Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 694
Here begins in true reality the story and the problem of the overseas British Empire. British the provinces were, as no overseas colony ever again except Australia and New Zealand. The emigration was practically all from the British Isles. The exceptions were so few as to leave little trace after the passage of a generation. The migration came in waves, proportionately of great size, at the foundation of each colony. But after the first 100,000 of immigrants and their offspring, the succeeding addition was mainly by the natural increase of population under circumstances favourable as nowhere else. Especially did migration dwindle to a flow of small dimensions in the first half of the eighteenth century. England could at that time utilize its own people. Foreigners were virtually shut out, and, in any case, did not want to come. The cosmopolitan movement of population, irrespective of flag, allegiance and language, was still a hundred years away. From the time when Wolfe overcame Montcalm in 1759, the British had North America to themselves. The Indians, in point of numbers, never mattered. No one ever counted them, but scholars’ estimates assign perhaps one Indian to every six square miles, not more. The Eskimos were a legend. The French-Canadians (60,000) were agricultural prisoners of war in the St. Lawrence valley. Spanish claims mattered about as much as the Papal Bull of 1493 which defined them. Black slaves were property. There were in America, before the revolution, 3,000,000 British people with the best continent in the world all their own; ruled, in a nominal way, by an affectionate and kindly King, no stupider than they themselves were, and deeply attached to their kindred people in the British Isles, the place which even Washington called ‘home.’
What a chance! If not for humanity at large, at least for all those who still spoke the common speech and shared the common history of England.
The inhabitants of the United States who are descended from Germans, Russians, or Czecho-SJovaks, naturally cannot see that the American Revolution was a great tragedy. For them it was not. Without it they would probably not be there. No doubt most Americans think of the Revolution as a noble chapter in history, a great forward movement in the world’s progress. Who can blame them if they do? Such great figures as those of Washington and Jefferson, the splendid courage of the farmers and ‘minute men’ of Bunker Hill, and the opening of the Declaration of Independence (no one ever reads the rest) have thrown a halo around the separation of England and America.
The soil is, for many, too sacred to be treated as controversial ground. Yet nearly all agree that there was in colonial America, till the very heat of the quarrel, no thought of independence. The code of colonial regulations was in reality of no great burden and of no little benefit. The Navigation Acts were as natural as leading strings. Incidentally they opened to the colonies the West Indian trade. Prohibition of colonial manufacture made no great difference to farmers and planters; later on, manufacture was to bring the tariff and separate North from South. Nor did the British Government see more clearly than the colonists. They were appalled at the growth of the national debt, a new thing since the Stuart times, mistaken for national indebtedness, in reality evidence of the rising finance of London. The Stuarts had banked in their pocket, like the Sultan of Turkey, borrowed at exorbitant rates and paid or not as might be.
The debt under King George III when Canada was ceded (1763) stood at £132,000,000. The appalled generation little dreamed that their grandchildren would carry the debt easily enough, at £800,000,000, and their descendants a century later at £8,000,000,000. Their ignorance mistook rising wealth for impending bankruptcy. They were bound that the Americans should pay their share. The attempt to collect it, with Stamp Taxes (1765) and by customs at colonial ports led to controversy, to anger, riot, petition under arms, rebellion and finally independence. The old colonial system ended with the separation of 1783.
Having lost one colonial empire Great Britain set to work in its own haphazard way to make another. The Crown kept French Canada, though at first with doubts and afterthoughts that had the happy result of leaving language and law and the church undisturbed. Only the criminal law, a British specialty, was introduced. The pattern of the settlement is still to be seen stamped on the present isolationist allegiance of Quebec.
