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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 52

Colonisation

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Colonisation.

Vignette

If I regarded the aim of these lectures as being the exhaustive discussion of the subjects of which they treat, I should have had much hesitation in choosing such a subject as Colonisation, for it would require not merely an evening lecture, or a short pamphlet, but many volumes, in order to discuss it adequately. But considering, as I do, that the main object of the lectures is to suggest topics that may be further pursued by the members of this Association, I trust that an evening or two may not be ill-spent in taking a rapid glance at the history of some of the colonies of the world, and seeking to deduce from their failures and successes the true objects and right means of colonisation.

It is necessary first to examine what we mean by the term "colony." The word has been defined as "a body of people formed by migration to a distant region, where they support themselves by industry and the produce of the soil, and are under the protection of and attached to the supreme Government of the mother-country."

This definition is important for three reasons—
I.It shows us the distinction between the correct, and the popular—but incorrect-use of the term:
II.It explains the causes and objects of colonisation:
III.It leads us to the consideration of the proper relations between the colony and the parent State:
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I. In order therefore that a community may be a colony, it is necessary it should keep up connection with the mother-country, and that it should be self-supporting.

Thus when the fierce bands of Norsemen poured into the rich districts of France, forgot their homes and their ancestry, and formed the Duchy of Normandy; or when the conquering hosts from Central Asia swept over Eastern Europe, and founded the Ottoman Empire on the ruins of the Greek power—such movements are "migrations," not "colonisation;" as the tie between the emigrants and their mother-country is wanting. On the other hand, although the rock fortress of Gibraltar and the Island of Malta are under the authority of the Colonial Office, and are officially treated as colonies, yet as they are not fields for Englishmen to emigrate to, but are held as naval and military stations, they cannot be considered as coming within the true classification of colonies.

II. Again, the definition I have given explains the causes and objects of colonisation.

These admit of infinite variety; but they may, I think, be mainly classed under three heads, viz.:—The exigencies of commerce; the need of an outlet for an excess of population; and the desire of strengthening the parent state, and forming an empire.

All these causes we see at work in the colonies of the ancient world. Of those colonies or migrations which took place before the dawn of history, when the Aryans of Central Asia moved westward into Europe, and the cities of Upper Egypt formed settlements in the fertile Delta of the Nile, we know so little that, interesting though the investigation may be, no light can be thrown by them on the present subject. I shall consider, therefore, but three groups of colonies of the old world, the Phœnician, the Greek, and the Roman.

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Now we, with the accumulated science of centuries

Phœnician Colonies.

—who may any day take a pleasure trip round the world, and indulge ourselves in grumbling if news from London takes more than a few hours on its journey—may smile at the narrow field of ancient travel; but when we recollect that all Phœnicia is hardly larger than some Australian sheep runs, and that from that little territory (shut in on one side by lofty mountains, on the other by the Mediterranean), those energetic people,

The first who dared, so legends say,
Men's thoughts in writing to portray,

set forth in the veriest cockle-shells of boats, without maps, without compasses, without telescopes, and with only the simplest ideas on astronomy, passed along the coasts and amongst the islands of the Mediterranean, through the Straits of Gibraltar, and so north as far as England, and south along the coast of Africa, doubling the Cape of Good Hope some 2,000 years before it was "discovered" by Vasco de Gama, until they entered the Red Sea or turned further east to India and Ceylon—we can feel nothing but astonishment and admiration at the energy and industry of that enterprising people. No wonder that these merchant princes soon planted settlements in the countries with which they traded, and thus we find their colonies on the islands of the Ægean, in Sicily, in Spain (where the still flourishing town of

Fair Cadiz, rising o'er the dark blue sea,

dates from the time of the Phœnicians), and far away in the cast along the gulfs and shores of Asia. These settlements were, however, all kept of small size in order to maintain their dependence upon the mother-country.

But there is one Phoenician colony which attained

Carthage.

to specially great importance, and had a history far more famous than all the rest. I refer to Carthage. If we cannot admit that the legend of Pygmalion and the romantic tale of Dido and Æneas belong to the province of history, at least they seem to point page 6 to the original peopling of Carthage by a band of political exiles; just as in more recent times the Pilgrim Fathers, driven from home, founded a colony in New England. Near the northernmost point of the African shore, on the beautiful bay now known as the Bay of Tunis, the emigrants found a new home; they tilled the fertile tracts in the neighborhood; their fleets sailed away on missions, of war and peace alike, over the ocean; and by the time when old Tyre was sacked by Nebuchadnezzar, the daughter state had not only established her sway over the native races of Africa, but also over the other Phœnician towns along the coast, and the distant islands of Sardinia, Majorca, and Madeira. And as the Phœnician colony succeeded to the commercial enterprise of the parent state, and added to it great military and naval strength, she, too, sent out her colonies—small settlements both in Africa and Europe—until we find a new Carthage, the modern Cartagena, placed in the midst of the rich mining districts of south-eastern Spain. And as these colonies grew and multiplied, a regular course of colonial policy was adopted—a policy which we, in the nineteenth century, may reprobate, but which we must always recollect has been followed by each of the colonising nations of modern Europe, England amongst the rest. The markets of the colonies, with the exception of those in Sicily, were closed against foreign buyers, in order that all the trade might flow through the port of Carthage—a system of protection the fallacy of which centuries of experience has been needed to expose. History does not contain a chapter of more lamentable interest than the history of the great city of Carthage, as it, torn by jealousy and internal feud, became an easy prey to the foreigner, and was at last so absolutely destroyed, that the modern excavator, amidst the ruins of later buildings on the same site, can hardly find a trace of the once glorious Punic capital.
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But if the Phoenicians had thus been the pioneers

Greek Colonies.

of colonisation, it was amongst the Greeks that the practice became a science. The various states into which the small mountainous country of Greece was divided were found too limited a field for the support of an energetic and rapidly increasing nation; and so each tribe and city in turn sent forth bands of emigrants to find a home for themselves in other lands. A thousand years before the Christian era, Ephesus and other Greek cities were rising on the coast of Asia: to the north, Byzantium, the modern Constantinople, was one of many Grecian colonies; whilst gradually the race spread over the islands and all round the Mediterranean, penetrating westwards as far as Marseilles and the coast of Spain. So many Greek settlements flourished in Italy that that peninsula was named "The Greater Greece;" and to this day the traveller in Sicily turns from the natural beauties of that favoured island, and its riches of mediæval and modem art, to gaze with wonder and admiration at the Greek Temples of Agrigentum, or to trace out the site of what must once have been the noble City of Syracuse. Sometimes, it is true, these colonies were caused by fugitives in the time of foreign invasion or civil war; and there were some expeditions sent out from Athens, the members of which remained citizens of the metropolis, but resided either on their estates in the colony, or sometimes even at Athens itself, without forming a new state for themselves. These, however, were the exceptions amongst Greek colonies. In most instances, a colony was planned by the State, and immediately on its formation became politically independent of its mother city, although united to it by ties of filial affection. Before the altar in the new city rose the sacred fire reverently brought by the emigrants from the temple of their tutelary deity at home; embassies were sent to represent the colony at the national festivals, and as the Father of History tells us,1 it was held as a violation

1 Herod, viii., 22.

page 8 of sacred ties for a colony and the mother state to be at war with one another. And just as Phoenician Carthage sent out its colonies into the west, so we find amongst Greek cities, Corcyra (the modern Corfu), itself a colony of Corinth, sending forth an expedition led, according to the custom in such cases, not by a Corcyraen but by a Corinthian, to plant a new colony at Epidamnus. From the history of these three cities we may learn the relations between colonies, sub-colonies (if I may use such a word), and the parent state in Greece. The men of Epidamnus, hard pressed in a local war, applied for aid to Corcyra; and on this being refused they carried their appeal to Corinth direct. Corinth having granted the assistance sought for, the Corcyraens were somewhat unreasonably offended at the action of the parent state, declared war against her, and sent an embassy to her old enemy, Athens. Even the Athenians charged the Corcyraen ambassadors with a breach of filial duty. This incident is memorable from the words made use of by the Corcyraen ambassadors in defending themselves—words which, though not justified by the circumstances of the case, undoubtedly contain much truth. "Every colony," they said, "as long as it is treated kindly, respects the mother-country; but when it is injured is alienated from it, for colonists are not sent out as subjects, but that they may have equal rights with those that remain at home."1 Thus we learn that the question of the relation between colonies and the Home Government, so far from being a new one, exercised people's minds more than twenty centuries ago.

Roman Colonies.

There is a radical difference between the colonisation of Greece and that of Rome. In Greece we saw a number of independent cities planting settlements as independent as themselves in other parts of the world. In Rome we find a powerful central body, aiming and extending its authority over the

1 Thuc., i., 34.

page 9 neighboring states, the peninsula of Italy, and then the known world itself. And the very word "colony" is not without its signification. For whereas the Greek word referred either to the emigrants starting from home to their new settlement, or to their seeking for a home in the place of their destination, the Latin word "colonia," of which we find a trace in such names as Lincoln and Cologne, refers only to the cultivation of the soil; for the Romans knew well that frontier towns fortified and peopled by Roman subjects, and land tilled by Roman hands, formed the best bulwarks of the state. "A colony," says a Roman writer, "is, as it were, a cutting from the State—"a small effigy and image of the Roman people."1 Amongst the reasons why Rome sent forth her colonics, we are told, some were to keep in check a conquered people, or to repress hostile incursions; others to increase the power of Rome by increasing the population; others to carry off discontented people (who left their country for their country's good); others, again, were mere military colonies, a provision for old soldiers. Nothing like a voluntary colony (such as South Australia is) was possible under the Roman system; it must always be founded by a law of the State; in fact, a Latin author2 has defined a colony as "a body of citizens sent out to possess a commonwealth with the approbation of their own State;" "and by the colonies," says another author,3 "the empire was consolidated, the decay of population checked, and the unity of the nation and language diffused."
As time went on, all Italy was covered with these colonies; the citizens of some having full privileges of Roman citizenship, those of others bearing only the lower rank of "Latins." Each colony, however, managed its own internal or municipal affairs, and each had its own senate, but, with a policy which has been imitated by England, the appointment of the governors rested with the central state, and no

1 Gellius, xvi., 13.

2 Serv. ad. Virg. Æn., i., 12.

3 Machiavelli.

page 10 governor was allowed to remain long in one colony.

When Rome was no longer merely one of the cities of Italy, but had become the centre of a world-wide empire, the idea of a Roman "colonia" was changed; subject cities had the rank of colonies granted to them, which was merely a way of conferring honor on them and their inhabitants. At this time, therefore, the real idea of a colony had been lost.

With the Roman Empire the history of the ancient world closes. As the central state became weak, and province after province fell into the hands of Teutons and Saracens—until at last a Gothic king of Italy assumed the place of the Roman Emperors—the old order was changed, giving place to new, and the arts and sciences of peace were buried under the ruins of the past, only to be brought to light again in a later and a happier age.

Mediæval Colonies.

The second division of the world's history—from the fall of the Roman Empire until the great moral and social revolution of the sixteenth century—was rather a time for the slow and painful reconstruction of society at home than for the discovery of new fields for energy and enterprise abroad. From the date of the first incursions of the Germanic tribes until the final establishment of the nations of modern Europe, there were many migrations, many conquests; but few attempts at real colonisation.

Of that marvellous nation which, in the seventh century of our era, burst forth like a mountain torrent from the deserts of Arabia, swept across northern Africa, shattering at a blow the once powerful Roman Government and the once flourishing African church; then having made Sicily and Sardinia their own, crossed over into Spain, drove back the Gothic power from its capital, at Toledo, into the heart of the Asturian mountains, and passed unchecked into France, until the hammer of Charles Martel fell at Tours, and the tide of Arab page 11 conquest in Europe was stopped for ever—of that I shall say but little. The subject is too vast, and the circumstances too unique, to be properly treated here. Yet some of these conquests were intended to be, and for a time were, real colonics. But soon the central power became so weakened that separation became inevitable, and the colonies were formed into separate states.

Meanwhile, far away, amidst the ice and snow of the north, new settlements were being formed by the bold Scandinavians, which remind us to some extent of the Greek colonies of former ages. About the end of the ninth century, bands of political refugees, fleeing from tyranny in Norway, formed a new home on the barren shores of Iceland, and reproduced with strange exactness a Teutonic state, like those they had left on the continent. The rude commonwealth, however, soon became a dependency of the Norwegian Fatherland, governed by an earl or deputy, and is to the present day subject to the Crown of Denmark, having a parliament and a government of its own. But the same policy as that followed by Carthage of old has led Denmark to keep the trade of Iceland as a monopoly of its own, and thus her commerce is blighted and her progress is stopped.

The energy which had inspired the merchant princes of Phœnicia still lived amongst the republics of northern Italy. Once more commercial stations were found along the coast of the Mediterranean, throughout the Levant, on the Black Sea, and far away in Eastern lands; and the Genoese settlements in Spain and Barbary rose during the thirteenth century to the rank of important colonies.

It is not, however, the Phœnician, or the Greek, but the Roman form of colonisation, that we find most frequently initiated in the middle ages. Military settlements, such as had done good service to the empire in time of war, were vastly important to the mediæval states, amongst whom peace was page 12 almost unknown. The Feudal tenure of land, one of the institutions most characteristic of the middle ages, was to some extent an imitation of the system which prevailed in the military settlements of the Roman Empire.1 For instance, as Spain was slowly reconquered from the Arabs, each new frontier was strengthened by the planting of such fortified colonies. In the same way the fiefs in the north of England, and the lordships of the marshes in the west protected the country against the incursions of the barbarians from Scotland and Wales.

