The close of the American struggle, however, brought a new problem.  Many thousands of exiles from the revolting colonies, willing to sacrifice everything in order to retain their British citizenship, poured over the borders into the Canadian lands.  They settled for the first time the rich province of Ontario, greatly increased the population of Nova Scotia, and started the settlement of New Brunswick.  To these exiles Britain felt that she owed much, and, despite her own financial distress, expended large sums in providing them with the means to make a good beginning in their new homes.  But it was impossible to deny these British settlers, and the emigrants from Britain who soon began to join them, the rights of self-government, to which they were accustomed.  Their advent, however, in a hitherto French province, raised the very difficult problem of racial relationship.  They might have been used as a means for Anglicising the earlier French settlers and for forcing them into a British mould; it may fairly be said that most European governments would have used them in this way, and many of the settlers would willingly have fallen in with such a programme.  But that would have been out of accord with the genius of the British system, which believes in freedom and variety.  Accordingly, by the Act of 1791, the purely French region of Quebec or Lower Canada was separated from the British region of Ontario or Upper Canada, and both districts, as well as the coastal settlements, were endowed with self-governing institutions of the familiar pattern—­an elected assembly controlling legislation and taxation, a nominated governor and council directing the executive.  Thus within eighteen years of their conquest the French colonists were introduced to self-government.  And within nine years of the loss of the American colonies, a new group of self-governing American colonies had been organised.  They were sufficiently content with the system to resist with vigour and success an American invasion in 1812.  While the American controversy was proceeding, one of the greatest of British navigators, Captain Cook, was busy with his remarkable explorations.  He was the first to survey the archipelagoes of the Pacific; more important, he was the real discoverer of Australia and New Zealand; for though the Dutch explorers had found these lands more than a century earlier, they had never troubled to complete their explorations.  Thus a vast new field, eminently suitable for European settlement, was placed at the disposal of Britain.  It was utilised with extraordinary promptitude.  The loss of the American colonies had deprived Britain of her chief dumping-ground for convicts.  In 1788, six years after the recognition of their independence, she decided to use the new continent for this purpose, and the penal settlement of Botany Bay began (under unfavourable auspices) the colonisation of Australia.