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in Britain a dominion over the forces of nature which he has gained nowhere else in the world.

On the causes which have led to the development of such a nation, on even its parliamentary tongue-talk, the articulate expression of its opinions and its aspirations, the historian is right in dwelling. Nor is he wrong in relating in less detail the doings of her children who have sought homes in other lands. The colonist engaged in subduing the soil of a distant colony is no doubt helping to found new and greater Britains. But his occupations do not afford much material for history. It is much more important to trace the causes which have led to the foundation of a colonial empire, and to relate the circumstances which have led to colonial autonomy, than to describe the even course of colonial history; and, in the present chapter, therefore, it is much more necessary to state a few general conclusions than to weary the student with a mass of historical details.

When the earliest British settlements were made in America in the course of the seventeenth century, the settlers were The causes

of emigration in the 16th and 17th cen. turies.

animated by different motives from those which influence the emigrants of the nineteenth century. They left a land where they were not allowed to follow their own convictions, and sought in another continent the freedom which they could not find at home. Just as the Dutch, in the crisis of their great struggle, once contemplated leaving a country in which a strong and brutal despot was endeavouring to crush free thought, just as the Huguenots carried to England their industry and their faith, so the men who sailed in the Mayflower, and the men who followed Baltimore and Penn, sought freedom from persecution in a new world. No other impulse drove them from their old homes. Britain was still broad enough to support a far larger population than that which had gathered on British soil; she still contained vast tracts of woodland and upland which had never rung with the woodman's axe and which had never felt the farmer's plough. The population, except possibly in one or two towns, grew so slowly that the competition for land

was small, and the people had much more temptation to let their own land fall out of tillage than to seek new lands to till in other hemispheres.

Mr. Froude relates in the opening pages of his history,1 that the population of England and Wales at the time of the Armada was supposed to be something under five Increase of millions. Macaulay assumes that a hundred years population. later England did not contain more than 5,500,000 souls. 2 If, however, it be concluded that at the close of the seventeenth century England and Wales contained 6,000,000 persons, a little more than a century of progress had augmented the English race by a little more than a million people. The succeeding century added some 2,800,000 persons to its numbers, and raised the population to 8,873,000.3 But the next forty-five years added more than 8,000,000 people. In other words, while, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the population only increased by 10,000 and 28,000 persons annually, from 1801 to 1846 it rose at the rate of 180,000 persons a year. The same thing was true of Scotland. Chamberlayne, in the edition of 1727, writes that "a million and a half of people is the most that has been reckoned" in Scotland. As Chamberlayne's estimates are usually high, it will perhaps be safer to conclude that there were about 1,250,000 persons in Scotland in 1700. In 1801 Scotland contained 1,599,000 persons.6 She had not added more than 350,000 people, or 3500 persons a year, to her numbers during the century. In 1846 her population was estimated at 2,770,000. In this interval she had added 771,000 people, or 17,000 a year, to her numbers.

It may, therefore, be concluded that from the end of the eighteenth century the population of Great Britain had been growing with an increasing rapidity. The gradual development of the country, the expansion of its external and internal

1 History of England, vol. i. p. 3.

2 History of England, p. 285.

3 Ante, vol. i. p. 22.

4 The estimated population in the middle of 1846 was 16,944,000. I have taken 1846, as the year in which the great Irish emigration commenced. 5 Present State of Great Britain, p. 345.

6 Ante, vol. i. p. 23..

trade, and the vast industrial revolution which resulted from the inventive activity of the century, all tended to add to the numbers of the people. The growing population increased the demand for agricultural produce; both the circumstances of the war and the character of legislation tended to encourage the home farmer; land was enclosed in large quantities, pasture was broken up, and the discovery that, by a proper rotation of crops, fields need not be left fallow, increased the productiveness of the soil, and enabled a large population to be employed on its cultivation.

labour.

