lands.  Unhappily the pride of this great achievement helped to persuade the Americans that they were different from the rest of the world, and unaffected by its fortunes.  They were apt to think of themselves as the inventors and monopolists of political liberty.  Cut off by a vast stretch of ocean from the Old World, and having lost that contact with its affairs which the relation with Britain had hitherto maintained, they followed but dimly, and without much comprehension, the obscure and complex struggles wherein the spirit of liberty was working out a new Europe, in the face of difficulties vastly greater than any with which the Americans had ever had to contend.  They had been alienated from Britain, the one great free state of Europe, and had been persuaded by their reading of their own experience that she was a tyrant-power; and they thus found it hard to recognise her for what, with all her faults, she genuinely was—­the mother of free institutions in the modern world, the founder and shaper of their own prized liberties.  All these things combined to persuade the great new republic that she not only might, but ought to, stand aloof from the political problems of the rest of the world, and take no interest in its concerns.  This attitude, the natural product of the conditions, was to last for more than a century, and was to weaken greatly the cause of liberty in the world.

Although the most obvious features of the half-century following the great British triumph of 1763 were the revolt of the American colonies and the apparently universal collapse of the imperialist ambitions of the European nations, a more deeply impressive feature of the period was that, in spite of the tragedy and humiliation of the great disruption, the imperial impetus continued to work potently in Britain, alone among the European nations; and to such effect that at the end of the period she found herself in control of a new empire more extensive than that which she had lost, and far more various in its character.  Having failed to solve one great imperial problem, she promptly addressed herself to a whole series of others even more difficult, and for these she was to find more hopeful solutions.

When the American revolt began, the Canadian colonies to the north were in an insecure and unorganised state.  On the coast, in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, there was a small British population; but the riverine colony of Canada proper, with its centre at Quebec, was still purely French, and was ruled by martial law.  Accustomed to a despotic system, and not yet reconciled to the British supremacy, the French settlers were obviously unready for self-government.  But the Quebec Act of 1774, by securing the maintenance of the Roman Catholic religion and of French civil law, ensured the loyalty of the French; and this Act is also noteworthy as the first formal expression of willingness to admit or even welcome the existence, within the hospitable limits of the Empire, of a variety of types of civilisation.  In the new British Empire there was to be no uniformity of Kultur.