reversal of the long-established system under which the outlying possessions of the United Kingdom were strictly reserved for the commercial benefit of its people, and from which foreign competition was practically excluded. Relatively, except in the case of India and the West Indies, the trade of possessions abroad with the United Kingdom was insignificant. It is no matter of surprise that, in days when a purely commercial instinct dominated policy, the importance of these possessions was measured by the immediate cash value of their custom. No oversea possession was then a going concern wholly independent of aid from the Mother Country in its local requirements, so the ledger account between the two was, in the view of the more powerful politicians at home, all on the wrong side. Possessions beyond sea were therefore looked upon as a liability of the United Kingdom, not as a potential asset of an Empire. Indeed, in those days the Empire itself came to be almost regarded as an unclean thing, and ideas of British Imperialism as a noisome pestilence. Except two provinces in North America, the affairs and local government of oversea territories were directed from an office in London, which from 1801 to 1854 was a part of the War Office. India occupied a wholly different position under the limited control of a chartered company. There were no Colonies in the true sense of the term, but a varied assortment of mere dependencies and scattered settlements lying outside the charmed circle of those great commercial activities of which Great Britain, by fortuitous circumstances, was then the centre. Following precipitately upon the renouncement of the old and the inauguration of the new policy, the World's Fair in Hyde Park of 1851 gave dramatic expression to the dreams of British politicians and the hopes of the people of these islands of that day. In this artificial atmosphere of commercial imagination that the old men of the present generation were brought up and the middle-aged were born; and it was but a natural result that many people in the United Kingdom should have come to regard friendly disintegration as the easiest