These conditions continued in force through the first two decades of the present century. The people grew in number, but the demand for agricultural labour also grew, Diminishing demands for From 1811 to 1821 more than one-third of the entire agricultural population of Great Britain was dependent on agricultural pursuits. But these conditions rapidly altered after the accession of George IV. Land which had been broken up during the war was suffered to relapse into pasture. The introduction of threshing mills reduced the demand for agricultural labour. In 1811 thirty-five families, and in 1821 thirty-three families, out of every hundred had been dependent on agriculture; in 1831 only twenty-eight families, and in 1841 only twentysix families, out of every hundred were employed in farming.1

While, then, other classes were multiplying their numbers and finding on the whole increased employment, the agricultural labourers were every day discovering that there was less and less work for them to do. But these poor villagers, including the poorest and least provident of the population, married and brought up children without thought for the morrow. The third decade of the century had hardly begun when thinking and unthinking men alike perceived that in every rural district there were more hands requiring work than there was work requiring hands. It was not easy before the introduction of railways for the labourers of Southern England

1 It is very difficult to obtain these figures accurately. For the purposes of the text I have followed the figures cited in Porter's Progress of the Nation, PP. 52 and

53.

to move into the northern hives of industry, and the rustic, whose ideas are bounded by the limits of his own village, in any event adapts himself with difficulty to the life of an artisan in a town. Hence a gradual conviction arose that the best fate for these men was their removal from their old homes, where there was no work, to the vast untilled lands in other continents.1

The increase

tion.

Then began the vast stream of emigration which is one of the most remarkable facts of the nineteenth century. Like a great river, its volume was originally only slight. A small body of people annually left the country for in emigra North America; and in 1819 the ministry, alarmed at the prevalence of distress, procured a vote of £50,000 to assist a few hundred labourers to the Cape of Good Hope.2 It is not difficult to understand the reasons which prompted this singular selection. The Cape was popularly considered as one of the most important of the acquisitions made during the war. It had twice been taken by us from the Dutch, and permanently surrendered by the treaty of 1814. The most important station on the common high-road to the East, it seemed desirable, on national grounds, to increase the British element in the colony. The emigrants, indeed, themselves preferred to seek their fortunes either in the United States or in Canada. But the ministry declined to increase the population of a foreign country at public cost, and hesitated to send large contingents of poor men to face the hardships of a Canadian winter. The Cape enjoyed a mild climate, its soil was favourable for the multiplication of stock,3 and

1 See the fine passage in Sartor Resartus: "Meanwhile, what portion of this inconsiderable terraqueous globe have ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannahs of America; round ancient Carthage and in the interior of Africa?" &c. Sartor Resartus, p. 223. Few people now recollect that the fifth Lord Selkirk founded a colony of Celtic Highlanders in Prince Edward's Island in 1803, and another colony of Highlanders in what is now called Manitoba in 1809. He was the author, in 1805, of a work called Emigration and the State of the Highlands. An interesting account of this remarkable man will be found in Manitoba, its Infancy, Growth, and Present Condition, by the Rev. Professor Bryce, head of the Manitoba College. 2 See ante, vol. iii. p. 325.

3 See an abstract of Vansittart's speech in Ann Reg., 1819, Hist. p. 87; and Lord Grey's Colonial Policy, vol. ii. p. 249 and note.

5000 persons were ultimately sent there. The experiment was successful Landing at Algoa Bay, these 5000 persons laid the foundations of the thriving settlements which now include Graham's Town and Port Elizabeth.

Successful, however, as the experiment ultimately proved, the Government hesitated to persevere in it. And it was fortunate that it did not do so. Emigration would

The Cape. never have prospered if the emigrants had been unnecessarily fettered in the choice of their destination. Some years afterwards, moreover, the opening of an overland route to the East diminished the strategic value of the Cape of Good Hope, while constant disturbances and frequent war to a certain extent hindered the development of the colony and increased the anxiety of those who were responsible for its destiny.

Yet, though the Cape became consequently an unpopular country, its history presents many points of interest which will repay a short digression. The Cape occupies a sort of middle position between colonies such as the West Indies and settlements such as Australia. It comprises a mixed race of white men, black men, and Malays. The Dutch conquerors had deprived the Hottentots of their lands, and reduced large numbers of them to slavery, while they had also imported negroes and Malays whom they used as slaves. But round the enclosures of the settlers there surged a large native population, which regarded property in cattle from the standpoint which every freebooter has assumed from Anchises to Rob Roy. Cattle-lifting, in other words, was "the natural and most honourable pursuit for brave men to follow." The Government at home could not, of course, allow the settlers to be plundered with impunity, and they were consequently forced into the serious and difficult Kaffir wars which tried the metal both of colonists and troops in 1811, in 1819, in 1835, in 1836, and in 1849. And the successful termination of each war laid the foundation for a new struggle. For in 1819 the eastern frontier of the colony was advanced from the Fish 1 Lord Grey's Colonial Policy, vol. ii. p. 250.

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