The islands are now the centre of an Empire which to some minds seems more important than the islands themselves. An empire it is called, but the name is really applicable only to India. The relation of England to her free colonies is not in the proper sense of the term imperial, while her relation to such dependencies as Gibraltar and Malta is military alone. Colonization is the natural and entirely beneficent result of general causes, obvious enough and already mentioned, including that power of self-government, fostered by the circumstances of the colonizing country, which made the character and destiny of New England so different from those of New France. Equally natural was the choice of the situation for the original colonies on the shore of the New World. The foundation of the Australian Colonies, on the other hand, was determined by political accident, compensation for the loss of the American Colonies being sought on the other side of the globe. It will perhaps be thought hereafter that the quarrel with New England was calamitous in its consequences as well as in itself, since it led to the diversion of British emigration from America, where it supplied, in a democracy of mixed but not uncongenial races, the necessary element of guidance and control, to Australia, where, as there must be a limit to its own multiplication, it may hereafter have to struggle for mastery with swarming multitudes of Chinese, almost as incurable of incorporation with it as the negro. India and the other conquered dependencies are the fruits of strength as a war power at sea combined with weakness on land. Though not so generally noticed, the second of these two factors has not been less operative than the first. Chatham attacked France in her distant dependencies when he had failed to make any impression on her own coasts. Still more clearly was Chatham's son, the most incapable of war ministers, driven to the capture of sugar islands by his inability to take part, otherwise than by subsidies, in the decisive struggle on the Continental fields. This may deserve the attention of those who do not think it criminal to examine the policy of Empire. Outlying pawns picked up by a feeble chessplayer merely because he could not mate the king do not at first sight necessarily commend themselves as invaluable possessions. Carthage and Venice were merely great commercial cities, which, when they entered on a career of conquest, were compelled at once to form armies of mercenaries, and to incur all the evil consequences by which the employment of those vile and fatal instruments of ambition is attended. England being, not a commercial city, but a nation, and a nation endowed with the highest military qualities, has escaped the fell necessity except in the case of India; and India, under the reign of the Company, and even for some time after its legal annexation to the Crown, was regarded and treated almost as a realm in another planet, with an