'* PQ OtTB COLONIAL EMPIRE. BY E. ACTON. CASSELL, FETTER, GALPIN & Co.: LONDON, PARIS & NEW YORK, [ALL RIGHTS EESEP.VED.] \<* PREFACE. THE design of the following chapters is here to be briefly explained. Many books have been written on the colonies; that is to say, books treating separately of particular colonies. But a comprehensive view of all the colonial off-shoots of this nation, in every quarter of the globe, and of all the British depen- dencies abroad, excepting India, seems likely to be of service, and at the same time full of interest, to all classes of Englishmen. The author has endeavoured to study the most authentic reports of the actual condition of our colonies, of their material resources, their social economy, and their public administration. It is of necessity little more than an outline sketch of this extensive and diversified subject that is here pre- sented to the reader. The main interest of the subject, apart from any personal connection that one may chance to have with the settlers of a particular colony, lies in the wide spread of the English nationality. It will, perhaps, be more exactly appropriate to say, of English ciftzeii- ship ; for the present survey does not include the United States of America, while it does include, along with the English, Scotch, and Irish colonial subjects of Queen Victoria, their French, Dutch, and German fellow-citizens in Canada and at the Cape, The aggregate number of people of European race now inhabiting the British colonies, all over the world, is fully seven and a half millions. The number will probably exceed twenty millions before the IV PREFACE. lapse of the next twenty years, that is, at the beginning of the twentieth century. English patriotism, though its first concern must be the welfare of Britain, cannot regard with indifference the prospect of the propagation of British social and political institutions abroad that is here in sight. The principles, rules, and methods of our public life, amidst party and sectarian differences in this as in former ages, are tolerably well understood and esteemed in this country. If we have any public spirit, we must care for the tokens already visible, that this national inheritance will not be lost by transplanting large communities of Englishmen to distant shores. We hope the best for England, and we are bound to do our best for her ; but there is a true sense in which England may be said to exist wherever, to use Cowper's heartfelt expres- sion, " a nook is left where English minds and manners may be found," and the practices of English citizen- ship tend to form the mind and manners. England should thus be found in Canada, in Australia, or in New Zealand, as well as here, and we are but half patriots if we care not to inquire about the civil and social welfare of these countries as part of England herself. The events of three or four years past, especially in South Africa, have provoked much feeling of vexation and anxiety with regard to British colonial policy and administration. This feeling was carried by some writers and speakers to the point of indis- criminate censure of British government in South Africa, as well in the Cape Colony, with its Par- liament and responsible Ministry, as " in Natal, and in the administration of the Native Protectorates. The real merits and tolerable success, during a long period, of those colonial administrative functions, which had kept the peace of South Africa, for the PREFACE. V most part, till the outbreak of the Galeka war in 1877, were too little perceived. It is not, however, convenient to discuss here transactions of recent colonial history. The vice which really lay at the root of the errors of South African policy was inherent in the treatment of Foreign Office affairs, under the existing official system, by an agent of the Colonial Office. We have seldom had much cause of late years to find fault with Colonial Office action in its proper sphere. There are some other topics of discussion, which have lately been more or less brought under public notice, and upon which a few remarks will be offered in the concluding chapters. The project of an Imperial Confederation, advocated for some years past by lecturers at the Royal Colonial Institute and others, is one of these topics; and that of an Imperial Customs' Union, or else of some restriction to be put on colonial tariff legislation, is another. The writer feels, indeed, that he ought not to dogmatise upon these questions ; but the views he has expressed are those of many intelligent British and colonial poli- ticians. R. A. October, 1881. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. OUTWAKD BOUND. The Steamship Orient at Gravesend, " Outward Bound " Farewell to Emigrant Friends Our Interest in the Future Home of Emigrants Homeward Bound Arrival of the Lusitania Meeting an Old Acquaintance ... 9 CHAPTER II. FOREIGN PRECURSORS. Earliest Types of Modern Colonies Trading Factories and Tropical Plantations Portuguese and Spanish Conquests in the West Indies, the East Indies, and South America The Negro Slave Trade Origin of Sugar Cultivation Dutch, English, and French Maritime Successes English and French West Indies Batavia and other Dutch Eastern Possessions Foreign Colonial Empires reduced by British Conquests Suppression of the Slave Trade Abolition of Slavery Free Trade, and Surrender of the Sugar Mono- N poly Threefold Emancipation ; of Labour, of Trade, and of Colonial Commonwealths Plan of this Treatise on the Colonial Empire Civil Equality, the Solvent of Race and Class Divisions True Ends of Colonisation . . 16 CHAPTER III. TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. Mercantile Factory Colonies, distinguished from Plantation Colonies Geographical Distribution of British Colonies in Tropical Regions British West Indies Sugar Cultiva- tion by Slave Labour Absentee Proprietors Foreign Sugar Trade Competition Emancipation of the Negroes Jamaica A Negro Peasant Proprietary Importation of East Indian Coolie Labourers Three Prosperous Colonies Barbadoes British Guiana Trinidad The Lesser Antilles Administrative Groups of Small Islands Statistics of the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, and the Bahamas Colonies in the Indian Ocean Mauritius Natal Ceylon Plantations in British India Singapore and Labuan Hong Kong Northern Australia The Fiji Islands West Coast of Africa . . 31 CONTENTS. VU CHAPTER IV. PAGE CANADA. Nearest of onr Great Colonies to Home The Atlantic Passage The Intercolonial Railway Vast Length of Inland Navigation The Dominion of Canada Province of Ontario Agriculture and Stock-rearing Canals and Railways y Government of Ontario Public School System Province of Quebec, or Lower Canada Consti- tution of the Provincial Government Cities of Quebec and Montreal The Maritime Provinces Nova Scotia Port of Halifax New Brunswick Forests and Fisheries Agricultural Settlement Prince Edward Island New- foundlandThe Great West Manitoba City of Winni- pegThe Western Lakes and Rivers The North- West Territory The Saskatchewan The Canadian Pacific Railway British Columbia and Vancouver Island The VDominion Government . . . : . . . 53 CHAPTER V. AUSTRALIA. The Great Southern Island Political Constitutions of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Queensland Enormous Disproportion of the Capital Cities, Mel- bourne and Sydney, to the Colonial Population Land Laws and Agricultural Occupation Commercial Policy of New South Wales Beneficial Results of the Free Trade System Agricultural Progress of Victoria The Gold Mines Mistaken Protectionist Policy Popular Education A Federal Union of the Australian Colonies . . . 78 CHAPTER VI. NEW ZEALAND. The Two Islands Physical Geography The Maories Colonial History The New Zealand Company The Otago and Canterbury Settlements Provincial Governments Fe- deral Constitution of 1852 General Government since 1876 Parliamentary Constitution Public Works Assisted Immigration Public Debt Debts of Provincial Governments Revenue and Financial Prospects Indus- trial Resources Principal Cities Commercial Statistics Land Sales Land Leases Religion and Education General Progress Australian and New Zealand Wool Supplies Real Benefits of Colonisation . . . .104 CHAPTER VII. SOUTH AFRICA. The Cape Colony, its Territorial Limits, and its History Western Districts Eastern Districts Kaffir Yv r ars Con- Vlll CONTENTS. PAGB stitutional Government at the Cape Legislative Council and Assembly Public Works Progress of Eastern Dis- tricts Port Elizabeth Roads, Telegraphs, Submarine Cable, and Mail Steamers Financial Position of Cape Colony Further Railway Extension Natural Resources The Diamond Fields Ostrich Feathers Copper Wool Fruit and Wine Natal Native Reserves Scanty In- dustrial Production Stationary European Population Objections to a South African Confederation . . . 132 CHAPTER VIII. NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. Naval Establishments Abroad Mediterranean Stations Gib- raltar and Malta North Atlantic Stations Halifax, Ber- muda, and Antigua South Atlantic St. Helena The Cape and Simon's Bay Falkland Isles Indian Ocean Mauritius, Aden, and Ceylon Eastern Archipelago Hong Kong Australian Station Cruisers in the Pacific Ocean South American Coast Esquimalt, Vancouver Island Combined Naval Defences for the British Colonies 147 CHAPTER IX. POLITICAL RELATIONS. Constitutional Self-Government of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony Limits of necessary Obli- gations to the Crown Command of Colonial Military Forces Diplomatic Negotiations The Zulu War The Annexation of the Transvaal Colonial Office Administra- tion Crown Colonies Colonies with Assisting Councils Self-Governing Colonies, with Parliamentary Ministries Appointment of Governors Schemes of Imperial Fede- ration Reforms Desirable and Feasible The Agents- General and the Government Departments The Court and Royal Family Titles Peerages .... 157 CHAPTER X. COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS. Mutual Defence of the Colonies and the United Kingdom ^ Economic Value of the Colonies to Great Britain Com- plaints of their Restrictive Tariffs Objections to Reci- procity Treaties of Commerce, and to an Imperial Customs' Union Absolute Dependence of this Country on Foreign or Colonial Supplies A British and Colonial s Free Trade Association Colonial Exports to Great Britain Prospects of Manufacturing Industry in the Colonies Conclusion 177 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. CHAPTER I. OUTWARD BOUND. The Steamship Orient at Gravesend, " Outward Bound " Farewell to Emigrant Friends Our Interest in the future Home of Emigrants Homeward Bound Arrival of the Lusitania Meeting an Old Acquaintance. IT is noon of Thursday, June 9th, 1881. A cool north-west wind brings a fleeting rain-cloud to hover for half-an-hour over the broad stream of the Lower Thames. But presently sunshine lights up again the pleasant green hills and the pretty town of Gravesend, with the verdant Essex shore opposite at Tilbury, and the mile-long white streak of slowly rolling steam from the railway train approaching that station. In the middle of the river, below the Terrace Pier, lies one of the noblest ocean steamships that serve our rich and busy nation in the ways of peace. That vast and stately vessel, an iron-grey hull with huge funnels and four masts barque-rigged, which sits there in supreme dignity amidst a flock of mixed river craft, of steam-tugs, tenders, and pilot-boats, sailing yachts for this week's race, and rowing-boats that are now speeding to bring passengers aboard that 10 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. is the Orient, which to-morrow departs for the other side of the globe. Thousands of us, home-staying people in England, have been called by family duties or friendships, perhaps more than once in our lives, to come down here to Gravesend, to bid farewell to those whom we love. There are so many people who have a son or a brother in our colonies. The present writer dined once at a party of twelve persons in London, four of whom, not at all related to each other, had brothers in distant New Zealand. It would seem that of middle- class families every third or fourth that one may visit has a share of private concern in somebody who is spending an active manhood on shores beyond the seas. Some of them may consider it worth while, on account of absent friends, to reckon up the social prospects of the different British Colonies. One might thus say to oneself, for instance, "The next generation of colonists, born in that far Australasian region, will yet be my near kinsfolk. Those ten boys and girls of my brother's in New Zealand are the grandchildren of my own parents. I cannot feel indifferent to the future of their country, which I shall never see." It would be sheer brutality for us not to care what is likely to become of those young commonwealths ; and it would be arrogant selfishness to regard them merely as fields of investment for British capital, or markets for our manufactures, or tokens and pledges of British imperial supremacy. Meantime, let us get on board the Orient, to see the emigrants who are now ready to depart. The OUTWARD BOUND. 11 decks of the great ship are in much bustle, tempered by the vigilant supervision of her officials in charge, very strict and firm, but civil in manner. The company's steam tender, the Duke of Teck, has brought down from London a large number of steerage passengers. They are crowding and trooping along, up the ladder and over the gangway to ascend the Orient's lofty side : men, women, and children, old and young, as merrily as if they were bent on a day's pleasure trip to Margate. The young men "hump their swag," to use a colonial bushman's phrase they have already learnt ; each brisk fellow has shouldered his pack, made up of blankets and shirts, with a tin pot and a tin plate, and other fancied necessaries, which he bought two days ago at the outfitter's shop. Some of the young women, laughing and talking in pleased excitement, carry nothing but a small basket ; while others nurse placid babies, and seem to think nothing else can possibly be of the slightest import- ance. The elders have frail wooden boxes, painted yellow, or papered with some blue pattern ; and oddly shaped bundles, not well tied, with a bird-cage, or it may be a sewing-machine, a favourite teapot, or an infant's chair. Up they go, all in cheerful humour, readily joking or taking a joke ; they show their papers to pass on deck, stop at the purser's office to get billets for their numbered berths, and in half-an-hour will all be settled for the six weeks' voyage. The deck of the Orient is now thronged like the street of a sea-side village, which, on a holiday 12 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. morning, is suddenly filled by the arrival of excursion trains. Alongside the other quarter lies the steam tender Cato, by which many second-class passengers have come from the Tilbury Railway Station, some of them perhaps accompanied by friends ; all rather too solicitous about the disposal of their trunks and bags. At a separate gangway, lowered to the water forward, the Gravesend Pier boats send up, in a more leisurely manner, the first-class saloon passengers, three or four at once, who are personally encumbered with little more than the ordinary tourist's neat leather bags and travelling rugs, or a bundle of plaids, shawls, and umbrellas. They have had all their bulky luggage safely deposited on board while the Orient lay in the Albert Dock, a day or two before their own embarka- tion. It is an agreeable sight to witness the ease and security with which all these people, several hundred passengers of different classes, are speedily settled in their new lodgings on the waters. The little children are the first to make themselves quite at home ; but, soon afterwards, even the most nervous ladies and anxious husbands appear relieved of the morning's toil and care. If one peeps into an un- occupied cabin or state-room, while walking through the long corridors between decks, the convenience, the neatness, the abundance of air and light, give assu- rance of comfort in the sultry nights at sea. In the three large dining-saloons, that of the first class being elegantly furnished and decorated, the tables are laid already for the mid-day meal. Meat and fish will be OUTWARD BOUND. 13 kept fresh by refrigerators during the whole voyage. Before taking their seats at table a few of the passen- gers enjoy a stroll on the high promenade deck, over- looking that lively scene of anchored vessels and boats gliding on the water, and that fair landscape of the north and south river banks, brightly illumi- nated by the joyous sunshine. This is the position of the grand ocean steamship, and of the good people who have committed them- selves to her safe and punctual conveyance. Early to-morrow morning, at half ebb tide, she will move down to the Nore and the open sea. In a few hours she will pass the Kent and Sussex shores and the Isle of Wight ; next morning she will be at Plymouth, stopping just to receive the mails and a number of additional passengers. She will then strike out into the Atlantic, touch at the Isle of St. Yincent for coal, and at Capetown, but within forty days she will have ' landed these our countrymen at the port of Adelaide, or, two or three days later, at Melbourne or Sydney. The questions naturally arise in one's mind, seeing them here about to go off, has England lost these emigrant sons and daughters of hers 1 Will they have lost their share of what we hold to be the blessings of English citizenship 1 It is not merely the formal allegiance to the political sovereignty of this kingdom that is here in question. There is a social, a mental and moral allegiance to the traditional ideas, habits, and manners of English life, which binds together the members of a national community. We cannot establish an inquisition throughout the wide colonial 14 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. world to cross-examine its adoptive citizens upon these subtle and delicate points. But here comes a whole cargo of living proofs that they still regard old England as the mother country, which, living so far away, they still call by the endearing word of "Home." We see yonder, below Gravesend, at this moment coming up the Thames, the steamship Lusitania, one of the same " Orient " line, entering homeward-bound the port of London. She left Adelaide, South Australia, on the 28th of April. Her sides are tarnished and discoloured with the stains of ocean, for a toilsome journey of ten thousand miles must rub off a little paint. But she has sped well and smoothly homeward, by the wonted " Orient " course, across the Indian Ocean, up the E/ed Sea, through the Suez Canal eleven days ago, thence traversing the length of the Mediterranean, issuing from the Straits of Gibraltar, crossing the Bay of Biscay, and finally coming up the British Channel, to run in home. This is the " Orient " homeward route, which is much used by Australians coming to England, as most of the thriving and successful class of colonists are pretty sure to come after a few years' absence. They will come home now and then, with their wives and children, if they can spare the time and money, for social recreation, to refresh or renew the old bonds of affection and friendship, or to introduce the colonial youngsters to the renowned European world. The Lusitania is now passing, with customary salutes, at half a cable's length, by her majestic sister OUTWARD BOUND. 