But the notable feature was the settlement of Upper Canada, the unused wilderness, the garden of Canada blocked hitherto by the war-like Iroquois on its flank. Hither came the United Empire Loyalists in a migration that is one of the great pages of our Empire history. Of these Loyalists some were people who refused to live in the American republic; others didn’t dare to. But our painstaking historians have long since sifted out the sturdy patriots as the large majority. The British Government found everything, transport, money, land, implements, seed. British people don’t do things by halves. In all about 40,000 Loyalists came to British North America, some to Nova Scotia, of which the western part thus settled became New Brunswick (1784); others passed on by sea, and up the St. Lawrence to winter at Sorel and thence next spring to settle above French Canada on the St. Lawrence and on Lake Ontario. Others again painfully made their way through the forest country of New York State. For all it was a pilgrimage as to a promised land. The first Loyalists were joined by a steady influx of other settlers from the States, not so much ‘loyal’ as knowing a good thing when they saw it. After the Great War ended with Waterloo a continuous migration of half-pay officers and former soldiers moved into Upper Canada. There was land and to spare for all.
Then came Australia. Its existence as a legend goes back to ancient times. The Dutch had touched its shores early in the seventeenth century. English sailors had seen it from Dampier’s ship in 1699. But no one claimed it. No one wanted it. The world of the seventeenth century was still inconceivably vast, and few foresaw how rapidly it would shrink to the little globe on which we live. British ownership begins with Captain James Cook’s voyage to the South Seas of 1768 — 70, undertaken to allow a group of Royal Society astronomers to view the transit of Venus. Cook circumnavigated New Zealand and sailed along the south-east coast of Australia. From a fancied resemblance to a more familiar shore he named it New South Wales. Cook claimed the land, found a wonderful bay where ‘great quantity of plants’ grew and named it Botany Bay. The report made by Captain Cook and his companions was favourable, even enthusiastic. The Government determined to take up the claim. It seemed necessary. The American colonies had served among other purposes as a place for the transportation of criminals. After independence began, the United States had no need, has never since had any need, to import foreign criminals. The colonization began, as all the world knows with the expedition of 1787-88 in which Captain Arthur Phillip and a fleet of eleven vessels landed at Botany Bay 717 ‘criminals,’ both men and women, convicted of all sorts of offences, great and small, real and imaginary. Within a short time the discovery of the marvellous grazing land behind the barrier of inaccessible mountains that shut in the convict settlement, changed the whole character of the colony. Within a generation, a quarter of a million sheep were grazing on the Bathurst plains. A few free settlers had come in within three or four years of Phillip’s landing. But for three decades the colony was mainly made up of ‘emancipated’ convicts. Even in 1821 the ‘emancipists’ and their families numbered over 13,000 as against 2,500 free settlers. But the migration after the Napoleonic War soon washed out the convict stain.
Thus, by one of the marvels of British good fortune, was secured, unopposed and unquestioned, the control of a continent.
The outcome of the same wars brought with the settlement of 1815 a great accretion of territory to the British Crown. The Cape of Good Hope (276,995 square miles) and Ceylon (25,481 square miles) taken from the Dutch during their eclipse as the Batavian Republic, and with these, Trinidad and Malta, British Guiana, the Seychelles and Mauritius.
