rench
government underwent a like revulsion of feeling as regarded India, and
in 1754 recalled Dupleix in mid-career, in order to quiet the
remonstrances of Great Britain. It would be irrelevant, were it not
signally instructive, to remark that both nations passed under the
influence of the same ideas a hundred years later. In the middle of the
nineteenth century, the preponderant expression in England was that the
colonies were unprofitable incumbrances, and, if occasion arose, should
be encouraged to separate rather than urged to remain; while France,
through whatever motive, at a critical moment abandoned the field in
Egypt, by refusing joint action. It is, therefore, probably the result
of a true national genius, asserting itself above temporary aberrations,
that the close of the nineteenth century saw France wholly excluded,
politically, from Egypt, as she had before been from India, and Great
Britain involved in an expensive war, the aim of which was the
preservation of the imperial system, in the interest not only of the
mother country, but of the colonies as well.

And that it was in the interest of her colonies was precisely the all
important part which differentiated the Seven Years War in its day, and
the South African War in our day, from the struggle, so disastrous to
the Empire, that is known as the American Revolution. "There is no
repose for our thirteen colonies," wrote Franklin a hundred and fifty
years ago, "so long as the French are masters of Canada." "There is no
repose for British colonists in South Africa," was the virtual assertion
of Natal and the Cape Colony, "so long as the Boer political methods are
maintained in the Transvaal with the pledged support of the Orange Free
State." Irreconcilable differences of political and social systems, when
brought into close contact, involve irrepressible conflict, and admit of
no lasting solution except the subjugation and consequent submersion of
one or the other.

Such a final settlement was attained in North America and in India by
the Seven Years War. The full results thereof even we of this day have
not yet seen; for who can yet predict the effect upon the question of
the Pacific and of China, that by this war was assured the dominance of
the Anglo-Saxon political and legal tradition over the whole American
continent north of the tropics, and that the same tradition shall, for a
future yet indeterminate, decisively shape the course of India and the