Excluding colonies which are mere advanced fortresses, and also dependencies
like India, West Africa, and the West Indies, which the white race can never properly colonise, Mr. Forster showed that..cur Colonies occupy upwards of 6,000,000 square miles (including, that is, the vast area of the North-West territory in British America). Of the unoccupied areas of the new Continents in the temperate regions, eighty per cent. belong to Great Britain and the United States together, and forty- four per cent. to Great Britain alone. Our coast-line in the temperate regions is 21,000 miles, their whole coast-line being 70,000, so that we have two-sevenths of the whole, while, inchuling the United States, English-speaking men hold three- sevenths of it. Mr. Forster calculated that the population of these colonies in the,temperate region, now about 6,600,000, would be by the end of the century 15,000,000. By the middle of the next century the British population of our Colonies would probably be 82,000,000, against only 63,000,000 in these islands. Here, then, is a vast power at our disposal, which we may either husband by union or waste by divergence.
Previous page
