0 The Child's Book of ALL COUNTRIES THE STORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE WE have finished the story of our homeland, yet the story of our homeland is as wide as the world. We live on a little island which seems hardly more than a speck on the map, yet from our little kingdom has grown an empire greater than any other empire that has been. One-fifth of the whole earth and one-fifth of its peoples live under the British flag. If we could walk all over the earth, one out of every five persons we met would belong to our own empire. So vast is this empire that the sun never sets upon it; it is an empire of eternal sun. We shall read the story of all parts of the empire, but here, in these pages, we get an idea of what the British Empire itself means and how it has come to be. Great Britain has become a great nation because her sons have carried freedom beyond the seas, and it is a fine and solemn thing for us to remember that we are helping to make a nation whose influence reaches to every corner of the earth. THE EMPIRE OF THREE hundred years ago Eng ETERNAL SUN land and Scotland and Ireland were all ruled by a single king; they had been united for the first time under one monarch five years before. But even then the nation did not own, outside of the British Isles, a single scrap of all the lands that are marked red on the map of the world to-day. Yet that was 1,100 years after the Saxon Cerdic set up the kingdom of Wessex, and began the line of kings whose blood runs now in the veins of Edward VII. In these three hundred years quite a small piece of time in the history of the British race-the whole of this great empire has been built up; and another great portion of the earth's surface-the history of which belongs to the same three hundred years-is also in possession of the same race, though it is not part of the empire, as it once was, and as it still might have been, perhaps, but for the blunders of statesmen one hundred and fifty years ago. How was it that this great expansion, or spreading out, of the peoples of these small islands took place, so that regions so vast have fallen under their dominion in so short a time; that they have taken upon themselves the task of ruling millions upon millions of peoples with black skins and yellow skins, and of making the earth yield up her riches in lands where earlier inhabitants had been content to roam from place to place, plucking the fruits which grew ready to hand, or slaying the wild creatures with bow and arrows? Well, there had been no chance of expansion till just about a thousand years after Cerdic came to England. It was only then that Christopher Columbus found out for certain that if ships sailed on and on westwards from Europe across the Atlantic they would come at last to land, which in those days men called the New World. And it was only then that the Portuguese sailors found out that if they sailed on and on southwards they could get round the end of Africa, and so sail on to the northeast till they came to India. As Columbus was in the service of the King and Queen of Spain when he discovered America, the Spaniards claimed that it was a possession of theirs; while the Portuguese mariners made themselves lords of the Indian Ocean; and so those two nations got much store of merchandise and spices from the East, and of gold and silver from the mines in South America. Now, at first the other European nations tried only to find whether other parts of America, to which the Spaniards had not gone, might not be richer than the islands of the West Indies or than the "Spanish Main itself, for this was the name by which с the lands of which the Spaniards had taken possession were called. But presently the English began to think there was no reason why the Spaniards should be allowed to shut everyone else out of those lands, where it seemed almost as if there was nothing to do but pick up gold and silver, or make the natives do it for you; and so they began to fight the Spaniards. How OW WALTER RALEIGH BEGAN BUILDING Then there arose, also, men with greater visions than those of just gathering up wealth at ease-men who dreamed of planting colonies, of creating a new England beyond the seas where wealth might be won not without effort, but by energy and skill and endurance. And though the first attempts which Sir Walter Raleigh made in the reign of Queen Elizabeth came to naught because men were not content with the slow way of industry when the capture of a Spanish galleon might make a man rich for life at one blow-the plans of Raleigh were at last carried out, when sundry merchants and others banded together to settle a number of Englishmen in a colony which they called Virginia. Now, the peoples of North America, whom the English called Indians because at first it had been supposed that it was India itself that Columbus had reached-dwelt for the most part in great tribes, roving from place to place; and they were fierce and merciless in their manner of warfare. And often grounds of quarrel would appear between the Englishmen and the redskins; so that many a time the settlers had to fight for their lives, and many times they gave Indians reason to hate them, and to fear them, too. south and these "New England" colonies on the north. But soon afterwards, when there was a war between England and Holland, the Dutch gave up those colonies to England, and the English gave the name of New York to the principal town which had been Dutch. There came Frenchmen, too, who made colonies further north still, in what we call Canada, and further south in Louisiana. Meanwhile, other merchants had banded themselves together to trade in the East with India and the islands which were called the Spice Islands; one company in London, and another in Holland. For the most part, it was the Dutch who sought trade in the Spice Islands, and the English who sought it in India. And the English got leave from the Emperor of India, who was called the