AFTER 1782: BRITAIN'S REDOUBLED VITALITY Take first the movement under the British flag. Only outstand ing events and corresponding statistics need mention. The rest will be found under the heading BRITISH EMPIRE and in other articles relating to the mother-islands and to the British domin ions. That the old country began to build up a new empire—in the sense of new colonies of her children, extending to shores far more distant than the trans-Atlantic seaboard—was and re mains, so far as concerns increase in the number of English speakers, the smaller part of the process. But the results are already big and still progressing, while their origins are as vivid in appeal to historic imagination as the beginnings of Virginia and New England.
First Canada. It is estimated that after the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from the mother-country, over 40,00o American Royalists, for the most part of picked quality, went to what are now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Cape Breton Island and Ontario ; and thus began the building up of the present English-speaking majority in the Canadian Confederation. Next Australasia—at the extremity of remoteness on the underside of the planet. A Frenchman wrote in the year of Yorktown that Captain Cook had sailed far south to redress the British loss in one continent by discovery in another. The English never were so planning. Their idea then was to keep up traditional transportation and to find fresh ground for the fruitful banishment of offenders. Instinct was true as usual. A penal settlement might grow into a colony. Accordingly in May 1787 Captain Philip with about 600 male and 185 female convicts sailed for Botany Bay but chose instead, at what is now Sydney, "one of the finest harbours in the world in which I,000 sail of the line might ride in perfect security." More than half a century later began the settlement of New Zealand—the real ultimo Thule of white home-making. By degrees were founded round the present island-continent of English-speakers all those colonies now joined together in the Australian Commonwealth. Meanwhile, the Mother Country had planted a community of its tongue and breed in yet a third continent—at Africa's southern extremity, annexed during the Napoleonic Wars. There in 182o, five years after Waterloo, the first British immigrants arrived. They, and those since added to them, have lived side by side with the Dutch through many vicissitudes; and though to-day they are a little less than half the white inhabitants of the South African Union, their greatest of world-languages is familiar to a majority.
We cannot mention here the dependencies—the "stepping stones" and stations strung along many shores and through all seas—where English is the official language and more or less spoken. Enough to say that to-day (within the British Empire but outside the mother-islands) in Canada, Newfoundland, the West Indies, in the Australian Commonwealth and New Zealand, in Southern Africa and more parts of that continent, and in other sundry places, there were (1933) as roughly estimated from re cent censuses nearly 22,000,000 of white people to by far the greater part of whom English is native while to the rest it is a language of daily use.
But in the same period of nearly Iso years (1783-1928) covered by the preceding paragraphs, the development of population in Great Britain itself has been the most surprising thing ever known in equally limited circumstances of time and area. There are nearly three times as many native English-speakers in Great Britain as in all the rest of those territories—comprising a quarter of the earth and of its inhabitants—which are part of that entire British system, beyond all parallel not only in geographical range and total extent but in every kind of variety political and racial, religious and linguistic, climatic and ec"!iomic. Let us look at the tables. As Great Britain and Ireland followed courses at first somewhat similar but afterwards tragically different for the smaller country, we must exhibit their statistics separately:— *Before the census of 1821 no certainty exists about the numbers of the Irish population. There are wide differences in the estimates. The figures above are suggested by the present writer on the basis of McCulloch "Statistical Account of the British Empire" (1839) and George O'Brien "Economic History of Ireland in XVIII. century" (1918).
Each of these col umns is of extraordinary meaning. Take the British column by itself. In 176o, while all the English-speaking peoples are still politically united, Great Britain is at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Her total population has not increased by much more than a couple of millions in a century and a half since Shake speare's last years when the first small settlements of the race overseas had just begun in North America. (Remember that in this same year when George III. succeeded to the throne the total number of all the English-speakers overseas was also not much more than a couple of millions.) Now began that swarming of life at home which the whole of English-speaking life overseas did not for a long time overtake. The means of increase were created when machine invention began and steam as a driving f orce was soon added. Town-life thickened where it never had been before. First, manufacture was revolutionized, then trans port. Britain led the world in prodigious innovation. The popu lation doubled in So years or so, during the earlier era of the manufacturing revolution. After that, the transport-revolution by means of railways and steam-shipping came into full swing and in another ordinary lifetime the population doubled again (from 16,5oo,000 souls in 1831 to 33,400,00o in 1891). In the shorter period since then, and especially under the influences of the World War, the rate of increase has slackened notably but the further absolute addition has been very large (33,400,00o in 1891 to est.
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. Britain to-day is less in geographical size than a 3oth part of the United States proper, but the number of its inhabitants is still nearly equivalent to 4o per cent of the popu lation of the whole American Union. England, Scotland and Wales together are not quite equal in area to the States of New York and Pennsylvania put together; but in their crowded aggregate of human life, they very nearly equal the combined inhabitants of the New England States, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan.
And yet in spite of this accumulation at home the originating island through the greater part of the period (176o-1928) dealt with in this section supplied to the United States, chiefly—in a lesser degree to Canada and Australia—millions and millions of nation-building emigrants. We shall get a clearer view of this process when examining presently the giant growth of the Great Republic.