But the most important of England's mediæval colonies was the colony, for such it truly was, planted in Ireland in the time of Henry II. It was not merely an extension of the English power, nor was it, until the sixteenth century, a kingdom in itself, but simply a lordship held under a grant from the Pope, of varying size: at one time extending over half the country; at another limited to a small part of the Province of Leinster, and a few free cities in the north and south. The post of Deputy, as the Lord Lieutenant was then called, was not exactly a bed of roses. On one occasion we find the Irish Council writing to Henry IV. about Prince Thomas, the Deputy:—"Your son is so destitute of money that he has not a penny in the world, nor can he borrow a single penny, for all his jewels and his plate that he can spare, and that he must of necessity keep, are pledged to lie in pawn." This does not seem, however, to have been an unusual state of things, for half a century later the Archbishop of Dublin was obliged to leave his pastoral staff for eight years in the hands of the pawnbroker. It was not until the time of Henry VIII. that the theory of the Papal grant was abandoned, and Ireland was raised to the dignity of a kingdom, subject to the British Crown.

Modern Colonies.

There were two great events which separated the mediæval from the modern world; the reformation

1 Stubbs' "Constit. Hist, of England," vol. i., p. 251, note.

page 13 in Europe, and the discovery of America. Of these, the former has only an indirect bearing upon the present subject; the latter was the opening up of a new world of colonies, the dawn of a new era of colonisation. At this time south-eastern Europe had been overrun by the Turks; Russia had hardly come into existence; Italy was broken up into a number of petty states; England was slowly recovering from a long and devastating civil war; France and Germany were too deeply torn with internal feuds to give much heed to foreign affairs; whilst on the other hand Spain had lately been consolidated under one powerful monarchy; and Portugal was at the zenith of her prosperity. Such was the state of Europe when Columbus laid a new world at the feet of the sovereign of Castile.

From this point begins the history of modem colonisation, which naturally falls into two divisions; first, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, when all the countries of western Europe were busily engaged in planting rival colonies in the East and West Indies, and on the African and American continents; secondly, our own day, when the colonics of Spain, Portugal, and Holland have sunk into comparative insignificance; when France, having lost all her old colonial empire, has been busily engaged in forming a new one, with varying success; but England, although one of the brightest jewels of the British crown has unhappily been lost, has acquired a vast and constantly increasing colonial empire in every quarter of the globe.

It was the decade which closed the fifteenth century that witnessed the revolution of the world. So far we have traced the course of mariners toiling along the coasts of the Mediterranean, and watched the growth of little states in Europe and Northern Africa. Now, instead of the Mediterranean, we have the boundless ocean; instead of the narrow limits of the old world, continents vast and unexplored lie open for the discoverer and the colonist. It was to the untiring zeal and unconquerable bold- page 14 ness of Columbus that this was mainly due; but, although I do not wish for an instant to seem to detract from the well-earned fame of that great but unfortunate hero, we must never forget that the first European who set foot on the American continent was not Christopher Columbus, but Sebastian Cabot, a native of Bristol; nor was it mere bombast in the old writer when he spoke of—

That country so large for room—
Much longer than all Christendom—
Which the most noble king of late memory,
The most wise Prince the Seventh Henry,
Caused first to he found.1

I should like to dwell on that romantic period of history; to narrate how, within half a century after the early navigators sailed away to the West, English and Norman fishermen were reaping a rich harvest from the waters of Newfoundland, the great powers of Mexico and Peru had been brought to desolation and misery by the Spaniard, and the daring Magellan had passed through the straits that bear his name, and traced the whole coast of South America; but my time is short, and such discoveries and conquests do not come strictly within the subject of Colonisation.

It seemed at first as though the newly-found lands would all fall to the lot of the Iberian Peninsula. We may now smile at the boastful impotence of Pope Alexander VI., who divided the world by an imaginary line 100 degrees west of the Azores, and granted all newly discovered countries to the west of that to Spain and to the east to Portugal, excommunicating all who might disturb his arrangement; but at least it had the advantage of directing the energies of the two nations into different channels and avoiding much jealousy, and, probably, bloodshed.

There is nothing which shows the different spirit which actuates the various nations of modern Europe more clearly than their treatment of their colonies and possessions beyond the seas. Some

1 From "The Nature of the Four Elements," written in the carl part of the reign of Henry VIII.

page 15 authors have attempted to divide them into two great families—the Latin race, including France, Spain, and Portugal, and the Teutons, including the Dutch and ourselves, and (so far as they may be called colonising nations) the Danes and Swedes. Such a classification I believe to be impossible, for a division is too large that would include both France and Spain, too narrow and too artificial that would distinguish between Portugal and Holland. I shall therefore briefly examine the history of the various states and then endeavor, to show that, making due allowance for the disturbing influences of climate and religion, the modern colonies, like those of the old world, fall naturally into three classes, according as their primary object is the development of trade, the strengthening of the national power, or the finding of a new home for a redundant population.
When Manuel ascended the throne of Portugal

Portuguese Colonies.

in 1495 the Cape of Good Hope was unknown, and the Indies were still the land of fable and romance. And yet that monarch lived to see the flag of Portugal wave triumphant along the shores of Africa from Gibraltar to Abyssinia, and in Asia from Aden to Cochin, and to send embassies to the Negus of Abyssinia, the royal chief of Congou, the Sultans of Egypt and Persia, and the Emperor of China.1 A great admirer of the Portuguese nation2 has said that "no nation has ever accomplished such great "things in proportion to its means as they have;" and to this it has been answered, "nor afforded an "instance of degeneracy so rapid."
But to explain this, we must remember the object of the Portuguese in the formation of these distant settlements. That they had some idea of increasing the power of their kingdom, both by direct conquest and establishing suzerain rights over foreign monarchs, is true; but their main object was trade, and the establishment of factories and depots for purely commercial purposes; except in the case

1 Dunham's "Hist, of Spain and Portugal," vol. iii., pp. 306, 322.

2 Southey.

page 16 of a few islands the thought of planting colonies in the rich and fertile tracts they passed on their way to the markets of India, Ceylon, China, and Japan, seems never to have occurred to them. So, as soon as the current of events drove the trade of the East through fresh channels and to different ports, the Oriental power of Portugal melted like a snowdrift in spring, and now nothing of those vast possessions remains, save a few languishing districts in India, and some thinly populated territories in southern and western Africa.

But in spite of royal plans and Papal grants, the strange irony of fate had destined that Portugal should he the mother of a vast empire colony on the American continent. The unexpected storm that drove Cabral out of his course as he was sailing southwards along the coast of Africa added the rich and beautiful country of Brazil to the crown of Portugal. So little, however, was its value realised, that at first it was used merely as a penal settlement for convicts and the unhappy victims of the Inquisition; and once again, as at Carthage of old, the exiles from their fatherland formed a new home for themselves, and these Brazilian refugees were the first European colonists in America. But few countries have had so disappointing a history as Brazil. Fertile in soil, favored in climate, rich in timber, about equalling the whole of Australia in size, and in its early days governed on the principle of religious freedom, it seemed in a fair way towards wealth and prosperity. But the foolish restriction placed on its trade in the last century blighted its commercial prosperity; the iron heel of the Inquisition crushed out thought, and stopped the progress of education; and although—when the political changes of the Napoleonic period raised Brazil from a dependency to a sovereign power, when commerce was thrown open, the Inquisition suppressed, and the art of printing introduced, it seemed that a new era had dawned upon the country—yet now, in spite of page 17 many honest efforts for the elevation of the people, and the importation of new colonists, in spite of the introduction of some of our own Australian land laws in place of the antiquated tenures of Portugal, Brazil seems to be making but little progress amongst the nations of the world; her commerce increases but slowly, religious equality is unknown, and she bears the unenviable notoriety of being the chief of the few remaining strongholds, amongst civilised nations, of the institution of slavery.1 Such has been the fate of the Portuguese efforts at colonisation in east and west.

Very different has been the story of the Spanish

Spanish Colonies.

colonies. From the cause I have already mentioned, it was to the West that the energies and hopes of Spain were directed, and indeed, her only possessions in the East—the Philippine Islands—were first reached by the Atlantic and the Straits of Magellan. Whatever mistakes Spain has made in her colonial policy, at any rate she has never undervalued her dependencies in the New World. The king became "King of Spain and the Indies," and wealthy men of Seville sold their houses and lands to provide equipments for their voyage to the lands of the West, not only to El Dorado and the golden City of Manoa, but also to that happy fountain whose existence they did not doubt, which would endow with perpetual youth the man who bathed in its waters; and although these fairy dreams were soon dispelled, it is hardly possible to conceive amongst mundane things a more splendid empire than that acquired by Spain in the Western Hemisphere, which included the whole continent, excepting Brazil, from the north of San Francisco to the confines of Patagonia and all the West Indian Islands. The Viceroyalty of Mexico alone, was nearly eight times the size of France, and when we read of streams

1 In 1876, out of a population of less than eleven millions, nearly a million and a half were slaves. The number, however, is rapidly decreasing, partly by numerous emancipations, but especially in consequence of the law of 1871, which declared that all children born after that year should be free.

page 18 abounding in the precious metals, flowing through fields in which the return of wheat to seed was twenty-four to one, in a country where the rainfall is certain, and where labor was cheap and abundant, we can understand the existence of those colossal fortunes of which Humboldt tells us. "One family" he says "possesses estates of the value of £6,000,000 without including the mine of Valenciana, which in common years brings in a net income of £50,000. Another individual has sometimes received from his single mine £24,000 in a year; and one vein possessed by the family of the Marquis de Fagoaga, has produced in six months, all expenses deducted, a clear income of £4,800,000!"

And yet these vast sums give but little evidence of real colonial progress. The great object of the Spanish Americans was conquest, not settlement; so far as they had any idea of a colony, their type was the Roman rather than the Greek one. The wealthy owners of mines and lands lived lives of luxurious indolence in Mexico and Peru, without interests, without education, without political aspirations; Indian and negro slaves performed the manual labor; to read, write, and say their prayers, was regarded, even by the higher classes, as the goal of a complete education; political power of all classes was kept exclusively in the hands of Spaniards, and most colonial offices were sold in Madrid. Of 170 viceroys who governed the provinces of America, four only were Americans; of 610 captains-general and governors, only fourteen; and this, although Spanish America contained a wealthy and powerful aristocracy, whose interests were entirely bound up with the country in which they lived, and whose employment in the public service would have been not only beneficial to themselves, but of the utmost importance to the whole community.

Nor were the commercial regulations of Spain with regard to her colonies more enlightened than her rule in other respects. She was the first among page 19 the nations of modern Europe to introduce what has been called the "Colonial System," and her colonies were treated not as daughter communities, but as estates which the old country might work to a profit. Trade between the colonies and other countries was absolutely prohibited; and so late as the middle of the last century, a Boston vessel putting into the desolate island of Juan Fernandez to refit, and the appearance of an English whaler in the South Seas, caused the reprimand and cashiering of several officers in Peru. Even the trade with the mother-country was confined to a single port in Spain, from which about twelve ships were annually dispatched to South America, and fifteen to Mexico; and yet, to secure a cargo for the five and twenty ships that were to supply the merchandise of a continent, not only was the cultivation of saffron, hemp, and tobacco in America prohibited, but in 1803 an order was sent from Madrid for the rooting up of the vines and olives in Mexico. The few steps that were taken towards the freedom of the colonies by the later Spanish monarchs—by permitting intercolonial traffic, throwing open more ports in Spain, and even by allowing municipal corporations to be elected in one or two of the principal colonial cities,—were too late and too feeble to be of much effect, or to prevent the colonists from taking the opportunity of the Peninsular War to throw off the yoke of the mother-country. Spain was not wholly unwarned. Thirty years before, the able and enlightened Conde d'Aranda had said plainly that if the Spanish power were to be maintained on the American continent, its unwieldy possessions must be divided into three separate kingdoms, each independent and governed by its own monarch, but paying an annual tribute to Madrid, and that thus the old country would be more than compensated for the loss of territory by becoming the head of a vast federation of Spanish-speaking nations; but his warning fell unheeded on the dull ears of the advisers of Charles III. And even after Wellington page 20 had driven Napoleon out of the Peninsula, and the Spanish monarchy was restored, so little had the Bourbons learnt, that the first idea of Ferdinand VII. was to punish the colonists for managing their own affairs during the prostration of the Home Government. When matters had come to such a pass separation became inevitable.

But the troubles of Spanish America did not end with the war of independence. It was one thing to throw off Spanish bondage; quite another to free themselves from military tyranny, official oligarchy, and clerical bigotry. The Spanish Americans knew nothing of the art of self-government,—least of all were they fitted to copy the model of the United States; and the history of the different nations which rose from the ruins of the old viceroyalties—for there was hardly a thought of cohesion amongst them—is instructive, but lamentable in the extreme. Mexico has produced emperors, presidents, military chiefs, and demagogues without end, but hardly a single real statesman; revolution has followed revolution; the first Empire of Mexico lasted less than a year; next, the Federal Republic was overturned by the Unitary or Centralised Republic; the ceaseless changes showing only how much truth there is in the the words of the poet—

For forms of government let fools contest,
Whatever's best administered is best.

