n this tremendous period. As a result of the
participation of Holland in the war on the side of France, the Dutch
colony at the Cape of Good Hope was occupied by Britain. It was first
occupied in 1798, restored for a brief period in 1801, reoccupied in
1806, and finally retained under the treaty settlement of 1815. The
Cape was, in fact, the most important acquisition secured to Britain by
that treaty; and it is worth noting that while the other great powers
who had joined in the final overthrow of Napoleon helped themselves
without hesitation to immense and valuable territories, Britain, which
had alone maintained the struggle from beginning to end without
flagging, actually paid the sum of 2,000,000 pounds to Holland as a
compensation for this thinly peopled settlement. She retained it mainly
because of its value as a calling-station on the way to India. But it
imposed upon her an imperial problem of a very difficult kind. As in
Canada, she had to deal here with an alien race of European origin and
proud traditions; but this racial problem was accentuated by the
further problem of dealing with a preponderant and growing negro
population. How were justice, peace, liberty, and equality of rights to
be established in such a field?

It was, then, an astonishing new empire which had grown up round
Britain during the period when the world was becoming convinced that
colonial empires were not worth acquiring, because they could not last.
It was an empire of continents or sub-continents--Canada, Australia,
India, South Africa--not to speak of innumerable scattered islands and
trading-posts dotted over all the seas of the world, which had either
survived from an earlier period, or been acquired in order that they
might serve as naval bases. It was spread round the whole globe; it
included almost every variety of soil, products, and climate; it was
inhabited by peoples of the most varying types; it presented an
infinite variety of political and racial problems. In 1825 this empire
was the only extra-European empire of importance still controlled by
any of the historic imperial powers of Western Europe. And at the
opening of the nineteenth century, when extra-European empires seemed
to have gone out of fashion, the greatest of all imperial questions was
the question whether the political capacity of the British peoples,
having failed to solve the comparatively simple problem of finding a
mode of organisation which could hold tog