face of difficulties vastly greater than any with which the
Americans had ever had to contend. They had been alienated from
Britain, the one great free state of Europe, and had been persuaded by
their reading of their own experience that she was a tyrant-power; and
they thus found it hard to recognise her for what, with all her faults,
she genuinely was--the mother of free institutions in the modern world,
the founder and shaper of their own prized liberties. All these things
combined to persuade the great new republic that she not only might,
but ought to, stand aloof from the political problems of the rest of
the world, and take no interest in its concerns. This attitude, the
natural product of the conditions, was to last for more than a century,
and was to weaken greatly the cause of liberty in the world.

Although the most obvious features of the half-century following the
great British triumph of 1763 were the revolt of the American colonies
and the apparently universal collapse of the imperialist ambitions of
the European nations, a more deeply impressive feature of the period
was that, in spite of the tragedy and humiliation of the great
disruption, the imperial impetus continued to work potently in Britain,
alone among the European nations; and to such effect that at the end of
the period she found herself in control of a new empire more extensive
than that which she had lost, and far more various in its character.
Having failed to solve one great imperial problem, she promptly
addressed herself to a whole series of others even more difficult, and
for these she was to find more hopeful solutions.

When the American revolt began, the Canadian colonies to the north were
in an insecure and unorganised state. On the coast, in Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland, there was a small British population; but the riverine
colony of Canada proper, with its centre at Quebec, was still purely
French, and was ruled by martial law. Accustomed to a despotic system,
and not yet reconciled to the British supremacy, the French settlers
were obviously unready for self-government. But the Quebec Act of 1774,
by securing the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion and of
French civil law, ensured the loyalty of the French; and this Act is
also noteworthy as the first formal expression of willingness to admit
or even welcome the existence, within the hospitable limits of the
Empire, of a variety of types of civilisation. In the new Britis