The whole of Texas and New Mexico seceded to the United States; the year 1840 saw two revolutions, and two others followed quickly after. A disastrous war led to the loss of California. After another revolution or two, so far had liberty advanced in the Republic by 1857, that a constitution was accepted, permitting liberty of worship, and thereupon all the leading men of the country were excommunicated by order of the Pope. The following year success again attended the arms of the clerical party at the capital, and for a while Mexico had two governments—one of General Zuloago, in the palace, the other of Juarez, in the provinces.

page 21

In 1861, Louis Napoleon, declaring himself the protector of all the Latin nations, invaded Mexico and attempted to establish an empire by the aid of the clerical faction, French bayonets, and the restoration of negro slavery. Within two years the unhappy Emperor Maximilian was shot and the Republic restored; another clerical rising was suppressed by force of arms in 1876; and although the last few years have seen some progress in the matter of order and religious liberty, very much must still be done before the rich tracts of Mexico can become a desirable field for European immigration.

It was in New Granada that the South American war of independence first began, and raged most fiercely. Once more a warning voice was heard in Spain, when Blanco White urged upon the Government of Cadiz that attempts to bolster up the tottering fragments of an effete and corrupt colonial system were worse than useless, and that in reform alone lay the safety of the Spanish power; but in vain. In 1810 the war began, and was waged with a fierceness on the part of the Spaniards well worthy of the descendants of Philip II. and Alva. No quarter was given to the prisoners; before the capital surrendered, 5,000 of its citizens had died of famine. The dream of the colonists was a very bold one; they sought to bring about, under the name of the "United States of Colombia," a vast federation of the peoples of South America, but they found only too soon that paper constitutions do not make a nation. The provinces of Venezuela and Ecuador seceded, to declare themselves independent, and ruin themselves by ceaseless internal strife; Bolivar, once the popular general, became the arbitrary ruler, then the absolute dictator; since his fall in 1830, the United States of Colombia, now confined within the limits of the old vice-royalty of New Granada, have witnessed four revolutions, and many more civil wars. Progress has been delayed for half a century, and many years page 22 of peace must intervene before Colombia—containing though she does land capable of growing almost all tropical products to perfection, and rich mines of coal and copper—can take her rightful place amongst the family of civilised nations.

The history of the Argentine States is one of special interest to us, as that great confederation may not unfairly be called the Australia of South America. In Mexico, and New Granada, the Spanish power was founded on the ruin of an earlier civilisation; the climate is tropical; and the civil wars have taken the form of clerical and anticlerical struggles. The states of the Plate River, however, form a new, not an old country; they lie almost wholly within the temperate zone; instead of plantations of sugar and coffee, we find vast runs for cattle, sheep, and horses; rank was almost unknown; the country drifted into independence rather than freed itself by a revolution, and the clerical power was hardly a political one. Nevertheless, the internal feuds have been many and disastrous. Possessing but one great outlet at Buenos Ayres, it was indispensable for the very existence of the country that that city should be at peace with the inland states; and yet there was but little in common between the hardy but utterly uneducated and almost barbarous leaders of the Federalist party—who were scattered over the distant stations of a country nearly as large as South Australia—and the small number of intelligent politicians who formed the Unitary party at the capital. The Federal Republic collapsed at the end of four years, Uruguay and Paraguay seceding; and the tyranny of anarchy which ensued, was only changed for the slavery of military despotism under the Dictator Rosas. It is calculated that, in fourteen years, no less than 22,000 persons were put to death by the orders of this man, thousands of them being shot in wholesale massacre. From 1848 to 1852, the country was again plunged in civil war, which was only brought to an end by the disastrous plan of separating Buenos Ayres from the other provinces, page 23 to the injury of the one and the ruin of the other. Another war, however, resulted in the complete victory of the unitary party; and there seem reasons to hope that now the confederation is progressing steadily, though slowly, towards peace and prosperity; 2,000 miles of railway have been opened; there are still in the country about the same number of sheep as in the whole of Australia; colonies from various nations of Europe have been successfully planted, and although the public revenue does not equal that of Victoria, and but little exceeds that of New Zealand, the development of the country may be looked forward to with some confidence.

I pass over, from want of time, the Republics of Bolivia, and Peru (where the recent war has annihilated whatever fragments of prosperity there were left in that unhappy country), and the smaller states, and can only take a glance at Chili before leaving the Continent of South America. In Chili there existed the most fortunate combination of circumstances for the formation of an independent state. Many of the colonists were industrious, though poor, Biscayans, who had brought to their new homes the ideas of liberty that have never quite died out in their native province. The possession of numerous ports prevented any collision between the parties of centralisation and federalism, and the power of the clerical faction was insignificant. Independence was not gained without a long and weary struggle, and, ere the Spaniards had been entirely driven out, another revolution was necessary to free the nation from a director, who, like Bolivar in Colombia, was endeavoring to supplant the Spanish power by a monarchy of his own. But for half a century Chili has been without a revolution; I do not say they have been years of peace, as they have included three principal though unsuccessful insurrections, besides many smaller ones, and two foreign invasions; but life and property have been more safe there than in any other of the South page 24 American republics; and instead of trusting to the dream of a paper constitution forming a nation, the constitution and the nation have grown together. For many years land has been offered on advantageous terms to immigrants from Europe, education has been encouraged, the clergy made amenable to the common law, and perfect toleration of all forms of religion established: and under this enlightened rule Chili has been enabled to maintain her credit in the money market of Europe, and to crush the forces of Peru by land and sea; and the only reason why her victorious forces have not been able to dictate terms to the Government of Lima is that in the Republic of Peru it was impossible to find a government to dictate to!

But the revolution at the beginning of this century, which robbed Spain of all her territories on the American continent, left her the fertile island of Cuba as almost a solitary relic of her once mighty empire. Even the Madrid Government had at last realised that concessions were necessary if a shadow of colonial power were to be retained, and in 1813 Cuba was liberated from the colonial system. There has been, too, another circumstance which has increased the prosperity of the island, but one of which it is impossible to speak with satisfaction. The revolution freed the negroes on the continent; a growing feeling of humanity put a stop, first to the slave trade, and then to slavery itself, in the other islands of the West Indies. Cuba alone retained the moral disgrace but pecuniary benefit of slave labor.1 But great as the natural advantages of the island have been, its prosperity does not equal the expectations of other days. A careful author,2 writing forty years ago, said that Cuba was then, beyond contradiction, the wealthiest and most flourishing colony possessed by any European Power, but its exports at that time were consi-

1 The Spanish Cortes have recently passed measures for the gradual emancipation of the slaves in Cuba. Unfortunately, however, these are not so practical in their provisions as the similar laws in Brazil.

2 Merivale.

page 25 derably less than those of South Australia now; and since that time, although the increase of population has been slow but steady amongst the whites, and enormous amongst the negroes, the prosperity of the island has been checked by two insurrections and one desultory civil war, which caused regiment after regiment of young Spaniards to be drafted off to die of fever at Havanna, but did nobody any-good. In 1861 an attempt was made to sell the island to the United States, who wisely decided not to entangle themselves again in the slavery question; but there are many close observers on both sides of the Atlantic who consider that the time is not far distant when Cuba will either follow the example of the Spaniards on the continent of America, or become merged in the great republic of the north.
The history of the colonies of France, the third

French Colonies.

and last of the colonising nations of the "Latin" race, is interesting as well as instructive. Brazil, if we except a short time when a part of the coast was in the possession of the Dutch, remained Portuguese until it separated itself from the mother-country; Mexico and America still belong to the Spanish race, although the colonists have shaken off the yoke of Spain; in France alone we find the strange spectacle of a foreign nation acquiring and nurturing great colonies with the utmost care and skill only to see them fall into the hands of another Power. Ever since the discovery of America it has been the ambition of France to extend her power by acquiring possessions beyond the sea; her colonial policy has been in the main an enlightened and certainly a liberal one, and the French have succeeded remarkably in conciliating native races; and yet at the beginning of this century France was without a colony! A history so remarkable is full of lessons to English colonists.

About the middle of the sixteenth century, before England had planted a single colony in the Western page 26 Hemisphere, the farseeing Coligny perceived that sooner or later the Huguenots would be driven out of France, and that their only hope lay in finding a new home. With this idea he planned a Huguenot settlement in Brazil; but the man to whose care the little community was entrusted turned traitor, the scheme was a failure, and in four years the few remaining Frenchmen were expelled from the country by the Portuguese. The fate of Coligny's second attempt was even more tragical. In 1562 a Huguenot expedition left France to settle in Florida; it might have been thought that in that remote province the little community might have been allowed, unharmed and harmless, to till the ground and plant their oranges in peace, but Philip II.—actuated by the same spirit which had prompted his ancestors to condemn 4,000 citizens of Seville to the flames, and many more to bonds and imprisonment, in the space of six and thirty years, on a charge of heresy—dispatched an expedition under an officer charged with the strictest orders to leave no Protestant alive in Florida; and within three years from the planting of the colony the whole body of the colonists, about 900 in all, were—with the exception of a few who were kept as slaves—massacred in cold blood, "not as Frenchmen, but as Lutherans."

In the following century, bold attempts were made by France to acquire colonies in east and west. As early as 1540 a small French colony had been planted on the banks of the St. Lawrence, and the country had been named "New France." But it was not for nearly seventy years afterwards that emigrants in large numbers flowed to Canada, and the cities of Quebec and Montreal were founded. The society of New France was intended to be a reproduction of that in the mother-country. Great tracts of land were granted out to feudal barons, who alone had the right of grinding corn, trading in furs, and fishing; and beneath whose protection freehold tenants lived, holding their lands by a quit page 27 rent, and subject to military service. At one time France claimed the whole of the inland part of the continent, from Labrador to the mouth of the Mississippi, but in 1713 England acquired Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and in 1763 all the rest of New France, except Louisiana, which was then ceded to Spain. The French plantations in the West Indies were rich and steadily improving. The first permanent French settlements in that part of the world were made about the year 1625. A century and a half later the exports from St. Domingo alone amounted to £8,000,000; its trade employed more than 1,000 ships and 15,000 Frenchmen; and France drew as much wealth from this one island as England did then from India, or Spain from Mexico and Peru put together. In 1791 the blacks revolted, and the troops of France were unable to quell a negro insurrection in a single island. But from the date of its independence, San Domingo, whether under negro emperors, kings, or responsible governments, has been in a perpetual state of anarchy. Martinique and Guadaloupe, however, still remain in the possession of France.

The history of the French in South America is very sad. Though France had long held a part of Guiana, but few attempts had been made to colonise it, until the loss of Canada stimulated Louis XIV. to seek for colonies in other parts of the world. Soon after the peace of 1763 an expedition of no less than 12,000 people started from France for Cayenne, for the colony proudly named "Equinoctial France." A city was to be founded immediately, and the motley group of emigrants included not only tradesmen and capitalists, but civil and military officials, and even actors and musicians. So hazy were the views of the managers of the party that they quite forgot that provisions would not keep in a damp tropical country. In a few months nearly all the ambitious colonists had died of famine and fever; the rest were swept away by the sudden rise of a river, page 28 and French Guiana was deserted. Since that time a few, more rational but hardly more successful, attempts at colonisation have been made by France in Guiana; at one time the colony fell into the hands of England; next, it was turned into a French penal settlement; but even that has been abandoned, and at present it is used as a convict station for Arabs from Algeria and negroes from Réunion.

In the early part of last century England and France were struggling for the mastery in Hindostan. Their object was trade, as neither power at that time had any idea of becoming the possessors of the country. For some time the scale seemed to be turning in favor of France; but in the wars at the time of Napoleon, one French settlement after another was seized by the English; then Pondicherry itself was taken; and though that has since been restored, yet at the present day, when British India is about the size of all Europe without Russia, the French can claim but one little tract of less than 200 square miles.

In the Indian Ocean France has been somewhat more fortunate. It is true that two attempts—one made in the seventeenth, the other in the present century—to plant French colonies in Madagascar, have been failures; yet, thriving settlements, of special importance in connection with the Indian trade, were established in Reunion and Mauritius. But in 1810, when the French settlements in India had fallen into the hands of the English, these islands were conquered too; and thus France was left without a single colony in the world!

During the period of which I have been treating, the French Colonial Policy had gradually undergone a change. For a short time French West Indies were governed by a company; but after its dissolution in 1674, their administration at home was entrusted to a Council of Commerce, and each island was ruled by a governor and council. Although the French regarded their colonies as estates, yet so far were they from working page 29 them to a profit that they actually taxed themselves for their benefit; and it has been computed that the prohibition of foreign sugar in the French markets amounted to a tribute paid by the mother-country to the colonies of nearly £2,000,000 a year, without any compensation.1 The trade of the colonies was restricted to French ships, but strangers were allowed to come and go as they would. The horrors of slavery were much mitigated by Louis XIV.; and in Canada the French lived on friendly terms with the Indians. The armies of France were always ready to protect her possessions abroad; but, with a strange inconsistency, the defences of the sea, where the real war was to be fought, were neglected, and during the struggle between military France and naval England, colony after colony, island after island, fell into the possession of Great Britain.

In the course of the last century, influenced by views advanced by her thinkers and writers, France ceased to look at her colonies as estates, and began to regard them as integral parts of the mother-country. This is, in fact, the modern form of the old Roman view, and it is being acted on by France at the present day. Deputies from Algiers and Constantine sit in the Assembly at Versailles side by side with those from Paris and Lyons.

