shut off to fight it out, New England would have made a speedy end of French Canada. But behind the friars and nuns, the missionaries and handful of fur-traders, who formed the feeble French colony, were the fleets and armies of France. New England took her ample share in the fight, contributing more men and more money than all the other colonies put together. But she needed the armies and fleets of the Mother Country, and to obtain them she bore the Navigation Acts without open opposition.

When all the other causes are allowed for, the most important still remains. The colonial system was tolerable because it was constantly evaded. The active agents of this evasion were the New England colonists. Simply because men could live there as they had done in England-or their fathers had— they produced less of those colonial products which the Mother Country needed, since she did not grow them herself. They had comparatively little intercourse with home. They sought their prosperity in the round of trade allowed to the Colonies outside the commerce reserved to the Mother Country, though they took some share in that. To carry non-enumerated articles to Southern Europe; to bring back pipe-staves, and molasses from the French islands of the West Indies, which were the chief source of supply; to make rum, carry it to Africa to exchange for slaves to be sold in the southern plantations or smuggled into the Spanish colonies :-that was the course of New England trade. It lay by the side of the main commerce guarded by the Navigation Acts, and though permitted was not of a nature to breed community of sentiment with the Mother Country.

But it did more. It was a constant invitation to contraband. In the seventeenth century New England provided herself with tea and other produce of the East Indies by sending out pirates who plundered Moor ships (to plunder the heathen was always lawful by sea morality), and brought their booty home. When piracy was suppressed, smuggling took its place. The prosperity of New England depended on this commerce so much that, though she would contribute freely to the fight with the French in Canada, she would not give up her intercourse with the French islands in war. Naval officers complained, and with truth, that the enemy was constantly supplied with food by New England ships. But what was to be

expected? If a colony is told it is to be kept in subservience and dependence it can hardly feel grateful. If we profited by the smuggling into Spanish colonies, to which New England contributed largely, was it wonderful that the smuggler extended his operations wherever he found his profit? A common patriotism is not generated under such impulses.

When the French rule in Canada had fallen we know what happened. The fact that it did come to pass does not prove that it was inevitable. And it might have been avoided in one way. The rights of kings and peoples agree best in silence, said the Cardinal de Retz. Hitherto mother and daughter had lived not without occasional squabbles, but on the whole peacefully, because the fatal question of rights had been left in a judicious obscurity. In an evil hour the mother dragged it into the light, and henceforward all hope of peace was at an end. We need not revive the memory of the controversy now. Few are more infested by the hair-splitting, and distinctions without a difference, which Burke dismissed as 'metaphysics.' He said he hated the very sound of them, and indeed they are dreary enough in the pages of Adam's 'Novanglus,' or the pamphlets of Otis, and a wilderness of others, whether the authors were American or English. The 'Controversy between Great Britain and Her Colonies Re'viewed,' written by William Knox and inspired by George Grenville, is as bad as any of them. But it contains a few lines worth quoting, for they afford a text and apply wonderfully to events of to-day. The author, in a shrill triumphant manner, asks how any man can think it other than absurd that the King should apply to the Colonies for a free grant of money, and parades his reductio ad absurdum.

'A war in Germany becomes the occasion for a requisition: rice, sugar, and tobacco all go there, but no fish. Why, then, should New England, Nova Scotia, or Quebec give anything? If it was for support of the Italian States these colonies might indeed contribute something, as they buy their fish; but if that were the occasion, would Pennsylvania or Carolina do so?'

The words, occurring not in a pamphlet written by some literary man, but in what was really the defence of a minister's policy, composed under his direction by an important official (Knox had been agent for Georgia, and became Under-secretary for the Colonies), make nonsense of the plea that the revenue

to be raised by the Stamp Act was meant only to provide part of the expenses of colonial defence. It is manifest that Grenville looked upon taxation of the Colonies as a source of revenue to be used for general purposes, and to be imposed by the Mother Country. But by that way we might slip back into the old quarrel. These sentences are worth quoting now because of the writer's manifest assumption that the Colonies could not be expected to aid the Mother Country save when their own pockets were threatened with loss, or flattered by hope of profit. And perhaps he was right. And what else could be the patriotism and morality bred by the old colonial system? It was based on a sordid foundation of cash. The Colonies were avowedly considered to be valuable because they gave prosperity to the Mother Country. Such prosperity as they might win was to be kept in strict subordination to hers. They had founded themselves by the efforts and at the risk of the settlers. When they began to have productive value their trade was regulated so that the Mother Country should be the greater gainer. Where was there room for a common patriotism in such a huckstering bond as this? It brought the retribution, in all possible senses, that it deserved-the repayment was just equal to the action.

