Garibaldi with his followers defeated the Papal troops, and entered Rome in the following year, but the French, again appearing as the Pope's friend, stepped in, recaptured Rome for the Pope, and forced Garibaldi and his army to surrender. It was largely due to Garibaldi's gallant efforts, nevertheless, that the Papal States were shortly afterwards finally incorporated into the kingdom of Italy, and in the following year, that is, in 1871, Rome became the capital of the kingdom and the seat of Government. The temporal power of the Pope was at an end; the national unity of Italy was virtually complete.

France, at that moment, had little enough attention to spare for affairs other than her own. Trouble had arisen between Napoleon III. and the King of Prussia, leader of that Northern Confederation of German States which Bismarck had firmly welded together, over the succession to the Spanish throne. Save for that Franco-German trouble, Spain, since her great days, has made little mark on the Greatest Story. As we have already seen before, so now again, she played her own part, cut off from the main stage behind the barrier formed by the Pyrenees. It was a troubled drama. One king and then another was tried and found wanting. An experiment with a republican form of government had even less success. A solution was found in going back to a representative of the old royal family in 1875; and his successor is on the throne of Spain to-day.

Franco-German War

As to that Franco-German war which resulted in 1870 from the dispute over the Spanish succession, it is still debated whether its actual outbreak was due to the ambition and machinations of Bismarck and the military spirit in Prussia or to the restlessness and ambition of Napoleon. Certain it is that he was very ready to take offence with Prussia which had already baulked him in a design of purchasing from Holland the Duchy of Luxemburg. That project had to be abandoned, and Luxemburg remained a Grand Duchy attached to the throne of Holland, until 1890, when a queen came to the Dutch Crown and Luxemburg passed under the Salic Law to the eldest male of the same family. Napoleon had expected that he would be helped, in the fight against Prussia, by Austria and also by the Southern Confederation of the States of Germany. But he had under-estimated the skill with which Bismarck held all the Teutonic States together. Neither of these came to his assistance when he declared war. And within a very short time after that declaration it became equally certain that he had wholly under-estimated the power and the readiness for action of the Prussian fighting machine.

In the course of a few weeks consistently disastrous for France, two of her principal armies laid down their arms, and at Sedan the Emperor himself was taken prisoner. Paris was besieged, and yielded under stress of famine early in 1871. Peace was made on the terms that France should pay a money indemnity and should give up to Germany Alsace and Lorraine. There was the usual anarchical interlude of the Commune, when the mob obtained temporary possession of Paris; and finally a republican form of government was adopted which still endures. Those provinces which Germany thus took from France remained under German rule until given back to her at the end of the Great War.

One result of the war of 1870 to 1871 was that the domination of Prussia over the rest of the German States was yet more firmly established. The Southern, as well as the Northern, were brought into one group, and the King of Prussia assumed the supremacy over all with the title of German Emperor.

Norway and Sweden

That severance of Alsace and Lorraine from France was the last change of really large importance made in the map of Europe during the nineteenth century. It was almost the latest made before the Great War. In Scandinavia there was a later rearrangement, where Norway, who had for a long while chafed under her union with Sweden and desired freedom and recognition as a separate nation, attained her aim in 1905.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SETTLEMENT OF AMERICA

When the United States of America had once acquired the extensive territory known at the beginning of the century as Louisiana there was no effective bar to their extension westward until they came to the shore of the Pacific. There were hostile Indians, and deserts difficult to traverse in the slow-going wagons, but the westward progress of the pioneers went on with no serious sets-back and at a pace which was very wonderful considering the conditions. When the railway era came—we may date its beginning approximately at 1830—the progress was much accelerated.

The population of the States grew very fast, both by the increase of the old settlers and by immigration, especially from Ireland. Ireland never had been happy in her Union with England, and her people were discontented and very ready to try their fortunes under the American flag. Just before the middle of the century the potato, on which the Irish people chiefly live, had failed almost entirely, and there had been cruel famine and distress, which further encouraged them to emigrate.

Thus America grew great. We have seen that as early as 1823 she had put forth that announcement known as the Monroe Doctrine, which proclaimed that she deemed the whole of the vast South American Continent, as well as the whole of the North which lay south of the Canadian border, to be her concern, and hers alone. She would allow no European nation to interfere there.

The South American states

That did not imply that she herself would seek to upset arrangements already made. What did happen in that South American section was that it was divided into a number of States, which never became united, as did the States of the North. Most of them, very soon after their settlement, had become self-governing, their mother countries in Europe being too war-weary to make very serious efforts to retain them. Spanish was the language of the majority, but in the State which had by far the largest territory of all, that of Brazil, which had rather unexpectedly fallen to the share of Portugal under the dispensation sanctioned by the famous Bull of Pope Alexander, the common language was Portuguese. The population in all of them varied from pure European to pure Indian, with every possible degree of mixture between. Side by side, on the north-east shoulder of the Continent, were, and are, the three Guianas, the British, French, and Dutch.

But whereas these three still are European possessions, over all the rest of the Continent the settlers soon threw off all allegiance to their mother lands, as also did Mexico, once known as New Spain, at the southern end of the Northern Continent.