The modern colonies of France are of two classes; the fragments of her old colonial empire that have been receded to her, and new acquisitions. Of the latter, by far the most important is her splendid dependency in North Africa, which has been gradually growing from the days of Charles X. until the present time. Algeria may almost be called the South Australia of France. Algiers, the capital of the colony, is in a latitude nearly corresponding with Adelaide. The country produces

1 The Parliamentary returns issued at the end of last year show that the British colonies are a net expense to the mother country of £2,000,000 a year. This sum, however, includes expenditure for such places as Malta, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and Bermuda, which are held as naval and military stations, and are not really colonies.

page 30 corn, wine, olives, and oranges in rich abundance; the climate much resembles our own, even possessing the charm of hot winds. It must be confessed that, in many respects, they have the advantage of us. Separated from the markets of Europe by a voyage of only two days from any of their many ports, with cheap labor, both native and imported from southern Europe; with government engineers to plan great works of drainage, irrigation, and planting, and soldiers to make the roads that open up the country in all directions; with a firm and well-administered government; with beauties of nature that attract the wealthy pleasure-seekers of the north; with snowy mountains for summer retreat, and sunny plains for winter labor; with veins of minerals and beautiful marbles; a fertile soil and phylloxera as yet unknown; it is no wonder that Algeria is now one of the most flourishing provinces in the world. But even here all is not perfect. The colony is still an annual expense to France. No pains have been spared to promote colonisation, immigrants being imported at the expense of the Government and of private societies; but amongst the French colonists the deaths almost equal the births. Of the 350,000 Europeans in Algeria, less than 200,000 (that is not much more than half) are of French origin;1 and it is no uncommon thing to hear Frenchmen complain bitterly that they have but labored to make a fatherland for foreigners (une patrie des étrangers). Although the European population in the towns is chiefly French, Spanish, or Italian, some of the most extensive and productive estates in the country are in the hands of Englishmen, just as we see some of the largest government contracts in New Caledonia taken by Australians.
In other lands, too, France has been seeking to establish new colonies. But the world's auction is over; the allotments have already been taken up. French influence in the Sandwich Islands has had

1 These figures are taken from the Census of 1876. The numbers since then have doubtless considerably increased.

page 31 no better result than it had in Mexico. The island of New Caledonia from its size can never be a serious rival to Australia or New Zealand; and though the French may establish missions and protectorates in islands of the South Pacific, a race which hardly increases in its own country is not likely to require a home for its younger sons in the colonies.
I turn now to the colonies of the Teutonic nations.

Teutonic Colonies.

Sweden and Denmark may be passed by. The settlements planted by the wise and beneficent Gustavus Adolphus, on the Continent of America, have long since passed under other rulers; and the few islands which the Scandinavians still possess in the West Indies, are, I am given to understand, all up for sale.

Switzerland has made no settlement of her own; but there is one Swiss settlement in America which deserves special mention, not so much on its own account as on that of its remarkable founder. In 1718 a Swiss named John Purry presented a memorial to the Dutch East India Company, in whose service he then was, pointing out that the true policy of commercial nations was not merely to trade with old countries in Europe, but to form permanent and self-supporting settlements beyond the seas; and urging the company to send out emigrants to such favored regions as South Africa, and Southern Australia. He was immediately dismissed from the company's service. He went to France, and met with a polite but cold reception. Next he turned to England; but our ancestors little dreamed then that what they called "New "Holland" was destined to become the Great New England of the southern seas, or that most of their American possessions would ere long fall away from the British Crown. They received the enterprising foreigner cordially, and recommended him to form a settlement of his fellow countrymen in the hitherto unoccupied districts of Carolina and Georgia; and there the flourishing town of Purrys- page 32 burg, still peopled by the descendants of Purry's emigrants, bears witness to this day to the wisdom and sagacity of that true colonist.

I have already said that some authors divide European colonies into two families—those of the Latin and Teutonic races, but that such a classification I consider too artificial. The colonies of Holland really fall midway between those of Portugal and England, for the Dutch acted with the same object as the Portuguese, but the same spirit as Englishmen. That object was commerce, that spirit was the love of liberty. It was the bigotry and cruelty of Philip II. which made the Netherlands a nation; but long before that, the burgesses of such cities as Amsterdam, Utrecht, and the Hague had, in their guilds of traders and artisans, learnt the habits of industry, self-reliance, and cooperation which at one time made them the greatest merchants of the world. There was, however, much truth in Canning's well-known lines, that

In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch
Was giving too little and asking too much.

When Holland freed herself from Spanish tyranny, her people were only able, with difficulty, to keep in repair the embankments on which the very existence of the Netherlands depended; less than fifty years afterwards Raleigh said, with hardly an exaggeration, that the ships of the Dutch outnumbered those of England and ten other nations; and the trade which was already flowing away from Lisbon was pouring into Amsterdam. This led to the formation of various joint-stock companies, only two of which, however, attained to great celebrity. In 1602 the famous Dutch East India Company received its charter, and was the first great joint-stock company whose shares were bought and sold from hand to hand. During the next half century the centres of Portuguese trade in the East, one by one, fell into their hands—in the Moluccas, Cochin, India, and Ceylon—and as early as 1618 an oriental Amsterdam had been founded at page 33 Batavia, in the Island of Java. The religious persecutions which mark the progress of Portugal in the east were unknown in the annals of Holland, and the Dutch were often looked upon as friends and protectors by the native rulers. But with a narrowness of view that marked a mere trading corporation, whose only object was their dividends, the company seized the best land that they could for their plantations, and ruthlessly destroyed all the other fruit trees throughout the islands, in order to keep up the price of their own spices.

This great company produced many trading stations, but only two colonies—the Island of Java (rich in spices and tropical products) and the Cape of Good Hope. It is specially interesting to us to watch the rise and progress of the latter, one of the earliest instances of modern colonisation on a regular system. The colony was founded about the year 1650, not by the nation, but by the East India Company, to whom it belonged, and solely with the object of benefiting their Indian trade. The bigotry of Louis the XIV., which drove thousands of his best and most industrious subjects into exile, brought many Huguenots, and with them the art of making wine, into the colony. According to the pernicious system of the time, labor was obtained by enslaving the natives. Foreigners were encouraged to settle, but trade with foreign countries was absolutely forbidden. Each settler was permitted to occupy nine square miles, 120 acres being freehold, the rest without any security of tenure. There was much to be admired in the patriarchal simplicity of these Dutch colonists. Many of them were men of deep religion, and full of that love of home and family which is the true basis of national prosperity; but it is needless to say that under such a system the population became too scattered, each generation grew up less cultured than the last, and the farming was of the rudest description. At the end of the last century, shortly before the Cape passed into page 34 the hands of the English, the Governor reported that the colony was fully peopled up to its food-producing capacity. It contained at that time 20,000 free inhabitants. The white population alone is now twelve times that number, and the annual exports are counted by millions of pounds.

The Dutch West India Company, even more than its eastern sister, shows us what admirable traders, but inferior colonists, were the men who planned its career. At the formation of the company in 1621, the States General endowed it not only with a large sum of money, but also with the most ample powers of trading and holding land abroad, but did not guarantee to it the possession of any of the territories it might occupy, or make any stipulations with regard to the liberties of those who might become its subjects. Five years afterwards the enterprising company had conquered half the coast of Brazil, and was paying a dividend of cent, per cent. But no efforts were made to conciliate the natives, who were ground down by irritating restrictions on their trade, and, with a strangely short-sighted policy, the directors reduced to so low a figure the sum allowed for the troops and fortifications necessary for the security of their important possessions, that in forty years the Brazilians succeeded in driving every Dutchman out of the country, and the trade of Brazil was for ever lost to Holland.

Yet under the protection of this company a colony was founded in North America, which was destined to have a glorious future. The settlement then called New Amsterdam, in the province of the New Netherlands, was that which we now know by the name of New York. As Canada was intended to be a reproduction of feudal France, so was this province planned in imitation of aristocratic Holland. Whoever would within four years plant a colony of fifty souls, was to become patron (or, as we should say, lord of the manor), with absolute possession of the lands he had colonised, and, should a town grow up, the right of instituting page 35 its government was his. So narrow were the restrictions on trade, that no colonist was allowed, under the severest penalties, to make any woollen, linen, or cotton fabric for himself. The principles of religious toleration had been brought by the Dutchmen from their fatherland. Once indeed we hear of a governor imprisoning a Quaker; but the directors at Amsterdam immediately sent to him these memorable instructions, admirable at all times, but doubly so when we recollect that they were uttered more than 200 years ago. "Let every peaceful citizen enjoy freedom of conscience; this maxim has made our city the asylum for fugitives from every land; tread in its steps and you shall be blessed." But the constant collisions between the ruling companies and the colonists, who flocked each year to the New Netherlands from the different countries of Europe would no doubt sooner or later have led to a civil war; and it was a loss to the few but a gain to the many, when, in 1674, the New Netherlands were finally incorporated with the Anglo-Saxon colonies in America.

In Guiana the Dutch have been somewhat more successful. Coming from a land of dykes and embankments, the colonists understood how to cultivate the rich alluvial plains, instead of planting settlements on barren mountain slopes, as the French had vainly attempted. But a servile war, which dragged on through half the last century, impoverished the country, and although it is now sufficiently prosperous to export a considerable quantity of sugar and other tropical products, still the Dutch colony is, both in material prosperity and in political condition, behind that part of Guiana which owes allegiance to the Crown of England.

I pass over the Dutch possessions in the West Indies from want of time. In the days of Napoleon, when Holland itself had to submit to a nominee of the all-powerful Emperor, the same policy which induced England to attack all the page 36 colonies of France led her to seize on those of Holland; not because they were Dutch, but because Holland was French, and undefended colonies always form a tempting object of attack to a hostile power. Before this time the Dutch companies had died a natural death, and their Oriental possessions had been ruled first by a committee of the States General, then by the Government of Holland itself. Java remained English for five years only; the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon permanently. At the present day the Dutch East Indies are probably managed better by the Government of the Hague than they ever were before, and infinitely more liberally than they would be under native princes; but, with a policy very different to that which has been pursued by England with regard to her colonial possessions, a revenue of nearly £3,000,000 a year is drawn from them by the mother-country, and spent on public works at home.

British Colonies.

I now pass from the consideration of foreign countries, and turn to that story which is dear to every true Australian, to the grand history of British colonisation. It is a tale which is marred by many a failure and darkened by many errors and much wrongdoing; but still it is in the main a glorious one, and one thought pervades the whole—the thought of untiring energy and law-abiding liberty. Circumstances may, and must change; but the spirit is the same, whether we picture to ourselves the England of Elizabeth, and the Queen herself standing on the shore at Greenwich, to wave a last farewell to three tiny vessels, the largest not more than 25 tons burden, as they sailed down the Thames on their way to the unexplored countries of the west; or think of the same spot at the present time, when fleets of steamships, compared with which the vessels of the Spanish Armada would be fishing boats, are daily passing to-and-fro between the mother country and the provinces and cities of the great empire whose page 37 people are proud to call themselves the subjects of Queen Victoria.

No sooner had Cabot returned from the American continent than the English formed plans for colonising its shores. At first indeed such ideas were subservient to the dream of finding the north-west passage to India, the plunder of Spanish vessels, and the discovery of gold on the coasts of Labrador and in the territories of the Esquimaux; but even the explorers of Newfoundland took with them cattle for the benefit of future colonists; and by the time of Elizabeth the people of England were slowly learning that it is not by finding precious metals in an icy and inhospitable region, but by the tilling of a fertile soil, that the foundations of a new commonwealth are laid. They were learning, to use the words of Schiller:1

Dass der Mensch zum Menschen werde
Stift er einem ewigen Bund
Glaübig mit der frommen Erde
Seinem mütterlichen Grund.

or, as translated by Lord Lytton—

Let, that man to man may soar,
Man and earth with one another
Make a compact evermore,
Man the son and earth the mother.

From this covenant between man and the earth has arisen all civilisation, and all the salutary order of human society, and upon it are based even the adornments of art and the attainments of science.

The history of the early English settlements in America is the very antithesis to those of Spain. There we found conquering armies setting forth by order of the king to sweep down empires and kingdoms before them, and plant Spanish viceroyalties on their ruins with all the surroundings of civil and ecclesiastical rank and state; here we see little bands of humble men and women, many of them religious refugees, with no thought of conquest or empire, desiring only to find a peaceful home amongst the woods and meadows of a new

1 Eleusischcn Feste.

page 38 country. Spain began with glory and ended with disaster; England started with failure and slowly worked her way to triumph.

Virginia.

The first English colony that was actually planted in America was directed, not by the State nor by a company, but by a private individual. In 1584 a patent was granted by Queen Elizabeth to Walter Raleigh constituting him "Lord Proprietary," with almost unlimited powers over a vast territory in the new world, subject only to homage and a nominal rent; and the name Virginia still bears witness to the colony that was planted in the days of the virgin queen. It is certainly a blot on this patent that it contains no direct security for the liberties, within the colony, of the colonists, who were thus placed at the mercy of a single man: but we must recollect that that man was the chivalrous and enlightened Raleigh; that he who provided the whole expenses of the venture had a right to look for substantial benefits in the event of its proving successful; that we can hardly expect a perfect colonial policy when colonisation was in its infancy; and, last but not least, that a special clause in the patent secured to all the colonists "the rights "of Englishmen," which might indeed be construed as merely reserving English citizenship to those who should return to the mother country, but might more fairly be, and actually was taken, as including the principle that Englishmen who settle in a colony are entitled there to privileges as great as those enjoyed by their brethren who stay at home.

