On the other hand, it may fairly be said that in America and Australia the English race has already entered into and begun the enjoyment of its great inheritance.  When these continents were settled they contained the largest tracts of fertile, temperate, thinly peopled country on the face of the globe.  We cannot rate too highly the importance of their acquisition.  Their successful settlement was a feat which by comparison utterly dwarfs all the European wars of the last two centuries; just as the importance of the issues at stake in the wars of Rome and Carthage completely overshadowed the interests for which the various contemporary Greek kingdoms were at the same time striving.

Australia, which was much less important than America, was also won and settled with far less difficulty.  The natives were so few in number and of such a low type, that they practically offered no resistance at all, being but little more hindrance than an equal number of ferocious beasts.  There was no rivalry whatever by any European power, because the actual settlement—­not the mere expatriation of convicts—­only began when England, as a result of her struggle with Republican and Imperial France, had won the absolute control of the seas.  Unknown to themselves, Nelson and his fellow admirals settled the fate of Australia, upon which they probably never wasted a thought.  Trafalgar decided much more than the mere question whether Great Britain should temporarily share the fate that so soon befell Prussia; for in all probability it decided the destiny of the island-continent that lay in the South Seas.

The history of the English-speaking race in America has been widely different.  In Australia there was no fighting whatever, whether with natives or with other foreigners.  In America for the past two centuries and a half there has been a constant succession of contests with powerful and warlike native tribes, with rival European nations, and with American nations of European origin.  But even in America there have been wide differences in the way the work has had to be done in different parts of the country, since the close of the great colonial contests between England, France, and Spain.

The extension of the English westward through Canada since the war of the Revolution has been in its essential features merely a less important repetition of what has gone on in the northern United States.  The gold miner, the transcontinental railway, and the soldier have been the pioneers of civilization.  The chief point of difference, which was but small, arose from the fact that the whole of western Canada was for a long time under the control of the most powerful of all the fur companies, in whose employ were very many French voyageurs and coureurs des bois.  From these there sprang up in the valleys of the Red River and the Saskatchewan a singular race of half-breeds, with a unique semi-civilization of their own.  It was with these half-breeds, and not, as in the United States, with the Indians, that the settlers of northwestern Canada had their main difficulties.