Sir Henry Maine's admiration of the Federal Constitution.

was new or un-English, something important had been sloughed off. Moreover, it is an innovation that there must be for State and for Union, the Constitution, the rigid, carefully formulated instrument by which legislature, executive, and judiciary are to be carefully bound; not to be amended but by a process of some difficulty, - in the case of the Federal instrument so difficult as to be seldom practicable. It has acted for America, says Sir Henry Maine, "like the dikes and dams which strike the eye of the traveller along the Rhine, controlling the course of a river which begins amid mountain torrents, turning it into one of the most equable waterways in the world." It was this restored Anglo-Saxon freedom, so similar to that of the plains of the Weser and Elbe two thousand years ago, in all its main outlines, however its adaptation to a higher civilization and a vastly larger nation may have caused development, sovereignty of the plain people, safeguarded and carefully ordered as long experience advised, which one hundred years ago, April 30, 1789, Washington, as Chief Magistrate, made oath to administer.

1 Popular Government, p. 245.

French anticipation of Eng

land's ruin at the close of

the American

Revolution.

WITH the loss of the thirteen American colonies, the greatness of England seemed quite destroyed. Far-seeing statesmen of her rival, France, had sought comfort at the time when Quebec fell before Wolfe, in the anticipation that the colonies, freed now from fear of a hostile power always ready to descend upon them from Canada, no longer needing protection, would soon throw off the dependence by which protection had been accompanied. The anticipation was well based: the spirit of independence at once appeared, as Choiseul, Argenson, Kalm, and other foreign observers had believed it would. France fanned the discontent; when the disputants came to blows, she gladly lent America money and men; when at Yorktown the British army surrendered and American independence became certain, France thought her revenge complete, and saw nothing in the future but her own undisputed supremacy in the civilized world.

The ill-wishers of England saw far, but not far enough. The independence of America crippled the island kingdom for a moment only: at the How they same time it established the supremacy in trated.

were frus

the world of the English tongue, of English freedom, of English ideas in general, a supremacy before which France was destined to sink irrecoverably. Since the establishment of the United States, the life of the English-speaking race has had two currents instead of one: the older has not lessened, while the newer current has flowed with a force which has changed the face of the world. With the adoption of the Federal Constitution, America began her separate course. Within thirty years England had acquired a new colonial empire vaster even than the one she had possessed at first. Taught by experience, she has managed these newer dependencies with wisdom: the connection which the Thirteen Colonies rejected, the new empire has carefully and affectionately cherished.

Why Canada did not join the United States.

Not all of America became independent with the United States. Canada, lately conquered, containing a population of sixty thousand French, remained to England. Between Canada and the Thirteen Colonies had existed a fierce hereditary feud. In religion, as Catholics and Protestants, they were utterly antagonistic; for a hundred and fifty years, since the occupation of America by French and English, in fact, the wars between them had been almost continuous. The Canadians might hate England, but they hated her late dependencies still more. During the war of the Revolution, American invasions of Canada met with no support from the habitans; and since the British fleet could easily pour troops into the country and command from the St. Lawrence all the most im

1 J. R. Green: History of the English People, IV, p. 270.

portant points, such invasions were easily frustrated. At once after the close of the war, we have seen a cause become operative which greatly increased Canadian dislike. The expatriated Tories, to the number of many thousands, sought homes in Canada. The ideas they rejected had triumphed; through wholesale confiscation they had been stripped of all they possessed; the spots they loved had been barred to them. Deep resentment on their part was inevitable, resentment which their descendants have not ceased to feel down to the present hour.

At the very time when the over-severe grasp of the mother-country upon America was being beaten off, the greatest of English sailors was lifting voyages of the curtain in the South Pacific behind Captain Cook. which lay concealed an immense new world. James Cook, in the "Endeavour," and the "Resolution," entering seas which, indeed, had been penetrated before by Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch, but of which almost nothing was known, brought to the attention. of civilized men the existence of vast habitable lands. He mapped out accurately the two contiguous islands of New Zealand, nearly as large as Italy, possessed of a climate most favorable to Anglo-Saxon men, and of the richest natural resources of every kind. Coasting at great peril through the intricate barrier-reefs, along the far-extending shore, from Van Diemen's Land to the northern cape of what is now Queensland, he traced the position and shape of a new continent, a land of the finest promise. How memorable the change these regions were to experience during the hundred years that followed! Scarcely was the work of Cook accomplished when the Cape of Good

Hope fell to England out of the weakening grasp of the Dutch. Her empire of India, which the French had disputed, was a matter of no doubt after the ruin of Dupleix. Rodney's defeat of De Grasse gave her at the same time the West Indies. Points of foothold in long series were made firm in the sea, Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vancouver, Bermuda, Ascension, the Falkland Isles, stepping-stones over which England might proceed with speed and unobstructed, to succor or comfort her vast outlying dominions. It was not until the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, which seemed at the time so immense, so decisive of her decline, that, in the period of Webster, she became "that power whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours, fills the whole earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

Distinctions

to be made among the present dependencies of England. The

Studying the extraordinary expansion of the influence of England with reference to the spread in the world of Anglo-Saxon freedom, we must, it is plain, make a distinction among the territories which form her great outlying East and West empire. In India, for instance, she appears Indies. simply as a ruler. Two hundred and fifty millions own her sway, which is exercised by only a few thousand Englishmen, the civil officials and the regiments which form the nucleus of the army. The vast mass of the population live on, little touched by the ideas of the masters, -preserving their own religious ideas for the most part, preserving the ancient structure of society based upon caste; preserving in the whole internal administration of affairs, the