When the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1783 the colonial system, as far as we were concerned, was mortally wounded. It did not die at once. Men and institutions are not to be easily persuaded that they are logically dead. The colonial system went on by its acquired momentum, growing ever weaker as friction wore it down. The most pestilent of all its errors was revived when the colony of New South Wales was founded as a place to send the thieves to.' White of Dorchester had noted with truth, if not with elegance, in 1630, that it seems to be a common and gross error that 'colonies ought to be emunctories or sinckes of States to drayne away their filth.' The common and gross error died hard, or indeed it did not die till it was killed by the threat of colonists at Melbourne to fire on the ships bringing

convicts.

Nevertheless the colonial system, and all that it implied, was sick unto death by the close of the eighteenth century. The remainder of its story is merely the history of the graceless

end it made. Experience could teach its supporters nothing. Not even the immense increase of British trade with America, which began on the very morrow of the recognition of the independence of the States, could convince them that the colonial system was of no real use even for the material purpose it was supposed best to serve. Dr. Tucker-though denounced for it by Burke, as a lackey in search of a basely won bishopric -lived to see his prophecy, that British trade would gain by the independence of her colonies and a fair treaty of commerce, more than fulfilled. The Navigation Acts were defended to the last moment by shipowners, who hoisted flags half-mast high when they were repealed in 1849. These men of business soon found that Josiah Child spoke truly when he said that merchants were not the best judges of the kingdom's interest in trade, for they were too exclusively devoted to their own. He might have added that they were not always the best judges of even this. The consequences of the repeal of the Navigation Acts would have borne him out. British shipping has at no period of its existence grown so rapidly, improved so fast, or formed so large a share of the total tonnage of the world, as since the laws meant for its protection were swept away. It would be bad logic to say that the growth was the result of the repeal alone: many causes helped. But, after all, the protection did not protect: it only hampered; and in so far as it gave men security that they might do business badly without incurring ruin, it did harm.

Prosperity, as interpreted in balance-sheets, is certainly not. everything. Nor is it the highest thing. Burke might have agreed with Tucker that the independence of the Colonies would do our trade more good than harm, and yet have been justly wroth with him for assuming that nothing was so well worth considering as trade. The Dean of Gloucester did lay himself open to the charge that this was his conviction. Was a common nationality nothing, was a brotherhood of race. and sentiment a small matter? Burke would have dismissed with scorn the mere suggestion. All through the American quarrel he laboured to persuade his countrymen that the one way of winning the lasting loyalty of the Colonies was to rely on their affection. Yet he would not go the whole way. The Revolution Settlement and the awful dignity of Parliament awed him, and he was always for insisting on the theoretic

supremacy of the Mother Country. He never came quite far enough to recognise that when you rely on affection it is at the best superfluous to reserve a power of coercion-and that a power which is to be hidden away and never used. The mere reminder that it is there and may be used irritates. There can be no equality when one of the two can punish.

Before Burke had been many years dead, men who had not a tithe of his wisdom were beginning to see what he would not recognise. Step by step, but with ever-increasing readiness, and at last even to absolute completion, the mother resigned all claim to control the daughter. We have heard much denunciation of the unwise persons who would talk about cutting the painter,' and yet they were not so foolish as those who would keep on referring to the painter as a limit of freedom. They have given up talking on both sides. Who dreams of coercing a colony, and what colony dreams of cutting itself loose? And now, first in the Boer War, and now in the infinitely greater war of to-day, the vision of the promoters of plantation in the seventeenth century has come true. The most wonderful part of it all is that the Boers we were fighting a few years ago are on our side. The kind of colonist we have most of us known-the man of the middle nineteenth century who had some lingering affection for the old country and a lively affection for some persons in it, but to whom it appeared on the whole to be a meddlesome nuisance, and who became furious at the mere suggestion that it retained any authorityis as dead as the gentleman who was Governor of New York in 1705. There is no place for him, when the mother no longer meddles and the daughter has nothing to resent. The long generations of Englishmen who were so concerned to bind the Empire together by a reciprocity of monopolies and by elaborate harness would have been provoked to derision if they had been told that the best way to achieve their purpose was to let things alone. They failed, and we had the sense to see that they failed, because they wished to foster by regulation. The ' retribution' has come soon and in full measure. The South African War was the forerunner of the spontaneous and ample help given to-day. And in both cases the aid has been given because after many years and after many errors the Mother Country has decided to lead matris non dominae ritu.

DAVID HANNAY.