only woke the interest of
Englishmen in these far-off islands, in their mighty reaches of deep
blue waters, where lands as big as Britain die into mere specks on the
huge expanse, in the coral-reefs, the palms, the bread-fruit of Tahiti,
the tattooed warriors of New Zealand, the gum-trees and kangaroos of the
Southern Continent, but they familiarized them more and more with the
sense of possession, with the notion that this strange world of wonders
was their own, and that a new earth was open in the Pacific for the
expansion of the English race.

[Sidenote: Britain and its Empire.]

Cook in fact pointed out the fitness of New Holland for English
settlement; and projects of its occupation, and of the colonization of
the Pacific islands by English emigrants, became from that moment, in
however vague and imperfect a fashion, the policy of the English crown.
Statesmen and people alike indeed felt the change in their country's
attitude. Great as Britain seemed to Burke, it was now in itself "but
part of a great empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the
furthest limits of the east and the west." Its parliament no longer
looked on itself as the local legislature of England and Scotland; it
claimed, in the words of the same great political thinker, "an imperial
character, in which as from the throne of heaven she superintends all
the several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all,
without annihilating any." Its people, steeped in the commercial ideas
of the time, saw in the growth of such a dominion, the monopoly of
whose trade was reserved to the mother country, a source of boundless
wealth. The trade with America alone was, in 1772, within less than
half-a-million of being equal to what England carried on with the whole
world at the beginning of the century. So rapid had been its growth that
since the opening of the eighteenth century it had risen from a value of
five hundred thousand pounds to one of six millions, and whereas the
colonial trade then formed but a twelfth part of English commerce, it
had now mounted to a third. To guard and preserve so vast and lucrative
a dominion, to vindicate its integrity alike against outer foes and
inner disaffection, to strengthen its unity by drawing closer the bonds,
whether commercial or administrative, which linked its various parts to
the mother country, became from this moment not only the aim of British
statesmen, but the resolve of the British peopl