But what happened in the spread of the white man's power all over the world was that he went here and there, in the first place, and settled, for purposes of trade. We have seen the Portuguese going down the west coast of Africa for slaves and gold and ivory; Spain crossing the Atlantic for the treasures of El Dorado, the supposed city of gold; Portuguese, Dutch, and English going easterly to India, and farther, all to see what they could bring back. They settled. Then they found that, in order to trade peaceably, and with tolerable security, they had to take control of the city or territory in which they settled. That is, in few words, the story of the whole process. The settlements were at first along the coasts, and then gradually extended inland, as the boundaries of the districts already settled were everywhere threatened by the unsettled peoples outside the boundaries. We saw the process in action in the British Empire in India. That is the common story. It is a little varied by the special circumstances of such countries as Australia and parts of South America which favoured the raising of sheep and cattle. There the settlers extended their boundaries not so much for security as to gain more pasture lands. Somewhat thus, then, is the manner in which the white man has been forced, if he would develop the earth so as to afford support for its increasing population, to take this burden on his shoulders. Africa, being so accessible to Europe, was the first of the new countries to which Europeans went trading in their ships. In a very early chapter of the story we have seen that many of the ports along the north coast of Africa, which is the Southern Mediterranean {219} shore, were nests of pirates preying upon the trading shipping. That was a condition of affairs which became more and more intolerable to Europe as the trade increased. It was with the approval of all Europe that the French in 1830 captured and took Algiers, which was the headquarters of the Moorish pirates. They extended that possession over the whole of Algeria till they reached the Turkish possession of Tripoli, which, again, extended to Egypt easterly. [Sidenote: Egypt] Egypt had freed herself from the suzerainty of Turkey about the date, 1830, of France's annexation of Algiers. Under an able ruler she developed her resources and was well governed, but from about 1870 onward, under a far less able successor, both government and finance fell into confusion. In 1876 the British Government acquired by purchase the larger number of the shares in the Suez Canal. As a short cut to India, the Suez Canal was of vital interest to Great Britain. It was of vital interest, too, that the traffic through it should be safe and well conducted. This led to an inquiry into the condition of the Egyptian government, which showed that unless these conditions were bettered it was most unlikely that the Canal would be properly controlled and made safe.