Terre Napoleon | Page 5

themselves at Port Jackson
in 1788; nor have any internal broils of serious importance interrupted
her prosperous career.
This striking variation from the common fate of peoples is attributable
to three causes. First, the development of a British civilisation in
Australia has synchronised with the attainment and unimpaired
maintenance of dominant sea-power by the parent nation. The
supremacy of Great Britain upon the blue water enabled her colonies to
grow to strength and wealth under the protection of a mighty arm.
Secondly, during the same period a great change in British colonial
policy was inaugurated. Statesmen were slow to learn the lessons
taught in so trenchant a fashion by the revolt of the American colonies;
but more liberal views gradually ripened, and Lord Durham's Report on
the State of Canada, issued in 1839, occasioned a beneficent new era of
self-government. The states of Australia were soon left with no
grievance which it was not within their own power to remedy if they
chose, and virtually as they chose. Thirdly, these very powers of
self-government developed in the people a signal capacity for
governing and being governed. The constitutional machinery submitted
the Executive to popular control, and made it quickly sensitive to the
public will. Authority and subjects were in sympathy, because the
subjects created the authority. Further, there was no warlike native race
in Australia, as there was in New Zealand and in South Africa, to
necessitate armed conflict. Thus security from attack, chartered
autonomy, and governing capacity, with the absence of organised
pugnacious tribes, have combined to achieve the unique result of a
continent preserved from aggression, disruption, or bloody strife for
over one hundred and twenty years.
There was a brief period, as will presently be related, when this happy
state of things was in some danger of being disturbed. It certainly
would have been impossible had not Great Britain emerged victorious
from her protracted struggle, first against revolutionary France, and
later against Napoleon, in the latter years of the eighteenth century and

the beginning of the nineteenth.
In those wars colonial possessions "became pawns in the game."* (*
The phrase is Professor Egerton's, Cambridge Modern History 9 735.)
There was no Imperialism then, with its strident note, its ebullient
fervour and flag waving. There was no national sense of pride in
colonial Empire, or general appreciation of the great potentialities of
oversea possessions. "The final outcome of the great war was the
colonial ascendancy of Great Britain, but such was not the conscious
aim of those who carried through the struggle."* (* Ibid page 736.)
Diplomacy signed away with a dash of the quill possessions which
British arms had won after tough fights, anxious blockades, and long
cruises full of tension and peril. Even when the end of the war saw the
great Conqueror conquered and consigned to his foam-fenced prison in
the South Atlantic, Great Britain gave back many of the fruits which it
had cost her much, in the lives of her brave and the sufferings of her
poor, to win; and Castlereagh defended this policy in the House of
Commons on the curious ground that it was expedient "freely to open
to France the means of peaceful occupation, and that it was not the
interest of this country to make her a military and conquering, instead
of a commercial and pacific nation."* (* Parliamentary Debates 28
462.)
PART 2.
The events with which this book is mainly concerned occurred within
the four years 1800 to 1804, during which Europe saw Bonaparte leap
from the position of First Consul of the French Republic to the Imperial
throne. After great French victories at Marengo, Hochstadt, and
Hohenlinden (1800), and a brilliant naval triumph for the British at
Copenhagen (1801), came the fragile Peace of Amiens (1802)--an
"experimental peace," as Cornwallis neatly described it. Fourteen
months later (May 1803) war broke out again; and this time there was
almost incessant fighting on a titanic scale, by land and sea, until the
great Corsican was humbled and broken at Waterloo.
The reader will be aided in forming an opinion upon the events
discussed hereafter, by a glance at the colonial situation during the

period in question. The extent of the dependencies of France and
England in 1800 and the later years will be gathered from the following
summary.
In America France regained Louisiana, covering the mouth of the
Mississippi. It had been in Spanish hands since 1763; but Talleyrand,
Bonaparte's foreign minister, put pressure upon Spain, and Louisiana
became French once more under the secret treaty of San Ildefonso
(October 1800). The news of the retrocession, however, aroused intense
feeling in the United States, inasmuch as the establishment of a strong
foreign power at the mouth of the principal water-way in the country
jeopardised the whole trade of the Mississippi