Cape Coast Castle, which was the residence of the Company's agent for the whole of Africa. Owing to "the machinations of the Hollanders," the Company was not financially a success, and in 1672 a new Charter was obtained for the new Royal Africa Company. The limits of the district worked by them began near Tangiers in South Barbary and ended at the Cape of Good Hope. A monopoly was conferred of the traffic in negroes, and we find numerous complaints from the West India Colonies of the manner in which the Company carried on their work. Jamaica was the chief market for negroes, and Barbados ranked next, though the trade of Virginia had come to be considerable. The fixed price for negro slaves was fifteen pounds for Barbados, sixteen pounds for the Leeward Islands, seventeen pounds for Jamaica, and twenty-two pounds for Virginia. In one year, several thousand slaves were shipped to the Colonies. With regard to Virginia, Bancroft has contended that negro slavery was forced upon a reluctant Colony by the callous Home Government, but later American writers do not accept this view. It is true that in the interests of the Royal Africa Company, and of English trade generally, the English Government might veto a duty placed by the Colony on their introduction, but assuredly the motives at work in America were not prompted by care for the negro. The New England merchant thought it no shame to go shares in a slave-importing transaction, and if slavery was hardly known in the Northern Colonies and persisted in in the Southern, the causes at work were economic and had nothing to do with the moral sense of the time. Without slavery, it has been conclusively shown, Virginia must have become a land of small proprietors; a condition of things to which it now seems tending. It was

as much the interest of the dominant class in the Colony in the seventeenth century, as it was in the nineteenth, that this should not be, and therefore it seems a little far-fetched to lay this additional charge on the broad back of English misgovernment.

In reading history no mistake is greater than to look

through the glasses of one's own age and prejudices, and it is a noteworthy fact that in the list of shareholders Sept. 1672. of the New Royal Africa Company occurs the name of John Locke. Nevertheless, few pages in human annals are so ghastly as the story of that Slave Trade, for the monopoly of which Christian nations fought, and about which they signed solemn treaties. A light-hearted and careless people, accustomed to idleness and sunshine, were herded in the foul darkness of ill-built holds, suffering the unknown horrors of seasickness, fed on the vilest food, the passage sometimes lasting for months, the rate of mortality passing belief. Compared

to the horrors connected with the slave trade, the actual evils of slavery were "as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." Bad, however, as the system was, it yet had its inevitable place in the artificial conditions of tropical cultivation, and therefore the lead taken in it by England— whatever its moral deserts-did make for commercial and Colonial expansion, and cannot be ignored in a study of British Colonial policy.

Upon the whole, an attentive study of the time does not Policy of bear out popular notions upon the subject. The general period. opinion, which is supported by works of authority, is that our Colonies were for many generations almost wholly neglected-left to work out their own salvation in their own way. The opinions of those most competent to speak, Mr Sainsbury and Mr Fortescue, the learned editors of the Calendar of Colonial State papers, do not bear out this theory. Mistakes were of course made, and there was always the ever present risk that the advantage of the Colony should be sacrificed to the private gain of some Court favourite; but, on the whole, if we compare the wisdom which showed itself in Home politics and on Colonial questions, we shall find a marked superiority in the case of the latter. Mention has already been made of the attempt to deal with the abuse of the grant by the Crown of Patent offices. Good intentions were at least shown by the Order of the King and Council, in 1680, which forbade Governors to leave their posts, except with the written consent of the

King and Council. It is true that the abuse of absenteeism still persisted, but the evil lay rather in the general temper of the times, than in the special administration of Colonial matters.

Neither do the facts warrant the general view of Charles's foreign policy, which has prevailed. It has been seen that war with Holland was an inevitable step in England's progress towards commercial supremacy. The quick-witted Ashley anticipated the verdict of history when he uttered his memorable "Delenda est Carthago." Though the advance of a Dutch fleet up the Thames caught deep hold of the popular imagination, in the long run it was not England which came off second best. With regard to the alliance with France, the French historian, Martin, has pointed out: 1 "It has been often repeated that Charles sold England to Louis XIV. This is true only of internal policy. . . as to external interests he did not sell them; for the greater share of the profit in the ruin of the Dutch was to go to England." It is noteworthy in this connection that naval precedence was in effect yielded by France. But, if on these grounds Charles must be acquitted, he stands condemned for the neglect of the fleet during the last years of his reign. Inasmuch as those years witnessed a great development in French shipbuilding, the situation of England and her possessions became very serious. Happily, James II., with all his faults, was a sailor, and the few years of his reign were busily employed in repairing the fleet. Otherwise the history of Europe might have run on different lines. There was a curious irony in the fact that it was due to James himself that his subsequent restoration became impossible. We may seem to be wandering from Colonial policy, but the truth that Colonial possessions must rest upon the command of the sea, and that without that command they are only sources of weakness in the event of war, which was exemplified in the next century at the expense of France, was very nearly at this time being exemplified at the expense of England. In constitutional matters the Colonies were more and more constitu- assimilating to a common type, based on that of the English Quoted by Mahan, Influence of Sea Power upon History.

Colonial

tions.

1

Constitution of the time. The Governor represented the King, and his Council was a pale imitation of the House of Lords. By the side of these was an Assembly, more or less popular in character, which had rights of legislation subject to the home veto. The question of the authority of the English Parliament was not finally faced and solved. We may notice that the omnipotence of Parliament, which became later an accepted doctrine, would hardly commend itself to lawyers brought up under very different notions of the Royal prerogative. There were already indications, however, that, if a struggle came, it would be on the question of taxation. We have noted instances where the Colonies showed an uneasy sense of the need for greater precision in the statement of their rights. It was only necessary that the spirit of compromise and tact should be absent for the sparks of friction to burst into a blaze. It has been said that the Colonies were assimilating to a common type, but from that type New England still held aloof in haughty isolation. We have seen the searchings of heart which her attitude caused at home. We have seen the revolution, which ended, for the time, her liberties, and the counter-revolution, which seemed to restore them. Nevertheless, under the pressure of domestic dissensions and foreign dangers, proud Massachusetts itself was to yield to British influences, and a Royal Governor to be admitted peacefully within the sacrosanct precincts of independence.

H

CHAPTER IV

Colonies IN passing to the reign of William and Mary, we are entering won by conquest. upon a new order of things. Hitherto the Colonies had been

mainly founded by settlement; in the times which will ensue they are mainly won by conquest. It is true that in the earlier period Jamaica and New York had been the fruits of conquest, and that in the later Georgia was settled, and Nova Scotia and Canada greatly developed by means of settlement; but on the whole the difference is obvious, nor is the reason of it far to seek. We are entering upon a long period of war with uneasy intervals of peace, wherein Colonies are regarded primarily as pieces in the war game, and to be dealt with accordingly. In this state of things we shall expect to miss the diversity of experiment which attracts us in the glowing youth of English colonization; but, in fact, military exigencies influence Colonial policy far less than might have been expected.

The magic of Macaulay's History has done its best to cast a spell over the period; but most people will agree with Hallam that it was in itself one of the least interesting in English history. Nevertheless, it was fraught with momentous issues for England. It opened out the great struggle for preeminence between England and France, which was to last more than a hundred years. It has been noticed how disgracefully the Navy had been neglected during the last years of Charles II., and how James had, partially at least, restored it to efficiency. William was both by necessity and choice a soldier, and his main business in the war was to preserve the existence of the Netherlands and of Protestantism upon the Continent from the aggressions of Louis XIV. Still, during the war, the English Navy did good service. The defeat, 1690. or partial defeat of Beachy Head, was much more than re