his great minister of finance, became the prophet of Mercantilism
to whom all Europe looked for guidance.

The entire foreign policy of Cromwell was a practical
application of the Mercantile System. It was invariably directed

against the rich rival Republic of Holland. For the Dutch
shippers, as the common-carriers of the merchandise of Europe,

had certain leanings towards free-trade and therefore had
to be destroyed at all cost.

It will be easily understood how such a system must affect
the colonies. A colony under the Mercantile System became

merely a reservoir of gold and silver and spices, which was
to be tapped for the benefit of the home country. The Asiatic,

American and African supply of precious metals and the raw
materials of these tropical countries became a monopoly of

the state which happened to own that particular colony. No
outsider was ever allowed within the precincts and no native

was permitted to trade with a merchant whose ship flew a
foreign flag.

Undoubtedly the Mercantile System encouraged the development
of young industries in certain countries where there

never had been any manufacturing before. It built roads
and dug canals and made for better means of transportation.

It demanded greater skill among the workmen and gave the
merchant a better social position, while it weakened the power

of the landed aristocracy.
On the other hand, it caused very great misery. It made

the natives in the colonies the victims of a most shameless
exploitation. It exposed the citizens of the home country to an

even more terrible fate. It helped in a great measure to turn
every land into an armed camp and divided the world into little

bits of territory, each working for its own direct benefit,
while striving at all times to destroy the power of its neighbours

and get hold of their treasures. It laid so much stress
upon the importance of owning wealth that ``being rich'' came

to be regarded as the sole virtue of the average citizen. Economic
systems come and go like the fashions in surgery and

in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the
Mercantile System was discarded in favor of a system of free

and open competition. At least, so I have been told.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
EUROPE HEARD STRANGE REPORTS OF

SOMETHING WHICH HAD HAPPENED IN
THE WILDERNESS; OF THE NORTH AMERICAN

CONTINENT. THE DESCENDANTS
OF THE MEN WHO HAD PUNISHED KING

CHARLES FOR HIS INSISTENCE UPON HIS
``DIVINE RIGHTS'' ADDED A NEW CHAPTER

TO THE OLD STORY OF THE STRUGGLE
FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

FOR the sake of convenience, we ought to go back a
few centuries and repeat the early history of the great

struggle for colonial possessions.
As soon as a number of European nations had been

created upon the new basis of national or dynastic interests,
that is to say, during and immediately after the Thirty

Years War, their rulers, backed up by the capital of
their merchants and the ships of their trading companies,

continued the fight for more territory in Asia, Africa and America.
The Spaniards and the Portuguese had been exploring the

Indian Sea and the Pacific Ocean for more than a century ere
Holland and England appeared upon the stage. This proved

an advantage to the latter. The first rough work had already
been done. What is more, the earliest navigators had so often

made themselves unpopular with the Asiatic and American and
African natives that both the English and the Dutch were

welcomed as friends and deliverers. We cannot claim any
superior virtues for either of these two races. But they were

merchants before everything else. They never allowed religious
considerations to interfere with their practical common sense.

During their first relations with weaker races, all European
nations have behaved with shocking brutality. The English and

the Dutch, however, knew better where to draw the dine. Provided
they got their spices and their gold and silver and their taxes,

they were willing to let the native live as it best pleased him.
It was not very difficult for them therefore to establish

themselves in the richest parts of the world. But as soon as
this had been accomplished, they began to fight each other for

still further possessions. Strangely enough, the colonial wars
were never settled in the colonies themselves. They were decided

three thousand miles away by the navies of the contending
countries. It is one of the most interesting principles of ancient

and modern warfare (one of the few reliable laws of
history) that ``the nation which commands the sea is also the

nation which commands the land.'' So far this law has never
failed to work, but the modern airplane may have changed it.

In the eighteenth century, however, there were no flying machines
and it was the British navy which gained for England

her vast American and Indian and African colonies.
The series of naval wars between England and Holland in

the seventeenth century does not interest us here. It ended as
all such encounters between hopelessly ill-matched powers will

end. But the warfare between England and France (her other
rival) is of greater importance to us, for while the superior

British fleet in the end defeated the French navy, a great deal
of the preliminary fighting was done on our own American

continent. In this vast country, both France and England
claimed everything which had been discovered and a lot more

which the eye of no white man had ever seen. In 1497 Cabot
had landed in the northern part of America and twenty-seven

years later, Giovanni Verrazano had visited these coasts. Cabot
had flown the English flag. Verrazano had sailed under the

French flag. Hence both England and France proclaimed
themselves the owners of the entire continent.

During the seventeenth century, some ten small English
colonies had been founded between Maine and the Carolinas.

They were usually a haven of refuge for some particular sect
of English dissenters, such as the Puritans, who in the year

1620 went to New England, or the Quakers, who settled in
Pennsylvania in 1681. They were small frontier communities,

nestling close to the shores of the ocean, where people had
gathered to make a new home and begin life among happier

surroundings, far away from royal supervision and interference.
The French colonies, on the other hand, always remained

a possession of the crown. No Huguenots or Protestants were
allowed in these colonies for fear that they might contaminate

the Indians with their dangerous Protestant doctrines and
would perhaps interfere with the missionary work of the Jesuit

fathers. The English colonies, therefore, had been founded
upon a much healthier basis than their French neighbours and

rivals. They were an expression of the commercialenergy of
the English middle classes, while the French settlements were

inhabited by people who had crossed the ocean as servants of the
king and who expected to return to Paris at the first possible chance.

Politically, however, the position of the English colonies
was far from satisfactory. The French had discovered the

mouth of the Saint Lawrence in the sixteenth century. From
the region of the Great Lakes they had worked their way southward,

had descended the Mississippi and had built several fortifications
along the Gulf of Mexico. After a century of exploration,

a line of sixty French forts cut off the English settlements
along the Atlantic seaboard from the interior.

The English land grants, made to the different colonial
companies had given them ``all land from sea to sea.'' This

sounded well on paper, but in practice, British territory
ended where the line of French fortifications began. To break

through this barrier was possible but it took both men and
money and caused a series of horrible border wars in which

both sides murdered their white neighbours, with the help of the
Indian tribes.

As long as the Stuarts had ruled England there had been
no danger of war with France. The Stuarts needed the Bourbons

in their attempt to establish an autocratic form of government
and to break the power of Parliament. But in 1689 the

last of the Stuarts had disappeared from British soil and Dutch
William, the great enemy of Louis XIV succeeded him. From

that time on, until the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France and
England fought for the possession of India and North America.

During these wars, as I have said before, the English navies
invariably beat the French. Cut off from her colonies, France

lost most of her possessions, and when peace was declared, the
entire North American continent had fallen into British hands

and the great work of exploration of Cartier, Champlain, La
Salle, Marquette and a score of others was lost to France.

Only a very small part of this vast domain was inhabited.
From Massachusetts in the north, where the Pilgrims (a sect

of Puritans who were very intolerant and who therefore had
found no happiness either in Anglican England or Calvinist

Holland) had landed in the year 1620, to the Carolinas and
Virginia (the tobacco-raising provinces which had been founded

entirely for the sake of profit), stretched a thin line of
sparsely populated territory. But the men who lived in this

new land of fresh air and high skies were very different from
their brethren of the mother country. In the wilderness they

had learnedindependence and self-reliance. They were the
sons of hardy and energetic ancestors. Lazy and timourous

people did not cross the ocean in those days. The American
colonists hated the restraint and the lack of breathing space

which had made their lives in the old country so very unhappy.
They meant to be their own masters. This the ruling classes

of England did not seem to understand. The government annoyed
the colonists and the colonists, who hated to be bothered