Delphi complete works of.., p.444
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 444
A sovereign state comes to possess dependencies in various ways. The simplest is that of conquest, by which the vanquished community is subjected to the rule of its victors. Such was the case with the expansion of Rome, whose “provinces” were countries conquered by the Roman arms. The Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru, and the British dominions in India, were the fruits of conquest. Closely akin to this is the acquisition of a colony by cession. A country possessing a colony may be compelled by defeat in war to cede the colony as the price of peace, or induced from commercial reasons to sell it. The numerous treaties of the eighteenth century, whereby France and England handed their colonial possessions back and forward, were of this sort. The cession of Canada by France (1763), and of the Philippines by Spain (1898), are instances of colonial acquisition by war, while the purchase of Louisiana (1803) illustrates the purely financial process of acquisition. In addition to these two modes of colonial aggrandizement there remains what may be called, par excellence, the colonizing process, namely, that of occupation and settlement. In this case the claim to the colony rests, if not on actual discovery of the land (Newfoundland, Australia, etc.), at any rate on priority of actual occupation. Where a native population is found in fixed agricultural settlements, the assumption of control approximates to conquest. But where the native population is sparse and migratory, merely wandering over the land in nomadic fashion, living on the bounty of nature and the fruits of the chase, their presence ought not to invalidate the claim of immigrants proposing to make a permanent and fixed settlement. Much sentiment has been wasted over the supposed claim of the Indians to the continent of North America. When it is recalled that the whole Indian population, from Newfoundland to Florida, and from the Mississippi to the sea, was about as numerous as the inhabitants of a large American city (probably about 200,000), and that its settlements were only in a few places fixed and agricultural, its “claim” to ownership of the whole country becomes somewhat absurd. One may well ask how far such reasoning should be carried. Did the few starveling bushmen of the desert and forest of Australia own the whole continent? Without accepting the brutal code of the right of the strongest, one may in all reasonableness recognize the right of civilized nations to the acquisition of territory which is only “squatted upon” by wandering savages.
2. Colonies of the Ancient World. Of the colonies of the ancient world those of Greece and Phoenicia along the shores of the Mediterranean are the most noteworthy. The Phoenician settlements were for the most part merely trading stations, but there were exceptions also (such as Carthage) in which a large body of emigrants established a permanent agricultural settlement. The colonies of Greece were on a larger scale: they resulted first of all from the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnesus about 1000 B. C., which drove many fugitives to seek new homes. Similarly the conquests of the Spartans and the inroads of the Persians occasioned a scattering of some of the conquered tribes. Other colonies were due to the political dissensions with which the restless city states of Greece were rife and which sometimes resulted in the deliberate withdrawal of a part of the citizens to found a new city elsewhere. But the establishment of Greek and Phoenician colonies did not involve what we now think of as colonial government. Athens, indeed, succeeded in exacting money tribute from the cities she had planted in the Ægean Sea, basing her claim on the naval protection afforded them. But the general practice was to regard a colony as an independent political unit from its inception. It was an emigration, an “outswarming” of freemen who carried with them the same right of self-government that they had had in their former home. A somewhat different type of colony made by settlement in ancient times is seen in the Roman colonia. This was a settlement of Roman soldiers on land allotted to them by their general after it had been conquered; here the prime object was to create a frontier defense of the empire, but these colonies often developed into permanent settlements.
3. Colonial Expansion after the Discovery of the Sea Route to the East Indies and the Discovery of America; Spanish Colonial System. It is with the discovery of the sea route to the East Indies and of America that modern colonization begins. The sixteenth century opened to the adventurous spirits of Europe a wonderland of unknown countries, in which to satisfy their passion for exploration and adventure, their lust for gold, their chivalrous ambition to increase the dominions of their king, and their pious desire to spread the Christian religion to the uttermost parts of the earth. It was in this age of adventure and conquest that Spanish and Portuguese colonial aggrandizement acquired the peculiar characteristics of domination and levying of tribute which proved its ruin. The Portuguese, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, secured a monopoly of the rich trade of the East. Thither their merchants flocked in great numbers, setting up trading stations on the coast of Africa (Sofala, Zanzibar), on the shores of the Indian Ocean (Goa, Malacca, etc.), among the East India Islands, and even in China and Japan (1542). In Brazil, partly by sending over exiled Jews and transported criminals, they founded a plantation colony in which the sugar cane was cultivated and to which slaves were early introduced from the coast of Guinea. Feudal grants of land were made to nobles of Portugal with almost absolute power over the natives. The Spaniards, equally adventurous, directed themselves not to the East, but to the West Indies, and to the mainland of Central and Southern America. A bull of Pope Alexander VI (1493) had divided the unchristian world with magnificent generosity between Spain and Portugal; Spain was to have the western world, Portugal the east. A revision of the shares by treaty gave Brazil and Labrador to Portugal and all the rest of America to Spain. The Spaniards proceeded to make good this shadowy claim by vigorous conquest. By the year 1510, Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Jamaica, and other islands had fallen an easy prey. Mexico was conquered by Cortes (1519-21), and Peru fell before the brutal conqueror Francis Pizarro (1525-35). Thence Spanish dominion spread over the whole of Central and South America, except Brazil.
