The spreading, starting with the days that saw the discovery of Newfoundland, continued and made the whole of North America Pan-Angle land. If the impulse had produced nothing more than this, its work would have been stupendous. Yet the spreading was so effective in other parts of the world that a large proportion of the Southern Hemisphere also became Pan-Angle land. To-day we control thirty per cent. of the world's land surface.[161-1]
The tendency to separate is stimulated whenever the imperative Pan-Angle need of exercising self-government is improperly checked. If this need is satisfied, separation is prevented. If the need is denied satisfaction, it grows more and more acute to the point of rupture.
The story of separations among us began with the failure to recognize this principle of local autonomy, and the many interferences which slowly exasperated the "American Englishmen" to rebel. Thus was destroyed the first Britannic Empire. Thus were embittered against each other the Americans and the British of three generations.
The American Revolution, aptly called the Imperial Civil War, started migrations. Loyalists from the thirteen new nations took Pan-Angle ideals into Canada. "It has been estimated, apparently on good authority, that in the two provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick {162} alone, the Loyalist emigrants and their families amounted to not less than 35,000 persons, and the total number of refugees cannot have been much less than 100,000."[162-1] This is the principal reason why Canada to-day is Pan-Angle rather than French.[162-2] It is the reason, too, why in some parts of Canada there is a feeling grounded on inherited prejudice against the United States.
So little were the causes of the phenomenon of separating understood by the rulers of the British Isles, that Canada, in turn, came to the verge of a revolt which "was in fact a war of nationality in the British Empire, though it wore the disguise of a war of liberty."[162-3] "The settlement of the difficulty was effected by means not very commonly in high favour. For once_ systematic thought was brought to bear upon politics_. . . . a young peer of considerable promise, Lord Durham, was sent out as Governor in 1838; he issued a famous report, due to the pen of Charles Buller, in which the Radical philosophers' principles were vigorously applied . . . and in 1840 Parliament was persuaded to give effect to the proposals made in the report; . . . the main point was that the Executive branch of government was brought under the control of the colonists. . . . The year 1841 is therefore the year of the inauguration of modern Colonial government."[162-4] The year 1841, therefore, inaugurated the {163} policies that were in time to check the separating tendency.
Not only was separation the desire of certain of the younger groups, but it was to some extent the desire and foregone conclusion of one group from which separation might take place. The attitude of the British public concerning those portions of the British world where English-speaking white men were claiming increasingly the right to govern themselves was in itself more than an invitation to these "colonies" to separate themselves from the Mother Country. Comparison was made to a tree whose ripened fruit in due season detaches itself from the parent stem. The loss of the richest area in whose conquest the British government ever shared had so impressed statesmen that such men as Gladstone could desire the separation from the British Isles of various Pan-Angle nations.
"During the years which preceded the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 there was in this country [British Isles] a general indifference to the colonial question which did not cease till long afterwards. . . . After the Cobden era came that of Mr. Gladstone, who was in his zenith in the sixties and as purely insular and deficient in the power of Imperial thought as Cobden had been in the forties."[163-1] "A governor, leaving to take charge of an Australian colony, was told even from the Colonial Office that he would probably be the last representative of the Crown sent out from Britain. This tendency of official thought found its culmination when, in 1866, a great journal frankly warned Canada, the {164} greatest of all the colonies, that it was time to prepare for the separation from the mother-land that must needs come."[164-1] "Mr. Goldwin Smith . . . in his . . . Canada and the Canadian Question, which may fairly be supposed to condense all that can be said in favor of the separation of Canada from the Empire, and generally in support of that form of national disintegration which is involved in the great colonies becoming separate states or annexing themselves to other nations . . . is almost the last conspicuous representative of a school of thinkers which twenty-five or thirty years ago appeared likely to dominate English opinion on colonial affairs."[164-2] Only slowly were learned the lessons of the American Revolution, which a British historian in 1883 could truthfully say, "We have tacitly agreed to mention as seldom as we can."[164-3]
The tendency to separation is latent in every Pan-Angle community. It is only when local and central authority are properly balanced that it is quieted. In one it has never been quieted. The story of Ireland it is unnecessary and inexpedient here to narrate.[164-4] An Englander calls it "the greatest and most lamentable failure of the Pax Britannica."[164-5] It is merely the proof, again and again repeated, of the inability of Pan-Angles {165} successfully to control the local affairs of other Pan-Angles. There is something in us, in our individualism, that forbids such success, and calls for separation, which leads to rebellion if opposed, or revolution if permitted.
The Irish for generations have been leaving Ireland. They leave embittered against England. That bitterness they spread broadcast in the six younger Pan-Angle nations. Everywhere in these six nations the Irish find home rule.[165-1] The bitterness against government, as government, wears off. The Irishman becomes a citizen of a new and proud nation—he becomes a self-conscious Pan-Angle. But the Irish Question is no nearer solution than before.
Contemporaneous with the separation sentiments among the Britannic peoples were the agitations in the United States that were to culminate in the secession movement. The dread of a strong central government had left in the southern portion of America a belief in state separateness that worked against the existence of a common government which, within the scope of its authority could make decisions binding on all its component lands and people. From the end of the French-Pan-Angle struggle to the beginning of the American Civil War, the century of 1763-1861, the course of separation ran almost unchecked.