Equally fallacious with the view that England failed because wrong-doing never prospers, is, or was, the view that the independence of the United States was wholly a loss to England and wholly a gain to the colonists. What would have happened if the revolting provinces had not made good their revolt must be matter of speculation, but it is difficult to believe that, if the United States had remained under the British flag, Australia would ever have become a British colony. There is a limit to every political system and every empire, and, with the whole of North America east of the Mississippi for her own, it is not likely that England would have taken in hand the exploiting of a new continent. At any rate it is significant that, within four years of the date of the treaty which recognized the independence of the United States, the first English colonists were sent to Australia. The success or failure of a nation or a race in the field of colonization must not be measured by the number of square miles of the earth’s surface which the home government owns or claims at any given time. To judge aright, we must revert to the older and truer view of colonizing as a planting process, replenishing the earth and subduing it. If the result of the severance of the United States from their mother country was to sow the English seed in other lands, then it may be argued that the defeat of England by her own children was not wholly a loss to the mother country. Nor was it wholly a gain to the United States. Such at least must be the view of Englishmen who believe in the worth of their country, in its traditions, in the character of the nation, in its political, social, moral, and religious tendencies. The necessary result of the separation was to alienate the American colonists from what was English; to breed generations in the belief that what England did must be wrong, that the enemies of England must be right; to strengthen in English-speaking communities the elements which were opposed to the land and to the race from which they had sprung. With English errors and weaknesses there passed away, in course of years and in some measure, English sources of strength; the sober thinking, the slow broadening out, the perpetually leavening sense of responsibility. Had the American provinces remained under the British flag it is difficult to see why they should not have been in the essence as free and independent as they now are; it is at least conceivable that their commercial and industrial prosperity would have been as great; assuredly, for good or for evil, they would have been more English. [Sidenote: Shortcomings of the English in foreign and colonial policy.]