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The American War of Independence 319 eighteenth Oglethorpe sent people from the English debtors' prisons to Georgia, and when in the end of the eighteenth the Dutch sent orphans to the Cape of Good Hope, the Europeans frankly crossed the seas to find new homes for good. In the nineteenth century, and especially after the coming of the steamship, the stream of European emigration to the new empty lands of America and Australia rose for some decades to the scale of a great migration. So there grew up permanent overseas populations of Euro- peans, and the European culture was transplanted to much larger areas than those in which it had been developed. These new com- munities, bringing a ready-made civilization with them to these new lands, grew up, as it were, unplanned and unperceived ; the statecraft of Europe did not foresee them, and was unprepared with any ideas about their treatment. The politicians and min- isters of Europe continued to regard them as essentially expedi- tionary establishments, sources of revenue, " possessions " and " dependencies," long after their peoples had developed a keen sense of their separate social life. And also they continued to treat them as helplessly subject to the mother country long after the population had spread inland out of reach of any effectual punitive operations from the sea. Because until right into the nineteenth century, it must be remembered, the link of all these overseas empires was the ocean- going sailing ship. On land the swiftest thing was still the horse, and the cohesion and unity of political systems on land was still limited by the limitations of horse communications. Now at the end of the third quarter of the eighteenth century the northern two-thirds of North America was under the British crown. France had abandoned America. Except for Brazil, which was Portuguese, and one or two small islands and areas in French, British, Danish, and Dutch hands, Florida, Louisiana, California and all America to the south was Spanish. It was the British colonies south of Maine and Lake Ontario that first demonstrated the inadequacy of the sailing-ship to hold overseas populations together in one political system. These British colonies were very miscellaneous in their origin and character. There were French, Swedish and Dutch settle- ments as well as British ; there were British Catholics in Maryland and British ultra-protestants in New England, and while the New Englanders farmed their own land and denounced slavery, the