Both Mexico and Brazil started their independent careers with governors of the style of Emperor, but in Mexico he was very soon ousted and a republican government instituted. In all the Spanish States of South America, too, the form of government was republican; but there was an Emperor of Brazil, of the royal family of Portugal, though quite independent of the Portuguese Government, throughout most of the century, until she too elected to become republican. The Continent is for the greater part exceedingly rich and fertile, and supplies to Europe a great deal of its surplus products of very many kinds. Were it not for the frequent revolutions and changes of government, which make property insecure and distract the people from productive work, all these States might be far more prosperous even than they are. Naturally enough they always have had many immigrants of the Latin race. Italians especially have been going out to the States of that Southern Continent in very large numbers. The United States have attracted the peoples of more Northern Europe, the Germans and Scandinavia. Of Canada the population has been swelled by English, Irish and, largely, by Scottish immigration. The French have not gone there in great numbers, but we must always remember that there is a considerable population, in certain parts of Canada, that is French in race and in speech—the descendants of the original French settlers.

Even after they had acquired Louisiana, the people of the United States did not find themselves with an entirely unimpeded course to the West, for Mexico, independent since 1822, possessed all or most of that territory which you may now see marked on the map as Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California, all of which passed, by conquest or by arrangement, into the hands of the United States shortly before the middle of the century. The transfer of California was immediately followed by a violent rush of Eastern Americans to the West, where gold, in great quantities, had just been found.

Thus, or somewhat thus, the general political boundaries of the United States and of the other countries of the two American Continents came to be as they are; but there was at least one moment when the Union of the States itself was in grievous danger of breaking up.

The slavery question

Between the States in the North and those in the South there were certain differences in interests and outlook which were very likely to lead to a quarrel. There had been some difference even in their original settlers. As already noticed, those who went to New England and the Northern States generally were for the most part of the Puritan persuasion, of a humbler social rank, and with more rigid religious views than those who settled in Virginia and other States of the South. The latter were largely of the landowning class at home, and when they came to America formed large estates and worked them by slave labour—negro slaves brought from America, or the descendants of those Africans.

When Louisiana was taken over from the French, slavery was in use all over its then vast extent. In the Northern section, soon to be known as the State of Missouri, slavery was abolished. It was retained in the South.

The idea of the slavery of the black races was not repugnant to the conscience of men of that day. It was not until later, and only after the great English philanthropist Wilberforce had devoted his whole life to the cause, that slavery was abolished in the British and French West Indies. The condition of the slaves, once they had arrived, was not, generally, so very bad, but the horrors that they suffered in the passage from Africa to America were unspeakable; the death-rate was terribly heavy; and the slave raids in Africa itself made the lives of the wretched negroes in their native country miserably anxious even if they evaded capture.

But the consciences of white men were not alive to these miseries then, even as they were not alive to the miseries inflicted by the industrial system on many who worked under it. When consciences did begin to be stirred, it was only in accordance with human nature that expressions of disgust with the conditions of slavery should be uttered by the people of the Northern States, who were not owners of slaves, and should be keenly resented by those in the South who did own slaves and whose sugar crops and cotton and maize were cultivated by slave labour.

Thus came division between slave States and non-slave States, that is to say, States in which slavery was the law of the land and States in which it was not. Now and again a slave would escape, and the right claimed by the master of an escaped slave to follow him and recapture him would naturally be resented in a State which did not recognise slavery.

So dissatisfaction arose, and so it grew, over this slave question, between the Abolitionists, as they were called—that is, those who favoured the abolition of slavery generally, and of the slave trade in particular—and the anti-Abolitionists. Nearly all the North was of the former, nearly all the South of the latter persuasion.

And this divergence about slavery was but one point of difference among several. The question of tariff—the duties to be paid on goods entering American ports—was another. There were Protectionists and Free-traders then and there, as there are here and now. There were States in the South that claimed the right to "nullify," as it was called, in respect of goods brought to their ports, the Act of Congress which imposed the duties. The nullifaction claim—the claim to "make nothing of" the Act—was disallowed; and thence arose more bitterness.

The War of Secession

So the embers of discontent went smouldering until active war broke out between the two sections in 1861; and it broke out over a difference, which was not actually a difference over slaves or tariffs although it originated in those questions. The point on which it broke out was this: that the Southern States claimed for themselves the right to secede, to cut themselves off, from the Union. That is why the war is called the War of Secession. They even called themselves by a distinctive name, not the "United," but the "Confederate" States. The North resisted, and refused them the right to break away and govern themselves as they wished. It was, perhaps we may think, a singular position to be taken by those United States which had lately fought so well and triumphantly to gain their own independent right to self-governance, but almost certainly it is a good thing for mankind that they did take that attitude. Had the attempted "secession" succeeded, the States of North America might have been as disunited as the States of South America; and so might never have stood, as they do, a strong force for peace in the world.

The War of Secession was waged with varying fortune, at first rather favouring the South, though always it was the South which, as the chief battlefield, had to endure the worst of the misery. It was a particularly cruel war in the divisions that it caused between friends and even between families. There were moments when the cause of the North was in great danger; but the North was able to dispose of rather larger forces and perhaps of a tougher type of soldiery, although the endurance and the aptitude for strategy and fighting seem to have been remarkable on both sides among armies of which only a small minority were soldiers by profession and training. The Northern advantages were compensated by the very remarkable military ability for war of the Southern leaders.

The sympathies of Europe and of England generally were rather with the South than with the North, and England gave some just cause of offence to the North by allowing the South to fit out privateering vessels in British ports.

It was not until after four years of fighting, that is to say, in 1865, that the end came with the surrender of General Lee's Southern army to the forces of General Grant at Appomatox in Virginia. That was the end of the fighting, and peace terms were agreed very shortly afterwards. The claim of any State or collection of States to break away from the Union has never been put forward since, and the authority of Congress was confirmed over the whole Union.