By the time of the close of the Napoleonic wars the British may be said to have definitely annexed the high seas as their peculiar province. The process had begun long before. It is true that the French built better ships than the English did down to the French Revolution itself, and the Americans, half a century after they ceased to be British, outbuilt Britain in shipbuilding as having first modelled the clipper ship. But navigation, and the exploration of the oceans, had become pre-eminently British as they had once been Portuguese. The quaint London corporation of Trinity House, concerned with setting out buoys and beacons, and caring for shipping, dates back long before Henry VIII (1514). Its executive of Elder Brethren (naval and merchant service combined) became after 1604 an adjunct to the administration of the Admiralty. The English improved nautical instruments. Halley, the astronomer, invented a quadrant (1730) that turned the ‘back staff’ of John Davis (Elizabethan) and the astrolabe of Chaucer into museum pieces. Greatest of all was the problem of longitude, the finding of east and west distances. Latitude settles itself; a child can read it off the pole star. The earth spins on a north and south axis, and every place reveals its own latitude by the height of the polar stars (north or south) above the horizon. For distance in the direction of the spin itself (east and west) the thing is different. Every place spins through every longitude. Greenwich is only called the start by convention. Longitude was first reckoned as from ‘the westernmost part of Africa,’ then from Teneriffe (Dampier’s voyage, 1699), but after about 1779, always, for the British, from Greenwich. But without instruments it could only be found by ‘dead reckoning.’ In the larger Spanish days Philip III had offered a prize of 6,000 ducats for a ‘discovery of longitude.’ No one got it. In Queen Anne’s time (1713) a Parliamentary committee took up the question. Sir Isaac Newton, as a member, gave as the solution the use of a clock set to Greenwich time and compared with a noon observation. The only trouble was to make the clock. Pendulum clocks wobble at sea; clocks with spring balances are too sensitive to heat and cold. The Admiralty offered a prize of £20,000 — overbidding Philip by seven to one. The reward went begging for over forty years. It was won at last (1764) by an English carpenter, John Harrison, who contrived a chronometer clock with compensation for heat or cold. It was tried out officially on a voyage to Jamaica, Harrison being taken along. The crucial test came off Porto Santo in Madeira. The ship had run out of beer, land still out of sight. The captain’s dead reckoning put the course one way, the new chronometer put it the other. They trusted the chronometer. They got the beer, Harrison got the reward, £10,000 down, and the remainder about ten years later (1773).
From those days on, the Admiralty work of survey, of hydrographic charts, of exploration and investigation has never ceased. Under these auspices Darwin made his famous voyage in the Beagle (1831) and Huxley in the Rattlesnake (1846). The intervals between wars saw polar expeditions seeking the north-west passage. Such work was supplemented by that of American sailors, the great oceanographer Maury, and, in the historical sense, by the master hand of Admiral Mahan.
With the transition from sail to steam the British tenure of the high seas was assured all the more. For steam itself was, in its early days, another apanage of Great Britain as a part of the industrial revolution. From now on, indeed, the Americans shared and more than shared in each mechanical advance, for in a land short of labour a premium was set on machinery. Robert Fulton was a chief inventor of the steamboat, and later on the submarine, like the aeroplane, first appeared in America. The Americans, however, were too busy with steam on land to do much with steamships at sea. But with steam appeared the Scottish engineer as a partner in British sea-supremacy. McAndrew’s Hymn, though no one heard it plainly till Rudyard Kipling, was already humming in the engine room half a century before.
The great outgoing emigration of the British and the Irish peoples belongs in this period of the Great Peace (1815 — 54). This is no longer a mere emigration of adventure, an ecstasy of religion in the wilderness, a transport of criminals, an exile of political refugees. This is the outgoing of people from a crowded mother country to seek new homes, as like as might be to the homes they left behind. And the numbers of them were such as never were known before. In colonial America, it is very seldom that more than 3,000 immigrants arrived in a year. But in the first five years after Waterloo 98.000 — British people went overseas as emigrants. Twenty years later (1835 — 39) the numbers had risen to 287,000; and fifteen years later still ( 1850 — 54), these emigrants numbered 1,639,000. At first more came to British North America than to the United States — in the twenty years 1815 — 34, 403,000 as against 269,000. To Australia there set in a rising tide of free immigrants that began with about 500 in 1825 and reached 15,000 in 1840. Trouble, rebellion, and then more trouble, in Canada, as contrasted with the rising glory of the American republic, presently shifted the balance. In the years 1850 to 1854 of the 1,639,000 British emigrants 1.158.000 — went to the United States and only 186,000 to British North America. The Irish were a case apart. They alone were exiles — of misgovernment, of pestilence and famine. They came with mingled hope and sorrow, and many with a hatred in their hearts that coloured the world’s history till yesterday, if not today. But for a time British immigration to British America went strong. These were the days not of individual homesteaders but of the collective immigration of the Canada Company (1825) and of the foundation of woodland towns — our Guelph and Galt and Peterborough — at a stroke, days of success and of golden opportunity that passed. Yet it may come again, patterned on something like the same model, when comes the great outward British migration that must follow the conclusion of what will be called peace in Europe.
