THE LOST POSSESSIONS OF ENGLAND.* In building up the vast
and scattered realm over which she presides, England has had not a few reverses and losses. The general course of her progress has been so conspicuously suc- cessful, that with one great exception—the revolt and separa- tion of the American Colonies—those losses are but lightly regarded, if indeed they are at all generally remembered, by her sons. Yet, as Mr. Walter Frewen Lord observes in the opening chapter of his well-informed and well-written book on The Lost _Possessions of England, they "include a number of strong places and rich provinces of which we may say with confidence that they constitute such a Colonial Empire as any other nation but ourselves would consider nothing less than magnificent."
Mr. Lord does not claim that his book is an exhaustive treatment of his subject. The United States, indeed, are expressly and, he says, "instinctively" excluded, because "it offends one's sense of propriety to speak of a nation once so intimate a part of our own polity as having ever been a possession ';" while "oar present affection and our hopes of the future alike forbid the word 'lost." Bat apart from that great excluded case, Mr. Lord's aim, to which he was counselled by Sir John Seeley, who revised his work, has been to confine himself in the present volume to present typical examples of the strong places and rich provinces which at one time or other we have held and lost, and to trace the story of their acquisition and loss so as to bring out its lessons. The cases he deals with are Dunkirk, Tangier, Minorca, Corsica, Buenos Ayres and Montevideo, Cuba, Manila, Java, and the Ionian Islands. Mr. Lord is a strong and uncompromising Imperialist. In the case of Dankirk, however, he recog- nises very clearly the essential nnwisdom of the attempt on the part of British statesmen to maintain a foothold in a French port, where, as a contemporary pamphleteer put it, we lay "as a Mouse between the cat's Paws," and he frankly expresses his approbation of the conduct of Charles II. in selling that port to Louis XIV. for the then considerable sum of fire million livres. He also denounces very vigorously the short-sighted, as well as arrogant and spiteful, character of the ninth clause of the Treaty of Utrecht, under which it was required, not that England should again have Dunkirk and make the best she could of it, but that the place should be for ever destroyed as a harbour, fortress, or sea-port; and he gives a vivacious and entertaining account of the manner in which the French promptly and steadily set themselves to evade, and we totally and even ignominiously failed to secure, the enforcement of that provision. We are inclined to agree with Mr. Lord's view of the Dunkirk clause of the Treaty of Utrecht, but do not think that the British Government of that day can be severely blamed for its attempt in that way to cripple the aggressive power of France without exposing this country to the constant anxiety involved in a British occupation of a French sea-port. Faller reflection • The Lost Pouessi.ms of England: Essays in Imperial Bistory. By Walter Froven Lord. London: it:chard Bent ey and ft:a.
apon human nature might, no doubt, have led Queen Anne's Tory Ministers to see that the motives operating upon the French in favour of a neglect of their obligations under the Dunkirk clause would be sure to prevail unless the British Government were sure to be continuously ready to take up arms in enforcement of those obligations, and might very possibly prevail even if that readiness could be guaranteed. Bat in this branch of statecraft the British Ministers, who negotiated the Sebastopol clauses of the Treaty of Paris in 1856, and the Batonin clauses of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, would not seem to have advanced very far. Perhaps, in all three cases, there was a common explanation,—a hope that the apparent infliction of a more or less humiliating disability upon a foreign Power would draw off public attention from the failure of the British statesmen concerned to secure, in more substantial respects, all that was expected of them for the advantage of their country.
The possession of Tangier, which came with the island of Bombay, as part of Katharine of Braganza's dowry, is shown by Mr. Lord to have been rendered of no value by the policy which the Ministers of Charles II. imposed upon the officers who were successively placed in charge of that acquisition. The port could not be made really serviceable and safe, and the place was therefore only useful—and it might have been very useful—as the base from which to conduct operations for the foundation of a North African Dominion. Our Indian experience has abundantly shown that many English- men, Sco.chmen, and Irishmen are eminently qualified to acquire the confidence and respect of warlike Mussulman races, and if the offi3ers placed in charge of Tangier had had discretion to enter into relations of friendship and alliance with chieftains who would have been glad of our help against their rivals, and generally had been encouraged to pursue a "forward" policy, there can be little doubt that British predominance would soon have been established in Morocco. But their instructions limited their activity to resisting attacks upon Tangier. For the rest they were to avoid trouble with the Moors, and to enter upon no entangling engagements. That kind of attitude is sure to be interpreted by Orientals as meaning weakness. Mr. Lord makes much too sweeping a generalisation, indeed, when he says that "we know now that it is impossible for English- men to settle peaceably in a country of barbarous or semi-barbarous people." The life's work of Sir Robert Saudeman, the tranquilliser of Beloochistan, for example, affords abundant evidence that effective moral ascendency can be obtained over a conglomeration of wild tribes by almost entirely pacific means. But the limits set to the exercise of the energies of our representatives at Tangier were fatal to the development of moral ascendency on their part over the Moors, unless in the case of officers of exceptional enterprise and sense of power. Not many such men were sent to Tangier, and the Governors were changed so often that the best of them had but little time to make themselves felt. The moat effective of all seems to have been Kirke, who with his " lambs " afterwards acquired an unfavourable reputation in connection with the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion, but who, as Mr. Lord affirms, and apparently with good reason, "in his conduct of affairs at Tangier displayed high qualities as a soldier and states- man." But instead of giving him a "free band," as we say now, the Merry Monarch and his advisers became alarmed at the prospect of costly African complications, and decided to put themselves and any enterprising officers of theirs out of the way of temptation by abandoning Tangier altogether. The story of the twenty-two years' occupation is told in a very clear and graphic fashion by Mr. Lord, who has evidently been at great pains to get at the original authorities and at sidelights from contemporary writings, and who has his decided views—a circumstance which certainly helps to im- part interest to his narrative—as to the character of almost every officer whom he mentions.
