While the Australian settlements were colonies in the strictest sense, the English possessions in South Africa began, like New York, in a settlement first planted by the United Provinces. ♦Conquest of the Cape, 1806.
1815.♦ The Cape Colony, after some shiftings during the French revolutionary wars, was conquered by England, and its possession by England was confirmed at the general peace. ♦Eastern Colony and Natal, 1820-1836.♦ Migration northward, both of the English and Dutch inhabitants, has produced new settlements, as the Eastern Colony and Natal. ♦Orange River State, 1847-1856.
Transvaal, 1861-1877.♦ Meanwhile independent Dutch states have arisen, as the Orange River Republic, annexed by England, then set free, and lastly dismembered, and the Transvaal, more lately annexed after sixteen years of independence. Lastly a scheme of confederation for all these settlements awaits some more peaceful time to be carried into effect.

♦Europe extended by colonization.♦

In all these cases of real colonization, of real extension of the English or any other European nation, it is hardly a figure to say that the bounds of Europe have been enlarged. All that makes Europe Europe, all that parts off Europe from Africa and Asia, has been carried into America and Australia and Africa itself. The growth of this new Europe, no less than the changes of the old, is an essential part of European geography. ♦Barbarian dominion.♦ It is otherwise with territories, great or small, which have been occupied by England and other European powers merely for military or commercial purposes. Forts, factories, or empires, on barbarian soil, where no new European nation is likely ever to grow up, are not cases of true colonization; they are no extension of the bounds of Europe. ♦English dominion in India.♦ The climax of this kind of barbarian dominion is found in those vast Indian possessions in which England has supplanted Portugal, France, and the heirs of Timour. ♦Empire of India. 1876.♦ Of that dominion the scientific frontier has yet to be traced; yet it has come to give an Imperial title to the sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland, while those two European islands, as perhaps befits their inferiority in physical size, remain content with the lowlier style of the United Kingdom. Whether the loftier pretensions of Asia do, or do not, imply any vassalage on the part of Europe, it is certain that the Asiatic Empire of the sovereign of the British kingdom is no extension of England, no extension of Europe, no creation of a new English or European nation. The Empire of India stands outside the European world, outside the political system which has gathered round the Old and the New Rome. But a place amongst the foremost members of that system belongs to the great European nation on American soil, where the tongue of England is kept, and the constitution of old Achaia is born again, in a confederation stretching from the Western to the Eastern Ocean.

♦Summary.♦

We have thus traced the geography, and in tracing the geography we have in a slighter way traced the history, of the various states and powers of Europe, and of the lands beyond the Ocean which have been planted from Europe. We have throughout kept steadily before our eyes the centre, afterwards the two centres, of European life. We have seen how the older states of Europe gradually lose themselves in the dominion of Rome, how the younger states gradually spring out of the dominion of Rome. We have followed, as our central subjects, the fates of those powers in the East and West which continued the Roman name and Roman traditions. We have traced out the states which were directly formed by splitting off from those powers, and the states which arose beyond the range of Roman power, but not beyond the range of Roman influence. We have seen the Western Empire first pass to a German prince, then gradually shrink into a German kingdom, to be finally dissolved into a German confederation. We have watched the states which split off at various dates from its body, the power of France on one side, the power of Austria on another, the powers of Italy on a third, the free states of Switzerland at one end, the free states of the Netherlands at the other. We have beheld the long tragedy of the Eastern Rome; we have told the tale of the states which split off from it and arose around it. We have seen its territorial position pass to a barbarian invader, and something like its position in men’s minds pass to the mightiest of its spiritual disciples. And we have seen, painted on the map of our own century, the beginning of the great work which is giving back the lands of the Eastern Rome to their own people. We have then traced the shiftings of the powers which lay wholly or partly beyond the bounds of either Empire, the great Slavonic mainland, the Scandinavian and the Iberian peninsulas, ending with that which is geographically the most isolated land of all, the other world of Britain. We have seen too how Europe may be said to have spread herself beyond her geographical limits in the foundation of new European states beyond the Ocean. We have contrasted the different positions and destinies of the colonizing European powers—where, as in the days of Old Rome, a continuous territory has been extended over neighbouring barbarian lands—where growth beyond the sea was the natural outcome of growth at home—where European powers have colonized and conquered simply of their own free will. In thus tracing the historical geography of Europe, we have made the round of the world. But we have never lost sight of Europe; we have never lost sight of Rome. Wherever we have gone, we have carried Europe with us; wherever we have gone, we have never got beyond the power of the two influences which, mingling into one, have made Europe all that it has been. The whole of European history is embodied in the formula which couples together the ‘rule of Christ and Cæsar;’ and that joint rule still goes on, in the shape of moral influence, wherever the tongues and the culture of Europe win new realms for themselves in the continents of the western or in the islands of the southern Ocean.

[INDEX.]

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