When the outpouring of Europe into the rest of the world began, the British peoples alone had the habit and instinct of self-government in their very blood and bones. And the result was that, wherever they went, they carried self-government with them. _Every_ colony of British settlers, from the very first, was endowed with self-governing institutions. _No_ colony ever planted by any other nation ever obtained corresponding rights.[1] That is one of the outstanding features of British expansion. In the eighteenth century, and even in the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain herself and the young nations that had sprung from her loins were _almost the only free States existing in the world_. It was because they were free that they throve so greatly. They expanded on their own account, they threw out fresh settlements into the empty lands wherein they were planted, often against the wish of the Mother Country. And this spontaneous growth of vigorous free communities has been one of the principal causes of the immense extension of the British Empire. Now one of the results of the universal existence of self-governing rights in British colonies was that the colonists were far more prompt to resent and resist any improper exercise of authority by the Mother Country than were the settlers in the colonies of other countries, which had no self-governing rights at all. It was this independent spirit, nurtured by self-government, which led to the revolt of the American colonies in 1775, and to the foundation of the United States as an independent nation. In that great controversy an immensely important question was raised, which was new to human history. It was the question whether unity could be combined with the highest degree of freedom; whether it was possible to create a sort of fellowship or brotherhood of free communities, in which each should be master of its own destinies, and yet all combine for common interests. But the question (being so new) was not understood on either side of the Atlantic. Naturally, Britain thought most of the need of maintaining unity; she thought it unfair that the whole burden of the common defence should fall upon her, and she committed many foolish blunders in trying to enforce her view. Equally naturally the colonists thought primarily of their own self-governing rights, which they very justly demanded should be increased rather than restricted. The result was the unhappy war, which broke up the only family of free peoples that had yet existed in the world, and caused a most unfortunate alienation between them, whereby the cause of liberty in the world was greatly weakened.[2]