"The colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and the acquisition of South Africa in the decline of Holland, created the new and wider British Empire still based upon sea-power and comprising a fifth of the human race, over which Queen Victoria, in the longest reign of British history, presided. In this period moral issues arising from Christian ethics became prominent. The slave trade, from which Britain had so shamelessly profited in the past, was suppressed by the Royal Navy. By a terrible internal struggle, at the cost of nearly a million lives, slavery was extirpated from the United States; above all, the Union was preserved."