A history of England

by Charles Oman

The scramble for Africa.

The history of British Africa during the years 1885-95 was mainly the story of a scramble with the other European powers for the possession of the unoccupied parts of the continent. Since the Germans began to seize large tracts of southern Africa, and the French to extend their power into the Sahara and the valley of the Niger, the British government was forced in self-defence to make similar seizures, in order to prevent its colonies from being cut off from the interior. This has resulted in the annexation of three great tracts—one reaching from the Orange River and Griqualand up to the Zambezi, and circling round three sides of the Transvaal Republic; a second round Lake Nyassa; a third further north, including a slip of coast about Mombasa and Witu, and running up inland to the great equatorial lakes which feed the Nile, so as to include the kingdom of Uganda. At the same time the Niger Company has been allowed to establish a protectorate over the lower valley of that great river, where a colony is being built up which throws into the shade the old pestilential seaports at Sierra Leone and on the Gold Coast, which were once the only British possessions in Guinea. The annals of South Africa from the day of the Jameson raid (December 29, 1895) onward have possessed so much more than local importance, that they will be found recorded in the general chapter dealing with the closing years of Queen Victoria.

Upper and Lower Canada.

The history of the British colonies in North America is of a very different character from that of British South Africa. We have spoken in an earlier page of the gallant aid which the colonists gave to England in her struggle with the United States during the years 1812-15. When the excitement of this war had died down, there arose a slowly increasing estrangement between the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada; the English settlers of the former and the old French habitans of the latter were separated from each other by race, language, religion, and prejudices. They were, moreover, administered as wholly different colonies. Gradually a dangerous spirit developed itself among the French Canadians, who complained that their governors and officials were unsympathetic, and chafed against the limited self-government allowed them by Pitt's Canada Act of 1791. Even some of the settlers of the Upper Province expressed disloyal sentiments on this latter grievance, and spoke of asking for annexation to the United States.

The Canadian rebellion.

This discontent took shape in the Canadian rebellion of 1837, a movement almost entirely confined to the French-speaking districts, and easily suppressed by the loyalists, aided by a few British troops. After investigating the grievances which had led to the rising, the Home Government resolved to unite the two provinces into a single colony, that the French districts might be more closely linked to and controlled by the English. At the same time a more liberal measure of self-government was conceded. The constitution for the future comprised an elective Lower House and an Upper House of life-members, who stood to the governor much as the two Houses of the English Parliament stand to the Queen (1840).

Canadian federation.

The most important event in the history of British North America has been the federation of all its colonies into the single "Dominion of Canada" in the years 1867-1871. The danger which the British possessions had experienced during the threatened war with the United States in 1862 and the Fenian invasions of 1866-7 impelled the provinces towards the union which gives strength. Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, British Columbia, consented to federate themselves with Canada. Only the remote and thinly populated fishing-station of Newfoundland has preferred to remain outside the alliance. The four other colonies send deputies to the Dominion Parliament, which meets at Ottawa, though they retain for local purposes provincial legislatures of their own.

The Canadian Pacific Railway.

The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885, so that free communication exists across the whole continent from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Since then the broad plains between the great lakes and the Rocky Mountains are being rapidly peopled. The old settlement of Manitoba and the newer provinces of Assinboia, Saskatchewan, and Alberta are all being put under the plough or turned into cattle runs.