But the Nemesis which pursued the heroic founder seemed to brood over the colony that he had founded. We owe much to those early settlers. The maize and potatoes that we eat, the tobacco we smoke, and the beautiful wild vine that adorns our walls, which from its native country we call "Virginia creeper," were brought from Raleigh's settlement; but two years after the patent was page 39 granted the colonists in despair returned home; and soon afterwards the few men placed as the guardians of English rights were murdered by the Indians. The bold spirit of Raleigh, however, was not conquered by one or two failures; the very next year he chartered fresh ships and sent out a fresh band of immigrants. With more ambitious ideas, he granted a charter to the town that was intended to be built, "The City of Raleigh"; and the summer of 1587 saw a colony of English men and women on the shores of Virginia. What was the fate of that little band? Whether they perished by a lingering famine, by a sudden disease, or by the hands of the natives, or whether they, as some have thought, wandered away into the interior, mingled with the Indians, and at length became merged in their tribes, must remain for ever a mystery. We only know that three years after they had formed their settlement, the site was once more a desert; Raleigh, from his prison, spent the remnant of his shattered fortune in searching for them, but in vain; and at the close of the sixteenth century, when the Spanish conquests in America were completed, many graves, but not a single settlement bore witness to the efforts of the English to plant a colony in Virginia.

These efforts, however, were renewed at the very beginning of the next century. Of the many English settlements in America which date from that period I shall take but three—Virginia, Maryland, and the first settlement in New England—as instances of how they all, starting with different ideas, and governed by different constitutions, gradually approached each other, as character overcame circumstances.

Raleigh had spent £40,000 in his attempts to colonise Virginia; the work was now taken up by a corporation. In 1606 a patent was granted by King James to a company in London, conferring on them the exclusive right of occupying all the land between the 34th and 38th degrees of latitude, page 40 subject only to homage, a royalty on minerals, and a prospective duty on vessels trading in the harbors of the colony. The company were to have the privilege of coining money, but legislative power was reserved to the king himself, and a code of laws was framed by him somewhat in imitation of those prevailing in England, and including trial by jury for serious offences. English nationality was promised to the emigrants and their descendants, but with that their liberties ended; they had no votes in the election either of the local council in the colony or of the superior body in London.

It seemed at first as though the new settlement would end as tragically as its predecessors. In December, 105 emigrants crossed the Atlantic, entered the Bay of the Chesapeake, ascended the River Powhattan for about fifty miles, and built the fort and village of Jamestown; but of this little band fifty died before the following August, and of the rest many were laid low by sickness, and actual famine was avoided only by the kindness of the Indians. Fresh immigrants arrived from time to time from England, merely to find a tomb where they had sought a home. In 1609 the colony contained 490 souls; before the next summer the number had dwindled down to sixty! The miserable remnant resolved once more to quit the fatal spot, make their way to Newfoundland, and beg a passage home in the ships of English fishermen. They bade farewell without a tear to Jamestown, and actually reached the mouth of the river, when the longboat of Lord Delaware, who had come with aid, appeared. The fugitives again took heart, and returned with him to their deserted settlements.

And now a happier era began to dawn on Virginia. Fresh supplies and immigrants arrived from home; and the daily morning and evening devotions in the little church at Jamestown contained the simple but touching prayer, "Lord bless England, our sweet native country."

At this time three important events took place, page 41 which changed the whole condition of affairs. The first of these was a reform of the land laws. When the original code was formed, a mistaken policy had led to the insertion of a clause that the industry and commerce of the colony should, for five years at least, be conducted in a joint stock. This premium on idleness was now abolished, and a few acres were allotted to each man as his own share, grants were promised to future colonists, and land was made saleable. Thenceforward the sanctity of private property was recognised as the surest guarantee of order and abundance.

The second was the culture of tobacco. As often happens, in a new country, much labor and expense had been wasted in the attempt to raise unsuitable crops, but in tobacco they found the one that was best adapted to their soil and climate; the very streets of the town were planted with it, and it became, not only the staple, but even the currency of the colony. Tobacco enriched Virginia.

The third event, the establishment of peace, for a time at least, with the Indians, brought about by a happy marriage. During the early struggles of the colony, food had been, from time to time, supplied to the fort by the chief Powhattan and his little daughter Pocohontas. The child had now grown up, and John Rolfe, "an honest and discreet young "Englishman," loved and won the native maiden. I must give her history in the words of the American historian.—"Quick of comprehension, the youthful princess received instruction with docility, and soon, in the little church of James-town, which rested on rough pine columns fresh from the forest, and was as frail as an Indian wigwam, she stood before the font, cut out of the trunk of a tree that had been hollow like a canoe, openly renounced her country's idolatry, professed the faith of Jesus Christ, and was baptized. The gaining of this one soul, the first fruits of Virginian conversion, was followed by her nuptials with Rolfe. In April, 1613, to page 42 the joy of Sir Thomas Dale, with the approbation of her father and friends, Opachisco, her uncle, gave the bride away, and she stammered before the altar her marriage vows according to the rites of the English service. Every historian of Virginia commemorated the union with approbation: distinguished men trace from it their descent. In 1616 the Indian wife, instructed in the English language and bearing an English name, the first christian ever of her nation, sailed with her husband for England. The daughter of the wilderness possessed the mild elements of female loveliness, half concealed, as if in the bud, and rendered the more beautiful by the childlike simplicity with which her education in the savannahs of the New World had invested her. How could she fail to be caressed at Court and admired in the city? As a wife, as a young mother, her conduct was exemplary. She had been able to contrast the magnificence of European life with the freedom of the western forests, and now, as she was preparing to return to America, at the age of 22, she fell a victim to the English climate, saved, as if by the hand of mercy, from beholding the extermination of the tribes from which she sprung, leaving a spotless name, and dwelling in memory under the form of perpetual youth." But though she thus early passed away, Pocohontas left behind her a little one that lived to grow up and keep her name alive; and to this day there are some, not only in America but in South Australia, who trace their descent from the noble and generous Powhattan and the good and gentle Pocohontas.

But it was not until the colony had been in existence for thirteen years that the fundamental change took place by which a plantation was made a nation. The original patent had already been modified, the powers at first reserved for the king being transferred to the company; but without any additional rights being bestowed on the colonists. In 1619, however—to use the quaint page 43 words of the historian of Massachusetts—"a house of burgesses broke out in Virginia." (The application to the First Colonial Parliament of an expression more often used in connection with an epidemic is doubtless an Americanism.) The governor, the council, and twenty-two members elected to represent eleven districts of Virginia formed the first popular representative body in the Western Hemisphere; the first in the world, it is said, in which the principle of universal suffrage was recognized. Two years afterwards an ordinance of the company established a constitution for the colony—a governor and a permanent council appointed by the company themselves, and a body of members annually elected by the several plantations, who, with the permanent council, would form a single House of Assembly. Legislative authority was granted to the Assembly, subject to a veto by the governor and ratification by the superior council at home; and similarly orders of the London council required ratification by the local assembly. But in 1623 the company, who had spent about £100,000 on the colony, was dissolved, and the appointment of the governor was vested in the Crown. The colonists succeeded, not without a struggle, in retaining to themselves the nomination of other officers.

The Assembly was not long in making use of its newly-acquired powers. Less than twenty years after the first settlement of Englishmen in Virginia had been effected, the Colonial Parliament made a formal declaration of those rights which long years after were only finally established by a bitter and a lamentable war—a war to be doubly regretted by Englishmen and colonists. "The Government," said the Assembly, "shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony, their lands or commodities, other way than by the authority of the general Assembly, to be levied and employed as the said Assembly shall appoint." And not long afterwards the Assembly was equally emphatic in page 44 asserting their right to free trade, "for freedom of trade," said they, "is the blood and life of a commonwealth." Thus did the people of Virginia secure to themselves the three necessities of a flourishing community—the security of property, the freedom of industry, and the possession of civil franchises.

No sooner was the Constitution established than the planters began to regard Virginia as their home. "They fell to building houses and planting "corn," and so eager were the young men to enter on family life that it is recorded that even 150lbs. of Virginia tobacco was sometimes given for a wife! Religious persecution, still unhappily rife in the mother-country, existed only on paper in Virginia, for although by the law the Church of England alone was tolerated, yet, as a matter of fact, Puritans and Brownists were invited to the colony, and lived there in peace until Puritanism had been identified with Republicanism, and its professors were banished, not as heretics, but as Revolutionaries, by the Royalist majority. The only deep blot on the history of religious liberty in the early days of Virginia was an Act passed in 1658, ordering Quakers to be banished; but even that might possibly have been avoided had not some mistaken members of that society, by their excesses, outraged feelings of common decency and propriety. Such was the story of the early struggles of the first British colony in the Western Hemisphere, the settlement which the colonists proudly, but not at that time untruthfully, called "the best poor "man's country in the world."

Maryland.

Now I come to the Colony of Maryland. Virginia was colonised by a Church of England corporation; Maryland owed its existence to a Roman Catholic proprietary. Wise men take warning by the failure of others, and the prudent Lord Baltimore steered his bark safely past the rocks on which Raleigh and the other founders of Virginia had page 45 struck. In 1632 a grant was made by the Crown to Lord Baltimore of a territory which was erected into a province, and named after Henrietta Maria, the Queen of Charles I., subject to a nominal rent and a royalty on the precious metals. But, unlike the original patent of Virginia, this charter contained a special clause securing to the emigrants an independent share in the legislation of the province, the statutes of which were to be established with the advice and approbation of the majority of the freemen or their deputies, and the authority of the proprietary was limited as to the life freehold or estate of any colonist. The following autumn a band of 200 emigrants, chiefly co-religionists of Lord Baltimore, set sail for America, and, after a short visit to the Virginian settlement, made their way to Maryland and founded the humble village of St. Mary's. The leading characteristic of this little Roman Catholic colony was perfect toleration of all forms of Christianity. From the very first, the oath of the Governor contained the memorable words, "I will not, by myself or any other, directly or indirectly, molest any person professing to believe in Jesus Christ, for or in respect of religion;" the same sentiment is expressed in one of the earliest statutes of the Colonial Assembly; and Protestants exiled and persecuted by Protestant intolerance frequently found a shelter amongst their Roman Catholic brethren in Maryland. But Arianism and Socinianism were still punishable with death; and the first colony which granted toleration to all creeds alike was the Baptist settlement of Rhode Island.

Deeply indebted though the colonists felt themselves to Lord Baltimore, they lost no opportunity of asserting their independent rights in the Assembly. They claimed the power, not merely of assenting to, but of originating laws, made provisions for an elective Assembly and declared that no tax should be levied upon the freemen of the province except by the vote of their deputies in the page 46 Central Assembly. Maryland was following in the steps of Virginia.

It is lamentable that a colony founded on such liberal principles should have become the scene of religious strife, and still more so that the Puritans, who had been treated with such hospitality, should plot against the liberties of their hosts. Yet such was the case. By the time of the English Commonwealth so many Puritans had settled in the colony that in the Assembly held at Patuxent a Bill was actually passed providing that liberty of conscience should not be extended to popery, prelacy, or licentiousness of opinion; but Cromwell merely advised the bigoted legislators "not to busy themselves about religion, but to settle the civil Government." A civil war actually broke out only to end in a compromise at the end of six years; but tranquillity was not perfectly restored until 1660, when the assembled burgesses of Maryland solemnly declared that thenceforth no authority should be recognised except that of the Assembly and of the King of England. Thus Maryland established for itself a constitution much like that of Virginia, and the two constitutions remained almost unchanged until the war of American independence.

New England.

New England, as we all know, was originally a Puritan settlement. It is impossible to regard the early Puritans otherwise than with feelings of admiration. They were men who, with a strange mixture of narrow-mindedness and some absurdity, yet held their principles dearer than life itself—principles for which they were ready to suffer, bleed, and even die. Both sides of their character were strongly marked in the history of their colonies in New England.

It had been intended that this territory should have been colonised simultaneously with Virginia, and patents had been granted to companies similar to the first Virginian one. But of the two page 47 expeditions dispatched, one left the colony in disgust, the other never reached it. New England was colonised neither by a chartered company nor by a wealthy proprietary; but by the settlers themselves, without authority. A congregation of Puritans living in exile in Holland—for religious liberty was still making slow way in England—resolved to emigrate to the unoccupied territories of the New World. They refused a patent from the Crown, "for," said they, "if there should afterwards be a purpose to wrong us, though we had a seal as broad as the house-floor, there would be means enough found to recall or reverse it," and the only assistance they ultimately received was an absolutely valueless charter from the Virginian Company.

But though the Pilgrim Fathers had been persecuted at home and driven into exile; though they had been hospitably received by the men of another nation; though they were now starting with no help from their mother-country and were relying on their own efforts only; still they never forgot that they were Englishmen, carrying with them wherever they went the duties and the privileges that are the birthright of every British subject. The solemn compact of the body politic signed by every head of a family before they landed on the American coast, was as follows:—"In the name of God, amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign King James, having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do, by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and of one another, covenant and combine ourselves together, into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof, to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, page 48 from time to time, as shall be thought most convenient for the general good of the colony. Unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."

