lowed by ferocious anarchy. The army, seeking for itself some more important work than the distracted condition of the provinces afforded it, formed the vast design of conquering the British possessions of Hindustan, where, had it been successful, its officers would have ruled with Oriental tyranny and rapacity the provinces then under the mild administration of the East India Company.

In February, 1845, they crossed the frontier, and attacked the British post at Moodkee, where they were repulsed. In the successive battles of Ferozeshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon, they were defeated, and the rajah made submission in the name of his turbulent army to the governor-general of India. But this army was yet unsubdued. At Chillianwallah they were attacked in January, 1844, by Lord Gough, with more impetuosity than science; and although the balance of victory was on the side of the British, yet it was a critical conflict, and one of which, had the Sikhs turned the scale, no one could have predicted the results to the Indian empire. General Sir Charles Napier was on the way from Britain to bring the contest against the Sikhs to a conclusion, but in the meantime Lord Gough again encountering them at Goodjerat, effectually defeated them and broke their force. The formidable extent of this force was shown in their ability, after so many defeats, to bring 60,000 men into action. It became necessary after this conflict, that the Punjaub should be ceded, and placed at the disposal of the British Indian government.

But a very few years elapsed, ere contention broke out on the other side of the British Indian empire. The haughty court of Ava had for years treated the Company's resident or ambassador with contumely, and the mission was at last withdrawn. Ever, according to a common Oriental failing, treating caution and reserve as weakness, the Burmese attacked British merchant vessels, and outraged the Company's territories. The effects of these injuries fell

heavily on peaceable Hindu merchants and peasants, as they increased rapidly under impunity; and the Indian government, however unwillingly, were obliged to act. At the close of 1851, Commodore Lambert was sent to Rangoon, whence these outrages emanated. The governor was dismissed, and reparation professed, but the British authorities appeared to be so very readily satisfied, that the Burmese seemed to repent of compliance, and the new governor became more insulting than his predecessor. Some officers sent from the expedition to confer with him, were told that he was asleep, and that they must wait outside-a trifling matter in itself, but in Oriental usages, an indication of insult and defiance, which it would have only excited the Burmese to more preposterous rashness to have passed over. The mouths of the Irrawaddy were declared to be under blockade, and all who claimed. British protection in Rangoon were removed. Unwillingly, and with every warning to the king of Ava to retract while it was yet time, the Indian government under Lord Dalhousie prepared for war. Martaban, Rangoon, and Prome, were successively taken. At length, in November, 1852, after the troops had suffered severely from the climate, Pegu surrendered. The district was then annexed to the Company's dominions, and the king of Ava, who could not be brought to reason by any more moderate course, submitted with Oriental grace to the clemency and magnanimity of the British power.

By an act passed in 1853, some alterations were made in the constitution of the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Their tendency was to bring that powerful and peculiar body closer to the character of responsible administrators of public business, and to destroy the vestiges of the old system, which made the function of a ruler in India, the counterpart of a privilege to enrich himself and others according to degrees of consanguinity or claims of friendship.

HE shock occasioned to the British colonial system by the severance of the principal Atlantic colonies was naturally of a kind not to be speedily overcome; but in the end, it was acknowledged to be, to all appearance, a fortunate event for the progress of mankind, and it taught more than one useful lesson to the imperial government. In the first place, the public who had imbibed the fallacy that the possession of colonies is essential to the maintenance of British commerce, and that no amount of life and money could be too great to be expended in the preservation of this source of prosperity, found that the United States, when their government was settled and enterprise revived, made much more rapid advances in their commercial dealings with England than they were ever likely to have made as dependencies. She thus learned the valuable truth that it was the diffusion of her enterprising people abroad that created for her customers at the ends of the earth; not by retaining them in dependence. The object of colonization, therefore, in later times has been. chiefly to afford encouragement and protection to those who have chosen to emigrate to new fields of labor, leaving the connection of the colony with the parent empire rather a matter of voluntary arrangement, so long as it suits the interest of both parties, than a rule to be rigidly enforced at whatever cost.