The effects of the war were grievous for the vanquished. Their fairest territories had been overrun by the troops of both sides, their crops had been ruined and, heaviest blow of all, their slaves were emancipated so that there was the less labour available to repair the losses. All the money that they might have spent in hiring labour had gone in the war, and the problems of the peace were scarcely less difficult than those of the war.

It was very many years before the South recovered, and it has scarcely recovered now. Nor has the bitter feeling of the South towards the North, which arose from the war and from the many differences of which it was the outcome, even yet wholly died away. As lately as 1924 a member of one of the old Virginian families told me that the Great War, of 1914-1918, by summoning Americans from North, South, East, and West to serve in the same regiments and in a common cause, had done more to bring them together and create a sense of unity, and dispel the misunderstandings, than anything that had happened in all the years between the American War of Secession and the Great War.

Maximilian in Mexico

While the United States were thus in the agonies of their Civil contest, an attempt was made to interfere with the affairs of Mexico which was in direct defiance of that Monroe Doctrine already mentioned. Just as there is now, at this time of writing, so were there then, Europeans and European property in Mexico which the Government of the country was not able to make tolerably secure. It did not seem to be putting out much effort to secure them. Europe thought then, as she is perhaps justified in thinking now, that if the United States forbade any foreign interference with the American Continents it was their business to see that the States of those Continents behaved themselves in a reasonable manner. At that moment the United States were obviously unable to undertake any such responsibility. Europeans in Mexico therefore appealed to Europe, and especially to Napoleon III., to enforce a better government on the country. It was the sort of appeal to which the character of Napoleon, made him peculiarly ready to respond, and under his promise of support Maximilian, brother of Francis Joseph of Austria, went out to take over the government of Mexico, with the title of Emperor. His reception was by no means as warm as he had expected. On the contrary, he found his own partisans inferior in force to those of the opposing faction. For a brief while he held a nominal rule over some two-thirds of the country. The French troops supporting him were quite insufficient to put down the native republican bands. His position was very shaky even at its best.

Then in 1865 the United States, freed from their Civil War, reasserted the Monroe Doctrine, and made some demonstrations under arms which clearly indicated that they were ready to give active effect to it. Upon that, Napoleon recalled his French troops, and the already shaky position of the Mexican Emperor at once became desperate. He was captured, tried by a court martial, condemned, and shot.

So, tragically and ingloriously, ended what really was Europe's one and only attempt at action opposed to the doctrine enunciated by Monroe.

A certain implication, or what has been considered an implication, of that doctrine, namely, that the United States shall abstain from any interference with affairs foreign to her own two Continents, even as she has forbidden the foreigner to interfere with them—this implication she violated, most happily for Europe, in the Great War. But she had already violated it in her own Spanish war, of 1898, which followed on Spain's ineffective attempts to restore reasonably good government in Cuba, that island which lies in a position to guard the Gulf of Mexico and the Panama Canal. Spain was unable to enforce respect for the lives and property of Americans in the island, and, not unjustifiably, the United States, after some years of long-suffering, resolved that the Spanish rule must be overthrown. Even America herself shared in the general surprise that the complete defeat of Spain was so easy; and she was genuinely surprised also to find the sympathy of Great Britain cordially with her in the short war.

And as its results, not only Cuba itself, but also the far-off Philippines, those Spanish-owned islands where Portuguese going East and Spaniards going West had unexpectedly met a few centuries before, were given over to the United States.

Nearly at the same time certain Samoan Islands and the Hawaiian group of islands were annexed to the United States. Therefore she too must now shoulder her portion of what Kipling has well called "the white man's burden."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

SECTION I.—AFRICA

I have taken the above heading for this chapter because it indicates truly the manner in which the dominion of the white man over many of the coloured races has been thrust upon him. There is a good deal of misunderstanding on the subject. Really the world-wide dominion of the British Empire, to take the most conspicuous example, has been forced upon the mother country. There is an idea, and some of our rival nations have specially encouraged it, that those overseas dominions have been won by our aggressive spirit, land-grabbing and desirous of ever acquiring new possessions. Even we ourselves are rather apt to attribute it to the adventurousness of our ancestors; as if they had gone out seeking adventures like the knights-errant of old.

If we regard the events as they actually did happen we must confess the process much more prosaic. No doubt very adventurous and heroic deeds were done during its course. We have every right to be proud of our Anglo-Saxon race on their account. But our principal reason for pride is to be found in what the race has done, less in aggression, than in defence. It was Britain that was very largely concerned in humbling the overweening ambition of Spain, in baulking the arrogance of Louis XIV., in thwarting the projects for world empire of Napoleon.

But what happened in the spread of the white man's power all over the world was that he went here and there, in the first place, and settled, for purposes of trade. We have seen the Portuguese going down the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold and ivory; Spain crossing the Atlantic for the treasures of El Dorado, the supposed city of gold; Portuguese, Dutch, and English going easterly to India, and farther, all to see what they could bring back.

They settled. Then they found that, in order to trade peaceably, and with tolerable security, they had to take control of the city or territory in which they settled.

That is, in few words, the story of the whole process. The settlements were at first along the coasts, and then gradually extended inland, as the boundaries of the districts already settled were everywhere threatened by the unsettled peoples outside the boundaries. We saw the process in action in the British Empire in India.

That is the common story. It is a little varied by the special circumstances of such countries as Australia and parts of South America which favoured the raising of sheep and cattle. There the settlers extended their boundaries not so much for security as to gain more pasture lands.