It was during this period that was tested and proved the peculiar capacity of British people for overseas ‘settlement.’ It is not well in history to overemphasize psychological causes. But undoubtedly this national characteristic reacted powerfully on the course of events. The English people are by character a people suited for overseas settlement. Other nations either cling too much to home, or too readily leave it. Others again seem in their migration to have no middle term between conquerors and coolies. Others become absorbed and disappear. The English, an ‘indigestible’ people, talking no other language but their own, never do that. The French as settlers have never hit the same happy mean as the English. The French in the Sahara, or in a South Sea island must needs create a little ‘Avenue de Paris,’ if only of three coconut trees — with a boulevard somewhere to lounge upon — with a Café de la Paix, if only of bamboo, with fermented coconut as apéritif. Or else they must go the other way, go native — turn more Indian than the Indians, wear a scalp lock, live with Algonquins in a wigwam, and teach ferocity to their instructors. For proof see the journals of Radisson or Lahontan, or any real authority.
German settlers in America lay like an inert mass, waiting with beer and music, for some one to turn them into something else. They might have coagulated into Nazis, as nature breeds horse-flies. Luckily they didn’t know it. They turned instead into solid American Republicans and Canadian Liberals, deeply respected and still smoking and arguing. This vanishing picture, smeared with the brutality of two wars, is one of the tragedies of our time. ‘German’ now means something else, and beer-garden means Munich.
The Dutch were ‘settlers’ like the English, only more so. Their ideal was isolation, as in South Africa — to have one’s neighbour’s smoke just in sight over the hill, but not to see him. Some of us can understand it still. The Dutch started from Manhattan on this plan, moving up the Hudson. They might have strung out all across the American prairies. But the accident of war (1664) put an end to it. South Africa repeated history. In any case there were not enough of them; the land of tulips and canals could hold them all. So the Dutch Empire of Dutchmen has become just a dream of what might have been, like the Swiss Navy, with the reality of counting houses in Java and profits in Amsterdam.
The Scots one separates here from the English. At times they settled in blocks alone, like the Glengarry people on the St. Lawrence, and the mournful Highlanders of the ‘45 wailing on the bagpipes their ocean way to the Southern States. Lochaber no more, was a sad tune as compared with the Cheer, boys, Cheer of the outgoing English emigrant, hauling up the anchor to the song, leaving home and glad to get out of it. When he got well away, he boasted of it. The Scots also settled themselves in Dunedin and Southern New Zealand, looking for something as bleak as the Highlands — or call it as ‘stem and wild’ — their own name for it.
But the Scots, like their own whisky, were better half and half. In this way they penetrated French Montreal, and coloured the Hudson’s Bay and Prince Edward Island. Their trace lies round the world in curling clubs and golf links and in their conception of a drink. But the Scots seldom settle alone. It scarcely pays.
The Irish too, like the Scots, needed a larger mixture. Nor had they wanted to leave Ireland, soft and green in the rain. They came as children of adversity and hence their coming carried with it an account to settle and an ancient grudge elsewhere. But even this had a way of washing out. It is hard to make trouble among decent neighbours; it’s no use being ‘against the government’ when half of all the other people are; and hard to live on history and cry over a shamrock for ever. So the Irishman was odd man out, till he thought of the police force. If this is exaggerated, it is easily re-compressed to truth.
But the English were always the ideal settlers. They could go away and stay there, call England ‘home,’ boast of it, curse at it, and still love it and fight for it. The Englishman carried away with him enough of his home but not too much. He had his tin bath, and his briar pipe and cricket in a bag to teach to the natives. He had his own clothes till an English tailor followed him. But beyond that he accepted the ways of the country. He drank whatever they had till a brewer came out from Burton-on-Trent. He never knew whether he was going ‘home’ or not and in the end he didn’t. People went ‘home’ from India, not from the colonies. His children and grandchildren shaded off, less and less distinctive but with the tie unbroken. Thus could the overseas Englishman ride it out on a long hawser, generations through.