The oldest of the prosperous colonies are the cluster of states in North America-the Canadas, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the territory of the Hudson's Bay Company. Occasional discord has arisen among these, and especially in the Canadas, from differences in the origin and character of the

inhabitants. The French of Lower Canada mingle little with the British, and love their own old customs; untempted by the active and aggrandizing propensities of their neighbors, they are content to cultivate their small ancestral holdings. They retain their old peculiar feudal tenures, and it is a remarkable instance of the conservative spirit of British administration-of its tendency to keep as it is whatever is admitted to be good by those concerned, that the inhabitants of Lower Canada hold their lands under that Coutume de Paris so long swept from effective existence in its native France. These small holders elected a popular parliament, which was long at variance with the legislative council, chosen by the crown, and consisting generally of Englishmen, who had few sympathies in common with the French inhabitants. In 1832 and '35, when these disputes grew more bitter, a controversy very similar in appearance arose between the popular and the executive in Upper Canada. In 1836 the British parliament having passed specific resolutions repul- . sive of the demands of the assembly of Lower Canada, an insurrection broke out, which M. Papineau, who had been speaker in the House of Assembly, was charged with instigating. It was attended by insurrectionary movements, less extensive, in the upper province. Both were suppressed without much difficulty, and the Earl of Durham was sent out as a special commissioner, accompanied by Mr. Charles Buller, to report on the proper policy to be adopted towards these colonies. It was in consequence of the views thus suggested, that by an act passed in 1839, the colonies were united under a governor-general, with a legislative council and a legislative assembly, to which each province contributes

forty-two members. Gradually any inequalities of which the inhabitants of the American colonies could complain, were removed; and practically they differ little from independent nations; owning in common with the United Kingdom the sovereignty of her majesty.

In the West Indian islands, once proverbial as the birthplace of rapidly made fortunes, defects have been at work not so easily susceptible of a

cure.

The influence of slavery has there left its taint, not to be eradicated; for what made the land so valuable, was the privilege of exacting the labor of others, and since the enforced labor has departed, the wealth has gone with it. When the great measure of emancipation was passed in 1834, parliament resolving that, as the existence of slavery was the nation's act, the nation should pay for its removal, the sum of twenty million pounds was virtually paid to the West Indian proprietors, as compensation for the loss of the forced labor. It is said to have been totally inadequate; and such a complaint has naturally suggested the enormous extent of the value of the labor compulsorily exacted under the unjust system.

When Britain was establishing her free trade policy, the planters claimed a continuation of the protective duty on their sugar and other commodities, on the plea that otherwise they could not compete with those countries where slavery subsisted and labor was compulsory. This created much discussion, and the national abhorrence of slavery gave the plea some hold on the public mind. But it was well shown, that the English could not make their trade the means of regulating the moral conduct of mankind; that any regulation they could make requiring free labor for foreign sugar would be defeated; and that the practical means of diminishing slavery throughout the world were of a different kind. Accordingly, a series of levelling operations on the duties on colonial produce, chiefly applicable to the staple article of sugar, came to a conclusion in 1854, when they were equalized.

While the tropical colonies have thus rather decayed than increased, great sources of colonial enterprise have opened up in those temperate and salubrious regions which are deemed suitable emigration fields for the population of the English empire. In the great Australian continent to which, over eighty years ago, a few of the criminal refuse of

the English population were removed, as to another world, where they would be apart from the fellowbeings they contaminated, there is now a population of more than two millions. But the extent of the progress of the Australian colonies is not to be estimated simply by numbers, since the society of such a country contains few unproductive members, and nearly all are going onward in industrious productiveness and wealth. When it was found that the vast grassy districts round the edge of this island continent were adapted for other inhabitants besides gangs of convicts, they were occupied as sheep or cattle runs, and a sort of pastoral aristocracy spread themselves far over the available districts, who received the name of squatters, because, like the poor wanderers in America who built their solitary huts beyond the range of settled property, they occupied the soil without any specific title. The British government excited much unpopularity among them by laying a tax or rent on temporary occupancy, and a price on permanent possession, and prohibiting the acquisition of great territories by occupancy, or by fictitious purchase from the natives. These arrangements, extremely unpopular among the capitalist aristocracy, were adopted in pursuance of an old policy of the British government, which has never countenanced her subjects in the establishment of independent settlements, neither controlled nor protected by the mother country. As the converse of that protection which is afforded whenever there is an inducement to extensive colonization, British laws and British administration must extend, and the initial step towards them is an adjustment of the ownership of the territory. In such a country as Australia, indeed, this was the first object of the law of civil rights and obligations; since to protect the liberty and general rights of the poorer emigrants, it was necessary that the law should extend over the territory of their rich and powerful employers.

the source of its greatest vicissitudes. In South Australia a settler, while trivially employed in searching for a lost bullock or some similar occupation, observed and picked up a green stone, which a scientific friend found to be copper ore. The mineral riches of which it was the index raised the value of some allotments from less than a hundred to several thousands of pounds, and the copper mines opened in the province were a source of vast wealth. But the productiveness of the copper mines of South Australia was forgotten in the brilliant results of the discovery of gold in the mountain regions near Melbourne in the year 1851. The ever-attractive pursuit of gold digging has rapidly increased the population of the Australian colonies, and created a trade with the home country, in the course of which a large amount of bullion has been remitted. But the exciting character of the pursuit has been attended with many disastrous reactionary effects.