Somewhat thus, then, is the manner in which the white man has been forced, if he would develop the earth so as to afford support for its increasing population, to take this burden on his shoulders.

Africa, being so accessible to Europe, was the first of the new countries to which Europeans went trading in their ships. In a very early chapter of the story we have seen that many of the ports along the north coast of Africa, which is the Southern Mediterranean shore, were nests of pirates preying upon the trading shipping. That was a condition of affairs which became more and more intolerable to Europe as the trade increased. It was with the approval of all Europe that the French in 1830 captured and took Algiers, which was the headquarters of the Moorish pirates. They extended that possession over the whole of Algeria till they reached the Turkish possession of Tripoli, which, again, extended to Egypt easterly.

Egypt

Egypt had freed herself from the suzerainty of Turkey about the date, 1830, of France's annexation of Algiers. Under an able ruler she developed her resources and was well governed, but from about 1870 onward, under a far less able successor, both government and finance fell into confusion.

In 1876 the British Government acquired by purchase the larger number of the shares in the Suez Canal. As a short cut to India, the Suez Canal was of vital interest to Great Britain. It was of vital interest, too, that the traffic through it should be safe and well conducted. This led to an inquiry into the condition of the Egyptian government, which showed that unless these conditions were bettered it was most unlikely that the Canal would be properly controlled and made safe.

The outcome was that the English and French established themselves in a joint control—it was called a Dual Control—over Egypt, in 1879.

Three years later, again, Egypt revolted against this control. England asked France to join her in forcibly putting down the revolt. France declined. England then invited the aid of Italy, for Italy had an interest both in Egyptian affairs generally, and in the Suez Canal especially, because she had established a coaling station, where her ships might replenish their coal supplies, in Eritrea, a district far down on the west shore of the Red Sea. But Italy also declined. Therefore Great Britain went in alone to restore order.

The revolt was effectually quelled; but Great Britain dared not leave the country to the mercies of a native or of a Turkish ruler. She had to stay, in the very interests of Egypt herself. At the moment of writing, Egypt has been given a large share of self-government, of which she still has to prove herself altogether worthy.

And this burden of Egypt, thus undertaken, led on to the shouldering of yet another, of the country southward, the Sudan. Really it is a burden inseparable from the burden of Egypt, because the Nile, which is Egypt's very life-blood, passes through it, and because it is, or it was, the home of wandering slave-making Arab tribes always liable to inflict raids on Egypt itself.

Hence arose expeditions and again expeditions, in some of which Great Britain's arms suffered heavy reverse, against one or other of the fanatical Arab leaders who arose and assumed the title of Mahdi. The loss which stands out most tragically in England's memory is that of General Gordon, at Khartoum, in 1885. It was not until 1898, and the decisive defeat of the Mahdi by Lord Kitchener, that the problem of the Sudan could be regarded as tolerably solved. We may note that the manner of fighting of the Arabs was to charge in cavalry masses. It is mode of attack which gives a target terribly exposed to the fire of modern machine guns; and that gun has greatly diminished the danger of civilised troops charged by those desert warriors.

In the south of Africa the burden of the white man had at first lain chiefly on the shoulders of the Dutch, and the story of South Africa in the nineteenth century is mainly the story of the shifting of that burden to the British. It was in the year of the battle of Waterloo that the Dutch possessions, from the Cape of Good Hope northward, were ceded to Great Britain by the King of the Netherlands.

The Boers

But the Boers, as the colonial Dutch were called—the name is akin to German bauer, a peasant—were, and are, a people who valued their nationality and their independence. It was not for more than thirty years that they formally acknowledged the British rule, which in the meantime had been extended to include the district of Natal. After a few years of experience of that rule, the Boers made a great "trek," or exodus, and established themselves farther north, beyond the British domination, in what was then called the Orange Free State.

And there it is possible they might have dwelt for many generations as a free republic of farmers had it not been for the discovery, some twenty years later, of the diamond mines in the Transvaal district, farther north again, whither the Boers had by that time extended their occupation.

The effect of that discovery was to attract to the region of the diamond mines a rush, chiefly of British, but of variously mixed, nationality. Ten years later the Transvaal was proclaimed a British possession, and almost immediately the Boers went to war to maintain its independence.

The war was inglorious for Great Britain and involved a serious disaster to a considerable British force. It ended in a compromise which did not promise much security for the future. The Boers acknowledged the suzerainty of Great Britain and, subject to that not very clearly defined control, were conceded the right of managing affairs in the Transvaal. That was in 1881.

And from that time until the end of the century trouble grew and grew between the increasing population of the diamond fields and the increasing numbers and strength of the Transvaal Boers. Britain's position was difficult. These Boers had been the first to shoulder the white man's burden—if we like to put it in that way. They had been the first to drive out those black people who had owned the land before them—if we prefer to put it so. Whichever way we prefer, they had a right prior to that of those diamond finders, who came in and bought up their farms at great prices and were not at all welcome to the majority of the Boers whose farms did not happen to lie over diamond-producing strata.

From that point of view, all the argument seems to be on the Boers' side. But there is another point of view. These diamond searchers had come in in a perfectly peaceful way. They brought much wealth to the Boer Government which taxed them very severely, and really did not give them fair and decent treatment. The result was the breaking out, in 1899, of the great Boer War which went for a while so hardly for Great Britain that it looked at one moment as if her armies might be forced right back to the sea. Not only the Transvaal Boers but those of the Free State, and of Natal, joined together. Fortunately for Great Britain, Cape Colony, where the British element was largest, stood firmly for the Empire. At length the fortune of war turned, as more and more British troops arrived from oversea. By 1903 it was ended: the Boers surrendered at discretion.