This observation applies to all the other essays in his volume on our "Lost Possessions." They all bear evidences of industrious research, and they are all lit up by a touch of historic imagination which, despite their melancholy endings, makes them very good reading. The story of the capture of the capital of Cuba by the Keppel expedition, and of Manila by Draper, are told by Mr. Lord with much spirit, and no one can read it w:thont entering into the writer's indignation against the Government that lightly gave up prizes of such value in the West and East which had been won in both cases by signal exhibitions of British valour and address, and in that of Havana at a terrible cost in British life. If Bute, then unhappily Prime Minister, could have had his way, Havana would have been given back to the Spaniards for nothing, and only very strong pressure from George Grenville, supported by public opinion, secured that Florida and some adjacent territory should be exacted in return for so immense a concession from England at the close of the most glorious war she ever waged. Nor, though it doubtless was very convenient to our colonists in South Carolina and Georgia to have the Spaniards removed from their near neighbourhood, could it be pre- tended by any one that Florida was in any sense an equivalent of the rich and fertile "Peed of the Antilles." As for the very valuable island of Manila, owing to what Mr. Lecky justly describes as the "shameful omission of any provision relating to conquests that bad been made, though they were not known, before the preliminaries of the Treaty were signed," it and the other Philippine Islands were actually handed back to Spain without any compensation whatever. It is difficult to condemn too strongly either the levity—if it is not to be called by a worse name—with which the fruits of splendid British exploits were thrown away, or the wholesale corruption by which the Peace was carried through Parliament. What surprises us is that Mr. Lord who feels so deeply on the subject of those disgraceful pro. ceedinge, should be found, in the concluding essay to tht volume before us, which deals with the anti-Imperial spirit affirming that "if we examine the record of the anti. Imperialists we shall find that they have always belonged to one political party," by which it is plain from the context that he means the Whig, or Liberal, party. This assertior can only be made to appear even plausible by dating anti. Imperialism, as Mr. Lord does, from Barke's attack or Warren Hastings. But he is not entitled to draw an such line. The Peace of Paris, in 1763, was certain13 in large measure a Tory Peace, carried, and in its most unworthy features arranged, by the mentor and favourite Minister of the young King, who recalled the Tory party from its long depression. The Peace of Utrecht, by which, fifty years earlier, the fruits of a war hardly less successful than that which ended in 170 were reduced far below theil natural and legitimate dimensions, was carried in the House of Lords by twelve Tory Peers created for the occasion, —as to whom the witty Wharton asked whether they in tended to vote singly or by their foreman. The reproach, in so far as it is a reproach, of having opposed Imperial expan. sion belongs to both political parties, or sections of them, at different periods, and we are bound to say that that oppo- sition, in our judgment, bears much more evidence of having been dictated by principle, however mistaken and perverted, in the case of the Whig party than in that of their rivals. That Whig or Liberal action unfavourable to the growth of the Empire or its security has frequently been so inspired is indeed, acknowledged by Mr. Lord. In one sense that fact makes such opposition all the more dangerous, for the Eng. lish, despite the incredulous sneers of foreigners, are easily influenced by considerations of principle in regard to foreign affairs. But happily—and here we are entirely at one witi Mr. Lord—every decade that passes proves with increasing clearness that the consolidation of British power is for the benefit of the races over which it is exercised. The noble worlt which Mr. Lord so well describes as done for the natives of Java by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1811-16, and broken oft because neither the East India Company nor the Britisb plenipotentiaries at Vienna knew or cared anything about that remote, though very important, island, is only an example of the work which has been done throughout this century by an ever.growing number of British officers for ever-increasing multitudes of the coloured races of mankind.
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