15 the Orient, so that we on board the latter can recognise the passengers from Australia standing on deck. Their appearance is surely that of respectable English- men and Englishwomen, with a rather remarkable air of social independence and consciousness of prosper- ing activity. It is interesting to see the father of a family, who has now returned to his native land after an absence of twenty or thirty years, intently scan- ning the landmarks of the Thames, and pointing out to his boy and girl that dark region on the horizon where mighty London awaits their wondering view. They know Melbourne, which is already the equal of our chief provincial cities ; and they were delighted, six months ago, with the glories of its great Exhibi- tion. But they have been taught, we cannot doubt, to claim an hereditary share in all that belongs to the external prosperity of this realm ; its wealth and power, its rule over vast Asiatic and American domi- nions, and its just influence in the councils of foreign states upon all affairs of general concern. This sentiment, in the minds even of our children and of uneducated persons, is sustained by a notion, however vague and inexact, of the grand historical achievements of the English nation in the past. That such feelings may be abused and perverted into a false public pride, which is quite compatible with the neglect of civil duty, with selfish pursuit of venal ends in politics, and with the reckless strife of factions to the ruin of a country, we have learnt from the history of other nations. The empire of Rome, in the world of antiquity the empire of Spain, at an 16 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. early stage of the world's modern political organisa- tion did not bequeath to posterity a high standard of the virtues of citizenship. We will hope the best for Madrid and for Mexico in this nineteenth century, as well as for London and Melbourne ; but we trust that there is an essential difference between the colonial empire of Great Britain and the examples of large dominions in countries remote from Europe, which have played so prominent a part in the history of former ages. CHAPTER II. FOREIGN PRECURSORS. Earliest Types of Modern Colonies Trading Factories and Tropical Plantations Portuguese and Spanish Conquests in the West Indies, the East Indies, and South America The Negro Slave Trade Origin of Sugar Cultivation Dutch, English, and French Maritime Successes English and French West Indies Batavia and other Dutch Eastern Possessions Foreign Colonial Empires reduced by British Conquests Suppression of the Slave Trade Abolition of Slavery Free Trade, and Surrender of the Sugar Monopoly Threefold Emancipation, of Labour, of Trade, and of Colonial Commonwealths Plan of this Treatise on Our Colonial Empire Civil Equality, the Solvent of Race and Class Divisions True Ends of Colonisation. FOUR centuries and a half ago, on that rocky promontory of south-western Europe, off which British fleets have fought more than one great battle with the Spanish and French, Prince Henry of Portugal sat, and looked forth over the Atlantic FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 17 Ocean. It was not a void and blank prospect to the eye of scientific faith. In his mind lay ideas that were to become the germ of modern enterprise beyond the seas : of discovery, commerce, settlement and colonisation, to be carried all round the globe. He had in him a piece of the Englishman, for he was a grandson of John of Gaunt. The steamship passenger of our day, in going out to the West Indies, to Brazil, or the Plata, or by the Cape route to India, Australia, or China, passes some hundred leagues west of Prince Henry's abode, 011 the farthest verge of the Old World. At Sagres, 011 Cape St. Vincent, he dwelt and did his work till 1463, sending forth one ship after another to the Canaries and Madeira, to Cape Verde, to the Gambia, and to Sierra Leone. Those vessels were still feeling their way to the route of navigation round South Africa, to the famous Eastern realms of imagined riches, long celebrated among the Greeks, the Arabs, and the Venetians in Levantine ports. Without such efforts in that direction first, it might have been ages yet before mariners would have cared to sail to the West. Those Portuguese adventurers 011 the Atlantic coasts and the islands beyond the Moorish dominion were the beginners of European colonies destined to occupy the remotest shores of ocean. The earliest colonial type proceeding from modern Europe was unlike either the Roman military garri- sons or the Greek free civic commonwealths of mari- time emigrants, which had been multiplied in the B 18 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. ancient world. It was a trading " factory," or agency, commissioned for the king's mercantile profit, or for that of persons to whom this royal privilege was granted. Such was the spirit of the fifteenth century, when the age of chivalry was past, and princes sought to make money like other people. The later Plan- tagenets and the first Tudor king of England were London merchants; and Ferdinand of Spain, when Columbus gave him the West Indies, valued them chiefly for their mines of precious metal. But establishments formed abroad for purposes of trade, or the entrance upon a field of search for mineral riches, though accompanied with a claim of sovereignty, falls short of true colonisation. That work, as we under- stand it, is the raising up of a new people in a new country. It is to be accomplished by productive industrial culture of the soiL "Plantations," as colonies in general were formerly called, may cf course be associated with traffic in natural com- modities, the spoils of the chase or fishery, or riches dug from underground. But husbandry, the growing of crops and rearing of cattle for the subsistence of the community, seems indispensable to the vitality of colonial growth, when what we mean by a colony is an infant nation. There are, indeed, two different orders of colonial plantations. The first to be noticed, according to the historical date of its appearance, is a territorial domain cultivated for the production of articles that require a tropical climate, and that are chiefly sold in the European market. The agricultural labour here FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 19 employed can scarcely be that of European settlers; they can only perform its direction and management. Hence they are and must remain but few in number. The country may become extremely valuable by the skill and capital they bring to develop its resources. It may be made to support thereby a greatly increased native population, but it has 110 capacity of attracting or supporting a large population of European race. The proprietors, agents, overseers, and merchants residing there can never become a nation. They do not much increase by natural propagation, and many of them will return to the old country, or will send their families home. All might easily be removed, if any commercial or political revolution took away the profit of their planting, without causing any great decrease in the population. Sooner or later, in some notable instances, this is likely to happen; in some cases, it has actually taken place. The ruling class of colonists, however, though it cannot subsist apart from a labouring non-European race, has some- times had power to change the labouring race in mass, in fact, to substitute one population for another. This was done by the Spaniards when they filled the Antilles with negroes from Africa. A new nation is thus created, but of other materials than the people who have established the colony. It will never be a home for that people, broadly speaking, but only for a special class who have gone abroad in hopes of private gain. The colony may stay during many generations, but only so long as is worth its while to stay. It is a provisional settlement with a view to a specific 20 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. commercial object. It cannot aspire to an abiding state of independence. Many such colonies have already departed, and others now existing will pass away. The second order of colonies, according to the time when it becomes conspicuous in modern history, is very superior to the former in its influence upon civili- sation. It consists of the transplanting of European society, with an emigrant agricultural population to provide for its own sustenance by raising food corn and meat from new and ample lands in a temperate climate. To this primary occupation, which makes the colony self-supporting and independent of the aid of inferior races, some of its people may add a variety of other productive or mercantile employments. They may have large exports, for instance, of wool, or hides, or timber; they may procure gold from the gravel of streams, or from the rock ; but they make themselves at home in the new country. They live upon it, and of it; most of them are farmers, householders, and parents of families, to be reared and fed of its bounty through the labour of their own hands, like the home-staying husbandmen of the old country from which they came. Such a com- munity is already, by its habits of social economy ? fit to be accounted a young nation. It is destined to grow up to adult strength and stature. It promises to become a self-managing and substantially independent State, whatever titular connection of political alle- giance elsewhere may still remain. The essential distinction between these two dif- ferent kinds of colonies should be kept in view, FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 21 throughout the sketch of their historical beginnings in the present chapter. It will afterwards serve for the grouping and classification of those which now consti- tute the British Colonial Empire. The earlier Portuguese and Spanish colonisation, beginning with that of Madeira in Prince Henry's time, and proceeding to all the tropical parts of Asia and America, was of the order first described. So likewise was the Dutch, being necessarily imitative of the Portuguese, as it was brought about by the forcible acquisition, after two hundred years, of Portu- guese commercial factories and plantations in the East Indies. It was for the gold-dust and gems, the ivory, the costly gums of West and East Africa for the silks and embroidery and fine muslins of India for the cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and other spices of the Moluccas, that those mariners crossed the seas. It was the gold and silver of Hispanic! a, and Mexico, and Peru, that lured Spain, when Columbus had shown her the way, to send over the Atlantic her military and official agents of power. The French, too, so late as 1534, when they entered the St. Lawrence, were chiefly intent on the fur trade. This was not the planting and rearing of new nations. It was not yet real and effective colonisation. But a commencement was soon made by the Portuguese, in three quarters of the world, of the first kind of productive plantation. They early took to employing servile labour to grow sugar, first in Madeira and the Canaries, at a later period in Brazil. For this purpose they invented the negro slave trade. 22 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. The sliort sea-passage across from Guinea to the most easterly shore of South America, with the favouring winds and currents, rendered it but too easy. The natives of Brazil could not be made to work in the plantations for the Portuguese feudal lords, to whom vast estates were granted by the king. So likewise in Hispaniola, as the sordid avarice of the Spanish tyrant was soon apprised, the toil of the mines could not be endured by the native islanders. Negroes were, therefore, borrowed from the Portuguese slave- trade to supersede the perishing race. Despotic power may be as greedy and cruel as it will, but it cannot entirely alter the conditions of human nature. It finds that the extermination, indeed, of a simple and unwarlike people is not nearly so difficult as com- pelling them to work at an unaccustomed kind of labour. They cannot fight against it, but they die under it. The aborigines of a country are not the most convenient and profitable subjects of a new institution of slavery, though foreign conquerors may readily impose upon them the continuance of old forms of predial servitude. This is why it was found needful, after a very few years, to bring African labour to America, so that American soil might produce the tropical growths of Asia for luxurious purchasers in Europe. Such was the circle of trade and industry, not wholly beneficent or innocent, at first created by the rise of colonial and mercantile interests outside of Europe. Portugal, however, lost great part of her vast possessions of this kind, and all her FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 23 maritime ascendancy, through her fatal temporary annexation to the misg aided Spanish monarchy. And Spain could not long hold her own dominion, which ,she had never known how to use or cultivate. After the blow dealt to her naval power by the England of Elizabeth, the West Indies and the Spanish Main lay at the mercy of pirates. The Dutch, French, and English buccaneers then ravaged and plundered every shore. England and France took some of those fine islands, Jamaica, St. Domingo, and the Lesser Antilles, which Spain had first discovered. The history of colonisation is thenceforth concerned with the rivalry between the Dutch, English, and French, with their ex- clusive and domineering commercial pretensions. At last the ambitious maritime power of France, drawing with it first Spain, and finally Holland, into a decisive conflict with Great Britain, brought upon these two nations the loss of some of their remaining colonies, with those which France had possessed. The record of conquests by war is only noticed here as determining the ultimate distribution of colonial interests between the leading European nations. It would be arrogant presumption to deny that French, Dutch, and Spanish dominions in distant parts of the earth were as justly founded as the British ; or that the French and Dutch, at least ; were very well able to make good use of them. What French rule might possibly have effected in India, or whether it might not even have become as beneficial as the dominion exercised by our own countrymen, is a question outside the present inquiry. 24 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. French management of the sugar-growing islands both in the East and in the West seems to have been really successful. The Isle of France and St. Domingo were efficiently cultivated. The Dutch government of Java and other insular East Indies has continued to pay its way, and has accomplished the industrial training of a large native population. The prosperity of Surinam has been likewise maintained. Had the Dutch retained Ceylon, and had the French not lost the Mauritius, there is no reason to doubt that they might have prospered in both those islands, with the advancing knowledge and skill of modern times. There are, however, two important considerations not of an economical, but of a moral and political character which for the general welfare of mankind seem to recommend the colonial predominance of Britain. It is in no spirit of national vain -glory or self-complacency that these views are put forward. We feel too profoundly a grave sense of national responsibility for serving the apparent designs of Providence in the advancement of humanity over the earth. These considerations bear reference to the internal progress of the two different orders of European Colonies already described. Modern enlightenment, since the middle of the last century, has shown the need of adapting social institutions to true ideas of morality; and it has demanded two conditions. The one had to be conceded by slave emancipation in the tropical plantation colonies, and by the changes of FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 25 commercial policy that ensued. The other was to take place by the admission, in principle, of the right of every commonwealth of civilised men to virtual self-government, that is, to the management of its own internal affairs. This principle allows the complete social fusion of mixed nationalities by the influence of common and equal civic rights. The process has now been going on during half a century or more, in all colonies of the second order namely, those created by agricultural and pastoral industry of free European immigrants, which are probably destined to form hereafter new independent nations. The British Empire has been peculiarly qualified, since the beginning of the present century, to preside over the carrying out of these changes, which are pregnant with vaster results than we can yet foresee. The suppression of the. slave trade, the abolition of slavery, and the overthrow of commercial monopoly, with regard to tropical produce raised by European direction, came first, and were the task of reformers during three quarters of a century. The political emancipation of the more substantially emigrant and self-sustaining colonies began with Spanish America, above fifty years ago. It may not necessarily imply, for the chief British Colonies, an entire severance from the British Empire. In any case, it will preserve the traditions of English public life. English political life, by its direct action, and by its indirect or transmitted influence, as through the example of America, has been the main source of these wide reforms. But it would be a mistake to claim 26 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. for the English, upon this account, greater suscep- tibility to moral ideas in their public policy, than that with which the French and the Dutch are endowed. In point of fact, it was the French, at the outset of their Revolution, who precipitately and therefore disas- trously began in Hayti to proclaim the abolition of negro slavery. The republican liberties of colonial commonwealths owe not a little to the example of the Netherlands. But whatever liberal sentiments might be entertained, there were, in France and in Holland, in the last century, great practical obstacles to the extension of freedom to their remote depen- dencies. In the one instance, there was the excessively powerful interest of the Court and State, or rather of the herd of courtiers and suitors for royal and official favours. This influence con- tinued just as strong after the Revolution, so that colonial interests were still jobbed away by the governments of the Republic and of the Empire. In Holland, there was the not less powerful monopoly of official as well as commercial privileges, enjoyed by strong old chartered companies, in the East Indies and Africa, and likewise in the West Indies, whose administration long withstood in the States-General all proposals of reform. It was only in England, thanks to the Whig party, that popular opinion and parliamentary discussion at length found means to deal with colonial abuses. The spirit