As we know, there was another power besides the French with which Great Britain came into collision in the East--the Dutch. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century there had been much ill-will in Holland against England. Holland only a little while before had been the chief naval power in the Northern seas. Her ships had even come conquering and destroying far up the Thames. And now the Dutch saw that supremacy gradually taken from them; the British Government actually passing resolutions to restrain their free right of traffic on the high seas. And at the same time Great Britain was taking much, and constantly more and more, of the carrying trade away from Holland; Great Britain was trading more and more, on her own behalf and on that of other nations, with the East; Great Britain was bringing to the West, from her ever-growing Eastern possessions, the produce of the East which used to be brought from the Dutch colonies in Dutch ships; some of these colonies and trading settlements themselves were being taken from the Dutch by the British; and where the Dutch rights were not very firmly established British traders set up settlements to compete with them. A state of actual war between the countries existed from 1780 to 1784. The terms of the treaty which put an end to that active warfare could not put an end to their constant trade rivalry in the East in which Great Britain was usually the gainer and Holland the loser. By the date of the great convulsions caused by the French Revolution we find Holland so diminished in power as to be ready to do the bidding of Great Britain and of Prussia. It was thus that Britain's star rose higher and {149} brighter in the East even as it sank in the West, and if we look to the far southern quarter of the world stage we find it in the ascendant there also, for in 1787 New Zealand was declared a British possession, and that declaration was followed in the next year by the colonisation of New South Wales. The beginning of the British occupation of the west coast of Africa dates from the same time. On every side therefore, except along that eastern fringe of the American continent where the colonists had gloriously won their independence, the British, the Anglo-Saxons, were extending their sway. [Sidenote: Poyning's Act Repealed]