From the very beginning, however, the colonial system of Spain had taken a false bias. The colonial establishments were regarded solely as a source of profit to the conquerors. There was no question of real self-government or liberty of trade. A recent writer has thus described the Spanish system of administration in the centuries which followed: “All the laws, the control of trade, commerce, agriculture, finance, taxation, the foundation of municipalities, the management of the natives, and the regulation of religion were made in the mother country, and sent to the colonies with the expectation that the colonies would adapt themselves to the laws. Nor did the decrees of the crown and its agencies stop here, but the home bureau organized the colonial government, local and central. The officers and rulers were natives of Spain sent out to rule their distant dependencies. During the Spanish domination in America nearly all the important offices of the state and church had been filled by Spaniards. The presidents and judges of the courts were from Spain. There were 18 Americans out of 672 viceroys, captains-general, and governors; and 105 native bishops out of 706 who ruled in the colonies. This system of officialism continued in all of the colonial possessions of Spain to the close of the present [the nineteenth] century.” In matters of trade and industry the Spanish colonies were under the most stringent regulation. They could trade with no other country but Spain itself, and even then only through the organization known as the Casa de Contratacion, which held a monopoly. That such a system contained in itself the seeds of its own ruin is only too evident. The revolt of the Spanish colonies and the establishment of their independence in the early part of the nineteenth century were the natural outcome of such a vicious and short-sighted colonial policy.
4. Colonial Policy of England and France in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Although England and France were early in the field with voyages of exploration (Cabot, 1497, Cartier, 1534) the establishment of their American colonies belongs to the seventeenth century. With Champlain’s permanent settlement on the St. Lawrence (1603), and the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers (1620) the beginnings were laid of New France and New England. From the grant of the charter to the Virginia Company, 1606, dates the commencement of the plantation colonies of the South. That the English colonies grew and flourished on the Atlantic is to be attributed to the good fortune of the English government, rather than to its political foresight. The sterling qualities of the colonists themselves, animated by the high purpose of religious refugees, or by the daring of adventurers, had much to do with their success. It was through the neglect, and not by the policy, of the home government, that the colonists acquired their political right of self-government. The charter granted to the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628 was intended by the government as a sort of commercial instrument for the conduct and governance of a trading company. It was the emigration of the officers and the company itself to the shores of America which converted it into a political constitution. In the seventeenth century the English in general did not dream of the magnitude of the colonial empire which lay within their reach. In this their colonial policy was sharply contrasted with that of France. The French government early recognized the possibilities of American colonization; they realized the value of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi as opening the way to the interior of the continent, and planned a vast colonial empire which should encircle the narrow English settlement of the Atlantic seaboard. The English government in the seventeenth century gave little or no help to its dependencies; the French were ready from the first with money and ships to be used in the upbuilding of New France. It has been part of the irony of history that the magnificent empire thus planned by the French should have passed by the fortune of war into the hands of the British crown.
But before the close of the seventeenth century, the American colonies, from their growth in population and the development of their resources, began to assume a new importance. The colonial trade offered a harvest to the merchants of the mother country, and supplied a new bone of contention to vex the long-standing quarrels of England and France. Indifferent as the British government had been to the political position of its earlier colonists, it adopted in reference to the growing trade of the colonies a policy much resembling that of Spain. So too did the French, whose colonial schemes included, of course, the profit to be derived by the mother country from the natural wealth of its possessions. Already in the reign of Charles II the navigation acts had placed restrictions on colonial commerce. By the first of these (1660) foreign ships were forbidden to trade with the colonies. All colonial sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and other enumerated articles were to be sent only to England, or to an English possession; nor could foreigners become merchants in an English colony. A new act of 1663 kept out all ships that had been built in foreign countries. An act of 1664 obliged European goods, even if placed in English ships, to be first landed in England before being exported to the colonies. Finally, an act of 1672 made goods passing from colony to colony liable to whatever customs duties they would have incurred if brought into England. These are the famous navigation acts which formed the basis of the English colonial policy of the eighteenth century. It was necessary indeed to modify them by making concessions to the colonists where they became too burdensome. The trade in wine and fish between Portugal and New England was made an exception. On the other hand the acts were reënforced by a number of statutes in the early part of the eighteenth century. Such a commercial code, if applied to a modern colony, would appear monstrous. It can however be said in defense of the acts, that they helped to encourage the growth of British and colonial shipping, and thus contributed to the national defense of both the mother country and the colonies. Nor did the restrictions laid upon trade press as severely upon the colonies as might be imagined. Evasion of the laws was notorious, and in any case the natural direction of commerce was to the British Isles. Less defense can be found for the policy of Great Britain in legislating in the eighteenth century against colonial manufactures. “The creating of manufactures in the colonies,” ran a resolution of the British House of Commons in 1719, “tends to lessen their dependence on Great Britain.” In accordance with this a statute of that year, fortunately applied only in part, forbade all forms of iron manufacture in the American colonies. Indeed, when all is said, the whole code of commercial and industrial regulation must be considered as the outcome of the inveterate European habit of viewing colonial establishments as a source of mercantile profit. “The deliberate selfishness of English commercial legislation,” says Mr. Lecky, “was digging a chasm between the mother country and her colonies, which must inevitably, when the latter had become sufficiently strong, lead to separation.”
