which had received some sort of political education.

The defects, however, of a political system, which restricts power to a limited class or classes, are that each class tends to exercise it in its own interests and resents its extension to others, even when they are qualified for its use. If all other historical records had disappeared, land laws, game laws, inclosure acts, and corn laws--after the Revolution a bounty was actually placed on the export of corn, whereby the community was taxed in order to deprive itself of food or make it dearer--alone would prove that political power in the Georgian period was vested in a landed aristocracy, though England's commercial policy, especially towards Ireland, would show that mercantile interests had also to be consulted. Similarly, the journals of the House of Commons would prove it to have been a close corporation less anxious for the reign of law than for its own supremacy over the law. It claimed authority to decide by its own resolutions who had the right to vote for its members and who had the right to a seat. It expelled members duly elected, and declared candidates elected who had been duly rejected. It repudiated responsibility to public opinion as derogatory to its liberties and independence; it excluded strangers, and punished the publication of debates and division-lists as high misdemeanours. It was a law unto itself, and its notions of liberty sometimes sank to the level of those of a feudal baron.

Hence the comparative ease and success with which George III filled its sacred precincts with his paid battalions of "king's friends." He would have been powerless against a really representative House; but he could buy boroughs and votes as effectively as Whig or Tory dukes, and it was his intervention that raised a doubt in the mind of the House whether it might not need some measure of reform. The influence of the crown, it resolved in 1780, had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished. But it could only be diminished by destroying that basis of corruption which supported the power of the oligarchs no less than that of the crown. Reform would be a self-denying ordinance, if not an act of political suicide, as well as a blow at George III. Privileged bodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and by others were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolution came to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the Industrial Revolution had changed the face of England did the old political forces acknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nation against its will.

CHAPTER VI

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

1603-1815

In the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen had made themselves acquainted with the world. They had surveyed it from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand, and from the Orinoco to Japan, where William Adams built the first Japanese navy; they had interfered in the politics of the Moluccas and had sold English woollens in Bokhara; they had sailed through the Golden Gate of California and up the Golden Horn of the Bosphorus; they had crossed the Pacific Ocean and the deserts of Central Asia; they had made their country known alike to the Great Turk and to the Grand Moghul. National unity and the fertile mingling of classes had generated this expansive energy, for the explorers included earls as well as humble mariners and traders; and all ranks, from the queen downwards, took shares in their "adventures." They had thus acquired a body of knowledge and experience which makes it misleading to speak of their blundering into empire. They soon learnt to concentrate their energies upon those quarters of the globe in which expansion was easiest and most profitable. The East India Company had received its charter in 1600, and the naval defeat of Spain had opened the sea to all men; but, with the doubtful exception of Newfoundland, England secured no permanent footing outside the British Isles until after the crowns of England and Scotland had been united.

This personal union can hardly be called part of the expansion of England, but it had been prepared by some assimilation and cooperation between the two peoples, and it was followed by a great deal more. The plantation of Ulster by English and Scots after the flight of the Irish earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607 is one illustration, and Nova Scotia is another; but Virginia, the first colony of the empire, was a purely English enterprise, and it cradled the first-born child of the Mother of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drove them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the _Mayflower_ in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right to compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. Schism, however, appeals with ill grace and little success to authority; and dissentients from the dissenters formed Independent offshoots from New England. But all these Puritan communities in the north were different in character from Virginia in the south; they consisted of democratic townships, Virginia of plantations worked by slaves. Slave labour was also the economic basis of the colonies established on various West Indian islands during the first half of the seventeenth century; and this distinction between colonies used for exploitation and colonies used for settlement has led to important constitutional variations in the empire. Only those colonies in which large white communities are settled have received self-government; those in which a few whites exploit a large coloured population remain subject to the control of the home government. The same economic and social differences were responsible for the great American civil war between North and South in the nineteenth century.

