"LEST WE FORGET!" 235

forests and deserts that had grown into the United States of
America. Denied opportunity in their own country, a race of
invincible romanticists had made new homes in the wilderness
to meet their heart's desire.

The new English nations so formed had rebelled against the
home government's claim to control them and had formed an
independent polity of their own. Yet even in the hour of the
English schism the age-long process continued. As the first
Empire fell away a second grew in its place. The united Empire
Loyalists, unable to fit their own conception of home into that
of a rebel federation, tramped across the Canadian border to
seek a new habitation in the wilderness. Here they mingled with
conquered French settlers and British emigrants to form in the
fullness of time the Dominion of Canada. During the next
century others crossed the oceans to make homes under the
Brhish flag in Newfoundland, Cape Colony, in the islands of
New Zealand and the virgin continent of Australia. Most of
these emigrants were poor men who sought on a distant soil
the happiness and freedom they had failed to find in their own
. country.1 Few amid the hardship of their lot found the promised
land for themselves. They, left it for their children to create after
them.

In this process the pioneers received small help from the
imperial government. The ruling classes at home were not
interested in British settlers overseas. Thw thoughts of them
were coloured by the memories of the War of Independence and
of the humiliations which had then befallen English statesmen.
They wished to have nothing further to do with colonials. They
regarded the Empire, apart from India, as a strategic network
of trading factories, spice islands and naval bases in which
squatters' settlements had no part. At the end of the eight-
eenth century they found a temporary use for New South
Wales as- a dumping ground for convicts. But when this practice
.was stopped in the 'sixties the interest of the English official
classes in the colonies sank to zero. j

The utilitarians had even less use for such troublesome
appendages. For to their way of thinking their only function
was to embroil the country in expensive foreign entanglements.

1 The graveyards of Quebec and Montreal were piled high -with British immigrants
who died in the crowded holds of the immigrant ships in the terrible transatlantic
passage against westerly gales. *