SECTION I

THE FIRST TWO CENTURIES OF EMPIRE

CHAPTER I

THE COLONIES

THE theme of this book is the way in which, and the extent to which, the Overseas peoples of the British Empire have served the cause of the Empire in time of war, pre-eminently in the last and greatest of wars. Its object is to trace growing co-operation within the Empire at times when the Empire has been in peril from without; to tell how common effort and common sacrifice cemented unity; how distance, diversities of race, colour, land, and creed yielded to loyalty to one Crown and devotion to equal laws and world-wide liberty.

The empires of history, other than our own, have been the handiwork of war. To most men the word empire has in the past connoted conquest, subjection, and dependence. It is the glory of the British Empire that war has shaped its course, not by riveting an iron yoke upon unwilling subjects, but by creating sense of partnership, joint responsibility, and mutual confidence.

Great Britain first became Great Britain in James the First's reign, when the Crowns of England and Scotland were at length united under a sovereign, who took the title of King of Great Britain. At the same date Greater Britain began with the beginnings of permanent colonization beyond the Atlantic, and the first ventures in the East of the newly-formed East India Company. In the preceding reign, the memorable reign of Queen Elizabeth, England had fought through a mighty war. The danger of military domination at the hands of Spain had been dispelled by the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and English sea-captains had taught the lesson that the future of Britain lay on and across the ocean. For a hundred

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seventeenth

years afterwards there was no similar war. British history through the seventeenth century, until that century was century. drawing to a close, may be summed up as a fight against arbitrary government at home; a duel with another maritime trading nation, the Dutch, for the upper hand on the sea and in sea-borne commerce; and a slow but steady widening of settlement in the West, of trade on the African coast and in India. The Empire was then in infancy, and its infancy was cradled in diversity and freedom. In the Mother Country the century was one of civil war and revolution. Beyond the seas colonies were refuges for political and religious martyrs and malcontents; trading factories were the domain of private merchants, who did the work of the Empire on their own initiative and at their own risk. Conspicuous for the absence of State control, for the presence of all that makes for democracy and self-government, was the childhood of the British Empire. From time to time, in spasmodic fashion, the Home Government made itself felt across the ocean. There was an interlude of strong firm policy while Cromwell lived and ruled. In one year and another, at this point or at that, English ships and sailors gave occasional assurance of protection to the outposts of the British race. But the Colonies were small and distant, they were divided from the homeland and from one another, and the homeland was divided against itself. In the old Dominion of Royalist Virginia, in Puritan New England, in the West Indian island of Barbados, where Cavaliers and Roundheads fought a miniature civil war, on the fringes of Newfoundland, where a handful of settlers held their own in the midst of a fishing preserve, on the Gambia River and on the Gold Coast, on the East and West sides of India, Englishmen took their own lines and went their own ways, under little or no obligation to the Mother Country for defence against foreign foes, carrying with them the traditional rights of English citizens, cherishing a general allegiance to the old home, but not greatly concerned with King or Parliament, so long as King and Parliament left them alone.