There are three periods in British colonial expansion. The first, or introductory period, was marked by England's rivalry with Spain and Portugal; the second by its rivalry with the Dutch; and the third by its rivalry with France; and in each the rivalry led to wars in which Britain was victorious. The Elizabethan war with Spain was followed by the Dutch wars of the Commonwealth and Charles II's reign, and then by the French wars, which lasted, with longer or shorter intervals, from 1688 to 1815. The wars with the Dutch showed how completely, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, commercial interests outweighed those of religion and politics. Even when English and Dutch were both living under Protestant republics, they fought one another rather than the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. Their antagonism arose over rival claims to sovereignty in the Narrow Seas, which the herring fisheries had made as valuable as gold mines, and out of competition for the world's carrying trade and for commerce in the East Indies. The last-named source of irritation had led to a "massacre" of Englishmen at Amboyna in 1623, after which the English abandoned the East Indian islands to the Dutch East India Company, concentrating their attention upon India, where the acquisition of settlements at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay laid the foundations of the three great Presidencies of the British Empire in India.

A fatal blow was struck at the Dutch carrying trade by the Navigation Acts of 1650-1651, which provided that all goods imported into England or any of its colonies must be brought either in English ships or in those of the producing country. The Dutch contested these Acts in a stubborn naval war. The great Admirals, Van Tromp and Blake, were not unevenly matched; but the Dutch failed to carry their point. The principle of the Navigation Acts was reaffirmed, with some modifications, after the Restoration, which made no difference to England's commercial and colonial policy. A second Dutch war accordingly broke out in 1664, and this time the Dutch, besides failing in their original design, lost the New Netherland colony they had established in North America. Portions of it became New York, so named after the future James II, who was Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, and other parts were colonized as Pennsylvania by the Quaker, William Penn. The great importance of this acquisition was that it drove out the wedge dividing the New England colonies to the north from Virginia and Maryland, which had been founded in Charles I's reign, mainly as a refuge for Roman Catholics, to the south; and this continuous line of British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard was soon continued southwards by the settlement of the two Carolinas. The colonization of Georgia, still further south, in the reign of George II, completed the thirteen colonies which became the original United States.

France now overshadowed Holland as England's chief competitor. Canada, originally colonized by the French, had been conquered by the English in 1629, but speedily restored by Charles I; and towards the close of the seventeenth century France began to think of uniting Canada with another French colony, Louisiana, by a chain of posts along the Mississippi. Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, had greatly developed French commerce, navy, and navigation; and the Mississippi Company was an important factor in French history early in the eighteenth century. This design, if successful, would have neutralized the advantage England had secured in the possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North America, and have made the vast West a heritage of France.

Nevertheless, the wars of William III and Anne were not in the main colonial. Louis' support of James II, and his recognition of the Old Pretender, were blows at the heart of the empire. Moderate success on James's part might have led to its dismemberment, to the separation of Catholic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands from the remainder of the British Isles; and dominion abroad would not long have survived disruption at home. The battle of the Boyne (1690) disposed of Irish independence, and the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) ensured Great Britain against the revival of separate sovereignties north and south of the Tweed. Scotland surrendered her independent parliament and administration: it received instead the protection of the Navigation laws, representation in both houses of the United Parliament, and the privilege of free trade with England and its colonies--which put an end to the tariff wars waged between the two countries in the seventeenth century; and it retained its established Presbyterian church. Forty- five Scottish members were to sit in the House of Commons, and sixteen Scottish peers elected by their fellows for each parliament in the House of Lords. Scottish peers who were not thus chosen could neither sit in the House of Lords nor seek election to the House of Commons.

In time this union contributed materially to the expansive energy of the British Empire, but it did not substantially help Marlborough to win his brilliant victories in the war with France (1702-1713). Apart from the general defeat of Louis XIV's ambition to dominate Europe, the most important result, from the British point of view, was the definite establishment of Great Britain as a Mediterranean power by the acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca. English expeditions against Canada had not been very successful, but the Peace of Utrecht (1713) finally secured for the empire the outworks of the Canadian citadel-- Hudson's Bay Territories, Newfoundland, and the future provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The trading privileges which Great Britain also secured in Spanish America both assisted the vast growth of British commerce under Walpole's pacific rule, and provoked the war with Spain in 1739 which helped to bring about his fall. This war, which soon merged in the war of the Austrian Succession (1741-1748), was indecisive in its colonial aspects, and left the question of French or English predominance in India and North America to be settled in the Seven Years' War of 1756-1763.

War, however, decides little by itself, and three of the world's