Before entering upon a review of the events which brought to a violent close the peace which Great Britain had maintained for thirty-nine years with the other European Powers, the present seems a fitting place to give a sketch of salient points in the expansion of British Colonies in various parts of the world--Colonies which, for the greater part, had no existence before Queen Victoria came to the throne. It was in 1858 that the discoveries of gold in British territory, as well as in California, had begun to fill the channels of trade and enrich the manufacturers of the home country in a degree beyond all previous experience. The great Continent of Australia, discovered by Captain Cook in 1770 and by him named New South Wales, was hardly known to people in England during the first forty years of the present century except as a penal settlement, although a number of British emigrants found their way there when the Army and Navy were reduced after the long European wars had come to an end in 1815. But it was not until the gold-fields were discovered in 1851 that the full tide of immigration set in. The growth and development of the European community since that time have been immense. From the original settlement at Botany Bay in 1788 have arisen the States of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Western Australia, each with its separate representative constitution and legislature, and a governor appointed by the Queen. The population, rapidly increasing, already amounts to three millions and a quarter, with an annual export trade of more than £70,000,000. The gold-fields, since their discovery in 1851, have added about £300,000,000 to the wealth of the world, nor is there any near prospect of the supply failing. On the contrary, the newly-opened mines at Coolgardie, in Western Australia, promise to prove the richest field in the whole island. [Illustration: _From a Photograph_} {_by Gregory & Co., Strand._ THE SOUTH BORING MILL AT WOOLWICH ARSENAL. Showing the machinery for boring and rifling heavy ordnance.] New Zealand was first colonised in 1839, though Europeans had settled there as far back as 1814, and in 1841 it was created by letters patent a colony distinct from New South Wales. The chief wealth of this island is pastoral and agricultural, though New Zealand contributes also to the Pactolus flowing north, having exported gold to the value of more than a million sterling in 1895. Tasmania, formerly Van Diemen's Land, is another insular possession of Great Britain in the South Pacific, originally occupied in 1803 as a penal settlement; and the Australasian Dominions of the Crown were completed by the annexation of the Fiji group of islands in 1874, and British New Guinea in 1888. This vast territory, with its almost inexhaustible mineral wealth and fertility, may be said with almost literal accuracy to be the peculiar creation of the reign of Queen Victoria. [Illustration: _Walker & Boutall sc._