was willing enough in other European nations, but it was un- furnished with a political instrument that could do the work. FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 27 Emancipation then first, that of alien labour in the tropical plantations ; secondly, the freedom of trade and navigation ; thirdly, the concession of self-government to adult communities so as to make them socially independent, but saving the re- lations of foreign policy that belong to Imperial supremacy has been the honourable task of British statesmanship. This is the way in which Great Britain has dealt, these hundred years past, with the numerous and diverse territorial dependencies entrusted to her care. Of her we may say, as truly as it was said of Rome : " Htec est, in gremio victos qua3 sola recepit, Humanumque genus conimuni nomine fovit, ftlatris, non dominte ritu, civesque vocavit." And it is conceivable, it is even allowable to hope, that her immense provinces of India will not prove an eternal exception to this treatment. One chapter of this book will show the existing con- ditions of all those minor British possessions in the tropical regions, collectively of immense value to British commerce, which correspond with the old transmarine dominions of foreign European nations. In four succeeding chapters, we shall view the progress of several robust English communities of freemen carrying on industrial pursuits, under a temperate sky, and managing their own public affairs, with due loyalty to the Imperial Crown, but in an effectively Republican spirit. The creation of these prosperous self-governing colonies is a credit to the 28 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. English nation. But the merit of their well-doing is shared by large contingents of French, Dutch, and Germans, who have helped to settle vast new countries, or have even shown the way. The rising composite nationality, in every such instance, cannot be a mere second-hand copy of Old England. It is the birth of new great civilised nations. Such has been the ultimate consequence of those troublous events which deprived France of Canada and of the Mississippi, but left a valuable French ingredient of American population, now equally at home in the British Dominion and in the United States. The same process has been going on with the Dutch in the Cape Colony, and we confidently trust that its beneficial consummation will not be hindered there. We are of the cheerful faith that full political liberty, the active exercise of self-government, whether in the form of a single commonwealth or a federation, is an effectual solvent of the rivalries between fellow- citizens of differing national origin. In colonial society, with the absence of aristocratic traditions, and with the need of combination for material in- terests, this amalgamation takes place very rapidly. It affords the most hopeful prospects of domestic prosperity for the rising nations of the New World. Human progress is greatly concerned in this result. Such is the encouraging point of view from which it is here proposed to contemplate the British Colonial Empire. It is a magnificent fabric, not wholly of English construction, and one assuredly not designed for the mere selfish profit of England, or to gratify FOREIGN PRECURSORS. 29 the vain sentiment of Imperial pride. The fate of the great Spanish Empire is an impressive warning to those kingdoms which indulge in such iniquitous delusions. Possession of territory, dominion of subject millions, cannot be aught but a solemn and sacred trust for the benefit of humanity. The objects for which this trust should be exercised are, first, the improvement of the land, rendering it useful to feed mankind and otherwise productive of wealth ; and secondly, the improvement of the people by all civilising rules and operations, by just laws and government, by diffusing knowledge and school education, but of course mainly by industrial em- ployment. Social life, with its laws and institutions securing property and civil liberty, supplies a political education by which the colonists of European race become fit for self-government ; and it is then the duty of the parent State frankly to let them enjoy such freedom in peace. Great Britain's highest office in the world, during the last century and a half, has been to superintend and protect these salutary de- velopments of human energies abroad. So long as this grand task is faithfully performed, the great maritime and mercantile ascendancy of England will not be endangered. Anarchical, op- pressed, malcontent colonies w r ould soon pull much of it down, and not a little of our manufacturing prosperity with it. Incomparably less disastrous, though much to be deprecated and deplored, would be a peaceable secession of this or that fully equipped commonwealth from the Empire, with free leave and 30 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE, consent. There is not, in these times, the slightest sign of the faintest wish to anticipate that consumma- tion. But is our posterity, if ever it does come to pass, to be expected to suffer by its ultimate effects 1 We confidently believe that they would suffer no more than we now do from our profitable intercourse with the fifty millions of people in the United States. Would we, if we could, reduce those people to five or two millions, and replace them in colonial subjec- tion 1 Assuredly not. The true ends of colonisation are far higher and better than Empire. They are, let us repeat, first, the productive cultivation of land that lies vacant, by employing, as the climate may require, native, coolie, or European labour; next, a nobler task, that of social improvement, perpetuating, propa- gating, and perfecting true civilisation in manners, ideas, and the useful and the liberal arts ; thirdly, that of maturing public life to the development and exercise of a conscious national will by a free political constitution. All these ends cannot be attained in all the British colonies. In some, as will now be seen, they are only to be realised very partially ; or they may even, to a considerable degree, appear to have failed, where the abiding residence and personal activity of our countrymen has been prevented, as in the West Indies, by unfavourable natural con- ditions, or by peculiar defects in their economic administration. TROPICAL PRODUCE COLO> 7 IES. 31 CHAPTER III. TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. Mercantile Factory Colonies, distinguished from Plantation Colo- nies Geographical Distribution of British Colonies in Tropical Kegions British West Indies Sugar Cultivation by Slave Labour Absentee Proprietors Foreign Sugar Trade Competi- tion Emancipation of the Negroes Jamaica A Negro Peasant Proprietary Importation of East Indian Coolie Labourers Three Prosperous Colonies Barbadoes British Guiana Trinidad The Lesser Antilles Adminis trativo Groups of small Islands Statistics of the Windward Islands, the Leeward Islands, and the Bahamas Colonies in the Indian Ocean Mauritius Natal Ceylon Plantations in British India Singapore and Labuan Hong Kong Northern Australia The Fiji Islands West Coast of Africa. JN our glance at the history of Portuguese, Dutch, and French colonisation, we have discussed the earlier kind of colonial establishments beyond the Old World. They were created for mercantile profit, either to cultivate the products of a tropical climate, or to procure them when already raised by the hands of a non- European labouring population. It is proposed here to treat of the existing British Colonies of this description ; of their social economy and administrative organisation. The tropical produce colonies, as we will call them generally, may be sub-divided into two different classes. The first to be noticed here are those which are essentially plantations, for the immediate cultivation 12 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. of sugar or other crops with the aid of a host of field labourers, such as negroes or coolies, in the service of European masters. The second class is that of commercial stations, formerly styled " factories," at which mercantile residents purchase from, the natives of neighbouring lands what these can bring for sale. It is obvious that the social conditions of these two kinds of colonial settlements will be dissimilar in many important respects. Historically, as we have seen, the last-named class was the first to come into existence. These are, however, of very secondary importance with regard to the process of real colonisation. The principal British plantation colonies of our own day are distributed in widely separate geo- graphical groups. These lie first in the West Indies including the north eastern shore of South America ; secondly, on some of the shores and islands of the Indian Ocean, and in some eastern frontier provinces of our Indian Empire ; further, in the Straits of Malacca, in the northern parts of Australia, and in the West Pacific Ocean. Of the other class, Singapore, Hong-Kong, and Labuan, bear the character of national establishments for the advancement of trade in articles of foreign produce ; and the chief business of our West African possessions is likewise of this nature. The British West Indies, as popularly understood, comprise two large islands, Jamaica and Trinidad ; three groups of smaller islands, the Bahamas, the Leeward Islands, and the Windward Islands; a piece of the South TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 33 American mainland, British Guiana ; and a pi^ce oi Honduras, on the inner coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Jamaica was taken from the Spaniards in 1655, and Trinidad in 1797, but most of the lesser isles were original English settlements of an early date, though two or three were for a time in French possession. Guiana, after some vicissitudes, has been divided between the Dutch, the French, and the British. The aggregate population of the British West Indies may be estimated at one million and four hundred thousand, of whom less than thirty thousand are persons of European race. It is an undeniable fact that this division of the British Colonies has failed of its early promise ; that of furnishing new homes for the industrial settlement of English families. Two hundred years ago, there were in Jamaica, it is said, nearly seventy thousand of our countrymen, instead of fourteen thou- sand, the present number. In Barbadoes, likewise, there were English settlers, numbering several tens of thou- sands, working on their small freeholds, the thriving yeomanry of a tropical clime. They were emigrants who had left England disgusted with the Civil War, or with the politics of the Commonwealth and the Restoration, like those who went to New Jersey and Maryland and South Carolina. The upland districts of Jamaica have not been found unhealthy for people of our race. That island may be compared with Sicily for its capabilities of various culture, and it might well, by this time, have become the habitation, like some Australasian colonies, of a large English c 34 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. population. In some of the other islands, on the contrary, the climate is unsuitable for the out-door labour of white men. Sugar, with slave-labour for its production, being favoured with a trade monopoly by the victories of Great Britain in naval and military warfare, in the course of the eighteenth century, decided the fate of the West Indian interest. The frequent enormous rises in the price of that commodity, which ran up to eighty shillings the hundred-weight after the negro revolt in prosperous Hayti, tempted all British proprietors to devote their w r hole care to its exclusive cultivation. The importation of negroes from West Africa, as a necessary part of this business, very speedily over- whelmed the European industrial class. The small farms already created were merged in great sugar- plantations. These were usually managed by a few salaried " attorneys," or agents of planters; while the owners of the estate enjoyed their newly-got riches in England. Hence the rapid decrease of European inhabitants, from thousands to hundreds, and, com- paring the present state of some islands with their former condition, in certain places even to scores. There was, for a time, immense commercial gain, but with it came a swift decay of the social fabric of the colony; for society does not live by material wealth alone. After the conclusion, in 1815, of the great Euro- pean war, Cuban and Brazilian sugar, and that of Java, competed in the Continental markets with that grown by British planters. This was done with fatal effect to the latter, even in spite of the formal TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 35 prohibition of the slave trade, which had most aided the Spaniards and Dutch. It has often been said that the British concerns of this sort were badly managed. But there was a physical disadvantage, at least in the Leeward Islands and Jamaica, compared with other lands of still greater fertility nearer to the Equator. The sugar-cane will grow in a wide range of semi-tropical latitude ; it was formerly cultivated on the shores of the Mediterra- nean. But its juice is more richly yielded beneath the hotter sun ; and thus it is far more profitable in Demerara or in Trinidad than it could ever be in Jamaica. The Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian planters had also a more ample and constant supply of labour already at hand, from the large extent and population of. their, colonies; and they were not slow to adopt improved processes for the conversion of juice into sugar. Then came a fundamental change of the system of labour. In 1838, by an Act of the British Imperial Parliament, all the slaves in our West Indies were emancipated, the period of apprenticeship enacted four years before at the prospective abolition of slavery being thus cut short. The masters had already begun to fall behind their foreign rivals in trade ; and the removal of the protective duties, in 1847, brought many estates to ruin. Those houses fell which were built on the sand of absentee pro- prietorship and thriftless conduct. Trinidad, Bar- badoes, and British Guiana, have since more than recovered; they are making steady progress in wealth and social improvement. Of Jamaica, and some of 36 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. the lesser Antilles, we cannot present an altogether satisfactory report. The size of Jamaica a hundred and fifty miles in length and fifty in breadth, her population, 580,000, equalling all the other British West India islands put together, and her old standing as one of our most important colonies might have been expected to ensure her supremacy in this region of the globe. As a matter of fact she has languished sadly during two past generations. Still we are most willing to put faith in some encouraging accounts very recently published. As the governor, Sir Anthony Musgrave, observed in March, 1879, she "had paid off nearly a quarter of a million of debt in ten years, and that she owed but two years' revenue, including loans for special services, irrigation and waterworks, and .150,000 for costs of coolie immigration." These administrative reforms have been effected since the establishment in 1866 of a more absolute form of Crown Government, superseding the old representative constitution, which had stood nearly two hundred years. The necessity for this rather ignominious surrender of political liberties resulted from the exposures following a hideous passage of colonial history in 1865, when the local negro insurrection of Morant Bay was avenged by the massacre of four or five hundred persons, some days after resistance had ceased. After the official inquiry, which revealed the thoroughly rotten condition of the island govern- ment, Jamaica felt herself obliged to give up her elective assembly. Her old garment of ample self- TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 37 government no longer fitted the shrunk figure of a dwindling and decaying white population. She descended to the inferior position of a mere Crown Colony, like one of the lesser islands. Her Governor is assisted by a Legislative Council of twelve, half composed of the head officials, half consisting of nomi- nated members. It is not surprising that, whatever improvements have really been made in the adminis- tration, some resident planters should now and then be inclined to find fault with it. The coolie immigration question claims particular remark. It appears that, since 1846, some twenty thousand East Indian labourers have been introduced into Jamaica, at an expense of j56 a head on the average, of adults and children, this sum including the cost of return passage to India after ten years. Five years are served under indenture to contracting masters. The reason for this is that many of the planters declare chat free negro labour cannot be depended upon. There are half a million of negroes; but those who have small plots of ground to grow their yams, their fruit, or any vegetable food, will not hire themselves for many days' plantation work. Besides, the laws regulating labour contracts in Jamaica are not so favourable to the employer's interest as in other West Indian islands. There, in the absence of any particular stipulation beforehand, a labourer working for one day is bound to go on working four weeks, and to do any kind of field work. In Jamaica, on the con- trary, work is taken by the piece or task, and there is no implied contract to work for more than one day. 38 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. The estimates of one planter, Mr. W. B. Espeut, regarding the vast difference thus made in the cost of sugar cultivation, seem almost beyond belief. To dig an acre of land, he says, making holes five feet square for setting the canes, will cost <2 10s. in Jamaica, and in the Isle of St. Vincent only 16s. 8d. To make a hogshead of sugar, inclusive of the opera- tions of planting, weeding, and " trashing " the super- fluous leaves, of cutting and tying the canes, carting them to the mill, grinding or crushing, boiling and potting the sugar, and drying the " trash " for fuel, costs in Jamaica 2 10s. ; but in St. Vincent the whole series of operations can be done for 1 5s. If this estimate be anything like the truth, it is no wonder that sugar occupies a declining place among the products of Jamaica. It constitutes there but five-ninths of the aggregate produce ; while in Trini- dad it is three-fourths, and in British Guiana seven- eighths. This calculation includes rum and molasses with sugar. While, however, the cultivation of sugar had been decreasing in Jamaica, the exports of coffee, pimento and ginger, and that of logwood, had much more than doubled within five years. The question of coolie labour pervades all discussion of the affairs of our tropical plantation colonies, almost in every region of the globe where they exist. It is apparently considered of far greater importance than any question respecting the condition of the mass of the population bred and born in the colony. Sir Anthony Musgrave declares, though to little purpose as meeting the planters' complaint, that the TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 39 black people of Jamaica "have of late years made substantial advances in civilisation." He denies that they are generally thriftless, indolent, and addicted to petty larceny ; he points to the increased extent and improved productiveness of their provision-grounds, and to the amount of their savings' bank deposits. They contribute much, from their small pieces of freehold land, to the production of some articles of export trade. It has been suggested that a peasant proprietary, each man holding ten or twenty acres, might well grow the sugar-cane, leaving to large capitalists the business of the sugar-mill and factory, for which costly machinery is required. This may possibly at last prove the true solution of the economic and social difficulty which more or less embarrasses nearly every plantation colony in tropical regions. In Barbadoes, it is true, the labour question does not present itself as a hindrance to agricultural and commercial prosperity. That island, as big as the Isle of Wight, is more densely peopled than any country in Europe, having a thousand persons for every square mile, in all 176,000. They are obliged to work for hire, as not an acre of spare land is to be found ; all is owned and held for cultivation. Indeed, several thousand labourers now emigrate yearly from Barbadoes to British Guiana. The annual exports reach the value of one million and a quarter ; while the quantity of sugar from Barbadoes is next to that from Trinidad. The coolie immigration system, formerly connected with China, but now chiefly with Madras and 40 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Calcutta, Las been more successfully carried on by Trinidad and British Guiana. These colonies rank highest of the British West Indies in commercial importance; the annual exports of British Guiana amount to three millions sterling, and those of Trinidad to nearly two millions in a favourable year. Besides sugar, Trinidad has taken with good results to the cultivation of cocoa, which is extending also to Grenada and other Windward Islands. Coffee, too, and a variety of fruits are now grown in Trinidad to a considerable extent. Many of the Hindoo labourers in Trinidad as well as in British Guiana, when their term of bound residence in the colony has expired, choose to stay and settle on their own purchased freeholds. They begin to form a valuable part of the permanent colonial population. The Chinese, not having brought their wives across the ocean, go back to China. Thus the island of Trinidad, not half the size of Jamaica and with a quarter of the population, now almost equals it in commercial products. The form of government is similar to that of Jamaica. It has not the same recollections of a dignified English antiquity ; its past history is that of Spanish rule, and many French planters came here, when driven out of Hayti by the negro insurrection, ninety years ago. Much of its land still remains an uncleared forest, but may be expected, in future years, to yield a large increase of wealth, and to support a considerable number of people. In Grenada, where the importation of coolies from TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 41 India has been tried and failed, official complaints were made, in 1878, of the neglect to provide food, lodging, and medicine in sickness for hundreds of poor creatures brought to work on the estates. It appeared on further inquiry that these charges were much exaggerated ; but there had been a sad amount of actual suffering, disease, and mortality ; and there was reason to think some of the managers and overseers were not competent to take care of the foreign labourers. Similar complaints were also made in British Guiana some years ago, and were then investigated by a Special Commission; but it is now believed that the faults in the former treatment of coolies have been completely amended. We are led, however, to agree with the Governor of Jamaica and with Lord Carnarvon, in hoping that the necessity for this cumbrous and costly system, which is always liable to abuses, will one day be superseded by the increasing readiness of the Creole or colonial negro to work for hire, if not by the success of peasant proprietors in cultivating the staples of colonial produce. The average cost of importing and maintaining the coolies, for five or ten years' service, is calculated to be equal to one shilling and sixpence a day for all their w r orking days in that period. One and ninepence is an ordinary day's wages for a common field labourer in Jamaica, so that the colony does not get its coolie labour very much cheaper than negro labour ought to be. But the colony has to pay for it in a manner prejudicial to trade, by a special export duty upon its sugar, rum, and molasses. The West Indies, it is 42 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. to be hoped, will yet find some better expedient to carry on their work of cultivation ; and they will, perhaps, hereafter apply this to some other crops not hitherto grown. The natural resources of British Guiana are vast ; and only a small portion of them has yet been utilised by cultivation. Its territory far exceeds in magnitude the whole of the islands, stretching two hundred miles inland, up the three rivers Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, with their numerous tributary streams. The total number of inhabitants, of many African, Asiatic, European, and native American races, is now considerably above three hundred thousand. The political constitution of British Guiana is very peculiar. The Governor is assisted by a " Court of Policy," which is composed of the five chief officials, and five members nominated by the district electors, or " Kiezers," an old Dutch institution, one for each district. The Kiezers, who hold this privilege for life, nominate two candidates for any vacancy in the Court of Policy, and one of the two is preferred by a vote of the Court itself. The Court of Policy is a Legislative Council, but may not deal alone with finance and taxation ; this department of public business is reserved for the " Combined Court," formed by joining certain finance delegates of the five districts to the Court of Policy. The revenue is about 400,000, and there is but a trilling amount of public debt. It is not requisite for our purpose to dwell much upon the condition of the three administrative groups TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 43 of the Lesser Antilles. Those little islands, mostly of volcanic formation, with all their picturesque beauty and romantic associations of maritime adventure, have seen their most nourishing days pass away. Except Barbadoes, which presents some essential differences, they seem destined to comparative insignificance, both from the colonial and from the commercial point of view. Those which have best maintained, though with dubious result, a sturdy resistance to the process of decay, are the islands originally settled, like Barba- does, by our own countrymen about two centuries ago ; namely, Antigua, St. Kitts, and Nevis in the Leeward group ; Tobago, Grenada, and the old English portion of St. Yincent in the Windward Isles. But the British industrial population has melted away to a mere remnant, while the mass of negroes has not been educated, socially and civilly, in spite of the new schools and chapels, to form a self-supporting people. The upper class, proprietors and planters, who might have preserved and improved colonial society, have too commonly been absentees. The Windward Islands, of which Barbadoes is the chief in political rank and in general importance, include also St. Yincent, Grenada, Tobago, and St. Lucia. Not one of these lesser islands has 40,000 inhabitants, or a revenue of 40,000, and their aggregate exports may be worth half a million sterling. They are ruled by governors with small nominee councils, and hav-Bh^ablic life. To the naturalist, or to the liistorical~~antiquaiy, they may still be interesting, but not to the political statistician. 44 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Some reluctance, on account of local interests or pre- tensions, lias delayed hitherto the proposed regular administrative union of the Windward Islands. The Leeward Islands (those lying to the north- west) comprise Antigua, Mont ser rat, St. Kitts, Nevis, Dominica, and the Virgin Isles. They are associated in a kind of federal union which was revived, after long desuetude, ten years ago. They contain altogether 120,000 inhabitants, and their aggregate value of trade exports is above <600,000. Antigua is the seat of the general government, and has also its local island government ; which is constituted on more liberal principles than those of the other islands, having an elective or representative legislature. Dominica, indeed, has a mixed legislative assembly of seven nominated and seven elected members. Several of these islands have, within the last few years, voluntarily surrendered their separate repre- sentative constitutions. This may be due to the fewness of European residents and to the fact already noticed, that many owners of property are absentees, living in England or elsewhere. There is, however, a general legislative council, which consists of nine delegates from the councils, partly elective, of An- tigua, St. Christopher, and Dominica ; with nine others, four being the head officials, and five nominated by the governor from the different island councils. The Bahamas, about twenty inhabited islands, one of which, New Providence, contains the port and capital town of Nassau, lie near the coast of Florida. They include the first bit of the Western World TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 45 discovered by Columbus in 1492, namely, the Isle of St. Salvador. Their collective population is 44,400, and the value of their exported produce was 142,000 in the best of late years, but they are not sugar- growing islands. The government is controlled by a representative assembly and a legislative council. British Honduras is a rather large piece of the Central American mainland, with 25,000 people, a few hundred of whom are English, and with products approaching the yearly value of 200,000, chiefly mahogany, cedar, and logwood. From the Gulf of Mexico we now pass to the Indian Ocean, alighting upon the island of Mauritius, which stands high in rank among the tropical produce colonies, and highest of all among the British sugar- growing colonies. The aggregate quantity of sugar, reckoned in hundredweights, produced in 1877 by all the British dominions, was nine million hundred- weights. Of these, Mauritius alone supplied 2,725,000 cwt. ; British Guiana, 1,915,891 cwt. ; Trinidad, 917,000 cwt; and Barbadoes, 803,000 cwt. The sugar contributions of other British West Indian plantations, and of Natal, Queensland, and Fiji, are comparatively quite inconsiderable. The uncommercial reader may be tired, we fear, of hearing about sugar ; but the fact is that this article, with its manufacturing and mercantile concomitants, rum and molasses, is the foundation of the whole wealth of nine out of ten British tropical plantation colonies. Mauritius, sometime the Isle of France, has a little history of its own. Discovered by the Portuguese, 46 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. occupied by the Dutch, it was really colonised by the French, and was taken from their dominion, in 1810, by British conquest. This has been the fate of many places in the Eastern seas. Mauritius became ours because, during our long war with France in the early years of this century, it became a point of absolute necessity for us to take possession both of the Cape arid of this small island in the Indian Ocean, as the French cruisers and privateers would otherwise have been enabled to do enormous mischief to our Indian trade. The majority of the European inhabitants of Mauritius are still French. There is, in all, a population of about 360,000, one-third of which is European, and the remainder chiefly of the labouring class from Southern India. The exports amount to between three and four millions sterling, and the imports to nearly two millions and a half, so that this colony fully equals British Guiana in mercantile importance. The government, which has no representative constitution, disposes of a revenue of 750,000 ; it has the rule also of the Seychelles, Rodriguez, and other scattered islets in that region of the ocean. What sugar is to the Mauritius, coffee is, in a great degree, to the much larger and more imposing island of Ceylon, off the southern promontory of India. The coffee exports of Ceylon are to the value of two millions sterling ; but the total of her exports, including cocoa, cocoa-nut and fibre, rice, cinnamon, chinchona, tobacco, ebony, and pearls, with other sundries, amount to five millions, and sometimes more. Ceylon is about the size TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 47 of Scotland, and has a population of two and-a-half millions ; native Cinghalese and Tamils from Southern India form the two millions; then Moors and Malays ; a few Dutch called " Burghers," and British planters, make up ten thousand European residents. The modern history of Ceylon, an oft-repeated tale, is made up of successive Portuguese, Dutch, and British dominion, with the final overthrow of the native King of Kaiidy in the highlands of the interior. But its older renown, before the Arab Mussulman conquest, goes far back, through the middle ages of Venetian mercantile enterprise, to the Roman Empire, to the Greeks, and to the Phoenicians of remote antiquity. The present form of government has an Executive and Legislative Council appointed by the Queen's re- presentative, and voting only upon such measures as lie thinks fit to propose, and is administered by the Government Agents in the seven provinces. ' The revenue is XI, 3 8 2, 000, and the public debt is but one year's revenue. Railways have been constructed from Colombo to Kandy, and in several other directions through the coffee-growing districts. The roads, which do credit to the Public Works Department and to the local municipalities, are kept in repair by a law com- pelling every man to contribute six days' labour in the year, or its equivalent in money, to this service. (The same law exists in Canada). From the diversity of climates and soils, the hill stations in Ceylon being several thousand feet above the sea level, this island is capable of a great variety of culture. Tea has lately been planted with good success. Labour is 40 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. procured by free immigration from the neighbouring Indian mainland. The advantages possessed by Ceylon for tropical agriculture will be sufficiently apparent. We cannot fail to notice also the maritime importance of its situation, Point de Galle being the regular place of call for the mail steamers oil their way to or from India, Australia, or China, although it may soon be superseded by Colombo. In the class of productive colonies, economically though not politically so regarded, we might include the Assam tea plantations and the Bengal indigo- growing districts of British India. These plantations are of great commercial importance. The Indian exports of tea now amounts to fifty million pounds avoirdupois in the season, which exceeds what the whole Chinese export on British account was less than half a century ago. On the shores of the Bay of Bengal there are some districts of British Burmah and of the Malay Pen- insula, which have been applied to growing tropical produce, just as a strip of the South African sea-coast at Natal has been devoted to the same purpose. Natal, however, even with the aid of coolies to supply the place of her Zulu Kaffirs, who refuse to work in sugar plantations, does not send much more sugar to market than one of the small West Indian islands, and may therefore be briefly dismissed. The Straits Settlements, comprising Peiiang and Malacca, with dependent native territories, as well as the great commercial depot of Singapore, are occu- pied, to a small extent, by European planters of TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 49 coffee, sugar, rice, tapioca, pepper, and spices ; but their chief trade is that in the produce of native or Chinese industry. The tin mines of the country furnish a large proportion, in value, of its original exports, not taking into account the very large amount of traffic at Singapore in the commodities brought from all parts of the Eastern Archipelago. The mention of this town leads us away from the plantation colonies to the more properly mer- cantile British establishments, called "factories" in old times, founded for procuring the commodities furnished by foreign hands, or the spontaneous gifts of nature. The chief collecting centre for our East Asiatic commerce is the town and port of Singapore; the trade of Penang and Malacca is of a local character. These three places are united under the rule of one Governor residing at Singapore, who has his Lieut. Governor at Penang, and a Resident Councillor at Malacca. The usual Executive and Legislative Councils assist him in the administration, which is responsible only to the Crown. The revenue is not much below 400,000 a year, though the Straits ports are free from all Customs' duties ; their united imports and exports amount to not less than thirty- two millions sterling yearly. Singapore is a town of a hundred thousand inhabitants, with a harbour always full of shipping. One thousand Europeans, merchants with their families and assistants, manage its great business, while 60,000 Chinese, 20,000 Malays, and many thousand natives of India, do the meaner work of the place. D 50 OUK COLONIAL EMPIRE. There is tlie same division of labour at the other Straits towns ; and pretty much the same at Hong- Kong, off the entrance to the Canton river of China. The little island there belonging to England, with Kowloon, on the other side of a narrow strait, pro- tects a magnificent harbour, which is furnished with wet and dry docks and appliances for the repairing of ships. The aggregate tonnage of British and foreign vessels yearly entering and leaving this port is about two millions, besides that of native vessels to the amount of one million and a half. The European and American inhabitants of Hong-Kong number eight or ten thousand, but its government is managed simply by Crown officials. Although more a " fac- tory " than a colony, it is also an important naval station. In connection with Hong-Kong are the British mercantile communities, or factories, estab- lished at the several treaty ports on the coasts and rivers of the Chinese Empire, such as Canton, Swa- tow, Amoy, Foochow, and Shanghai; and these too cannot be regarded as proper colonies. On the north coast of the large island of Borneo is Labuan, a little islet in British possession, with about five thousand people, chiefly Malays and Chinese, exporting sago flour of its own growth and manufacture, and a variety of raw products, but not to a large amount. Australasia presents more than one suitable field of tropical produce cultivation. The northern coast of Queensland is well adapted for growing sugar, and already contributes, like the coast of Natal, a small TROPICAL PRODUCE COLONIES. 