And then was done one of the noblest and most generous and most courageous acts that the whole of this Greatest Story is able to show in the way of the treatment of a vanquished people by the victors: a very large part of the independent rule for which the vanquished foe had been fighting was voluntarily given to him. It was a tremendous experiment—tremendous, in the most literal sense of the word; that is to say, an experiment to be feared. It seemed an immense risk to take—thus to rely on the sense of gratitude of a beaten foe. But that foe showed himself as generous in acceptance of the experiment as Great Britain in making it. He proved his gratitude by devoted service for the Empire in the Great War. It was a tremendous experiment, wonderfully justified.

The division of Africa

It is not needful, for the purposes of this story, to go over in detail the possessions, and their boundaries, of the various white nations in Africa. The French have a huge area in the north-west, reaching right down from Algeria to a junction with the Congo River. The Belgian Congo lies between that French area and British Rhodesia, which joins the other British colonies farther south. Great Britain has Nigeria on the west coast and British East Africa on the east. Portugal has Angola on the one side and Mozambique on the other, with the large island of Madagascar, which is French, lying off it. Abyssinia, easterly of the Sudan and bounded on the east again by the British and the Italian Somalilands, is by far the greatest and most interesting of the African countries still in the possession of a coloured race. Even Morocco, just westerly of Algiers, is now under French protection, and on either side of it lies a territory that is under Spain.

These many and very different countries have not been won for the white man without heavy fighting with the natives whom the white intruders found there. Great Britain has had its severe campaigns against the Kaffirs and the Zulus in the south. The Italians have received very rough handling from the Abyssinians. Spain and France still have their troubles in the north. But the white man has prevailed, and must prevail increasingly as his better science puts better instruments of war into his hands.

There remains one great nation not yet named in this chapter which also had extensive possessions in Africa until the Great War—Germany. It was not until rather a late date in the story that Germany, under the strong hand of Bismarck, had been welded into a nation at all. The year 1884, when the German Colonisation Society was founded, may be taken as the date when she set to work with the deliberate and avowed purpose of taking her place among the colonising nations. It was less a matter, with her, of shouldering a burden thrust upon her, than of going out of her way to seek the burden, in her fear lest the other nations should possess themselves of all the unclaimed spaces before she could stretch out a hand for them.

Acting from this motive, she obtained, on the west coast of Africa, the large territory of the Cameroons—now, since the Great War, under the French mandate—of German South-West Africa—now under the mandate of the Union of South Africa—and of German East Africa—now under the mandate of Great Britain.

Of all these, the last was perhaps of chief importance from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxon dominance, because there was a small portion of its north-eastern boundary where it joined with the Belgian Congo, and it was just this, and only this, junction which intervened between the Anglo-Saxon protectorate of Uganda on the north and the long lake of which the southern shore was part of Rhodesia. That is to say, that this junction of Germany with Belgium alone prevented an all-British route, by river, lake, or land, from the Mediterranean mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope.

With the mandate to Great Britain of German East Africa, which was one of the results of the Great War, that intervention has been removed.

This then, in bare outline, is the way in which the burden of Africa has been distributed on the shoulders of the white men.

It was thus that the Company came to have an army in its pay and to hold the control over extensive lands and many peoples. It was a position never contemplated when the Company was formed, nor was it a position entirely welcome to its directors. Continual additions had been made to the territories over which its control spread. The most notable perhaps were the addition of Cashmere in 1846, of the Punjab in 1849, and of Oudh in 1856. Farther east even than India, to the Straits Settlements and even to China itself, the authority reached of this vastly overgrown trading concern. Obviously it involved a control which could far better be undertaken directly by the British Government than by a Company acting under its charter. But with that typically British tendency to let things go on as they are going until it is impossible so to let them go any longer, nothing was done to transfer the Company's power to the Crown until the crisis came in the shape of the most formidable rising of a coloured people which the white man ever has been called on to meet in the whole course of taking up his burden. It is that known as the Indian Mutiny—"mutiny," because it was mainly the affair of the native soldiers in the Company's pay. This was in the years 1857 and 1858. It threatened the very existence of the white man in the East, and only a splendid heroism in resistance to heavy odds, and heroic efforts and forced marches to relieve a situation nearly desperate, saved the principal, though scanty, British force from being annihilated. Once more the British wonderfully won through to a final victory, but the events of the war had brought into clear light the long known fact that the government of British India was an affair which demanded the most direct attention of British statesmen, with all the resources at their disposal. The East India Company were relieved of their far too heavy burdens. The Crown took over their responsibilities both in India and in the farther East.

The responsibilities of India were not only those which arose from the troubles incidental to a rule over peoples of different race and of religions—the Moslem and the Hindu—which brought them often into collision with each other. There was another trouble which began to menace like a dark cloud on the north-eastern boundary of the country, where lay the independent State of Afghanistan bordering with Persia on its east and with Russia on its north.

Russia had taken no part in that overseas colonisation by the other great powers of Europe. She had vast spaces enough, contiguous to her own bounds, over which she spread. Gradually she had annexed all Turkestan, which brought her into direct contact with Afghanistan, and she had been at frequent war with Persia over the question of the Russo-Persian boundary on Persia's north-west. Both Persia and Russia had ambitions to absorb that independent Afghanistan which lay in the corner where they joined, and where, but for Afghanistan, they would join British India also. It was Britain's policy to maintain Afghanistan independent, as a buffer between her and those others, especially against Russia.

