142 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



must be followed, among animals as among men, by effective occupation. 

 The Portuguese were roused into warlike excitement a few years ago by 

 the advance of the Chartered Company into Mashonaland, where their 

 settlements had long ceased to exist. Their claims to the basin of the 

 Congo were on the same ground equally disregarded — this time by all 

 the powers. A bit of seacoast can more easily be kept, and Delagoa 

 Bay was assured to them by the French arbitrator. Mere occupation 

 has at various times given a valid right to a territory. The 

 Puritans found several islands off the New England coast to be desti- 

 tute of inhabitants, and the shores so thinned of Indians by an 

 epidemic as to be practically uninhabited. Yet they were careful to 

 assure their title by purchase. The Manowolko Islands of the Malay 

 Archipelago were without indigenes when the first settlers arrived. 

 Pitcairn and Norfolk Islands were found by the mutineers of the 

 Bounty and the convicts from New South Wales to answer to Defoe's 

 notion of a desert island. The first English settlers in Australia and 

 the first French settlers in New Caledonia met with no resistance from 

 the blacks at the initial stages of occupation. When the Boers trekked 

 across the Vaal they entered on a country that had been left, through 

 exterminating native wars, to the beasts of the field and the forest. 

 The situation is very different when a rival civilized power lays claims 

 to the territory. When Great Britain forcibly took possession of West 

 Griqualand in 1871 she had to salve, without satisfying, the claims of 

 the Orange Free State to one of the richest diamond fields in the world 

 by a payment differently stated at £90,000 and over £100,000. Having 

 to deal with a European power, she was constrained to submit to arbi- 

 tration her pretensions to the so very useful and convenient Delagoa 

 Bay. In attempting to extend British Guiana, so as to gain command 

 of the Orinoco, she came into collision with the mightiest of American 

 peoples, which now guards the interests of all the others. The United 

 States refused to acknowledge the doctrine of 'squatter sovereignty,' 

 and one of the preliminaries of the Venezuela arbitration was the 

 addition to international law of the rule that a period of fifty years' 

 uninterrupted occupancy was required to constitute valid sovereignty. 

 England has gone through the world, like Sir Tantalus's man with his 

 iron flail, beating down the weak and robbing the helpless. Yet few 

 countries can show an equal record of honorable renunciations. It 

 long refused to annex New Zealand, now one of the finest of its colonies. 

 It long refused Fiji and Natal. It refused Samoa. It refused Bechu- 

 analand for a time. It refused Angra Pequena. It would not listen 

 to the discoverer who called on it to occupy equatorial Africa. It 

 disavowed the action of Queensland in annexing New Guinea. It sur- 

 rendered the Ionian Islands. Its constant injunction to its high com- 

 missioner in South Africa was not to advance the line of con- 



