its natural course.  The only considerable opposition to this body of economic doctrine came from those who desired to protect British agriculture; but this motive had (at this period) no bearing upon colonial trade.  The triumph of the doctrine of free trade meant that the principal motive which had earlier led to restrictions upon the self-government of the colonies—­the desire to secure commercial advantages for the mother-country—­was no longer operative.  The central idea of the old colonial system was destroyed by the disciples of Adam Smith; and there no longer remained any apparent reason why the mother-country should desire to control the fiscal policy of the colonies.  An even more important result of the adoption of this new economic doctrine was that it destroyed every motive which would lead the British government to endeavour to secure for British traders a monopoly of the traffic with British possessions.  Henceforth all territories administered under the direct control of the home government were thrown open as freely to the merchants of other countries as to those of Britain herself.  The part which Britain now undertook in the undeveloped regions of her empire (except in so far as they were controlled by fully self-governing colonies) was simply that of maintaining peace and law; and in these regions she adopted an attitude which may fairly be described as the attitude, not of a monopolist, but of a trustee for civilisation.  It was this policy which explains the small degree of jealousy with which the rapid expansion of her territory was regarded by the rest of the civilised world.  If the same policy had been followed, not necessarily at home, but in their colonial possessions, by all the colonising powers, the motives for colonial rivalry would have been materially diminished, and the claims of various states to colonial territories, when the period of rivalry began, would have been far more easily adjusted.

These were negative forces, leading merely to the abandonment of the older colonial theories.  But there were also positive and constructive forces at work.  First among them may be noted a new body of definite theory as to the function which colonies ought to play in the general economy of the civilised world.  It was held to be their function not (as in the older theory) to afford lucrative opportunities for trade to the mother-country:  so far as trade was concerned it seemed to matter little whether a country was a colony or an independent state.  But the main object of colonisation was, on this view, the systematic draining-off of the surplus population of the older lands.  This, it was felt, could not safely be left to the operation of mere chance; and one of the great advantages of colonial possessions was that they enabled the country which controlled them to deal in a scientific way with its surplus population, and to prevent the reproduction of unhealthy conditions in the new communities, which was apt to