5. The American Revolution. The quarrel between England and her American colonies which ended finally in independence is the most important fact in the evolution of colonial government. It showed to the world the elementary fact of colonial administration, that no civilized colony of size and increasing population can be kept in a state of permanent political tutelage. It led England to adopt, not immediately but ultimately, the policy of colonial autonomy. What had previously been done through neglect was now sanctioned by the teaching of experience. Yet, as in every quarrel, there were certainly two sides to the question. On the one side was the righteous protest of a free people against political dictation, against that “taxation without representation,” the very sound of which is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon ears; on the other side were pressing needs of imperial defense. The patriotism of national historians has long obscured the one or the other of the two sides of the controversy; it is only after a lapse of a century and a half that a clearer vision is becoming possible. That the American resistance to imperial taxation in the form in which it came to them was justified seems beyond a doubt. But the colonies were equally wrong in adopting towards the vexed question of imperial finance the selfish inertia of indifference. Unkindly critics have not scrupled to say that it was not “taxation without representation” that they resented, but taxation in any form and by any authority. The strain on the imperial treasury of protecting British subjects, both home and colonial, against foreign powers had been great. The successive wars against France — King William’s war (1689-97), Queen Anne’s war (1702-13), King George’s war (1744-48), and the French war (1756-63), to give them the names by which they were known to the colonists — had increased the national debt at an alarming rate. Amounting in 1702 to a little over twelve and a half millions pounds, it stood at over one hundred and thirty-two millions at the Peace of Paris (1763). Much of this had been spent in defense of the American possessions. The colonies indeed had contributed, in separate fashion and in unequal proportion, both money and men to aid the British arms in America. It was a colonial expedition that captured Louisburg in 1745, the money thus spent being partly reimbursed by a parliamentary grant from Great Britain. But colonial contributions for defense were irregular and unequal. The colonies removed from the scene of immediate danger were inclined to shirk responsibility altogether. During King George’s war the New York Assembly proved quite intractable. At first they would do nothing for defense; later they contributed money sparingly for the Louisburg expedition, but would send no men. New Jersey was an inveterate delinquent. Sheltered by the adjacent colonies from the actual ravages of frontier warfare, she was never ready to make adequate contribution towards the common defense. In Queen Anne’s war the Assembly struggled hard to prevent the raising of a military force, and was only forced into doing so by the packing of the house. Contributions were made to King George’s war, but in the great final struggle of the French war New Jersey remained culpably inactive. These were not isolated instances, but were characteristic of the difficulty of obtaining joint action from the colonial governments. Mr. Lecky thus describes the situation: “In order to raise the money for the support of the American army it was necessary to have the assent of no less than seventeen colonial assemblies. The hopelessness of attempting to fulfill these conditions was very manifest. If in the agonies of a great war it had been found impossible to induce the colonies to act together; if the Southern colonies long refused to assist the Northern ones in their struggle against France because they were far from the danger; if South Carolina, when reluctantly raising troops for the war, stipulated that they should act only within their own province; if New England would give little or no assistance while the Indians were carrying desolation over Virginia and Pennsylvania, what chance was there that all these colonies would agree in time of peace to propose uniform and proportionate taxation on themselves in support of an English army?” The financial difficulty to be faced was thus an actual one, though aggravated by the mistaken policy of the British crown. The colonies and the mother country had reached an impasse; further continuance on the existing basis was no longer possible; the only solution could have been found in a joint revision of inter-imperial relations; this the dull stupidity of the English administration and the willful inertia and mutual jealousies of the colonies rendered impossible. It is of importance properly to appreciate the historic situation thus created; for the relative financial situation of Britain and her colonies is now reproducing itself on the horizon of the twentieth century. To this attention will be directed later.
