enterprise are in their nature, together with a
certain love of free-breathing, adventure and discovery. Now look at the
map, and observe how small is the circumference of the British Isles.
"Our Empire has no geographical continuity like the Russian Empire; it
is that larger Venice with no narrow streets, but with the sea itself
for a high-road. It is bound together by a moral continuity alone." What
are our Sons to do? Must our immense population be debarred from passing
through these ocean tracts to lands where there are great uninhabited
wastes capable of cultivation? What shall we do with our sons and our
daughters innumerable, as the ways become overcrowded in the mother
land, and energies have not the outlets needful to develop them. Shall
we place legal restrictions on marriage, or on the birth of children, or
prescribe that no family shall exceed a certain number? You are
shocked,--naturally. It follows then that some members of our large
British families must cross the seas and seek work and bread elsewhere.

The highest and lowest, representing all ranks, engage in this kind of
initial colonization. Our present Prime Minister, a "younger son," went
out in his youth,--as others of his class have done,--with his pickaxe,
to Australia, to rank for a time among "diggers" until called home by
the death of the elder son, the heir to the title and estate. This
necessity and this taste for wandering and exploring has helped in some
degree to form the independence of character of our men, and also to
strengthen rather than to weaken the ties of affection and kinship with
the Motherland. Many men, "nobly born and gently nurtured," have thus
learned self-dependence, to endure hardships, and to share manual labour
with the humblest; and such an experience does not work for evil. Then
when communities have been formed, some sort of government has been
necessitated. An appeal is made to the Mother Country, and her offspring
have grown up more or less under her regard and care, until
self-government has developed itself.

The great blot on this necessary and natural expansion is the record
(from time to time) of the displacement of native tribes by force and
violence, when their rights seemed to interfere with the interests of
the white man. Of such action we have had to repent in the past, and we
repent more deeply than ever now when our responsibilities towards
natives races have been brought with startling clearness befo