h possessions. Henceforth all territories administered under the
direct control of the home government were thrown open as freely to the
merchants of other countries as to those of Britain herself. The part
which Britain now undertook in the undeveloped regions of her empire
(except in so far as they were controlled by fully self-governing
colonies) was simply that of maintaining peace and law; and in these
regions she adopted an attitude which may fairly be described as the
attitude, not of a monopolist, but of a trustee for civilisation. It
was this policy which explains the small degree of jealousy with which
the rapid expansion of her territory was regarded by the rest of the
civilised world. If the same policy had been followed, not necessarily
at home, but in their colonial possessions, by all the colonising
powers, the motives for colonial rivalry would have been materially
diminished, and the claims of various states to colonial territories,
when the period of rivalry began, would have been far more easily
adjusted.

These were negative forces, leading merely to the abandonment of the
older colonial theories. But there were also positive and constructive
forces at work. First among them may be noted a new body of definite
theory as to the function which colonies ought to play in the general
economy of the civilised world. It was held to be their function not
(as in the older theory) to afford lucrative opportunities for trade to
the mother-country: so far as trade was concerned it seemed to matter
little whether a country was a colony or an independent state. But the
main object of colonisation was, on this view, the systematic
draining-off of the surplus population of the older lands. This, it was
felt, could not safely be left to the operation of mere chance; and one
of the great advantages of colonial possessions was that they enabled
the country which controlled them to deal in a scientific way with its
surplus population, and to prevent the reproduction of unhealthy
conditions in the new communities, which was apt to result if emigrants
were allowed to drift aimlessly wheresoever chance took them, and
received no guidance as to the proper modes of establishing themselves
in their new homes. The great apostle of this body of colonial theory
was Edward Gibbon Wakefield; and his book, A View of the Art of
Colonisation (1847), deserves to be noted as one of the classics of the
history of imperialism. He did not