Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 57.djvu/154

144 have been regular campaigns and pitched battles the metropolitan troops bear the brunt of the fighting. Where there is a guerrilla warfare, as with the Australian blacks, it is carried on by the colonial police or by the settlers, sometimes with the aid of the natives themselves. The Carthaginians built up their empire by native auxiliaries. The French and English conquered Canada with the Hurons and Iroquois as auxiliaries. The English mastered New Zealand with Maoris for allies, and defeated the Kaffirs with the help of the Fingoes (a related variety of the Bantu race). Rhodesia was won by a force half Kaffir. Peruvians aided Pizarro. India has been made British by armies of which four fifths were Indian. A people, like a man, contributes to its own subjugation. The expense is likewise distributed. Fifty years of intermittent war with the Kaffirs cost Great Britain twelve million pounds, and it may safely be assumed that a no smaller sum was expended in New Zealand. The colonists honorably bear their share. The premier of the latter colony told a London audience in jubilee year that it was now cheerfully paying the interest on a debt of eleven millions incurred in "holding the colony for the empire." After a Kaffir war Cape Colony was saddled with a debt of three or four millions. Other losses fall more directly on the settlers. Probably none have borne such disasters and so much suffering as the early colonists of North America. The destruction of property in a single New Zealand campaign amounted to £150,000, and the farmers on the frontiers of Cape Colony have suffered far more severely, as those on the frontier of Queensland are suffering now. If blood and money, poured forth like water, can furnish conquest with a valid title to territory, not a few British and French colonies have been justly annexed.

The expansion of an organism or a species is determined also by its struggle with other equal organisms or species which conflict with it. The hardest fight is with individuals of the same or similar species. So are rival colonizing powers usually more formidable opponents to the acquisition of a country than its indigenes. The Carthaginians were robbed of some of their colonies by the more numerous Greeks, and the Greeks of many of theirs by the all-conquering Romans. The Swedes lost a colony to the Dutch. The short but decisive struggle between the Dutch and the English was followed by the loss of the Dutch colonies in North America and the West Indies. In the eighteenth century, after every great war a group of colonies fell into the hands of the victorious power. The West India Islands and those of the Indian Ocean were for many years tossed as in a game of battledore and shuttlecock between France and England. The possession of Canada was a bone of contention between the two countries for several decades. Seeley even maintains that the hundred years' war ending in 1815 was a long rivalry between France and England for the New