Mogul, to set up what was called a "factory," which meant offices and warehouses to store the goods which they bought from the Indians and the goods which they brought from England to sell; and when Charles II. married a Portuguese wife the Portuguese gave him Bombay, which had come into their possession long before. How NORTH AMERICA WAS DIVIDED INTO BRITISH COLONIES In this way the English got trading stations, or factories, at Bombay, and Madras, and Calcutta ; and the French got trading stations not far from Madras and Calcutta. And so, about two hundred years ago, the way of things was this. The English had for a long time given up troubling themselves about South America, which they left to the Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Mexico, the southern bit of North America. But in North America, all along the coast from Florida at the south end to Nova Scotia at the north end, the country was divided up into British colonies or states, which had to obey any laws that were made for them by the Parliament of Great Britain, but were allowed in other ways to govern themselves. On the north and on the south were French colonies, but westwards the Indians still owned the land. The French and the British each of them thought they had a right to all that land, taking no count of the Indians; and since they would not share it, but each meant to have it for THE PEOPLES OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE People of every race and colour and religion, speaking every language, live under the protection of the British flag. No other flag flies over so huge a family, or over so strangely mixed a population, as the Union Jack, which waves over 400 million people. 1113 themselves, a time came when the two countries went to war. At the end of the war the British had beaten the French so badly that France gave up Canada to England altogether, and all the French colonists in Canada became the subjects of King George III., and they or their descendants have been subjects of the British Crown ever since. THE 'HE QUARREL IN WHICH AMERICA BROKE AWAY FROM THE MOTHERLAND But after that time numbers of Englishmen and Scots and Irishmen went out to Canada as colonists, as well as many people from the other American colonies. And so to this day the people of Canada are partly British and partly French, but all are loyal members of the British Empire. It is sad to think that, not long after Canada became British, the other colonies in America had such a quarrel with the Mother Country that there was a great war; and at the end of it, owing to the stupidity of the rulers at home, those colonies were separated altogether from the empire, and became the United States of America. Now, while the French and the British were fighting out the question which of the two was to possess North America, they were also fighting out the question which of the two was to possess Indiathough neither of them at the time really guessed that India itself was going to be conquered. For India was not at all like North America, where there were no civilised states, but only wild tribes. For India was made up of a number of great states containing many rich and great cities, and having vast armies with cannon like the Europeans, and strong fortresses. The rulers of those states owned the Mogul as emperor, though they paid little enough heed to his will. FRE RENCH AND BRITISH GO TO INDIA ON 66 But as for the British and the French, they just had their few factories" on the coast, with a little bit of ground, and a very few soldiers and guns in case they had to defend themselves from attack; and the rest of their people were the clerks and traders and managers, who were called governors, in the service of the British and French companies. guessed that it would be at all possible even if they did wish it. Only French and British were each of them anxious to get all the best of the trading into their own hands, and to persuade the native rulers to give them advantages over the rival nation. So when war broke out between England and France, the British and French in the south of India began to fight each other; and then, when some native princes began to fight each other for the thrones of their states, the French and British joined in on opposite sides. The end of it was that the British side won, and the French had to promise to keep no more soldiers in India at all. But more than that: during the fighting the British themselves and the native princes learnt that a few British soldiers, or native soldiers led by British officers, could defeat huge native armies. And when the prince who was called the Nawab of Bengal attacked the British in their factory at Calcutta, he was completely overthrown; and though a new Nawab was set up in his place, the Mogul very soon afterwards agreed that the British should govern Bengal; while they could rule the country round Madras almost as if it belonged to them. TTO RULE IN INDIA HE WAY IN WHICH THE BRITISH BEGAN Then, when the native princes saw that a new power had appeared in India, whenever they had quarrels among themselves one or another would ask the British to help them, or to protect them; while some of them thought that if they could only destroy the British they would be able to make themselves lords of their neighbours' lands. And whenever the British had to go to war, either to defend themselves or to protect an ally, the end of it was that some more lands came under the British rule. So it happened that by degrees half of India passed into the hands of the British, while the various princes of the other half governed their own territories, but had to obey when the British thought fit to interfere. And at last, after the Moguls had disappeared altogether, the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland was proclaimed Empress They had no wish to conquer the of India, and all the princes owned native states, and hardly anyone her as the supreme ruler. |