no more money on it than she could help, and
sought to avoid the acquisition of new territory, because that meant new
troubles and new outlays.

The views of colonial policy which prevailed in England down till about
1870 were very different from those which most of us now hold. The
statesmen of the last generation accepted that _consilium coercendi
intra terminos imperii_ which, according to Tacitus, Augustus held sound
for an empire less scattered than is that of Britain; they thought that
Britain had already more territory than she could hope to develop and
(in the long run) to govern; and they therefore sought to limit rather
than increase her responsibilities. And they believed, reasoning
somewhat too hastily from the revolt of the North American Colonies,
that as soon as the new English communities to which self-government had
been or was in due course to be granted, reached a certain level of
wealth and population they would demand and receive their independence.
That the fruit would fall off the old tree as soon as it was ripe was
the favourite metaphor employed to convey what nearly all publicists
took to be an obvious truth. No one stated it so trenchantly as Disraeli
when he wrote: "These wretched Colonies will all be independent too in a
few years, and are a millstone round our necks;" but the dogma was
generally accepted by politicians belonging to both the great parties in
the state. Those, moreover, were days in which economy and retrenchment
were popular cries in England, and when it was deemed the duty of a
statesman to reduce as far as possible the burdens of the people.
Expenditure on colonial wars and on the administration of half-settled
districts was odious to the prudent and thrifty contemporaries or
disciples of Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. Accordingly, the chief
aim of British statesmen from 1830 till 1870 was to arrest the tide of
British advance, to acquire as little territory as possible, to leave
restless natives and emigrant Boers entirely to themselves. Desperate
efforts were made to stop the Kafir wars. We can now see that the
tendency--one may almost call it a law of nature--which everywhere over
the world has tempted or forced a strong civilised power to go on
conquering the savage or half-civilised peoples on its borders, the
process that has carried the English all over India and brought the
Russians from the Volga to the Pamirs in one direction and to the mouth
of the Amur in