When James I ascended the throne of England, the British Empire was not in existence. The map of the world would have been searched in vain for any settlement of English men on English soil outside of the British Isles. When, less than half a dozen decades later, the third Stuart returned from “his travels,” amidst the acclaims of the nation, it was to become the head of an empire which already encircled the globe. From Newfoundland to the Caribbean, English colonies stretched in a great arc upon islands and mainland, while the Bermudas, equidistant, roughly speaking, from all its parts, formed a strategic centre far out in the Atlantic. Across that ocean, Fort Comantine on the coast of Guinea protected the African slave-trade, and the fortified island of St. Helena was a half-way station for the Indian fleets. Passing around the Cape, the next English possession was Gombroon, on the Persian Gulf; while, still farther east, in India, lay the factories on the Madras and Bombay shores and the Bay of Bengal. Beyond those, again, English traders were permanently established on Sumatra, Java, and the Celebes. Such an imperial structure could not have been raised in less than the allotted three-score years and ten of individual life by a practice wholly tyrannical, or a colonial theory wholly false. The great trans-oceanic empires which were attempted in the seventeenth century by the leading European powers were political phenomena of an absolutely new type. Neither the colonies of the city-states of Greece, nor the slow continental expansion of Rome offered any adequate parallel to the political results of the age of discovery, or any solutions of the problems created.[715] Of those new empires, the English not only has proved the most lasting and the greatest, but has secured, from its very beginning, the largest comparative amount of freedom to the colonists. Assertions have often been made that its development has been unintentional and unconscious; that the English race, as the phrase goes, has peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. This is true only in the sense that the Empire's growth has been slow, normal, and unhurried, and that its strength has lain in the character of the people rather than in any consistent policy of aggression upon the part of their rulers. That it has been unconscious in the sense that it has been unobserved is, of course, disproved by the contemporary literature relating to imperial problems in almost every decade from the sixteenth century to the present day; while the wars of the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were largely caused by trade and colonial questions.[716] Footnote 715: _Cf._ E. A. Freeman, _Greater Greece and Greater Britain_ (London, 1886); C. P. Lucas, _Greater Rome and Greater Britain_ (Oxford, 1912). Footnote 716: J. R. Seeley, _Expansion of England_ (London, 1884), pp. 110 _ff._