51 amount of the general supply of that article. There is little doubt that on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria, at certain points on the north-west of Australia, near Port Darwin and on the Fitzroy River, this kind of industry could be practised with a fair return. It would be desirable here to make arrangements for the immigration of Indian coolia labour, and for the permanent settlement of the Indians, as a landowning peasantry, to be encouraged to grow sugar on their own account, when they have worked out the term of their indentures. This does not apparently meet the present views of the planter capitalists in any of our colonies. But it may be the system which best secures the general prosperity, not of a class but of the whole population. It appears suitable to every country where sugar is the chief staple, and where labour must be imported from abroad to cultivate a large extent of . territory. This is the case in North Australia, as well as in British Guiana. The recently annexed Fiji Islands, in the West Pacific, are nearly equal in extent, collectively, to the British West Indian Islands, and are similar to these in some qualities of climate, soil, and natural resources, bearing on their productive capability. Their aggre- gate population, however, native and European, is only about as large as that of the Leeward Islands, and their aggregate trade is much less than that of Antigua alone. It is very doubtful whether Polynesian labourers can long supply the needs of the plantations in this region, or in Queensland, 52 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. while Chinese are socially objectionable to the majority of English colonists. We believe, there- fore, that the superabundant population of India will be found, in all such cases, the best source from which labour for tropical produce plantations can be obtained. It remains only to notice, but very briefly, the possessions of Great Britain on the west coast of Africa. These are mercantile stations, not plantations. They are, in a national point of view, certainly the least valuable of all here enumerated. Some of them, among the oldest of colonial settlements, played a part in the history of the extinct West African slave trade. In that trade, it is notorious, the English vied with the Dutch, the French, and Portuguese, or rather outdid them in their worst practices, during more than two centuries ; but, at a later date, we atoned for this by our costly efforts to suppress the slave trade with our naval squadron. The Gambia and Sierra Leone, with their in- significant population and commerce, need not be noticed at length. These two settlements, nearly a thousand miles apart, have been joined together, since 1874, by an administrative union. The situation of the Gold Coast and Lagos, which are now united, by a similar arrangement, under a Governor-in- chief, with his official legislative council, is much better than that of those settlements. There is a very large negro population, half a million or so, under the British rule or protectorate, and there is a flourishing branch of British trade. The exports CANADA. 53 of the Gold Coast, such as palm oil, palm kernels, gold dust, and gum copal, are worth 400,000 a year, and those of Lagos amount to a yet larger sum. The revenues are quite sufficient for the ordinary expenses of government. CHAPTER IV. CANADA. Nearest of our Great Colonies to Home The Atlantic Passage The Intercolonial Railway Vast length of Inland Navigation The Dominion of Canada Province of Ontario Agriculture and Stock-rearing Canals and Railways Government of Ontario Public Schoot^ystem Province of Quebec, or Louver Canada Constitution of the Provincial Government Cities of Quebec and Montreal The Maritime Provinces Nova Scotia Port of Halifax New Brunswick Forests and Fisheries Agricultural Settlement Prince Edward Island Newfoundland The Great West Manitoba City of Winni- peg The Western Lakes and Rivers The North-west Terri- tory The Saskatchewan The Canadian Pacific Railway British Columbia and Vancouver Island The Dominion Government. A SPAN of seventy degrees of longitude will embrace the greatest breadth of North America, with New- foundland and Vancouver Island, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. All this belongs to Great Britain, and its nearest continental shore is separated from her by an ocean passage of less than two thousand miles. The best steamships can run over to Belle Isle Strait from Mo villa, Lough Foyle, in just five summer days. A week by this route brings us tj 54 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Quebec. When the St. Lawrence is blocked with ice, we may land at Halifax, Nova Scotia, and travel by the Intercolonial Railway, making a circuit through New Brunswick to reach Montreal; but if we dis- embark at Portland, in the United States, the land journey is a much shorter distant Canada, therefore, to begin with, is the most accessible, as well as the most extensive, of all the British colonies. Having entered its eastern gates from the Atlantic, we are on the threshold of a continental interior, most remarkable on account of the facilities of inland navigation. The St. Lawrence Gulf and River, the great freshwater seas, Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior, open quite half the width of North America to maritime traffic. By the enlargement now in progress of the Rideau and Welland Canals, the former made to evade the rapids above Montreal, by the Ottawa, and the latter to escape the Falls of Niagara, vessels of fifteen hundred tons can pass from the head of Lake Superior to the ocean that washes our own island shores. Much bigger ships, of course, find a port in the river at the quays and wharves of Montreal, nearly six hundred miles from the sea. But the wonderful system of great waters farther west is yet more worthy of attention. A short way beyond Lake Superior, towards Manitoba, begins the manifold chain of lakes communicating northward with Hudson's Bay, and receiving from the remote western region, from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, those mighty rivers, the Sas- katchewan and its affluents, which fertilise prairies CANADA. 55 to the extent of a million square miles. It is con- fidently expected that a maritime outlet for the traffic of this vast region may be found available at Port Nelson, in Hudson's Bay. Whether or not this scheme be a practicable one, the Saskatchewan and its tributaries, with the Assineboine, and the Red River, and Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, will afford great facilities for collecting the agricultural produce of their immense arable plains. The Canadian Pacific Railway, to be extended within four years to the Rocky Mountains, will furnish the North-western Territory with means of conveyance at all seasons ; and it will ultimately, by opening a line of communication between Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and Canada, shorten by one thousand miles the route of mail and passenger traffic between Europe and Japan or China. The name of Canada, in modern political geography, is now extended to all the countries between the Atlantic and Pacific shores which are included in the Canadian Dominion. But the past history of Canada is confined to Quebec and On- tario, together with Acadia, or Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the islands at the mouth of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The history of these countries begins in the last years of the fifteenth century. In. 1497, the same year when the Portuguese navigator rounded the Cape of Good Hope, the Cabots, father and son, in the little English barque Matthew, belonging to our King Henry VII., sighted the isle of Newfoundland. Thirty years later, Thomas Thorne, of Bristol, landed on the shores of the Gulf of St. 56 CUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Lawrence. Then came, in 1534, the Breton mariner, Jacques Cartier, of St. Malo, who passed up the great Canadian river. At the Indian wigwam villages, Stadacona and Hochelaga, he pointed out the im- portance of the present sites of Quebec and of Montreal. But it was not till 1608 that abiding French settlements were formed. And, during a century and a half of the Ancien Regime, with its exiled feudal seigneurs and their dependent serfs, Canada made little progress. \ Its chief profit was from the fisheries, and from the peltry bought of the Indians ; while the missionaries, Franciscans and Jesuits, went up among those heathen, intent on their religious conversion. The population of Canada was but sixty- five thousand in 1759, when General Wolfe captured Quebec. On the other hand, being founded on prin- ciples of freedom, the English North American colonies had, in the meantime, grown apace. New England Virginia, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsyl- vania, and the Carolinas, were strong enough, with moderate British assistance, to shut out France from the West. Then England, inspired by Lord Chatham, made another effort and deprived France of the North. All that vast continent, within temperate latitudes, had in 1763 been won to British citizenship. The result of this we now see, both in Canada and in the United States. Canada had thus got the start of our colonies in . the Southern Hemisphere. Her nearness to England y was another great relative advantage. Her social \/ development, again, was never checked, like the CANADA. 57 beginnings of Australia, by the depressing conditions of a penal settlement. Nor had she to struggle, in her economic development, with a squatters' land monopoly ; while her native troubles were never so formidable as the conflicts with Maories and Kaffirs. Constitutional liberties began to be introduced in 1791, and ripened slowly but steadily, on the whole, in the separate provinces of British America. The brief revolt of 1837, provoked by the arbitrary de- meanour of our Government, was happily followed, in 18-40, by the union of Upper and Lower Canada, with ajDaiiiament and ...responsible admiiiis. traiJiHi lu __These liberal measures of Lord Durham and Lord Sydenham proved successful in reconciling a very large French majority of Canadians to an energetic and determined minority of British settlers. In that historical experience, we find some encouragement for the hope of a completely satisfactory adjustment of South African affairs. A free and sincere exercise of popular self-government, equally maintained in the several parts of an extensive territory occupied by diverse European nationalities, whether they be English and French, or English and Dutch, is the best preparation for their harmonious political union. This process has already resulted in the great North American provincial Confederation, established in 1867, which is styled the Canadian Dominion. It comprises the two elder Canadas, Lower and Upper, now termed the provinces of Quebec and Ontario ; Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, on the Atlantic coast; Manitoba (the old Red 58 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. River settlement) with Keewatin, and the vast North-west Territory, on the Saskatchewan, and the shores of Hudson's Bay ; and British Columbia, with Vancouver Island, on the side of the Pacific Ocean. Newfoundland has not yet joined the Confederation. We will now enter upon a more particular notice of the social, economic, and administrative conditions of different provinces, Ontario and Quebec being first discussed ; after which the general scheme of the Dominion Government will engage our attention. Ontario is entitled to our first consideration, because, though not the oldest province, yet it has the largest amount of population and of wealth hitherto realised, and the most complete social organisation. This province, moreover, is of purely British origin. The early settlers, a hundred years ago, were English loyalists from the revolted colonies of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, who declined to accept the republican Revolution. Their descendants preserve to this day the warmest attachment to the old country ; a sentiment which is, of course, not lessened by the addition of an energetic Scottish element to the population. Upper Canada, through several generations, has manifested the characteristic British habits of thought and feeling and behaviour, in all its public life. Ontario is about as large as the United Kingdom, and has nearly two million inhabitants. As this province includes all the Canadian shores of the great lakes, the better part of its territory is bounded by water. This has a favourable influence on the CANADA. 59 climate, and the province extends considerably to the south towards Lake Erie. The mean temperature throughout the year is but four degrees below that of the British Islands ; although the mean of winter is seventeen lower, and that of summer is seven degrees higher than our own average during those seasons. Such heat is favourable for the ripening of grain and fruit, in which Ontario is surpassed by few countries in the temperate zone. Agriculture, with the breeding of stock and dairy management, and with the cultivation of orchards and market-gardens, can here be practised in perfection. The exports of such produce are large and increasing ; that of fat cattle and dead meat for consumption in England seems likely to be of the greatest importance. Public works, executed by the Ontario provincial government, have rendered more available the natural resources of this country. Besides the Rideau and Welland ship canals, which have been constructed and enlarged by the Province, Ontario has been furnished with four thousand miles of railroad, giving access to every district in the province. These lines, indeed, were made chiefly by joint stock companies, but with public aid to the amount of one-sixth of their cost, granted by the provincial legislature, and of one-third by the local nmnicipalities. The administration of public affairs in Ontario seems to promise a secure continuance of this sub- stantial prosperity. There is a Lieutenant-Governor of the Province, appointed by the Governor-General of Canada. The Provincial Assembly, which consists 60 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. of eighty-eight members, elected in every fourth year, is the sole legislative body. There is no Upper House ; but there is an Executive or Ministerial Council of six members, who are responsible to the Assembly. The administration is therefore one of effective provincial self-government. It may appear at first sight remarkable that this Province, which is not the most democratic in its political sentiments, should be without an Upper Chamber for its Legislature. But the effect has rather been to impress a stronger sense of responsibility upon the members of the Assembly, who have mostly been trained to deliberations of public business by the management of local affairs. The Province is divided into nearly fifty counties, each of which has its elected Council. Every township or village of seven hundred and fifty inhabitants may claim municipal incorporation in the primary degree. When the village has got two thousand inhabitants, it becomes a town, with higher franchises and powers of self- government ; and the town, when it contains fifteen thousand people, takes rank as a city. The property qualification for municipal offices is higher in the three successive grades of township, borough town, and city. But the elective franchise belongs to all householders, all owners of freehold property, and all persons having a regular and permanent income from trade or employment. In the rural districts it is extended to the adult sons of farmers living with their parents. Ontario has frankly adopted those features of the American institutions, the land laws and the common CANADA. 61 school system, which have appeared suitable to the wants of a newly-settled country. The provision made for popular education is highly commend- able. There are five thousand public schools, attended by half a million children, out of the population of two millions. They have seven thousand teachers, of regularly examined and certified proficiency. These common schools, which are entirely non-sectarian, are maintained at a public yearly cost of three million dollars above 600,000. The instruction is given free of charge to the parents. There are, besides, nearly a hundred superior schools, like the grammar-schools of England, at which Latin and Greek, the modern languages, mathematics, and some of the natural sciences are taught. A good supply of trained teachers for the elementary schools is en- sured by the Normal Schools of the Province. The Ontario contributions, in 1877, to the educational department of the Great Exhibition at Philadelphia, won the highest approbation. The University of Toronto, with the several Colleges existing there and in the towns of Hamilton and London, has gained a fair reputation for scholarship. The Province of Quebec includes both the banks of the river St. Lawrence and the shores of the gulf, and extends from south-west to north-east for eight or nine hundred miles, with a mean breadth of three hundred. It is divided from Ontario by the river Ottawa, upon which stands the city of that name, the political capital of the whole Canadian Dominion. On the left bank of the St. Lawrence 62 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. and on the sliore of its noble estuary, the large towns and commercial ports of Montreal and Quebec, with the long-settled French districts of Ottawa, St. Maurice, and Saguenay, exhibit the results of the older colonisation. They carry on an immense trade in the forest timber and other products of that region. On the right bank of the estuary, which terminates at Cape Gaspe, and with Chaleur Bay creates a penin- sula of the marine coast, adjoining New Brunswick, are the eastern townships, presenting a beautiful and inviting tract of country, which like Ontario was settled by English loyalists at the American Revolu- tion. Those districts are now traversed by the Inter- colonial Railway, which forms its junction with the Grand Trunk at Riviere du Loup, opposite Quebec. They appear well suited, in all respects, to be chosen as a home for English middle-class emigrant families having the means and skill to engage in rural in- dustry, and unwilling to be, as in the western plains, too much separated by vast distance from their native land. The total population of the Quebec Province, which was nearly 1,200, 000 in 1871, has increased to 1,358,000 in the last ten years. The French, who count for one million, are as loyal as any other subjects of the Dominion of Canada, Sir George Cartier, a descendant of the ancient French discoverer, is said to have once replied to Queen Victoria when she asked him, "What is a French Canadian'?" "Your Majesty, he is a Canadian Englishman who speaks French." The ancestors of these people were CANADA. 