the prevalence of these views is quite inconsistent with the idea
that Britain was deliberately following a policy of expansion and
annexation in this age. Men who held these opinions (and they were to
be found in every party) regarded with resentment and alarm every
addition to what seemed to them the useless burdens assumed by the
nation, and required to be satisfied that every new annexation of
territory was not merely justifiable, but inevitable.

A second factor which contributed to the change of attitude towards the
colonies was the growing influence of a new school of economic thought,
the school of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. Their ideas had begun
to affect national policy as early as the twenties, when Huskisson took
the first steps on the way to free trade. In the thirties the bulk of
the trading and industrial classes had become converts to these ideas,
which won their definite victories in the budgets of Sir Robert Peel,
1843-46, and in those of his disciple Gladstone. The essence of this
doctrine, as it affected colonial policy, was that the regulation of
trade by government, which had been the main object of the old colonial
policy, brought no advantages, but only checked its free development.
And for a country in the position which Britain then occupied, this was
undeniably true; so overwhelming was her preponderance in world-trade
that every current seemed to set in her direction, and the removal of
artificial barriers, originally designed to train the current towards
her shores, allowed it to follow its natural course. The only
considerable opposition to this body of economic doctrine came from
those who desired to protect British agriculture; but this motive had
(at this period) no bearing upon colonial trade. The triumph of the
doctrine of free trade meant that the principal motive which had
earlier led to restrictions upon the self-government of the
colonies--the desire to secure commercial advantages for the
mother-country--was no longer operative. The central idea of the old
colonial system was destroyed by the disciples of Adam Smith; and there
no longer remained any apparent reason why the mother-country should
desire to control the fiscal policy of the colonies. An even more
important result of the adoption of this new economic doctrine was that
it destroyed every motive which would lead the British government to
endeavour to secure for British traders a monopoly of the traffic with
Britis