The sufferings of the little colony were as severe as those of the Virginians. In December, 1620, a hundred souls—men, women, and children—landed in New England. Before the following summer, fever and famine had brought fifty of them to their graves. Their friends in Europe did what they could to help and cheer them. "Let it not be grievous to you," wrote they, "that you have been instruments to break the ice for others. The honor shall be yours to the world's end."

For some time the infant state was a complete democracy. A governor, chosen by general suffrage, was assisted by a council similarly elected; but the whole body of the male inhabitants composed the primitive legislature, until, population having increased, a representative system was introduced. Here, as in Virginia, community of property was given a fair trial and found a failure. After four years a piece of land was allotted in fee to each member of the community, and a vast increase of territory was granted to the colony by the Crown.

I wish that I were able to dwell on the history of the other settlements in New England, which followed each other in rapid succession. I should like to narrate at length how Massachusetts owed its origin as an independent state to a chartered trading corporation, transferring itself bodily from England to America, and how Rhode Island was colonised by men exiled by the intolerance of the earlier settlements. But I must press forward. In less than a quarter of a century from the first landing of the pilgrims the "United colonies of New England were made all as one."

But the toleration which existed in Virginia and Maryland was sorely limited amongst the Puritan settlements of the North. Episcopalians were banished as early as 1629; at a later date, absence page 49 from the worship of the Established Congregational Church was punished by a fine, the meetings of other religious bodies were prohibited, and Quakers banished. Nothing can justify this retrograde policy; still in judging the Puritans of New England, we must admit that the men who had fled from their country to avoid laws which were to them oppressive, may be excused if they had an extravagant fear of their dearly-bought liberties being invaded; and that this, as is the case with the whole history of English intolerance, must be estimated not as an isolated fact, but in connection with the circumstances and the time. I deeply regret that, in the days of Elizabeth, a law ordering conformity or exile ever disgraced the Statute-roll; but I cannot forget that a century later the French king ordered poisonous gases to be pumped into the holds of ships leaving the ports of France in case the benevolent captains might have secreted a few Huguenots amongst the cargo. It is lamentable to think that on the American soil four Quakers sealed their faith with their blood; but the lowest computation of the victims to the persecution of Charles V., in the Netherlands alone, is fifty thousand!

The liberties which had grown up under the Stuarts were attacked by the Long Parliament. That autocratic body went so far as to claim the right to reverse the decisions and control the Government of Massachusetts. It was argued that the original charter was but a licence to a trading corporation. But the Colonial Court indignantly replied—"Plantations are above the rank of an ordinary corporation. Colonies are the foundations of great commonwealths. It is the fruit of pride and folly to despise the day of small things." And at length even the Long Parliament was obliged to admit itself in the wrong, and the legislative independence of New England was secured.

I have omitted to speak of the conduct of the English settlers in America to the natives. It page 50 is a subject on which it is impossible to dwell without pain. It is true that much allowance must be made for the little bands of colonists who were obliged to defend themselves; for as they paid no taxes to, so they looked for no aid from, the mother-country; but claimed the right to defend themselves by force of arms against every aggression as one of their privileges; and at least there was no organised cruelty, as in the case of Spain; each colony started with the intention of purchasing land and living at peace with the children of the forest. The idea of introducing Christianity was never lost sight of, and many noble and devoted men spent their lives in preaching the Gospel to the Indians; but the evil deeds of the few had more effect than the benevolent intentions of the many. One wretched Englishman kidnapped a cargo of Indians to sell as slaves in Spain; others seized the fields and gardens of the men who had been their protectors in the hour of need; and we must with shame admit that the cruel wars which led to the ultimate extermination of the Indians in North-East America were, to a great extent, brought on by the violence and injustice of the English colonists.

The "Colonial "System."

So far I have treated of the Anglo-Saxon settlements in America as independent communities subject to the British Crown, struggling into existence, and relying solely on their own resources. I come now to a very different period; the era of the so-called "colonial system." I have alluded to this system when speaking of other nations, but must pause to explain it more at length in connection with the colonies of England.

The colonial system may be defined as a series of restrictions placed on the production, manufacture, and trade of the colonies and the mother country, respectively, with the intention of conferring reciprocal benefits on both communities. We have seen this system developed in one direction by Spain, page 51 where the whole trade of South America and Mexico was restricted to Spanish ships and Spanish ports, in order to benefit the mother-country at the expense of the colonies; in the other, by France, where the mother-country taxed herself for the benefit of the sugar-growing colonists. In England, as I shall endeavor to show you, both ideas were followed, the object being reciprocal benefits.

If the colony is left perfectly free, she will naturally trade with the nation that affords the best market for her produce. At this point the mother-country intervenes, and, desiring to retain the benefits of the colony to herself, endeavors to obtain the monopoly of the colonial productions. Next, desiring to find a market for home manufactures, she forces her colonies to consume her own wares. So far, the benefit of the mother-country alone has been considered; but now it becomes necessary to compensate the colonies, and this is effected by granting to the colonies the exclusive right of producing particular articles for the home consumption. As illustrations of these three stages we may take—first, Holland, endeavoring to obtain a monopoly of the spices of the eastern islands; secondly, Spain ordering the vines and olives in Mexico to be rooted up, in order to oblige her colonists to consume Spanish wine and oil; thirdly, France prohibiting the importation of foreign sugar into her own markets.

Such is a brief history of the development of the restrictive policy amongst European nations. The restrictions themselves may be divided into five classes—
(1.)Those on the exportation of produce from the colony elsewhere than to the mother-country.
(2.)On the importation of goods into the colony from foreign countries.
(3.)On the carriage of goods to and from the colonies in other shipping than that of the mother-country.page 52
(4.)On the manufacture of their raw produce by the colonists.
(5.)On the importation into the mother country of articles similar to those produced in her colonies, either from foreign countries or their colonies.

Now the first of these—the restriction on the exportation of produce from the colony elsewhere than to the mother country—important though it was in the case of Spain, Portugal, and Holland, never was a leading feature in the English Colonial system. Holland, by obliging her own colonics to send their spices to Amsterdam, and destroying everybody else's, could obtain a monopoly of the spice trade in the European markets; but England could gain no similar advantage by forcing the tobacco of Virginia or the sugar of Barbadoes to pass through the hands of London merchants, as the same articles might be produced by other countries or their colonies. At one time, indeed, such restrictions were attempted; but they were found useless, and speedily abandoned.

The second class has played a large part in the history of Colonial America, and has been the cause of vast profits, made, however, by people who were never intended to be benefited. Wealth will always succeed in purchasing luxuries by some means or another, and the gold and silver which the Spaniards hoped to receive at Seville in exchange for the goods they wished to send to Mexico and Peru, made its way into the pockets of English, Dutch, French, and even Danish smugglers; and the smaller West Indian Islands became of importance as a focus for contraband traffic. In the the same way French buccaneers made their fortunes by the restrictions our ancestors placed on the trade of New England.

The third class of restrictions, on carriage of goods to and from the colonies in other shipping than that of the mother country, may seem to us at first sight trivial, seeing that the overwhelming page 53 majority of the vessels that leave the colonial ports sail beneath the protection of the Union Jack; yet it was the immediate cause of the introduction of the colonial system into England. A little more than two centuries ago, it was Holland, not England, that monopolised the carrying trade of the world; English ships lay rotting in the harbors, whilst English sailors went to Holland to seek employment. It was intended to strike a blow at this monopoly by restricting the trade to and from the English colonies to English ships. The soundness of the scheme was, at the time, hardly doubted. We can now look back on it as a passage in history, and ask, was it successful? There are some who still say it was, and point to the steady decline of the shipping trade of Holland and the enormous increase of our own as conclusive evidence. But it may be answered, in the words of Adam Smith, and the editor of his well-known work (McCullock's note to A. Smith"), that the carrying trade "is the natural effect and symptom of national wealth; but it does not seem to be the natural cause of it;" and that "the decline of the maritime preponderance of Holland was owing rather to the gradual increase of commerce and navigation in other countries, and to the disasters and burdens occasioned by the ruinous contests the republic had to sustain, * * * than to the exclusion of their merchant vessels from the ports of England."

The fourth class of restrictions, on the manufacture of their raw produce by the colonists, was stated in its extreme form by Lord Chatham.—"The British colonists of North America have no right to manufacture even a nail or a horseshoe." This most unjust of all restrictions must, however, die a natural death; for a young and thinly-populated colony will spend its energies in pastoral and agricultural pursuits; it is nature, not law, that prohibits manufactures in such a state of society; and when population has so far increased as to call for the page 54 building of factories, the law must be relaxed, either by the voluntary act of the mother-country, or by the separation of the colony.

I have reserved to the last the restriction imposed by the parent state, not on the colonies for her own benefit, but on herself for the benefit of the colonies—the restriction on the importation of colonial produce into the mother-country from foreign countries or their colonies.

The existence of such an enactment shows that the real intention of the English laws in restraint of trade—whether wisely carried out or not is not the question—was, to use the words of the preamble to one of the statutes, "The maintaining a greater correspondence and kindness between the subjects at home and those in the plantations." It was certainly the strongest proof of regard that England could show Canada that she continued to build ships of Canadian timber when better materials could have been brought at a cheaper rate from the Baltic; and it would have made the system perfectly fair—although, as we now believe, injurious to both parties—if an exact balance between the two classes of restrictions had always been maintained; but, unfortunately, that is impossible. The loss of a single possession, or a fall in the price of a single commodity, may at any moment disturb the symmetry of the whole plan; and, as a matter of fact, the restraints on the importation of timber from northern Europe remained in force long after all burdens imposed by England on the colonies had been abolished. The attempt to substitute artificial machinery for the laws of nature failed, and the last relics of the "Colonial System" were swept away.

Such were the views that for a long time governed the colonial policy of every nation of western Europe—Spain, from the discovery of America until the War of Independence; England, for the best part of two centuries. They had one unfortunate result as far as the colonies were concerned— page 55 they made each nation desirous of seizing the colonies of its neighbors in order to obtain the benefits of their trade. Under the present system of liberty of trade, however, all such danger is avoided. For instance,—to conquer South Australia and hold it by force of arms would now confer no benefit on French trade. The vessels of the Messagerie Maritime are welcome to come as soon as they like, and take away our corn and wool in exchange for Paris china and Lyons silk; but if the colonial exports were restricted by law to Bristol and London, the manufacturers of the Continent might well cast envious eyes at the vast stores of unmanufactured produce annually shipped from the ports of Australia.

The precise date of the introduction of the colonial system into England has been a matter of dispute, some writers seeing its germ in an Ordinance of Charles I. prohibiting the growth of tobacco in England, or the importation of any except from the colonies. But, as a matter of fact, that referred rather to the then vexed question of Royal monopolies. The English colonial system really dates from Cromwell's Navigation Act of 1651, which was framed with the double object of injuring the Dutch shipping and punishing the Royalist colonies in the West Indies. The colonial harbors were closed to all but English vessels. But this was only the first of a long series of Navigation Acts—as the statutes were called by which the whole "colonial system" was established—for, when the policy was once introduced, all parties in England pursued it with equal energy. In the reign of Charles II. one Act prohibited the export from the British colonics of such articles as sugar, tobacco, and ginger to any port in Northern Europe except those of England; another forbade the introduction of European commodities into the colonies except in English ships from England; and a third restricted intercolonial trade. Colonial manufactures were not made illegal until the time page 56 of the Georges, and the third stage,—the granting to the colonies a monopoly of goods required for home consumption,—came last of all. The protective duty on the importation of foreign timber, to which I have already alluded, was introduced as late as 1808; a similar duty on sugar existed until less than thirty years ago.

Period of the Restoration.

