Holland, France, and Spain, when they founded colonies beyond the sea, founded them for the good of the parent state, and governed them as dependencies.  The home country might treat her colonies well or ill, she might cherish and guard them, or oppress them with harshness and severity, but she never treated them as equals.  Russia, in pushing her obscure and barbarous conquest and colonization of Siberia,—­a conquest destined to be of such lasting importance in the history of Asia,—­pursued precisely the same course.

In fact, this had been the only kind of colonization known to modern Europe.  In the ancient world it had also been known, and it was only through it that great empires grew.  Each Roman colony that settled in Gaul or Iberia founded a city or established a province which was tributary to Rome, instead of standing on a footing of equality in the same nation with Rome.  But the other great colonizing peoples of antiquity, the Greeks and Phoenicians, spread in an entirely different way.  Each of their colonies became absolutely independent of the country whence it sprang.  Carthage and Syracuse were as free as Tyre or Sidon, as Corinth or Athens.  Thus under the Roman method the empire grew, at the cost of the colonies losing their independence.  Under the Greek and Carthaginian method the colonies acquired the same freedom that was enjoyed by the mother cities; but there was no extension of empire, no growth of a great and enduring nationality.  The modern European nations had followed the Roman system.  Until the United States sprang into being every great colonizing people followed one system or the other.

The American Republic, taking advantage of its fortunate federal features and of its strong central government, boldly struck out on a new path, which secured the freedom-giving properties of the Greek method, while preserving national Union as carefully as it was preserved by the Roman Empire.  New States were created, which stood on exactly the same footing as the old; and yet these new States formed integral and inseparable parts of a great and rapidly growing nation.  This movement was original with the American Republic; she was dealing with new conditions, and on this point the history of England merely taught her what to avoid.  The English colonies were subject to the British Crown, and therefore to Great Britain.  The new American States, themselves colonies in the old Greek sense, were subject only to a government which they helped administer on equal terms with the old States.  No State was subject to another, new or old.  All paid a common allegiance to a central power which was identical with none.

The absolute novelty of this feature, as the world then stood, fails to impress us now because we are so used to it.  But it was at that time without precedent; and though since then the idea has made rapid progress, there seems in most cases to have been very great difficulty in applying it in practice.  The Spanish-American states proved wholly unable to apply it at all.  In Australia and South Africa all that can be said is that events now apparently show a trend in the direction of adopting this system.  At present all these British colonies, as regards one another, are independent but disunited; as regards the mother country, they remain united with her, but in the condition of dependencies.