COLONIAL EXPANSION.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1321, 24 June 1897, Page 34

COLONIAL EXPANSION.

Fortunately for the Colonies, especially of Canada, the Cape and the Australasias, the miseries of the Old World were never repeated to any extent so far as the working classes have been concerned. That there is poverty in the large cities in all these lands not only strengthens the idea that we are to have the poor with us ever, but serves to show us that there will always be more or less failures in life. On tkese young lands, beneath the Southern Cross, there never was any necessity for poverty; but recklessness, shiftlessness, and above all the taint of pauperism brought into the younger lands from the older, have created for us both a pauper and criminal class. The almost entire absence of veneration among the people accounts for much that is evil in their lives. The failure to respect grey hairs, to 'be chivalrous to women, and to venerate sacred things is as much the misfortune as it is the fault of a large number of our young men. The parents themselves do not exact obedience, nor train their children in the way they should go, and the result is that we have many pert and saucy youngsters, many of them uncontrolled, and these grow into careless and loose-living men and women. The New Zealand children, taken as a whole, however, will compare more than favourably with those of any other land in the English-speaking world, and must be admitted to be of a higher moral standard than the Australians. "What' has this to do with colonial expansion ? Everything ; for though we increase in wealth and possessions, the national character is in danger and our future is in danger if the hearts of the people be not right. It is righteousness that exalteth a nation.

To go into anything like details of the expansion of the Colonial Empire, or of India, since the Queen's accession, would be manifestly impossible in the space allotted to the writer. For example, much of the great Indian Empire has been, added to Her Majesty's possessions, for until 1858, the then British territory in Hindostan were in the hands of the East India Company. Between 1837 and that date, however, the territories of Scinde, of the Sikhs, Tanjore, the seaboard provinces of Burma, Sattara, Jhansi, Nagpur, and lastly Oude, had been brought under the dominion of England. Since 1858 annexation has been less busy, but in 1884-88 Upper Burma and the Shan States were added, and the frontier of Afghanistan defined ; in 1891 the small State of Manipur was absorbed, and last year it was decided to annex the province of Chitral, which has for some time been the scene of disturbances which were finally put down by the gallant efforts of Sir Robert Low and Colonel Kelly. Here in the Australias the growth of the dominion has been contemporary with the Queen's reign, for the various colonies before that date had scarcely been commenced, and were hardly more than penal settlements. Of the seven separate colonies into which the Australian continent is now divided, New South Wales. Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, West Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania, only New South Wales and Tasmania had a separate colonial existence when the Queen ascended the throne. Since then New Zealand in 1841, Victoria in 1851, South Australia in 1856, Queensland in 1859, and West Australia in 1890 respectively, have been constituted separate colonics, and Now South Wales received in 1855 the constitution under which it is at present governed. In 1887 the population of the whole of Australia can hardly have exceeded a few thousands ; according to the latest rati -ns now available it reaches the total of :> ■''.'*.y.QOX) in found numbers, tho vast majority of whom arc of British descent. I/osirW' this wonderful development of Australasia.'hi 1881 the island of Fiji was annexed, and in 1884 British New Guinea,

while the English flag also waves over several islands in the Western Pacific under the charge of the Governor of Fiji.

In North America, the territorial extent of the Empire remains much the same as at the beginning of the Queen's reign, though in papulation, wealth and general development, the progress made during the past sixty years is almost as great as that in other parts of the British possessions. In 1841 the population is stated at about one-and-a-half millions, ha 1891 it was nearly five millions, an increase of more than threefold. During the past twenty years, for example, the population of Winnepeg, in Manitoba, has increased from 241 in 1871 to 25,642 in 1891, while the city of Vancouver, in British Columbia, which in 1885 had no existence, six years later had a population of 13,685. In South and Eastern Africa, the expansion of British influence has been equally marked, particularly during the last decade, and there is every prospect that progress in the immediate future will be even greater. Since 1837, when Capetown was our only possession in South Africa, we have added to our colonies Natal in 1843, Basutoland in 1884, Bechuahaland in 1885, and Zululand in 1887. In 1889 the British South Africa Company received a Boyal Charter entrusting it with the development of the immense territory lying to the South of the Zambesi, which in 1888 had been assigned to British rule. In May, 1891, the sphere of the Company was extended to the north of the Zambesi, and now includes the whole of British South Africa from Mafeking to Tanganyika, an area of 750,000 square miles.

In East Africa " the British East African Protectorate" extends British influence over some 468,000 square miles from the eastern coast to the Congo State on the west, and from the German sphere on the south indefinitely towards Khartoum and Egypt on the north. Zanzibar also is now under British control and has been a British Protectorate since 1890.

The extension by Great Britain of her diminion over' vast subjugated populations is without parallel in the history of the human family. She bears rule over fully one-seventh of the surface of the globe, and one-fourth of its population. Her possessions abroad are in area seventy-six times larger than the parent State. Schemes for combming Great Britain and her colonies in one grand federation have lately taken more definite shape, and the sojourn of the Colonial Premiers in England should do much to hasten ontbe great consummation so devoutly wished by all the children of a great and glorious nation.