63 chiefly the Bretons and Normans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who retained in that age much of their original race-character, having more affinity than other Frenchmen with the people of our southern and western shores. They have never, in Lower Canada, shown any inclination to re-unite with modern France. Their sentiments and habits ^ are decidedly conservative ; and it is but thirty years since many antique feudal privileges were abolished by the government of Lord Elgin. The Roman , Catholic religion prevails, of course, in this section of Canada, and the Irish immigrants, at Quebec and Montreal, are more numerous than the English or Scotch. The constitution of the Quebec Provincial Govern- ment is not altogether similar to that of Ontario. The Province, like every other in the Canadian Dominion, has its Lieutenant-Governor, appointed *- by the Dominion Government, in accordance with the Constitution of 1867. It may be questioned whether this is a wise provision ; at any rate, in Quebec, three or four years ago, its working in a ministerial crisis was attended with an injurious strain of the relations subsisting between the Legis- lative and the Executive authority. The appointment of Provincial Lieutenant-Governors, though nominally vested in the Governor-General, as representative of the Crown, is really disposed of by the Dominion Ministry, that is to say, by the chiefs of the party which happens to have got a majority in the Dominion Parliament at Ottawa. The Lieutenant-Governors 64 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. are likely, therefore, to be already known as political partisans; and this would seem rather to unfi t them, upon some occasions, for impartially presiding over Provincial Governments which have minor Parliaments of their own. They have to deal with Ministers of the Provinces who are properly responsible to the local Parliaments. It may too easily happen, as it did recently in Quebec, that the Provincial parlia- mentary majority, and the Provincial Ministry which it maintains, would be found to be opponents politically of the prevailing Dominion party, with which the Lieutenant-Governor is connected. The Legislative Council of Quebec Province con- sists of twenty-four members holding office for life, appointed by the Lieutenant-Governor, one for each of the twenty -four electoral divisions of the province. education, has ever been so munificent in proportion to the numbers of its people. They cannot fail to be the better for it, and to show the fruits of it, some day, in an improved social and political condition. In the last place, we may still look hopefully for- ward, for there can be no doubt that the federal union of the Australian colonies is only a question of time and convenient opportunity. It must be left, however, to their own spontaneous action. The absence of foreign or native foes to endanger their safety makes it unnecessary for the Imperial Govern- ment to urge confederation upon them, as was pre- maturely done in South Africa a few years ago. Their motives to adopt this course will only be such objects of domestic convenience as the uniformity of tariffs and abolition of inter-colonial customs' frontiers, the more economical conveyance of the ocean mails, the assimilation of laws, and of civil and criminal jurisdiction. These are matters for which the several existing legislatures now have to provide as best they can, but their leading statesmen have already come to see the need of some degree or mode of union. The question was discussed by them, early in the present AUSTRALIA. 103 year, at a preliminary conference, which agreed to establish an Australasian Court of Appeal, to render the execution of legal warrants valid throughout all this group of colonies, and to adopt combined measures for restricting Chinese immigration, and for checking outrages in the Polynesian Archipelago. New Zealand joined with Australia in these resolutions for the common benefit. The creation of a Federal Council was approved by the delegates of New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania, but Victoria and Queensland, as well as New Zealand, were unprepared to consent to formal union. The protectionist com- mercial policy of Victoria, as above noticed, is the chief obstacle in the way of inter-colonial free trade, which has already been agreed to between the Sydney and Adelaide Governments. These remarks upon the different conditions and prospects of the four principal colonies of Australia will show that much remains to be settled and harmonised before they are likely to unite in a grand confederation, similar to that of the Canadian Do- minion. It is a consummation that may be expected to arrive when the questions of the land laws, the tariffs, the rivalry between pastoral and agricultural settlers, of free trade or protection for colonial in- dustries, the demand for imported alien labourers to cultivate the northern tropical produce, and the prodigious schemes of railway extension to open up the interior plains, shall have been settled for the best by practical experience. All this may possibly be accomplished in the ,next twenty years. There 104 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. will be, 110 doubt, a very noble and fortunate Dominion of Australia, with continued safety from external attack, and with improved domestic legis- lation, when the nineteenth century, which beheld almost the first beginning of a colony in that region, shall have completed its full tale of fruitful years. CHAPTER VI. NEW ZEALAND. The Two Islands Physical Geography The Maories Colonial History The New Zealand Company The Otago and Canter- bury Settlements Provincial Governments Federal Constitu- tion of 1852 -General Government since 1876 Parliamentary Constitution Public Works Assisted Immigration Public Debt Debts of Provincial Governments Revenue and Finan- cial Prospects - Industrial Resources Principal Cities Com- mercial Statistics Land Sales Land Leases Religion and Education General Progress Australian and New Zealand Wool Supplies Real Benefits of Colonisation. NEARLY twelve thousand miles south-west from Great Britain, if we take the shortest line across the Isthmus of Panama, but fifteen thousand miles by the south- eastern voyage round the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, there are two large islands, with a little one at the southern end of the group. They are the nearest land to that portion of the ocean which is our exact Antipodes; and they lie in the midst of wider spaces of water (being more than a thousand miles from the east coast of Australia) than any other NEW ZEALAND. 105 country of their size. This might have been a pretty good reason for giving them the English name of New Sea Land, as being new land with a great deal of sea about it, if Captain Cook, in 1769, or any other Englishman, had been their first discoverer ; but as a matter of fact, they were found in 1G43, by the Dutch mariner Tasman, who had called them "New Zealand," mindful of his own home in Europe, as he was when he gave the name of " New Holland " to the huge Austra- lian island. It was a queerly incongruous geographical association ; for no two countries of the whole round earth are more unlike each other than those alluvial flats of the Scheldt and these mountainous isles of the West Pacific. They are anything but Dutch in physical aspect, with their volcanic peaks and boiling springs, their lofty Alpine ranges, garnished with perpetual snows and glaciers, the deep fjords and inlets of the rugged south-western coast, the high- land lakes and streams, dense forests, and wilderness of bush and fern. Nor is there more exactness in the favourite com- parison of New Zealand with the British Islands. The only analogous condition of its physical geography is that it consists of two islands, which, jointly, are about equal in size to Great Britain and Ireland. But the analogy is lost when we observe that those two principal islands of New Zealand, the North and the South (the latter was at one time called the Middle Island) are not, as Great Britain and Ire- land are, two islands of very unequal size. Each of them is five hundred miles long; the greatest 106 OUK COLONIAL KMP1KK. breadth of one is two hundred, and that of the other two hundred and fifty ; but the northern peninsula runs into more than one very narrow isthmus. The one island is as big as England alone ; the other is as big as England and Wales. The extreme remoteness of New Zealand from any continent is a circumstance, perhaps, in itself unfavourable to commercial advance- ment, and which seems, also, to make its external position different from that of our own country. Australia will never, we suppose, become the new Europe of the southern hemisphere \ but New Zealand could hardly, even in that case, be just the same to Australia that England has been to Europe. In the composition of the soil, and surface aspects of the land, we observe as great a diversity. New Zealand has no extensive tracts of country resembling our Midland shires and Eastern Counties, with their long, slow, winding rivers, such as the Trent or the Ouse. It has no wide levels or fen-lands. Scarcely anywhere is there an excess of moisture in the ground, except during local floods, or on the west coast of the South Island. The compact mass of mountains that occupies much of its breadth, without any break in the barrier, leaves but a long strip of terraced plains on the eastward Canterbury shore, excluded from the rainy western wind, and intersected by short, straight, changeful streams filled by the melting snows above. To the south, in Otago, and likewise in the northern parts, Nelson and Marlborough, these broad- based mountains branch off, or split open, making straths, or wide valleys, and basins for lakes or NEW ZEALAND. 107 rivers, as in other sub-alpine regions. The scenery here is more like that of the Western Highlands of Scotland. In. the North Island, on the contrary, volcanic forces have moulded a great portion of the land into something like Calabria or Sicily, but with very singular features, as in the deep central Lake Taupo, the large river Waikato, flowing out of it, and the subterranean hot springs of Rotomahana. New Zealand altogether, lying across fourteen degrees of latitude, stretching from north to south-west a thou- sand miles, and presenting, from those bold elevations of its surface, great differences of exposure to prevail- ing winds, displays a remarkable diversity of climate. Hardly any one country on earth is so variously warmed, watered, and aired. At one end, its tem- perature is like that of Madeira or the Azores ; at the other, it is like that of the Hebrides ; but the mean condition of climate resembles that of Southern Europe around the Mediterranean. There is a great deal of fertile land suitable for agriculture, but not, as in Australia, an unlimited width of natural pasture. There is plenty of mineral wealth gold, copper, lead, and silver, though only the gold has yet been worked to a very considerable amount ; there is much iron of various qualities, and a useful kind of coal. But we do not see, on the whole, that New Zealand is a " Britain of the South," though it is a congenial, very salubrious, productive and remunerative, and wholly satisfactory field of British colonisation. The Maories, who are the native Polynesian race, probably came from Hawaii or the Sandwich Isles, in 108 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. wild canoe wanderings about the Pacific Ocean, in some pre-historic mythical ages, several generations ago. They have little apparent chance of perpetuating their distinct national existence. It is not from the effects of destitution, or of any oppressive treatment by the European settlers, but from some obscure phy- siological cause of declining fecundity, that this race seems doomed to become extinct. They have dwindled to between forty and forty-five thousand, which is much less than a tenth part of the present European population of New Zealand. A considerable part of the Maori tribes have accepted European habits of life, and enjoy their share of social advantages as freely as the coloured races in the West Indies or in Ceylon. There still remains, in certain districts of the North Island, a wild and barbarous remnant of the Maori nation ; but it is hoped that the Maori wars, which in times past have cost six millions sterling, are finally closed. The position of this native race with regard to the colonists is not likely henceforth to be an im- pediment to colonial progress. The colonial history of forty years is full of inci- dents and variations of political experience. After some whaling and trading ports, and missionary stations, had long existed upon these remote shores, the first regular and permanent settlements were founded between 1839 and 1841. They were origi- nated by the New Zealand Association, also styled the New Zealand Company, in which a party of public- spirited promoters took up Mr. Wakefield's plan of systematic colonisation. It was a scheme of strictly NEW ZEALAND. 109 regulated land sales, and of duly proportioned class emigration, with a specific arrangement for the intro- duction and distribution of labour. Wellington and Nelson, on the opposite shores of Cook's Strait, which divides the North from the South Island, were thus founded in 1840, as well as Taranaki, or New Plymouth, on the western coast. But the New Zealand Company's agents had committed some in- discretions in their pretended land purchases from the native tribes, which led to so much ruinous dispute, little mended by the official action of the British Government, that they had to give up the whole undertaking. The South Australian enterprise of the Wakefield school, as had been predicted in 1834, when it was first started, also came to an abortive issue from the faults inherent in such an artificial system of regulating social economy. But the indi- viduals who had been engaged in these political experiments were men of considerable talent. They or their associates in New Zealand, when the New Zealand Company was obliged by financial failure to surrender its charter, still persevered in the work of colonial settlement. The Imperial Government, with not much goodwill, found itself compelled by circumstances to take charge of the North Island as a British colony. Captain Hobson, the first governor, founded Auckland in 1840, making a treaty with the natives, and relying on the support of the missionaries, to preclude the Company at Wellington from becoming actual rulers of the whole country. A few months later, he had to send one of the Queen's ships, with 110 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. all speed, to hoist the British flag in the South Island, and so just saved it, by a few hours, from being finally formally annexed to the French dominions. The British sovereignty having thus been established in New Zealand, rather with hesitation and reluctance, forty years ago, it was some time before much progress was made in colonisation. The economic ideas of Mr. "Wakefield, however, allied in other minds with a certain ambition to create new special models of Christian civilised society, pledged to the religious faith and culture of the Scottish and of the English Church, prompted fresh settlements on the east coast of the South Island. These were Otago, with Dunedin for its capital, founded in 1848 ; and Canterbury, of which Lyttelton is the port, and Christchurch is the city, founded two years later. It need scarcely be said that both those fine provinces, which have in some features of social progress greatly excelled all the rest of New Zealand, were soon obliged to forego their exclusive or preferential religious basis of settlement. Nor could they entirely put in execution the Wakefield scheme of financial and agrarian administration. The Otago and Canterbury Associations were in fact re- duced, like the original New Zealand Company, to give up their corporate privileges, because they could not repay the pecuniary advances granted by the Queen's Government. Every such benevolent effort to construct a model colony upon theoretical or senti- mental principles of organisation for philanthropic ends seems destined to turn out rather differently from the design of its authors; but something else NEW ZEALAND. Ill that is for the general good will probably arise from it. Good intentions, zealously and diligently pursued, are seldom wholly thrown away. There were, in this manner, brought into existence thirty years ago, all round the coasts of the two large islands, half a dozen quite distinct colonial settlements, founded by different agencies, and situated hundreds of miles apart from each other. It was a repro- duction, in miniature, of the historical state of English American colonisation towards the end of the seven- teenth century, when the Old Dominion of Virginia, the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts and Con- necticut, those of the Quakers in Pennsylvania, those established by royal grants in New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland, and by speculative associations in Carolina, were scattered along the Atlantic coast. The early conditions of New Zealand, within contem- porary remembrance, were very much less promising, the settlements appeared much weaker, and their prospects more uncertain, than we must suppose those of New England to have been under the Stuart reigns. The voyage from England was then to be accomplished in not less than 100 to 120 days, by sail- ing vessels of a class not to be compared with modern clippers, and at the cost of much personal discomfort. To go to New Zealand was to become an exile for life, with some risk of losing one's -life at sea. To send a letter there and get an answer was the business of nearly a twelvemonth. The dread of cannibalism, too, had a serious effect upon the popular mind in England against emigration to that most distant colony. And 112 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. then, when one got settled with Christian folk upon its shores, it was to dwell in an isolated hamlet, on a lonely sea-coast, with impenetrable bush or pathless moors behind. Before any railways, or even roads, were made across the country, the only means of passing from one place to another was by a wretched coaster on a dangerous sea. There could then be very little direct intercourse between the six provinces, as they were styled. Under these circumstances, while Auckland and Wellington, and New Plymouth, to which Hawke's Bay or Napier was added, in the North Island, and Canterbury, and Nelson, and Otago, with the gold-field territory of Westland, in the South, maintained their separate existence, there could be no social or political union. New Zealand was, as Prince Mettermch once said of Italy, and as George III. or his Ministers might perhaps have said of America, a mere "geographical expression." Provincial self-government, therefore, in which Canterbury and Otago, for their part, achieved a splendid success, while the other provinces made but a poor figure, was continued of necessity from 1852 until 1875. It was not till 1865 that the General Government was removed from Auckland to the more central situation it now occupies at Wellington. It could not properly, in those days, have dealt with many administrative affairs of the provinces, the management of the public lands, and of the funds accruing from their sale, the execution of public works, more especially railway construction, the con- duct of assisted immigration, and the maintenance of NEW ZEALAND. 