But it was to Persia, in the first place, that she had to say "hands off," when Persia advanced to the important position of Herat, within Afghan territory, in 1852. The result of campaigning and fighting lasting over some five years was that a friendly agreement was reached with Persia, which settled boundaries and left Herat to the Afghans.

Russia's menace to India

But in 1887 Russia, from the north, pushed down, and was across the Afghan boundary and advancing to that same Herat, when she was checked only by very forcible representations made to her by Great Britain. Britain herself had pushed her own Indian frontier forward by the acquisition of Beluchistan in 1878. Russia withdrew her forces for the time being, but all through that century and for some years of the present, the dread that she would come down upon India was always in the minds of British statesmen. There was more than one moment when war seemed imminent. Possibly it was nothing but Russia's own doubt of her effective fighting power which averted it. No suspicion of her internal weakness was entertained in Europe generally until it was revealed by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and yet more clearly by the Great War of 1914-1918. But there is little doubt that this small State of Afghanistan, which arose out of the Moslem spread towards the East many centuries before, saved Britain and Russia from disastrous collision. She had played the game that a small State thus situated was likely to play, intriguing with the great powers on either side of her and taking advantage of their rivalry. More than once there has been war between her and Great Britain. But she remains an independent State and Britain's friend to-day.

On India's north-eastern side Britain extended her Empire by the acquisition of Assam in 1826, and later by that of Burma in 1886. The French had taken to themselves Annam and Tongking in 1884, and thus the British Burmese territory marched with French Indo-China, as it was called, and both were bounded on their northern side by the great Chinese Empire which stretched right up to Siberia.

Affairs in China

For the last hundred years or so, the story of China has been largely the story of her efforts to prevent the foreigner from coming into China and playing any part in her story.

Nevertheless we find the white man pushing on, in his eternal quest for trade, not to be denied, founding trading stations at Chinese ports. Generally it is only in submission to a show of force, or to its active application, that these trading facilities, warehouses and so on, are permitted to him. He is obliged to fight to be allowed to establish them, and further, we find him fighting again to punish the native people who have disregarded the agreements they have made with him and who sometimes have killed the peaceful traders.

Out of the troubles thus arising came war between Britain and China as early as 1840. The Chinese were quite incapable of seriously opposing the large British force which was sent out. The result was the conclusion of a commercial treaty which opened five principal ports of China to British trading vessels and gave Britain possession of the island of Hongkong. In 1854 Shanghai, one of the five ports above named, was opened to the trade of all nations.

But still the attitude of the people and of the Government was hostile to the foreigner. At any moment an uprising and a general massacre might happen. A few white missionaries, chiefly of British and American nationality, penetrated into the country, preaching Christianity at constant risk of their lives.

The year 1860 saw a great change in the relations of the white men and the Chinese. Hitherto any fighting between them had been near the coast and the great ports. Now, as a protest against the ill-treatment of which the foreign traders were the victims and the bad faith with which the Chinese broke the treaties, and also to insist on the establishment of legations of the European Powers to protect the interests of their nations, a strong combined force of British and French marched on Pekin, the capital city, and looted and burnt the sacred Summer Palace from which the Emperor had fled.

The really important result of the campaign was the shock which it gave the Chinese and the conviction which it brought home to them of the strength and determination of the white men. Thereafter they treated the foreign traders with a consideration never paid them before, and ministers representing foreign powers had their appointed residences in Pekin.

It is true that as lately as 1900 a combined foreign force was obliged to march in extreme haste on Pekin in order to save those ministers, who were in great peril there. But it was peril arising out of an insurrection against the Government, rather than immediately from the Government's own action. Nevertheless it is also true that the very clever old Empress, who was then ruler of China, deliberately contrived to convert the activities of the revolutionaries into an attack upon the foreigners, rather than upon the Government itself. And it is to be noted that in co-operation with that combined army, which thus again invaded China's once sacred capital, was a force of the other branch of the yellow race, the island branch, the Japanese.

The story of that island branch is certainly no less interesting than that of the continental. At what point far back in the story they branched off from a common stock we do not know, but it is more than probable that they came from the same original source. We found Kublai Khan, when master of China and of an immense part of the world besides, sending out from China an expedition against the islanders, of which the fate was much like that of the Grand Armada which the masterful power of Spain launched against our own islands. Japan kept her independence then, and has fought for it again and asserted it conclusively far later.

The awakening of Japan

She too, in her story, seems to have repeated, as did China, something very like the series of changes through which society passed in Europe, with its feudalism and the rest of it. But whereas in modern China this feudalism seems to belong to some era very, very far back in her story, so that she has almost lost all memory of it, with Japan, on the contrary, it is a very recent chapter—later even than with us of Europe. It is a condition from which she has indeed only just shaken herself free. 1867 is generally given as the date at which Japanese feudalism passed. And it passed in a fashion for which there is certainly no parallel in Western story. The Daimios, who were the feudal lords, of their own accord agreed, as the only means of ending their mutual fighting, to give up their local powers into the hands of the Mikado.

