They were intelligent enough also to see the importance of good
calling-stations on the route to the East. For this purpose they
planted a settlement in Mauritius, and another at the Cape of Good
Hope. But these settlements were never regarded as colonies. They
were stations belonging to a trading company; they remained under
its complete control, and were allowed no freedom of development,
still less any semblance of self-government. If Cape Colony grew
into a genuine colony, or offshoot of the mother-country, it was
in spite of the company, not by reason of its encouragement, and
from first to last the company's relations with the settlers were
of the most unhappy kind. For the company would do nothing at the
Cape that was not necessary for the Eastern trade, which was its
supreme interest, and the colonists naturally did not take the
same view. It was this concentration upon purely commercial aims
which also prevented the Dutch from making any use of the superb
field for European settlement opened up by the enterprise of their
explorers in Australia and New Zealand. These fair lands were left
unpeopled, largely because they promised no immediate trade
profits.

In the West the enterprises of the Dutch were only less vigorous
than in the East, and they were marked by the same feature of an
intense concentration upon the purely commercial aspect. While the
English and (still more) the French adventurers made use of the
lesser West Indian islands, unoccupied by Spain, as bases for
piratical attacks upon the Spanish trade, the Dutch, with a shrewd
instinct, early deserted this purely destructive game for the more
lucrative business of carrying on a smuggling trade with the
Spanish mainland; and the islands which they acquired (such as