I need scarcely say that the Navigation Acts were not submitted to without a severe struggle. Disturbances broke out from New England to Carolina. But, irritating though the Acts were, there were other things that galled the colonists still more. With the restoration was introduced a new colonial policy which displayed not only injustice, but the most absolute ignorance, on the part of England, of the wants and state of society of the colonies. During the first four years of his power, Charles II. made presents to various friends of a large part of the North American continent, regardless of former grants or existing settlements, and soon after he gave to Lord Culpepper, for a full term of thirty-one years, "all the dominion of land and water "called Virginia." Hardly less absurd than the actions of the King and his courtiers were those of English statesmen and philosophers. When Shaftesbury and Locke had completely colonised Carolina—on paper—and were busily elaborating a constitution for their colony, with different orders of nobility, four estates of the realm, counties, manors, courts-baron, and all the necessaries of a flourishing mediæval kingdom, a few settlers' huts were the only buildings in the colony, the Governor and Council were receiving a modest salary (paid in tobacco), and the wife of the Chief Secretary travelling about by paddling her own canoe down the rivers, or threading her way along the tracks through the forest. "The sacred and unalterable "instrument," as the Constitution of Carolina was proudly called, will indeed "endure for ever," but only as a monument to human folly and ignorant ambition.
page 57

It was quite in accordance with their general policy that Charles II. should forbid the establishment of a printing press in Virginia, even to print the colonial statutes, and that his successor should do the same in Massachusetts. Happily for America, however, that policy was altered by the revolution of 1688—not that perfect colonial liberty, as we now understand it, immediately resulted from the succession either of the House of Orange or Hanover. In the time of Queen Anne, the Governor of Virginia stated in his report to the Home Government—"The people, mere of necessity than of inclination, attempt to clothe themselves with their own manufactures; . . . it is certainly necessary to divert their application to some commodity less prejudicial to the trade of Great Britain." At one time the cancelling of all the charters granted to the colonies was seriously contemplated by the British Parliament, and supported by a party in America, who maintained that the country would never be worth living in, for lawyers and gentlemen," till the charters were taken away; and Lord Chatham earnestly upheld the sovereign authority of legislature and commercial control" of England over her colonies. Still, partly by the change of ideas at home, partly by the analogy between the English and colonial assemblies, and partly by the necessities of the time, the position of British colonies steadily improved. In 1704 the first newspaper was printed in America, the Boston Newsletter. The full benefit of the writ of Habeas Corpus was granted to Virginia by Queen Anne. No sooner was the ascendancy of Parliament established in England than the Virginian Assembly "concluded itself entitled "to similar rights and privileges," and the records of the House of Commons were examined in search of precedents favorable to legislative freedom. The severe provisions of the Navigation Acts were sometimes evaded, sometimes limited by amending statutes; and the right of the mother-country to page 58 tax the colonies without their consent, though maintained in England, was denied in America, and never enforced. The colonial legislatures had their own budgets, and the colonial money which aided England in her memorable struggle with France at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was voted by their own assemblies and expended on the war in Canada. Even in 1765, very shortly before the outbreak of the War of Independence, Sir Robert Walpole could say in Parliament, "I will leave the taxing of the British Colonics for some of my successors who may have more courage than I have, and be less a friend to commerce than I am. It has been a maxim with me during my administration to encourage the trade of the American colonics to the utmost latitude—nay, it has been necessary to pass over some irregularities in their trade with Europe, for, by encouraging them to an extensive growing foreign commerce, if they gain £500,000, I am convinced that in two years afterwards full £250,000 of this gain will be in His Majesty's exchequer, by the labor and produce of this kingdom, as immense quantities of every kind of our manufactures go thither, and as they increase in the foreign American trade, more of our produce will be wanted. This is taxing them more agreeably to their own Constitution and laws."

I wish that time would allow me to give in detail the history of the British colonies during the century that intervened between the English revolution and the American War of Independence, to tell the story of the free and prosperous Quaker kingdom of Pennsylvania, the plantations of Jamaica and the conquest of Canada; for it is a history of progress probably without parallel in the annals of the world. The exports of England to the colonies alone in 1775, exceeded her whole export at the beginning of the eighteenth century; and, except in those points in which they were shackled by the policy of the Navigation Acts, each colony was page 59 allowed to remain, as far as possible, an independent community; a system not without its disadvantages, as it has resulted in the various states of the American union, and the various islands in the West Indies, each having their own collection of statues, to the delight of writers on private international law and the perplexity of every one else; still, such inconveniences are but a small price to pay for the blessings of liberty. At the close of the period of which I am speaking, the British possessions included besides the chartered and the proprietary colonies, the Crown colonies of Newfoundland, with the adjacent territory on the mainland; Nova Scotia; New Hampshire; New York; Georgia; and the Bahamas; and the four governments of Barbadoes, the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, and Jamaica. To this long list, the conquest of Canada, completed in 1763, formed a splendid addition. But less than twenty years later, Mr. Townshend had ventured on the course that Sir R. Walpole had avoided—to levy a tax on the American colonies, and the whole of the continent south of Canada was unhappily lost to the English Crown.

The loss of the American States affected the other British colonies in three ways: first, it and the French revolution brought about the beginning of the end to the colonial system, of which however a few fossilized relics remained for another century; secondly, it made it necessary for England to find new colonies to supply the place of those she had lost; thirdly, it led to the power of the Board of Trade over the colonies being abolished and the appointment of a colonial Secretary of State.

The half century, from the peace of Paris, 1763, to the end of the Napoleonic wars, forms the period of transition between the old and the new in the colonial history of England. Canada is the colony in which we can trace the progress of ideas most easily, and its history is of special interest on page 60 account of the different forces that have been at work, which have united the scattered colonies of the north into the vast dominion of Canada.

A hundred and twenty years ago, when Canada became subject to the British Crown, the whole colony contained a European population of about 65,000 persons, all of French origin, and all settled in that part of the colony which was afterwards called Lower Canada, but is now known as the Province of Quebec. The outbreak of the American War of Independence showed to England the absolute necessity of uniting these foreign colonists more closely to herself, and experience led her to trust less to Navigation Acts than to the concession of colonial liberties. Accordingly, in 1774, the "Quebec Act" was passed, by which a constitution was granted to Canada, somewhat on the model of the former Crown colonies, such as Nova Scotia or Georgia. The great problem was how to treat with equal justice the old French inhabitants of Quebec and Montreal and the newly-arrived English immigrants who had already begun to settle in the southern part of Canada; and certainly at first the former, who then constituted the majority, had the best of the bargain.

The old French land laws and the Roman Catholic Church were established, and a Legislative Council was nominated, one-third of which was to consist of French Canadians. Imperfect though this system was, it at least succeeded in winning the support of the people whom it was intended to conciliate; and French and English united in driving invaders from the States out of Canada. But when, at the close of the War of Independence, many of the Royalists from the South voluntarily exiled themselves to the wilds of Upper Canada rather than submit to a Republican Government, and a great colony sprang up round the shores of Lake Ontario, the Constitution of 1774 fell out of date and a total reconstruction of the Colonial Government became necessary. This led Mr. Pitt (who was then in power) to divide page 61 Canada into two provinces, Upper and Lower, each with a Governor, an Executive Council, a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown, and an Elective House of Assembly. But the analogy between this form of government and the constitutions that now exists in New Zealand and other colonies is more apparent than real, for the Government were entirely independent of the Assembly and responsible only to the Colonial Office in London. Canada had ceased to be a purely Crown colony; she had obtained something like representative institutions, but half a century was to elapse before the establishment of responsible government. The English Province of Upper Canada at once entered on a course of peaceful and uninterrupted progress; the French majority in the other colony, however, remained anti-English and unprogressive. For Lower Canada was not merely a copy of France but a little France of the "ancien regime"; feudal dues and duties remained, instead of the money payments of modern Europe; the clergy and landowners refused to bear their proper burden of taxation, and the common expenses of Government were thrown on the merchants, who were principally English. As time went on, however, the position of the French Canadians was changed; for the existing France had ceased to be the France of their memories and traditions, and their only alternatives were a submission to England or a still more unwelcome absorption by the United States; and thus when war broke out with the States in 1812, French and English colonists fought together in the defence of Canada. But it was impossible, with constant immigration and the example of the Republic so near at hand, that a purely nominated government could long satisfy the Canadians; disturbances broke out not only in the Lower but even in the Upper Province, the grievances of the French party being embodied in a manifesto, which I will not read in full, as it goes by the name of the "Ninety-two "Resolutions"! At length affairs in Lower Canada page 62 came to a deadlock. The Assembly refused supplies, for four years no taxes were raised, and the officials remained unpaid. A rebellion actually broke out in 1837, but was speedily suppressed; one of the most conspicuous rebels was Mr. Cartier, who subsequently became a loyal subject of the British Crown, and performed a very active part in bringing about the federation of the British North American provinces. He died not long ago, a short time after he had been created a baronet for his services to the State.

After a short interval of martial law a thorough reform of the Constitution was determined upon in accordance with the recommendations of Lord Durham, who was sent out as Governor-General with special powers and instructions to report on the affairs of the country. It was in the year 1840 that Canada was made a united province and a free nation. The French Canadians lost their ascendancy in a local and insignificant assembly, but became entitled to send their representatives to a great Central Parliament. The first Canadian Parliament consisted of a nominated Council and an elected House of Assembly, an equal number of members being returned for each of the two provinces. From this period we may date the happy change in the history of Canada; united in herself she has become the nucleus of a vast federation of British colonies—stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and including islands in both oceans, with a population far larger than that of all the British colonies in America at the date of the War of Independence. But this success has not been gained without repeated struggles. At first there was a contest between the Governor and the Parliament, when, in the year 1846, Lord Metcalfe, whose views on government were more suited to an Asiatic dependency than to a self-governing colony, for a time refused to concede the patronage of public appointments; the Administration of Lord Elgin (1846-1854) was marked not only by wise and temperate reforms, such as the gradual abolition of the old Feudal page 63 tenures in favor of the modern English system of real property, and measures for the promotion of trade and the opening up of the country, but also by serious and disgraceful riots at Montreal. On one occasion stones were thrown at the Governor on his way to open Parliament; then the mob burst into the House of Assembly and drove out the members, and finally set fire to the building, destroying all the colonial archives and a valuable public library.

After such treatment at Montreal, the Colonial Parliament were obliged to resort to the inconvenient and expensive plan of sitting sometimes at Toronto and sometimes at Quebec. The disadvantages of the peripatetic system were apparent, but local jealousies were so keen that it was found impossible to agree on any seat of Government, until in 1857 the question was referred to Her Majesty, who named Ottawa, a town of no importance in itself, but conveniently situated on the boundaries of the two provinces.

The Constitution of 1840 has been twice reformed; once in 1854, under the administration of Sir Edmund Head, when the Upper House was made elective, and again in 1867, when the first part of the long discussed scheme of a federation of the North American colonies was successfully carried out under Lord Monck; it was afterwards developed under Sir John Young (now Lord Lisgar), formerly Governor of New South Wales. The dominion thus established included the vast provinces of Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, to which were added Manitoba in 1870 and Prince Edward Island in 1873; and thus, with the exception of Newfoundland, which will probably not long remain separate, the great federation now embraces the whole of the British possessions in North America.

Canada has one difficulty from which the Australian colonies are happily free. The imaginary line by which she is separated from the United States page 64 is 1,500 miles in length, and should hostilities at any time break out between the two powers,—an event which I do not consider in the least degree probable,—the war of 1812 might have to be fought again, under greater disadvantages. Nearly twenty years ago I was sent by Her Majesty's Government to propose a scheme for Canadian defences; and, to carry out the plans I suggested, a sum of £1,100,000 was voted by the Dominion Parliament for fortifications. The fears of war, however, soon passed away; and the money then voted (which was to be raised by a loan, the interest being guaranteed by the mother-country) was diverted to the grand scheme of a transcontinental railway, which will not only hold together more firmly the provinces of East and West, but will form a line of communication between Europe and Eastern Asia shorter by 1,400 miles than the Pacific Railway of the United States, and may be of great importance as another route from England to Australia.

As to the future of Canada, it seems impossible even to hazard a conjecture. Although it is already the fourth mercantile nation in the world, being surpassed only by Great Britain, France, and the United States, the Dominion is probably only in its infancy. Manitoba alone, which was almost unknown until a few years ago, is a fertile province of about half the size of Tasmania; the still unoccupied territory in the north-west is said to contain tracts of rich land available for agriculture and pasturage twice as large as Victoria, and great mineral wealth. There is a school of Canadian politicians who look forward to the severance of the connection with the mother-country and a union with the States; but I do not believe that the majority of Canadians will ever wish to exchange the peaceful arrangement of a nominated Governor at Ottawa, acting according to the advice of his Parliamentary Ministers, for the struggle and turmoil of Presidential elections, with a President residing at Washington, governing by means of a page 65 Cabinet of his own choosing, and retaining to himself the patronage of all the leading appointments in the country.

But the century which has been to Canada a

West Indies.

period of material prosperity and political development, has witnessed the steady decay of the British possessions in the West Indies. This is usually attributed to the emancipation of the slaves; but that, though the principal, has not been the only cause at work. The fearful hurricanes to which those latitudes are subject have from time to time ruined whole districts; in Barbadoes alone, during the storm of 1831, 2,500 people perished, and property to the value of two and a half millions sterling was destroyed. Again, the exhausted plantations of the British Islands cannot compete with the virgin soil of Cuba, or the rich tracts of the flourishing colony of British Guiana; and the final abolition of the colonial system, beneficial though it was to the empire at large, meant simple ruin to many of the planters in the West Indies, who had only been kept alive by the protective duties in favor of their sugar in the English market.

Local self-government is an excellent institution in colonies peopled by Englishmen who have gone there to make a home; but in the West Indies, where the aim of the planters was to make their money and return as soon as possible, where the mass of the people were negroes, and where even government officials resided at home and performed their duties by deputy, the powers fell into the hands of obscure and ignorant people, and the system was found to be a mere useless expense. Hence in the West Indies we see the strange phenomenon of colonics resigning their constitutions and obtaining less apparent liberty, but more real privileges under the direct authority of the Crown. Within the last few years too, better machinery has been introduced, much attention paid to the development of the natural resources of the islands, and the official page 66 returns show an increase; and if the Panama Canal is ever completed, our possessions in the West Indies may become of great political importance in connection with the trade of the Australian colonies. I need not tell a South Australian audience that Jamaica is now carefully and ably ruled by Sir Anthony Musgrave; and I trust that the attention of all his friends in this colony has been drawn to an article which appeared not long ago in the Times newspaper, headed "Jamaica reviving."

South Africa.

I pass over the Oriental dependencies and the trading stations belonging to England as not being, for the reasons I have already given, real colonies, and turn next to the vast group of settlements in Southern Africa.