In the same southern hemisphere, two islands about the same in extent as Great Britain, and occupying a nearly similar position towards the opposite pole, have attracted much interest and attention since the days of Captain Cook, and are known by the name of New Zealand. Their inhabitants, not very numerous, were ingenious and clever, but it is beyond doubt that until a very recent date they were cannibals. As it seemed that these fertile islands were to be abandoned to deserters from the South Sea whaling vessels, to escaped convicts, or to any European power choosing to intimate possession of them, a company of able men with ambitious designs resolved to form a British empire there independent of the crown. The government, interfering on the principle already mentioned, annulled their bargains with the native chiefs, by which they obtained provinces for webs of red cloth or consignments of muskets and gunpowder. After a complex inquiry, an adjustment was made of the interests of the natives, the professing purchasers,

and the crown; and from 1839, when the islands were formally attached to the British dominions, downwards, the small settlements established in them have been making progress in wealth and population.

After North America, Australia, and New Zealand, the principal British emigration colonies have been those of Northern Africa. They gathered round the town and colony of the Cape of Good Hope, taken from the Dutch in 1795. The Cape has been chiefly known as the pleasant resting place of the travellers from Britain to India, although, soon after the Treaty of Vienna, it was selected as the place to which, when a project was entertained for expatriating a portion of the turbulent population of Britain, they were to be sent as emigrants; but it was not found that those who were restless and idle in Britain became patient and laborious in a new soil which demanded hard labor.

In the abolition, in 1834, of the right of any British subject to keep slaves, the Dutch farmers of the Cape found a signal grievance, and from that time they became troublesome and dangerous. A portion of them indignantly left the territory where they were subject to an interference which they counted tyrannical, and migrated across the mountain ranges, northwards, complaining that they were still followed by British interference. When emigration began to set towards Southern Africa, considerable territories, including the extensive alluvial plains of Natal, were added to the colony. But the Caffres and other native African tribes, by a long contest on its borders, rendered it for several years a territory which it was not the policy of the British government to enlarge-if it should not even be restricted. After a costly war the Southern African colonies were left at peace. The few petty British settlements in other parts of the African continent, in the Mauritius, the Auckland Islands, Ceylon, and elsewhere, belong rather to the department of geography than of history.

O connect together the various minor threads of history, it is necessary to go back to an early period, and rapidly to trace the separate course held by each of the smaller states, through the political events which took their turn and character from those proceedings of the great powers, the narration of which it would have been inexpedient to interrupt by such digressions.

The crown of SWEDEN, on the death of Charles XII., in 1718, was conferred on his youngest sister, Ulrica Eleanora, by the free election of the states. After the experience of a reign which had greatly exhausted the kingdom, and occasioned the actual loss of many provinces, an opportunity was taken, once more, to limit the kingly power, which had been rendered almost absolute in the reign of Charles XI., and to make the crown elective. The new queen, who was married to the hereditary prince of Hesse Cassel, and who had been. offered the crown in prejudice of the son and representative of her elder sister, the duchess of Holstein Gottorp, readily submitted to the conditions proposed by the states for limiting the royal authority, but soon after her accession resigned the government to her royal consort, who was crowned by the title of Frederick I., 1720.

The new king ruled the nation with little dignity, and less spirit; submitting to every thing imposed

on him by the states, till the government became more republican than monarchical. The Swedish territories were also much reduced during the early part of his reign. In the course of the years 1719, 1720, 1721, Sweden ceded to Hanover, Bremen and Verden; to Prussia, the town of Stettin; and to Russia, Livonia, Esthonia, Ingria, Wiburg, a part of Carelia, and several islands.

It was during this reign that the rival factions of the Hats and Caps had their origin, and which caused great trouble; the former being generally under the influence of France, the latter of Russia. To deter the latter from assisting the queen of Hungary, in the war that took place on the death of Charles VI., France made use of its influence with the Hats, to involve Sweden in hostilities with Russia, for which she was ill prepared, and from which she suffered considerably. Her losses were restored to her in some measure by the Peace of Abo, 1743, but upon the positive condition that Frederick should adopt as his heir and successor, at the instance of the czarina, Adolphus-Frederick, bishop of Lubec, uncle to the duke of Holstein Gottorp, presumptive heir to the throne of Russia, and nephew to the queen of Sweden, who would more willingly have had the latter for her suc

cessor.

Adolphus-Frederick came to the crown in 1751. The same factions which had disturbed the former reign continued to give him trouble, and though he