113 common schools. These and other matters, including the collection of the Customs' revenue, and the annual contribution of a proportionate share to the finances of the General Government, were by the constitution granted in 1852 entrusted to the Provincial Councils and Superintendents, both elected by the inhabitants of the Province. The South Island took the lead. Canterbury had a Provincial Council of forty members, and the Superin- tendent was assisted by Secretaries of Departments, who formed a Provincial Ministry, responsible to the Council. The separate revenue of Canterbury Pro- vince in 1873 was 650,000, the population being then 53,000. The Provincial Government had already made railways from Port Lyttelton to Christchurch and along the Plain, cutting a tunnel 2,838 yards in length through hard volcanic rock. It had also made roads and bridges, the care of which it had consigned to thirty-eight district road boards. It had established a College, and a liberal system of popular education, with grants in aid of local rates. The Provincial Council of Otago, with resources not inferior to Canterbury, had shown an equal degree of public spirit in the working of its own institutions. While subsidising local efforts for the construction of roads and maintenance of schools, it undertook railway and harbour works, founded the University at Dune- din, the High Schools, and other establishments directed by the Education Board. Dunedin, with a large accession of experienced and business-like colo- nists from Melbourne, who came after the discovery of H 114 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. the Otago gold-fields, soon became the most active commercial port and the largest city of New Zea- land. Both Otago and Canterbury made their own arrangements for the conveyance of emigrants from Great Britain, applying some part of their land revenue, on the Wakefield principle, to assist the passages of the labouring classes. The North Island Provinces were for some years hindered from emulating this example, chiefly by the prejudicial effect of the Maori wars, which at that time seemed to deter many settlers from coming there, or which at least prevented the sale and safe occu- pation of public lands. While Canterbury and Otago were in a flourishing financial condition, Auckland and Wellington had to wait for more peaceful times ; nor did these provinces enjoy the advantage, as the South Island did, of possessing large territorial estates free from native claims. New Plymouth has not yet recovered the severe check that was inflicted upon her by the Maori war of 1863. But the finest tract offer- tile soil in all New Zealand lies between New Plymouth and Wanganui, a district which is now about to be opened by railways from Wellington, and with the fairest promise of agricultural prosperity. The North Island appears likely to prove as rich, in all that nature can bestow upon human industry, as any of our Southern colonies. Ten years ago, the only energy displayed was in the Auckland gold-fields ; and the debts of the Provincial Governments caused some demur, on the part of the South, to a closer political union. NEW ZEALAND. 115 It should be remembered that, by the Act of 1852, which prescribes the form of the late New Zealand Constitution, the six provinces, afterwards joined by Hawke's Bay, Maiiborough, and Westland, were linked together in a Federation, which was somewhat analogous to the present Dominion of Canada. There was a Governor for the whole of New Zealand, with an Executive Council of Ministers responsible to Parliament ; a Legislative Council of forty members nominated for life by the Governor ; and a House of Representatives of above seventy members elected by the people. These constituted the New Zealand Parliament, which was called "the General Assembly," and which had full legislative powers with regard to such general concerns as the Customs' tariffs, the post- office, the code of statute laws, the judicial administra- tion in criminal and civil courts, and the general regulations for the sale of Crown lands. But each Province, under its elected Superintendents, enjoyed, as before explained, ample powers, nearly as great as those of the several Canadian Provinces, in the management of their own affairs. Only six years ago, however, the time came for a total change of the Federal Constitution of 1852. It has been completely superseded by the abolition of the nine Provincial Governments and the creation of one centralised New Zealand Government; though considerable powers in local administration are still loft to County Boards and to the District Road Boards, as well as to the municipalities of towns or cities. In. each Province, the Councils and all the 116 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Provincial Government machinery have ceased to exist. This great internal revolution was effected by the quiet agency of orderly political discussion throughout the whole country. The resolutions ot the General Assembly at Wellington, in 1874, passed upon the recommendation of the Ministry then in office, were followed by an Act of the session of 1875, subsequently approved by the Crown, which has given to the colonial polity its definitive and permanent constitution. All settled residents in the colony possess the fran- chise as electors of the House of Representatives. The Legislative Council, of forty-five members, two of them Maories, is nominated for life by the Governor. The Representative House consists of eighty-eight members, including four Maories elected apart by their own race. The General Assembly gets through its parliamentary work fairly well. Ministers have been enabled to pursue a bold and enterprising policy, which has indeed entailed heavy financial burdens, but has rapidly augmented the population. They have executed, perhaps too quickly and too expensively, many useful public works. We may just notice the opening for traffic of more than twelve hundred miles of railway, at a cost exceeding nine millions sterling, the construction of three thousand miles of common roads, and of three or four thousand miles of telegraph. All this work has been executed by the New Zealand Government in a period of ten } r ears ; and it has also, meanwhile, erected many bridges and several coast lighthouses, has furnished the gold-fields NEW ZEALAND. 117 with a system of artificial water-supply, and has purchased extensive lands from the natives for agricultural occupation. It has, at the same time, expended nearly two millions of money in giving free or assisted passages to British emigrants of the industrial class, to the number of a hundred thousand ; but this system, with a few exceptions, has now been discontinued. These appear con- siderable achievements to have been performed in a period of eleven years by the government of a colony, whose entire population was but equal to that of an ordinary English shire, or of one of our provincial towns 1 On the other hand, it must be confessed that New Zealand has to bear a great load of public debt, now exceeding twenty-seven millions, and that she has been, for so young a colony, rather heavily taxed. The annual charge for the debt is one million and a half. But a large share of the burdens at present laid upon her General Government was previously incurred by some of the provinces whose adminis- tration it has lately absorbed. The provincial debt then taken over amounted to 3,500,000. There was much indirect loss, as we have said, in con- sequence of the Maori wars, and the colony had to defray part of the cost of those military opera- tions. These circumstances will help to account for the unfortunate financial position of New Zealand, compared with Victoria or New South VVales. But the expenditure of late years has been of a remunerative and reproductive character. A reduction of 334,000 is announced for the current 118 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. year. An era of peaceful economic progress has already set in. It has gone far enough to assure us that the future prosperity of New Zealand rests upon a stable foundation. And we believe that her debt, though large at present, will, if not allowed to increase, soon become a light burden for her quickly growing strength. The revenue for the year ending March, 1881, was 3,423,000, of which the land sales contributed 300,000 ; but not less than two-fifths of this revenue is derived from the earnings of the railways, the post- offices, and the telegraphs, constructed and worked by Government. The railways already pay from their traffic receipts, after the deduction of working ex- penses, three and a half per cent, upon their whole cost. A reduction of the property tax by one half, and a remission of Customs' duties, were among the measures of last session. The comparison of this colony with the leading Australian provinces, described in our last chapter, will afford an interesting study. New Zealand has but a limited extent of natural sheep pasture, and this is confined to the South Island. The soil and climate, however, being especially favourable to the cultivation of the more nutritious English grasses and root-crops, the Canterbury graziers, flock and stock owners, can manage their business with fewer risks of loss and better average profit. Sheep grow much bigger and fatter, and bear a much heavier fleece, though not of such fine wool as in Queensland or New South Wales. The production of this commodity, Avhich now approaches the annual value NEW ZEALAND. 119 of four millions sterling, has been much more than doubled in the last twelve years. Wool-growing, too, has here a character of permanence, from the facility with which pasturage is reproduced, which may possibly be missed in the vast back countries of Australia, deficient of water and of trees. New Zealand is well adapted for agriculture, and chiefly for the cultivation of grain, combined as in Great Britain with alternate crops and with the feeding of live stock. The export of corn last year was worth half a million sterling. The average yield of wheat is twenty-five bushels to the acre, without the aid of manure. No country in the southern hemi- sphere is more suitable for regular and systematic farming. The report of Messrs. S. Grant and J. S. Foster, delegates from the tenant-farmers of Lincoln- shire, Yorkshire, and Norfolk, who examined the agri- cultural prospects of New Zealand in 1880, has recently been published. Their testimony, which must be of high authority among practical men, is discriminating, but is on the whole highly encouraging. We have to notice, on the other hand, some rather bitter com- plaints, recently uttered at Timaru, in South Canter- bury, as to the difficulty of procuring small freeholds. It appears that very large tracts of land, in some instances more than a hundred thousand acres to one person, were early granted to the squatters as sheep- runs, under depasturing licenses; and the squatters, taking advantage of their position as first occupiers of the country, have in many cases purchased, like those of New South Wales, nearly all the land that was 120 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. naturally fit for agricultural purposes. There is no room left for the small farmer, we are told, or for the working man who has saved a few hundred pounds of his wages, and who seeks to own and cultivate a small piece of land. This uninviting prospect, so far as the South Island is concerned, is said to have defeated, in a great measure, the attempt to bring a large number of industrial settlers to that country ; since Canada and the United States of America, on the other hand, freely offer them allotments of 160 acres of fertile soil upon the easiest possible terms. The New Zealand Government is further charged with having neglected a grand opportunity, in its arrange- ments for railway construction, of selling the land adjacent to the railway lines, or alternate sections of this land, as in America, to residential and agricul- tural settlers. There is, probably, much ground for these censures of the policy that has been hitherto pursued ; but it seems that they do not apply to the North Island, unless it be to some extent in the Hawke's Bay or Napier district. In Auckland, blocks of land, though not in the best situations, are, from time to time, laid out for occupation on the home- stead system, by which a family of four persons may secure a farm of 200 acres, upon condition of residence and gradual cultivation during five years, free of all money payment. Several of the most promising tracts of land in Auckland, and in the fertile region between Wellington and Taranaki, have been acquired, how- ever, by corporate associations, or by individual promoters of special settlements, expressly for sub- NEW ZEALAND. 121 division and sale, with deferred payments, to agricul- tural occupiers of limited means. It is to be expected that some of the great landowners in. Canterbury and Nelson will ultimately find it to their interest, as some in Otago have done, to dispose of much of their territorial property to the farmers, of course, at an advanced price ; so that the evil recently complained of may, in time, find its own remedy. The system of dealing with lands disposed of by the Government has not been rendered entirely uniform by the Act passed in 1877. The whole colony is now divided into ten Land Districts, each with its own Lands Commissioners. They put up the surveyed lands to public auction in three different classes, namely, town, suburban, and rural lands, the minimum upset prices being 30 an acre for town lands, 3 for suburban, and 1 for rural lands, except in Canterbury, where the lowest price has always been 2. Lands which remain unsold may remain open for selection, at the upset price, payment to be made in deferred in- stalments extending over ten years. There are, besides the lands for sale, pasture runs, to the amount of thir- teen or fourteen million acres, leased to squatters, as in Australia, which yield a rent of only 113,000. The most important differences still existing between some of the Land Districts are those with regard to the reser- vation of such pasture lease runs from liability to be put up for sale, and with regard to the squatter's rights of pre-emption and selection of any pieces he chooses to buy. A law for the simple registration and the easy and 122 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. secure transfer of private property in land, with a Government guarantee of title, has been made in imitation of that of South Australia. It has every- where had the effect of promoting this kind of in- vestment for moderate savings, and in elevating the ideas and habits of the people. We are told that it is quite common to take a deposit of c 50 from the bank and to buy a piece of land with it. Government Life Assurance, which was commenced in 1870, is another good institution. In the course of nine years, nearly thirteen thousand policies had been issued, for an aggregate sum assured of four and a half millions sterling, besides which many annuities had been granted. Post-office savings' banks have been used to a remarkable extent, without destroying the business of the private savings' banks. It is now proposed to offer an easy and popular investment with Government security, for sums of <10 and upwards, by creating a new Government stock to the amount of 250,000, in bonds with five per cent, interest, to be held and paid within the colony. One very peculiar and commendable official institution of New Zealand is the Public Trustee, who will, upon request, undertake the duties of executor of a private testator; he is also the administrator of all intestate estates, and may become trustee of a marriage settlement, or guardian of orpnans, or of a lunatic, by appoint- ment of the Supreme Court. The property thus held in trust cannot be dealt with in any way but with the consent of Government, which is responsible for its security. It scarcely need be observed that, NEW ZEALAND. 123 in a new and busy colony, most of the banks do a very profitable business, and the ordinary rate of interest is much higher than in Great Britain. AVith regard to the higher interests of life, although no Established Church exists in New Zealand, or in any other British colony, religious worship is liberally provided for, on the voluntary principle, by Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, Wesleyans, and other com- munions. About one-eighth of the population are Eomaii Catholics, the number of Irish being 43,000. A majority of the Maories, in or around the settled districts, are reckoned as Christians, and many of them are well instructed. There are 4,500 Chinese at the gold-fields. The education of the people, to which something like .400,000 of public revenues is yearly devoted, has in New Zealand, as in Victoria, been an object of zealous endeavour. More than eight hundred free schools, attended by sixty or seventy thousand children, furnish elementary secular instruction, and there are nearly three hundred private schools. The law obliges every child to be taught in a school of one kind or another. At Christchurch and Dune- din there have long been superior High Schools and Colleges, established and permanently endowed by the Provincial Governments ; and those of Auckland, Wellington, and other chief towns, are not less efficiently conducted. The New Zealand University, to which are affiliated the University of Otago, at Dunedin, the College of Canterbury, at Christchurch, and other colleges, has an academical authority recog- 124 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. nised in Great Britain, and the power of granting degrees. Museums, and special professorships of the natural sciences, have made valuable contributions to the study of New Zealand geology and mineralogy, botany and zoology. The names of Dr. James Hector, Director of the Geological Survey of New Zealand, and Dr. Julius von Haast, Director of the Canterbury Museum, are well known in the scientific world. A practical College of Agriculture, with a large model farm, has recently been established at Lincoln, seven miles from Christchurch, in connection with the Canterbury College. The latest statistics of New Zealand trade are significant, apparently, both of economic and of moral improvement. The whole population, by the census of March, 1881, was 489,561, exclusive of the Maories, whereas in 1871 it stood at 256,300, showing an increase of 90 per cent, in ten years. The aggregate exports of the year 1880 amounted to the value of 6,352,692, which was an increase of 609,566 over the preceding year. But the imports for last year were to the amount of 6,162,000, leaving a balance in favour of the colony. And we are officially told that the decrease of imports, to the large sum of 2,200,000, was " chiefly in tobacco and spirits." Among the recent symptoms of a wholesome social condition, it may also be observed that joint stock enter- prise has readily come forward to make the railways that are still needed. One company proposes to con- struct a line from Canterbury to Westland, crossing the Alpine range of the South Island ; another, to make a NEW ZEALAND. 