Such a complication, it is safe to say, never existed in any other region of the world, or in any other record of colonization and expanding empire. That government was possible at all reflects great credit upon the administrators, and shows that, as years passed on, the Colonial Office had at last risen to the level of its responsibilities, had grasped the true spirit and the absolute necessity of Imperial growth, and had learned that the men in charge of distant regions must have the confidence of rulers at home and a policy with some degree of continuity in plan and principle and detail. What really caused this change in policy and the resulting expansion of Great Britain in South Africa is an interesting historical question. The position of late years has been so different from the developments of the fifties and from the dominating ideas and ideals of the Manchester School of thought that some explanation is necessary. The discovery of gold and diamonds does not afford an adequate one. There was none of either in Basutoland, or Zululand, or Bechuanaland, or Tongaland, or in the great regions which the Chartered Company had acquired and held under the Crown. Much was due to the slow but sure subsidence of the Little Englanders after 1872, when Mr. Disraeli in a famous speech expressed the first formal antagonism of a great party, as a whole, to any further playing with questions and principles of Imperial unity. More was due to the sustained Imperialism of his succeeding Ministry, to the purchase of the Suez Canal shares and increasing public appreciation of the value of the Cape in connection with the route to India, and to the growing popular comprehension of the value of India itself. More still was due to the rise of a new school of British statesmen, in all parties, who had become instinct with the spirit and pride of Empire and inheritors of the sentiment which Disraeli in his later years, and under his new designation of Lord Beaconsfield, so strenuously propagated. The Imperial Federation League, formed in 1884 with strong support from leaders such as the Earl of Rosebery, Mr. W. H. Smith, Mr. Edward Stanhope, Mr. Edward Gibson, Mr. W. E. Forster, Sir John Lubbock, Sir Lyon Playfair and Lord Tennyson, constituted a most important educative influence. Writers like Froude and Dilke and Seeley took the place of philosophic disintegrationists of the Molesworth and Cornwall Lewis school; whilst Radical politicians of the Chamberlain and Cowan type came gradually into touch upon this subject with aristocratic Imperialists such as Salisbury, Carnarvon and Rosebery. [Sidenote: Cecil Rhodes and Expansion]