The white men knew very little about Japan until the sixteenth century. No overland travellers, like Marco Polo, had been there to bring back news to the West. About the middle of the sixteenth century a few Portuguese trading vessels touched it, and the very famous Jesuit missionary Xavier introduced Christianity. Here, however, as elsewhere, the Jesuits seem to have caused trouble by interfering with politics, and the exclusion of the foreigners was enforced more strictly than ever. Gradually, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, trade with foreigners began to grow, chiefly with the Dutch, the Russians, and the Americans.

But still Japan continued, like China, to hold aloof as much as possible from all intercourse with the West, and with its science and progress. America at length took the decided step of sending a strong naval force and demanding the opening of a port to American ships of trade. This was in 1850, but the real opening up of the country did not begin until after the end of feudalism and the establishment of the Mikado's single power in 1867. And then a most extraordinary change did happen—a change perhaps more extraordinary than any other of which we find record in the whole history of mankind.

We may describe the story of China for many centuries as the story of a people buried in a profound sleep. She shows but little immediate sign of awaking from that slumber even to-day. The story of Japan in the latter half of the nineteenth century we may designate as the most astonishing awakening of a nation out of slumber that the world has ever known.

Even now the part played by great China is only a passive, a negative part (except, of course, so far as her own people are concerned), but the part played by little Japan, though perfectly passive until some two-thirds of the nineteenth century had gone, has been startlingly vigorous and effective. The truth is that beneath the slumbering surface the spirit of the people had always been active, inquiring, ready for any novelty that struck them as valuable—in great contrast to the indifference of the Chinese. Their seclusion had been forced upon them by their rulers. When that enforcement ceased, they welcomed with very keen intelligence all the progress in science and thought which steam and evolution had given to the West. In religion and in art they seem to have been satisfied to follow their own traditions, but they took every possible opportunity to learn lessons that might be of practical use. Military experts were called from Germany and naval experts from Great Britain to teach the art of war by land and sea. Scientific, educational, and legal advisers were engaged. The nation set itself with astonishing quickness to learn all that the West could teach it, and within a few years the efficiency of both army and navy were very thoroughly proved.

OLD JAPAN: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMBS, TOKIO.
OLD JAPAN: ENTRANCE TO THE TOMBS, TOKIO.

One result of that war was that Korea was formally declared independent, but the Government was so feeble that the Japanese, in the years that followed, gained more and more power over it. By the terms of peace, the large island of Formosa was ceded to Japan. But the war's most important result was to reveal to the Western powers the weakness of China. Russia, thwarted in her advances towards India, was pushing but eastward into Manchuria, and now encouraged China to resist some of the demands of the victorious Japanese. In compensation, she obtained for herself certain advantages, as the friend of China. China handed to her Manchuria, partly as the result of pressure, partly of friendly persuasion. What was of still more importance for her was that she acquired the ice-free harbour of Port Arthur; for hitherto her only Pacific port had been Vladivostock, farther north and often ice-bound.

It mattered comparatively little to Japan that Great Britain and Germany, to balance these gains of Russia, demanded and took for themselves, from the enfeebled hands of the Chinese, ports in the same neighbourhood. What did matter was that the menace of Russian power, and Russia's insatiable desire to expand, became more and more formidable to her. But among the peace terms which she had not failed to extort from China was a large money indemnity, and that money she spent in buying ships of war.

So then, in 1904, as Russia grew more and more aggressive in her eastward push, Japan, confident in her German-instructed army and her British-instructed and greatly enlarged fleet, ventured on a kind of David and Goliath contest. She declared war on the vast power.

The Russo-Japanese War

And, just as, through the test applied by this surprising little island power in the Pacific, had been revealed the essential weakness of great China, so now, to the astonishment of the world, was revealed by the very same test the weakness of great Russia. The Russian fleet, sailing from the Gulf of Finland, circumnavigated the world to come into touch with the Japanese fleet awaiting it in Japan's home waters; and at the very first touch that sea-worn fleet of Russia was sent to the bottom, save for such inconsiderable remnants as the Japanese allowed to remain afloat or to run ashore.

On land the fighting was hard. Port Arthur, strongly fortified, held out bravely, but was invested and forced to yield. The Japanese armies were victorious, driving the Russians back, but at price of a continually lengthening line of communications as the battle rolled north. The victories had cost Japan the very utmost that she could afford. She consented to terms of peace which surprised Europe by their moderation. But the details were of little importance compared with the astonishing achievement. This little island State, scarcely emerged out of its feudal era, had become, at a stroke, a great modern power, the naval ruler of the Pacific, Great Britain's counterpart in the East, and her ally on equal terms.

She might now gratify her wish about Korea, and formally declared it a Japanese protectorate in 1910. The Russian menace was rolled back, by the restoration of Manchuria in the same year.

In the Great War Japan more than confirmed her claim to high place among the nations. She was active in scouring the sea for German marauders of commerce, and very early in the war captured the port which Germany had occupied in the Pacific, and so eliminated any threat to her authority with which that occupation might threaten her.

Within so few years did Japan thus pass, from taking no part whatever in the Great Story, to be one of the foremost actors.

Southward of the Japanese islands, the next most important group is that of the Philippines, transferred, as we saw, from the sovereignty of Spain to that of the United States as a result of the Spanish-American war of 1897-8. Southward again, we come to those islands of the Malay Archipelago chiefly dominated by the Dutch, although Britain also has important possessions there and on the Malay Peninsula itself.

And so, working yet farther southward through innumerable islands, we arrive at the huge British colonial territory of Australia, with the two islands of New Zealand some twelve hundred miles away towards the south-east.

A STREET SCENE IN MODERN JAPAN.
A STREET SCENE IN MODERN JAPAN.

