JJQ ENGLISHSAGA

the Protestant Irish who had the instinct for garrisoning in
their blood, knew more of the empire than the English com-
mercial classes whose wealth and power sustained it. It had
come into being almost accidentally, not as a result of conscious
national or governmental effort but as the bye-product of the
activity of innumerable private persons. The law of primo-
geniture, by creating in every generation a surplus of portionless
younger sons educated in a standard of comfort which they could
only maintain by going out into the world to seek their fortunes,
had had the effect of changing the status and allegiance of a
quarter of the globe. During the seventeenth century, while the
mind of England was obsessed with questions of internal govern-
ment and religion, the first British Empire had been founded
by the private enterprise of individual Englishmen who had
been unable to secure the kind of life they wanted in the home
country. A hundred and fifty years later, owing to the inability
of the British Parliament and people to comprehend it, it had
been lost.

Yet even while the first empire was dissolving, a second had

been growing up in the same haphazard way. The process,

though it had reached gigantic and almost unmanageable

dimensions, still continued during Victoria's pacific reign. A

good example of the way in which it occurred vms afforded by

the life of James Brooke, the first British Rajah of Sarawak.

After an adventurous youth in the service of the East India

Company, Brooke, at the age of thirty-five invested the modest

capital left him by his father in a schooner of 142 tons in which

he sailed on a voyage of exploration for Borneo. Here he became

beneficently involved in the unhappy internal politics of the

head-hunting county of Sarawak, and, making himself by his

tact, energy and great administrative talents indispensable both

to its rulers and people to whom—to the embarrassment of an

indifferent British government—he became enthusiastically

attached, was within a few years appointed hereditary Rajah of

Sarawak by the Malay Sultan of Borneo. He died in 1868, ruler

of a country as large as Scotland, which his heirs in the fullness

of time and in the teeth of Whitehall added to the British'

Empire.

The process of expansion went on, in short, without either
the initiative or the conscious will of an imperial government
which obstinately refused to recognise itself as imperial. Palmer-