INTRODUCTORY

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left to your own satisfaction.” It is true, that running counter to this main current, we find under Charles II. and James II. a narrow stream of Royal interference. The family failing of the Stuart dynasty was to reward their favourites by putting their hands in their neighbours’ pockets, and the American Colonies were too tempting a sheep not to be shorn. But, serious as such action might have been in its consequences, the revolution of 1688 came too soon for those consequences to happen, and henceforth the formula, as I have stated it, holds the field. The great wars of the earlier half of the eighteenth century were trade wars : Ireland, the Colonies,

War and Peace, were but pawns in the game, which was to win Great Britain commercial supremacy. From the eco­nomic point of view of the eighteenth century the policy may have been a wise one, but, as worked out, it involved the consequence that the interests of the Colonies were to be always sacrificed to those of the Mother country. So accus­tomed, however, had the Colonies become to this theory, and perhaps so easy were the opportunities for evasion, that pro­bably things might have gone on for long in the same manner, had not a crisis been precipitated by causes, with which we shall deal later on.

When all allowance has been made for the special causes of the American revolution, it must still be admitted that the spirit which they evoked had been engendered by the galling yoke of the Merpantile System. Monopoly brought forth its fruit, and that fruit was the disruption of the British Empire.

Even when she had lost her American Colonies, England did not at first alter her commercial policy. At the same time, it was in practice carefully safeguarded, so that the interests of the Colonies should not suffer prejudice. Generally, on colonial questions, the note of the period is one of extreme timidity.

To smother popular aspirations with kindness, and gladly to pay the piper, so that the Colonies might not ask to choose the tune, was for a time the policy of English statesmen.

Gradually, however, it begins to be recognised that a wholly (3.) The new way of regarding the Empire is coming into being. P eriod of Turgot had long ago said that Colonies were like fruit which, coloniza-' 0