It was not until the eighteenth century that the white man began to take much notice of these great lands in the South. New Zealand was the first to be proclaimed a British possession, in 1787, and the following year is the date of the beginning of the settlement of New South Wales. The founding of the next Australian colony, Queensland, was not until 1824, and five years later again began the colonisation of Western Australia. South Australia was recognised as a separate colony in 1834, and Victoria in 1851.

Australia

Of the settlement, and the claiming for the Anglo-Saxon, of these glorious and vast possessions, there is but little to say in this story, because each successive settlement was accomplished with comparatively little interference by the natives and with none whatever from any other white nation. The coast was found to have some splendid harbours, most of the interior was excellent grazing land, and later, profitable gold mines were discovered.

The chief drawback of Australia as a cattle and sheep producing country has always been its liability to long droughts when no rain falls and the grass perishes and the stock dies for lack of food and water. Much trouble arose at one time from the foolish and short-sighted action of the Government at home in transporting criminals thither. In the first instance they were sent to New South Wales and later to Queensland also. Many of these convicts escaped into the bush, and, banding themselves together, became a terror, by the name of bushrangers, to peaceful farmers. Obviously the families of the convicts could not have been brought up in circumstances likely to turn them into good citizens. It is all the more to the credit of the country that it has such a fine population to-day.

The folly and the wickedness of thus filling up a grand new country with the refuse ejected from the old was gradually realised. Transportation of criminals ceased in 1868.

The Australian colonies continued to govern themselves as separate units, under a constitution granted them by the Crown in 1850, for just fifty years. In 1900, by their own request, they were welded into the Commonwealth of Australia, with a Governor-General appointed by the Crown. The federated States are six, that is to say, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia on the main land, with the island State of Tasmania to the south.

Thus, shortly, it is possible to relate the story of the white man's acquisition of this great continent of the South; but though its story is so short and simple the importance of the part that it is likely to play in the future of this Greatest of all Stories is quite beyond our estimate, but is certain to be very large. Its vacant spaces, ready for the immigrant, are vast. The difficulties created by the droughts are being gradually overcome, as the means of irrigation are improved. The population is vigorous and efficient. Australia sent fighters of splendid bravery and splendid loyalty to aid the mother country in the Great War. The world has yet to learn the possibilities of this young and still undeveloped continent.

The story of New Zealand is very much the story of Australia, except that the New Zealand white settlers did, for a while, suffer much anxiety in their protracted warfare with the coloured race that they found there. It was not until 1861 that the Maoris took up arms in any force against the whites who were gradually driving them out of their ancient territories. Had they known how to combine and act together, and to take advantage of the concealment of the bush, they might have been really dangerous to the white man's rule. But jealousies between the tribes prevented their combination, and a Quixotic pride in braving death and danger seems to have caused them to deem it the act of a coward to creep upon the enemy undetected. They chose rather to dash themselves upon the defence in frontal attacks which cost them very heavy losses. Even so the war dragged on, in a series of intermittent fighting, for ten long years, and in the terms of peace which ended it the Maoris secured for themselves better conditions than before. Their bravery and fine qualities had made an impression, and they received a liberal recognition of their rights. They have proved themselves good friends and citizens of the Empire in the years since.

A SCENE IN NEW ZEALAND: MT. PEMBROKE.
A SCENE IN NEW ZEALAND: MT. PEMBROKE.

Thus then, in broad and simple lines, I have tried to sketch the manner in which the white man, and the Anglo-Saxon more than all other white men, has been shouldering the world's burden. That is a political sketch, showing the movements of some of the societies of men and some of the changes in the boundaries of States. But during the last hundred years of our Greatest Story the principal events have been five, of which three only have been of this political character. There is the unification of Italy into a nation, that is the earliest. There is the consolidation of the German States into the national unity of Germany, that is the second. There is the assumption of his burden by the white man, and especially of the Anglo-Saxon, all the world over—that is the third.

The fourth and fifth are not of a political character at all; though more important in our story than any political event. First of these last two, because it came first in time, though I am not sure whether we should rate it first in importance, is the application of steam power to the working of machinery. The second is the discovery of evolution, with all that the word implies, and its turning of men's eyes with glad hope towards a splendid future for human life on the earth, instead of a despairing regret for a vainly imagined splendour in the past.

INDEX

ABOLITIONISTS, and Anti-Abolitionists, 212, 213

Abraham, Plains of, 133

Abyssinia, 223

Act of Settlement, the, 109, 115

Act of Supremacy, the, 49, 61

Afghanistan, 32 et passim, 104, 226, 227, 228

Africa, 4 et passim, 218 et seq.

Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 114, 119

Akbar, Grand Mogul, 34, 67

Alaska, 182

Algiers, 45, 219, 223

Alsace, 206

Alva, Duke of, 57

Angola, 223

Anne, Queen, 101, 109, 110

Anne Boleyn, 47

Appomatox, 214

Assam, 208

Atlantis, 9

Aurungzeb, 104

Austerlitz, battle of, 171

Australia, 237 et seq.

BALKAN States, the, 182

Barbadoes, 81

Bastille, the, 158

Batavians, the, 155

Bavaria, Elector of, 118

Beluchistan, 227

Bengal, 103, 104

Bermuda, 81

Bismarck, 205, 206

Blake, Admiral, 90

Boers, the, 221

Boer War, the great, 222

Bombay, 103, 104

Boston, U.S.A., 139, 141

Bourbons, the, 58, 60