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Updated: June 1, 2025
Then he sailed to New Britain on a trading venture, and fell in with, and had much to do with, the ill-fated colonising expedition of the Marquis de Ray in New Ireland.
There was a time when the colonies were so weak that they depended mainly on England for their protection; but, unlike some of the great colonising Powers of ancient and modern times, England never drew a direct tribute from her colonies, and, in spite of much unwise and some unjust legislation, I believe there was never a time when they were not on the whole benefited by the connection.
At the beginning the caliphs had taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root, but be always free to join the caliph's standard. But it was inevitable that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land.
There have always been born into the world and continue to be born boys and girls in fairly equal proportions, but with colonising and soldiering our men go away, leaving behind them a continually growing surplus of marriageable but unmarried spinsters, who cannot spin, and who are utterly unable to find themselves husbands. This is a wide field on the discussion of which I must not enter.
There was an outcry raised at the French taking possession of Taheite, as if any attempt on their part to colonise was an infringement on our right as Englishmen of universal colonisation. I think if we were wise, we should raise no objection to their colonising as much as they please.
Like the Australians generally, who begin building a town by marking out a fine race-course, so the light-hearted sons of the Mikado's empire, when out colonising, begin as a first and necessary luxury of life by importing a few guechas who, with their quaint songs, enliven them in moments of despair, and send them into ecstasies at banquets and dinner-parties with their curious fan-dances, &c, just as our British music-hall frequenting youth raves over the last song and skirt-dance of the moment.
And the most important of the many questions raised by this development was the question whether the spirit in which this world-supremacy of Europe was to be wielded should be the spirit which long experience had inspired in the oldest of the colonising nations, the spirit of trusteeship on behalf of civilisation; or whether it was to be the old, brutal, and sterile spirit of mere domination for its own sake.
New competitors, indeed, now began to press into the field: the wildly exaggerated notions of the wealth to be made from colonial ventures which led to the frenzied speculations of the early eighteenth century, John Law's schemes, and the South Sea Bubble, induced other powers to try to obtain a share of this wealth; and Austria, Brandenburg, and Denmark made fitful endeavours to become colonising powers.
Thenceforward he lived a stirring life. We hear of him in Hispaniola, and serving as lieutenant in a colonising expedition under Alonzo de Ojeda.
Lastly, Britain, the oldest and the most fully endowed of all the colonising powers, was drawn, half unwilling, into the competition; and having an immense start over her rivals, actually acquired more new territory than any of them. She was, indeed, like the other states, passing through an 'imperialist' phase in these years.
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