”

“ Both religious and economic interests, therefore, made it desirable that the English colonies should remain within the English Empire; and it was the power of England alone which enabled them to do so. For it was not a question, for example, of the sturdy New England settlers warding off attacks from the far fewer French inhabitants of Canada. No colony was self-supporting or economically self-contained. ”

“ This accordingly suggests a question affecting the whole relations of British and European colonists generally to the native population of new lands settled and colonised by them. Not only English, Scotch, and Irish, but German, Norwegian, Icelandic, French, Polish, Russian, and Italian emigrants flock in thousands to the New World, merge in the common stock, and in the third generation learn to speak of themselves as “Anglo-Saxon!” ”

“ Our colonies, while they have English blood in their veins, and have relations in England, and while they can get by trading with us, the stronger and greater they grow, the more this crown and kingdom will get by them; and nothing but such an arbitrary power as shall make them desperate can bring them to rebel. ”

“ The work of colonization which has been performed by the people of England surpasses, both in extent and beneficence, that of any other race which has left an impression upon universal history, and the part the manual laborers have taken in this work is not less memorable than the part taken by the higher classes of the nation. ”

“ 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. ”