[170]
]CHAPTER VII
What would be the character, the fate of this infant British nation, so strangely inaugurated, so wondrously, providentially, even, cast forth upon the shore of an almost unknown continent?
The exiles came to strive with hostile natives and an unfamiliar climate. They found, day by day, birds and beasts, plants and seasons, alike foreign to all previous experience. Yet, so far, how amazingly has prospered the daring experiment in colonisation!
This founding of empires was undertaken with the splendid British contempt for obstacles and dangers, which, if often giving encouragement to apparently imprudent enterprises, has always ennobled the race. Not only was it such, but initiated almost in the throes of a conflict which imperilled Britain’s national existence,—a war, under the ablest generals, directed by the subtlest organising intellect in the then known world, aiming not so much at European conquest as the subjugation of the Mistress of the Seas!
But the haughty Spaniard—in the sixteenth century—who had planned to humble, to discrown, [171] ]was doomed, like the world-absorbing Corsican, to ruin and defeat—his ‘invincible Armada,’ tempest-driven on the rocks of a hostile coast, his grandest towering ‘tall Amiral,’ shot-shattered, burned, sunk, and destroyed by the unconquered naval heroes of ‘the spacious times of Great Elizabeth.’ What men the times bred!—captains by land and sea: soldiers, whether privates or officers, who, trained to obey to the death, stood unflinching or advanced resistless; sailors who walked above the blood-stained decks, cool as on a carpet, or swarmed over the enemy’s battleship to the maddening sound of ‘Boarders away,’ where every third man fell dead or wounded.
Have we such sailors, such soldiers still?
Yes! a thousand times, yes! and from this very land of the distant South. Was it not abundantly proved in the South African War, when the half-disciplined or wholly untrained colonial troops, whether Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, or Tasmanians, excited the wonder and admiration of all competent critics?—their initiative, their endurance, their intelligence proved on many a hard-fought field; not less also the stubborn valour which gloried in scorning to surrender, while the last man and the last horse lay dying, side by side!
From the weird, carelessly culled British crowd, flung as exiles on the shores of the far unknown South land, labourers and lawgivers, criminals and clerks—what a people has been evolved! The Briton has justified his constant boast, that, given the nucleus of a British community, with free soil, [172] ]free law, and his inherent right to appeal to it for relief against wrong and injustice, the community will develop the race-characteristics of the ancestral isle. From the oppressed band of Puritans, content to face the rock-bound coast, the storm-tossed ocean, the crafty, ruthless savage, if only they might enjoy religious freedom—from the men and women of their own creed and colour, crowded in unwholesome vessels—sold, yes, sold into slavery on arrival—from every kind of absconder and Adullamite, a newer, greater Britain confronts the world: in arms, a fearless rival; in peace or war, the strongest, the best educated, the most successful nation, this day, beneath the sun. Leavened by the virtue, the intellect, the heroism of the Pilgrim Band, the colossal American republic stands to-day, ready to face the universe in honourable contest: in contest for commercial success—for the triumphs of Art—for intellectual pre-eminence—for scientific progress.
What other human hive throws off such swarms as Britain the Unconquered—collectors from generation to generation of all things rich and precious in the eyes of men? Strong to defend also the treasure-cells; to punish, with fierce and deadly sting, the spoiler and the freebooter,—in material success rivalling, if not surpassing, the ancestral Briton.
The vast, impressive Dominion of Canada, about to take rank as the world’s granary, has shown her devoted loyalty to the British Empire in the recent war, and but for the mistaken policy [173] ]of the British Government—in the days of Lord North—the Great Republic of the United States might have been as firmly joined to the Mother Isle as the daughter States of Australia and New Zealand—forming a colossal bulwark against anarchy, socialism, and unnecessary interference with the world’s peace. That the rupture between Britain and her greatest oversea possession was suffered to take place, owing to the obstinacy of a mistaken King and a feeble Cabinet, was deplored by contemporary intellects of distinction. It has been even more deeply regretted by all thoughtful Britons, whether colonists or home-born, even unto this present day.