Of the Cape colony under Dutch rule, and of how it was occupied by England at the time of Napoleon, I have already spoken. It was formally ceded by the Treaty of Paris, in 1815. Here, as in Canada, the English immigrants have found existing settlements and native races; but as early as 1820 an English colony was planted in the Eastern Province, which, after many hardships and privations in its early days, steadily progressed in wealth and importance. But wars with the Kaffirs on the frontier in 1835, 1846, 1850, and 1877, and still more recently with the Basutos, have cost millions of money, and kept the country in an unsettled state; and difficulties with regard to our Dutch fellow colonists have also retarded the progress of what ought to be one of the most flourishing colonies in the world—a country where the severe winters of Canada are unknown, nearer to the European markets by some weeks than Australia, with an unlimited suppply of native labor, rich veins of copper, and beds of coal, and (as has comparatively recently been discovered) with diamond fields which can only be compared to the gold diggings of Ballarat.1

The Dutch have always claimed the right of treating the native races of South Africa as the

1 To the mineral wealth of South Africa the newly-discovered gold reefs must now be added.

page 67 Israelites treated the Canaanites; the action of the English Government in prohibiting the traffic in negroes, in making laws for the protection of the Hottentots, and finally in emancipating the slaves, was amongst the chief grievances of which the Boers complained. In 1837 many of them left their homes, "trekked" across the Orange River, and proclaimed the Republic of Natalia; but six years later the English Government were obliged, in order to protect both British settlers and natives, to declare Natal a colony, and appoint a Governor. A war between the Dutch settlers in the interior and the Griquas (who were under British protection) led to the establishment of English sovereignty for a short time over all the rich territory between the Orange and the Vaal; but this policy was speedily reversed, and the independence of the Orange River Free State was recognised in 1853. How the Boers once more "trekked" to the north, and established themselves beyond the Vaal; how the Republic fell into anarchy, and was taken over by the English; how this resulted in a disastrous and unhappy war, and the restoration of the Dutch Government in the Transvaal, are events too well known to make it necessary for me to dwell on them. I gladly pass over so unsatisfactory an episode in the story of British colonisation.

Meanwhile the prosperity of South African colonies had been steadily progressing. A great impetus was given to it fifteen years ago, when a diamond was discovered in the roots of a thorn tree in the Orange Free State, and soon afterwards there was a rush to the "Diamond Fields," towns and villages sprang into existence, and a new colony was proclaimed under the name of Griqualand West. Nor have other industries been neglected. Ostrich farming, which I hope ere long to see developed in South Australia, has for many years been a source of wealth to the Cape; the annual export of wool now amounts to nearly three millions sterling; and the imports of Cape Colony (exclusive of Natal) page 68 have in twenty-three years risen from a million and a half to upwards of £7,000,000.

The difficulties against which South Africa has had to contend have delayed the establishment of local self-government. In 1835 military government was abolished, and Executive and Legislative Councils were nominated by the Crown; but eighteen more years elapsed before representative institutions were established at the Cape, and responsible government was not added until 1872. Now, however, both Houses are elected by the people, a small property qualification being the condition of the franchise.

Natal has reached the stage of representation, and responsible government has recently been offered. But the establishment of this is not so easy as in America or Australia, involving as it would the duty to the colony of protecting itself in the event of hostilities with native races—a responsibility which it is not yet in a position to assume.

I have not touched upon the question of a federation of the South African colonics. It has been proposed, and is in the highest degree desirable; but, at all events for some years to come, the scheme must be regarded rather as an object of desire than of practical arrangement.

Australia.

There remains but one chapter to tell in the history of the colonisation of the world. We have seen the Aryan race leaving their primæval home in Asia and gradually spreading over Europe, and establishing themselves in Africa; then crossing the Atlantic to the New World beyond, and founding vast states and empires stretching from Canada to the confines of Patagonia; we have watched how

Westward the course of empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time's noblest offspring is the last.

So wrote Bishop Berkeley about a century and a half ago, little dreaming that his prophecy would page 69 have so remarkable a fulfilment. But history was once more to repeat itself. The fifteenth century had its Columbus; the eighteenth had its Cook. Both failed to attain the object they had set forth to seek; both found a treasure richer than that for which they sought. Columbus had started to find the passage to India, but found his way stopped by a rich and beautiful continent. One hundred and ten years ago Cook left Deptford Docks in the hope of discovering a continent called Australia, which was believed to exist somewhere to the south of the Island of New Holland. He found that no such place existed within latitudes where it would be fit for habitation; but that New Holland, far vaster than earlier voyagers had thought it to be, where

———undying sunbeams throw
Their clearest radiance and their warmest glow,

was the real southern land—the true Australia.

Proud Queen of Isles! Thou sittest vast, alone,
A host of vassals bending round thy throne,
Like some fair swan that skims the silver tide,
Her silken cygnets strew'd on every side;
So floatest thou, thy Polynesian brood
Dispersed around thee on thy ocean flood,
While ev'ry surge that doth thy bosom lave
Salutes thee "Empress of the Southern Wave!"

Not only does this continent of nearly 3,000,000 square miles, but New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and even British Columbia, also owe their fortunes to the great navigator Cook. But just as Columbus ended his days in misery and disgrace, and Hudson was lost in the bay that bears his name, so the earlier discovers of Australia toiled that others might reap. Cook perished by the hand of an unknown savage on a distant shore; Perouse, the French explorer who followed him, left the shores of Australia ninety-four years ago to be heard of no more.

Of the history of the vast Australian continent there is no need that I should speak. The story is too familiar to you all. Known at first only as a penal settlement, with a population of less than page 70 4,000 at the end of the last century, Sydney, where now

A masty forest, stranger vessels moor,
Charged with the fruits of ev'ry foreign shore,

has not only taken up her position amongst the capitals of the world, but has become the oldest amongst many cities in a happy continent, where war is unknown, where the fires of persecution are unlit, and where slavery has never existed. The feeble attempt once made by France to take possession of the coast, and rename it Terre Napoleon has been forgotten, and the group of colonies which now cover Australia are bound together, not only by the ties of race and language, but by a willing allegiance to one Fatherland, a heartfelt loyalty to one Queen!

We can afford to smile at the history of the colonies of other nations, for Australia has never been anything but a land of freedom. When it is clear that a colony is able to govern itself, a Constitution is granted to it. Each colony becomes free not only to choose its own representatives, but to regulate its own trade. New South Wales, having been at first a purely Crown colony, then under the rule of a Governor, assisted by a Council partly elected and partly nominated, obtained responsible government in 1855. In the same year, only four years after Victoria had been revolutionised by the discovery of gold at Ballarat, a similar system was introduced into that colony. For more than a quarter of a century responsible government has existed in South Australia. Queensland has governed itself from the date of its existence as a separate colony; it is only its vast size and scanty population that delays the introduction of the same system into Western Australia. Much, truly, has been done; when we count the spires and towers that rise above the lovely Bay of Sydney; when we see a city larger than some European capitals which has sprung up on the banks of the Yarra; when we find in the north the rapidly- page 71 growing and beautifully situated town of Brisbane; or look down from the Mount Lofty Hills on the rich and prosperous City of Adelaide, it is marvellous to think that less than a century has elapsed since the first band of settlers landed on the shores of Australia.

Nor as we glance at the map and see Sydney and Melbourne already connected by rail; the lines steadily advancing which will unite the former with Brisbane, the latter with Adelaide, and I hope some day Adelaide with Perth, so as to form a direct communication between all the capitals of the different colonies; and in the interior, a vast net work already planned and partly constructed, stretching from South Australia eastwards towards Victoria and New South Wales; northwards until it will ultimately reach the coast of Queensland and the straits at Port Darwin, and the bold scheme of Canada has been rivalled by the Transcontinental Railway of Australia—can we realise that this vast continent is but the latest off-shoot from one of the smallest countries of the Old World. Can any of the younger generation of South Australians, as they look at the splendid buildings of this city, or the evidences of comfort and prosperity that are to be seen all around, believe that forty years ago, £20,000 was with the utmost difficulty collected in the whole colony to purchase the Burra Burra mine, or that at one time it was even contemplated, as in old Virginia, to abandon the settlement in despair?

It has been the peculiar fortune of Australia always to find the right man and the right thing at the right moment. When New South Wales was in its infancy, the wool trade, which has brought such immense wealth to the whole country, was established by the introduction of merino sheep by Lieutenant Macarthur in 1803; at a time when labor was too scarce and costly to make reaping possible, the wheat crops of South Australia were saved by the ingenious invention of Mr. Ridley.

page 72

And it is not only by the products of temperate latitudes that Australia may make her mark in the world. I trust that in the northern part of the continent there is a vast region which, not by the forced toil of unhappy Africans, but by the free labor of our Indian fellow-subjects, may, ere long, become what the West Indies were a century ago.

But the history of British colonisation docs not end with the Continent of Australia. Tasmania, at one time behind her sister colonies, is now rapidly developing her mineral resources; another England has been formed in the beautiful and fertile islands of New Zealand; Fiji has been saved from bankruptcy and ruin, and made prosperous under the British Crown.

And now the question arises, why is it that the colonies of other nations have ended in failure whilst there seems no limit to the prosperity of those of England? How comes it that our settlements in America, Africa, and Australasia (not to mention other parts of the world) have thriven in a way that has no parallel in the history of France, Spain, or Holland? Doubtless many causes have worked together; our national character, the maritime supremacy of the mother-country, and the judicious choice of sites for colonies; but there are three reasons that seem to outweigh all the others in importance. The first is the absence in English farming of the "petit culture" of the Continent. Frenchmen who come abroad think only of taking an acre or two of ground, and cultivating it like a garden, without ever stepping beyond the limits of the commune, a system which may be very suitable to an old and thickly populated country, but which will never teach men to push their way into the wilds of Manitoba or to penetrate an Australian bush. This it is which has made Englishmen the pioneers of the world; still we must recollect that the work of the pioneer is different from that of the settler. When once the country has been generally occupied, the next step— page 73 not always an easy one, as they found in Virginia—should be to study the most suitable way of turning to account the soil that God has given us. This is the point that we have reached in South Australia; and, although I know it is a matter on which opinions are divided, for myself I feel strongly that there must be something wrong in the present system, under which, whilst the energies of the community have been mainly directed to agricultural and pastoral pursuits, a considerable part of the agricultural interest is in a depressed condition, this great colony has to import beef, and even mutton, and butter is dearer in the markets of Adelaide than it ever is in London. I trust that the time is not far distant when the industries of southern Europe and North Africa will be more generally imitated here, and South Australian fruits, wine, and oil, are exported to all parts of the world.

The next reason of the success of British colonies appears to be the strange power possessed by Englishmen of assimilating not themselves to foreigners, but foreigners to themselves. The German settlements, whether in Russia, or Sweden, or Brazil, always remain distinct communities—speaking their own language, retaining their nationality, and living amongst themselves; whereas in this, as in the other English colonies, we welcome them as fellow-citizens,—they learn the English language, enter Parliament, accept positions under the Crown, and become an integral part of the community. But the greatest reason of all is, that England has learned the true meaning of the word liberty. Liberty—the cause which united Norman and Saxon into one nation on the field of Runnymede; which led the people of Elizabeth to arm as one man to fight for England against the invading hosts of Spain; for which our ancestors ventured even to change the line of succession rather than see their privileges trampled under foot by the last of the Stuart kings; the cause which, when better understood, prompted our fathers to tax themselves page 74 to the amount of £20,000,000 in order to free the negroes in the West Indian plantations; that liberty has found a home no less in the colonies of England than

In the mother land beyond the sea.

Time will not allow me to pause to consider at length all the lessons that may be learnt from the history of colonisation. From each colony we may learn its own lesson, but a few maxims may be drawn from the story of them all. It seems an invariable rule from the days of Carthage to those of South Australia that the colonies which have had the humblest beginnings have also the most glorious results; whilst those which, like French Guiana, were transplanted not like saplings but as full-grown oaks, have withered and died. And the experience of the last three centuries has shown us that all trade restrictions imposed by the mother-country, however well intended, prove sooner or later hurtful to the colonies. And once more, I trust I have made it clear that the true system of colonisation is,—making allowance for the alterations necessitated by the change of time and circumstances,—the Greek; that is, the formation of communities having an independent existence, but united to the parent state by the closest bonds of loyalty and affection. The Roman idea, by which colonies were regarded as mere expansions of the central power, may be maintained in such a case as that of Russia in Central Asia; but is clearly inapplicable to the circumstances of Australia or Canada. With regard to mere trading colonies, we have seen how

Trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labored mole away;
While self-supported power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky.

And now I have done. I have glanced at the past, and watched the struggles of the various nations of Europe to plant new colonies beyond the seas; I have looked round at the present, when the page 75 colonies of England are spreading over the continents and islands of the world; into the future I will not penetrate. I see around me the vast dependencies of England, which, I trust, can never be driven into separation like the unhappy republics of Spanish America or become the possessions of another power, like the colonies of France; but must, should the world's history be prolonged, one day surpass the mother-country in wealth and population as they now so vastly do in size. I see before me the destiny of the future, pointing no longer to England and her colonies, but to a mighty federation, protected by a navy, and strengthened by defences belonging, not merely to the mother-country, but to the empire as a whole. I see old England, who has sent her sons to shed their blood in the defence of the colonies in Canada, Africa, and New Zealand, then, in the hour of need, protected by her daughter states throughout the world!

And, oh! Britannia, should'st thou cease to ride
Despotic Empress on old ocean's tide,
Should thy tamed lion—spent his former might—
No longer roar, the terror of the fight,

* * * * *

May this, thy last-born infant, then arise
To glad thy heart and greet thy parent eyes,
And Australasia float, with flag unfurled,
A new Britannia in another world.