125 Wellington and Manawatu line, in the North Island, and thus to complete the communications through that fertile district between the shores of Cook's Strait and New Plymouth. Shipping companies, too, have lately arisen to provide carriage for the increasing export of grain, while new agricultural settlements are founded in different places by associations of capitalists and emigrant farmers. Co-operative store societies are springing up in the South Island. These facts betoken a just degree of self-reliance and confidence in the advancing welfare of the country. Rapid fortune-making is not to be expected, but diligence and prudence find a sure reward after a few years' patient attention to work. The colonists of New Zealand seem to have learnt this lesson, perhaps, more effectually than some of their Australian neigh- bours. The New Zealand gold-fields, situated in Otago, at Hokitika on the west coast, and on the banks of the Thames estuary, not far from Auckland, have yielded a total value of 37,000,000, but the gold export of 1880 was one million and a quarter, less than half what it was in 1866 and in 1871. This decline, which has been common to all the Australasian gold- fields, may not, in its ultimate effects, be prejudicial, but the contrary, may prove conducive to the welfare of the country. In one important respect, the social progress of New Zealand has escaped the injurious consequences to which some reference was made in our last chapter, of riches suddenly gathered from the gold-fields. These fields, situated 126 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. at the farthest extremities of the two islands, are so divided and distant from each other, that they have not created, as in Melbourne and Sydney, an inordi- nate, restless, and even prodigal city population. The towns, in general, contain rather less than one-third, instead of one-half, as in Victoria, of all the inhabi- tants. Manufacturing industries have not yet attained great commercial importance. New Zealand, on the whole, since the bold policy of Sir Julius Yogel, in 1870, which began the system of rapid construction of railways in all directions, and a wholesale immigration of the labouring classes, assisted by grants of a free passage, has spent vast sums of borrowed money, but has realised much solid benefit from its expenditure. The progress of the colony during the past ten years has indeed been far greater than that of Australia. The agricultural capacity of New Zealand is, as we have seen, probably superior not only to that of New South Wales, but to that of Victoria or Queensland. We must be permitted to doubt whether any of the Australian colonies, though wheat of a good quality can be grown there, will ever produce such large quantities, at a low price, for the European market, as can be got from North America. There are no soils in any country of the southern hemisphere to be compared with that of Manitoba and the north-western territory of Canada, either for wheat-growing or for grazing cattle, while the great distance and cost of freight to England must always be a serious disadvantage to Australia and New Zealand. On the other hand, these countries NEW ZEALAND. 127 have proved their superiority to all other countries of the world for the rearing of sheep ; and New Zealand, while her extent of natural pasture is limited in comparison with New South Wales and Queensland, is better adapted to the more economical system of enclosed paddocks and cultivated grasses. This is, and this will be, the leading staple of colonial industry ; and whenever the time shall have come for mutton and beef to be as remunerative as corn, New Zealand will enjoy a degree of prosperity unequalled by any country producing those commodities. It is a curious reflection how few and simple, after all, are the main commercial ingredients articles of necessary food, or materials for clothing, or for manufactures indispensable to civilised mankind the abundant production of which seems to be the proper end of modern colonisation. Our European world is in want of corn, that is, of wheat, and of meat beef, mutton, and pork for which it calls upon the prairies of America and the plains of Australia, and has sent thither, in fifty years, many millions of laborious emi- grants, whose descendants now cultivate those lands mainly to raise the needful supply of grain and butchers' meat. And wool for the coats of men, and cotton for their shirts, are similarly demanded by Europe, more especially by England, which has the art of spinning and weaving those useful fibres ; and behold, there are millions of negro hands in American plantations culti- vating and gathering the cotton for Manchester ; while for Bradford, Huddersfield, and Leeds, there are myriads of fleecy flocks in Australia or New Zealand, 128 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. duly counted and cared for, duly shorn in season, from which comes warm material for our outer garments. It is admirable, this growth of our supplies ; and we can but hope that all the appliances of conveyance, both over land and over sea, will be speedily perfected by science and skill, reducing to the minimum the loss of time, labour, and money before the corn and meat, as well as the wool and other textile material, can be deposited in British warehouses. Fresh meat, especially, the flesh of colonial flocks and herds, if it can be preserved for many days by refrigerating apparatus during a voyage across the tropics, will be such a whole- some boon to us in the cities of Europe that our gratitude will be most sincere. Some of us, it is too true, are by no means over-fed. Official sanitary phy- sicians have testified that the English labouring classes, more particularly in the rural districts, where their employment is to produce food, do not get sufficient nourishing diet. We are informed, meanwhile, that the price of good beef and mutton at Brisbane, in Queensland, is threepence the pound ; here in London, as we know, it is tenpence or elevenpence, or more. We hear of meat-preserving establishments near Sydney, and of others in New Zealand; we have heard, not seldom, of a glut of mutton carcases in those countries; and of boiling down the flesh for the mere tallow. Considering the needs of our own people, we cry aloud, " How long? how long?" The vision of a good time coming, with abundance of cheap and nourishing animal food, to put fresh health and strength into the half-starved bodies of millions NEW ZEALAND. 129 among the European populations to make them robust, alert, energetic, cheerful, temperate, as they never can be until they are properly fed arises before the mind's eye ; and we get some idea of the benefits of colonisation. We see, again, in the possible abundance of wool, in the future cheap- ness of good stout woollen stuffs all over Europe thanks to Australia and New Zealand the hope of greater bodily comfort and of higher personal refine- ment, of improved manners and morals, for countless multitudes of the poorer classes in every nation. These hopes and visions are eminently practical; their realisation may be deferred by latent causes affecting commercial and industrial economy, but it cannot fail, in the long run, to benefit a future generation. It is hard to exaggerate their probable importance, when they shall fully take effect, to the happiness of civilised mankind. The part which New Zealand, as well as the colonies of Australia, is likely to bear in such con- tributions to the general welfare seems to us well assured beyond possibility of any miscarriage. The former seems to be destined not only to be a great producer of the staff of life and the staff of industry for other people, but also to develop, in her own people, a great variety of manufacturing and trading indus- tries. Dr. Hector's report, addressed to the Royal Com- missioners for the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879, contains an account of the " economic minerals " of New Zealand the coal, the iron ores and iron- sands, the gold and silver, the copper, lead, zinc, I 130 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. antimony, manganese, and graphite, the mineral oils, the building-stones, the materials for cement and paint, and of the varieties of timber, the kauri gum, the native flax, which has the strength of hemp, and other natural products. The reader cannot but infer that a country so endowed with manifold substances of known utility will become very rich, since she has plenty of food, as we have already seen, for the support of a large industrial population. New Zea- land is just now only beginning to think of what she will do with this diversity of the gifts of Nature. A similar prospect lies before New South Wales and Queensland ; and Tasmania, in these days, is beginning to discover that she possesses an abundance of metallic wealth. There is another resource that of maritime traffic, the commercial navigation of the South Seas from which it is probable that colonial enterprise will derive large gains at no very remote period of time. New Zealand is even more favourably situated than eastern Australia for the commerce of the countless isles of the Pacific Ocean, and commands its main routes to eastern Asia, to the Malay Archipelago, and to Japan, as well as to California, Mexico, Central and South America, between which and Australasia no small carrying trade is likely to arise. The pre- vailing winds and currents of the ocean set in such a direction as to give the navigation from New Zealand to most of the scattered island groups of Polynesia and Melanesia, or to Hawaii and San Francisco, a peculiar advantage. Auckland, with its magnificent NEW ZEALAND. 131 harbour of the Waitemata, and its great facilities for ship-building, already possesses twice as much tonnage as either Wellington, Port Lyttelton, or Dunedin, and promises to become the Liverpool of New Zealand. The whole system of the estab- lishment of plantations and of mercantile intercourse all over the insular world of the West Pacific lias of late years, since the annexation of the Fiji Archipelago to the British Empire in 1875, engaged the serious attention both of the Imperial and of Colonial Governments. In order to check the lawless and cruel practices of European adventurers, many of them British subjects, who visited the Melanesia!! isles, and who were frequently guilty of kidnapping the natives or of betraying them into slavery, Sir Arthur Gordon, the first Governor of Fiji, was appointed High Commissioner for the Western Pacific. He now exercises the same wide jurisdiction as Governor of New Zealand, and with uiidimimshed benefit to a multitude of diverse populations, separately minute and remote from one another, but in the aggregate of considerable importance. Although Fiji has made great advances in prosperity under British rule, there are no islands that can dispute the paramount title of New Zealand to be the Queen of the West Pacific. It is but the beginning that we now see of com- mercial and industrial relations that will doubtless expand to a magnitude equal to the most enthusiastic visions hitherto conceived by an ardent colonial ambi- tion. There will be a Great South as well as a Great West, inhabited b^ nations of the English race. 132 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. CHAPTER VII. SOUTH AFRICA. The Cape Colony, its Territorial Limits, and its History Western Districts Eastern Districts Kaffir "Wars Constitutional Government at the Cape Legislative Council and Assembly Public Works Progress of Eastern Districts Port Elizabeth Koads, Telegraphs, Submarine Cable, and Mail Steamers Financial Position of Cape Colony Further Railway Exten- sion Natural Resources The Diamond Fields Ostrich Feathers Copper Wool Fruit and Wine Natal Native Reserves Scanty Industrial Production Stationary European Population Objections to a South African Confederation. WE are accustomed, in these days, to speak of " the Cape," implying thereby a territory not only of con- siderable latitude, but also of considerable longitude, about twelve degrees of the one, and eighteen degrees of the other. In popular acceptation, it has come to signify the entire region, from Walvisch Bay on the Atlantic coast, to the eastern limits of the Transvaal and to the north of Zululand, towards Delagoa Bay on the shore of the Indian Ocean. Our newspapers have commonly spoken of each of the various conflicts with different races of people in many distant parts of South Africa as "the War at the Cape." But the u Cape Colony," known to official ad- ministration, is only the western half of this immense stretch of South African territories. It reaches no farther to the east than the river Kei and the SOUTH AFRICA. 133 mountains of Basutoland, and on the north-east to the Orange River. The name of " the Cape " originally, and with strict propriety, belonged to a small promontory, twenty or thirty miles long, between Table Bay and False Bay (including Simon's Bay), at the south-west corner of Africa. This piece of land was discovered by the Portuguese, was colonised by the Dutch, and was conquered by the British, like so many other countries of the world beyond seas. The process by which its name has been extended, first to a large colonial dominion, afterwards to a still greater geographical division, is similar to that which changed the antique signification of "Asia," from the site of a few Ionian settlements, to what we now call Asia Minor, and thence to a continent which includes one- third the land surface of the earth. The name of " Canada," as we have observed, is a modern instance of a similar change. But in this chapter, when we say "the Cape," we mean the Cape Colony, without Kaffirland, without Natal, without the Dutch States of the Orange River and the Transvaal. It is a question for politicians whether the Cape Colony, in the course of its social and political affairs, cannot very well afford to do without those districts for many years to come. This appears to be just now a question of urgent practical interest. As for the Cape promontory, with its two harbours for ships, it is a naval station of the utmost value to Great Britain. It is, perhaps, worth as much to us, even since the opening of the Suez Canal, as either 134 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Gibraltar or Malta. The protection both of our Mediterranean and of our Cape route to India, Australia, and China, is an indispensable object of national policy. There was, moreover, some political justification for our occupation of the Cape during the wars of the French Revolution and Empire. In 1795, a Dutch Revolutionary party had revolted against the Prince of Orange, and British intervention then saved the Cape from becoming a starting-point for French attacks upon our trade. In 1806, at the height of the European danger from Napoleon, the Cape was again occupied by an English force. It was formally ceded to Great Britain by the King of the Nether- lands in 1815. Nothing seems more reasonable than that Great Britain, with her commercial and colonial interests in the safety of the route from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, should be mistress of " the Cape." But a question may be raised concerning the necessary extent of our South African Dominion. There are two different sections of the Cape Colony, with separate ports of maritime access. The western districts, of which Capetown is the port, extend to Graaf Reinet and to Uitenhage, about five hundred miles east. They have a population of little more than one hundred and fifty thousand Europeans, the majority of whom are Dutch, descendants of the old seventeenth century settlement, the others British, French, and Germans. There are sixty-two thousand Hottentots, the remnant of a singular and obscure race of aborigines, not at all resembling either the negroes or the Kaffirs; and there is at least an equal SOUTH AFRICA. 135 number of other native Africans, with some imported Malays from Java. But all these people are thoroughly domesticated, and savages have disappeared long ago. The western part of the Cape Colony has indeed no cause, for its own sake, to live in fear of attack from native tribes. The eastern districts, which have Port Elizabeth, in Algoa Bay, and East London, a hundred and fifty miles farther along the coast, for their particular seaports, are very differently situated. Their concern with regard to "the native question" is much more serious. Less than one hundred thousand Europeans are here confronted with three times their number of Kaffirs. During seventy years past, the Dutch and afterwards British settlers in the country, between the Great Fish River and the Kei, have had to fight seven fierce wars against the' swarming hosts of naked brown men, a robust and hardy race. The Kaffirs are a pastoral folk. They drive herds of their own cattle to graze on the land, but have been known also to steal cattle from their colonial neighbours. Perhaps the Kaffirs imagined that these had stolen the land from them. It is estimated that above thirty millions sterling have been spent by Great Britain and latterly by the Colony in these tedious and wasteful conflicts, not including the cost of maintain- ing the Cape Mounted Rifle regiment. The last war, that for the reduction of the Basutos, cost in six months the sum of two millions and a quarter, which is to be paid by the Colonial Government. A portion, also, of the cost of the Galeka and Gaika war of 1877 136 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. and 1878 was defrayed by the Colony, and by these means its public debt and its annual public expenditure have been nearly doubled within the last five years. Constitutional government, which is fully enjoyed by the Cape Colony, will find the way to cope with this great difficulty. It was in 1850, and in con- sequence of the successful resistance of the Capetown people to an outrageous proceeding, that their political enfranchisement was first successfully claimed. A cargo of British convicts had been sent there, as in the old times they were sent to Botany Bay or Port Jackson. The colonial free-born citizens, Dutch and English, " boycotted " the Queen's ship and the Governor of Capetown. They compelled H.M.S. Neptune to leave their harbour without landing her disreputable passengers. They next petitioned the Queen for a regular legislative constitution, which was obtained in 1853. The Legislative Council and the House of Assembly met next year; but it was not till 1872 that a fully responsible government, exercised by a Ministry dependent on the votes of the Assembly, was finally established, the result of twenty years' parliamentary experience and of the gradual develop- ment of the constitution. The working of this constitution has, on the whole, been eminently creditable to the colonial politicians. If mistakes have been committed by the Administration, a remedy has been found in the proper action of Parliament, and in substituting a new Ministry for that which had lost public confidence. Without here entering upon any party questions of the day, we SOUTH AFRICA. 137 may congratulate the Cape colonists, in general, upon their able, orderly, and efficacious practice of the methods customary in British statesmanship. The Legislative Council, presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is composed of twenty-one members, elected for a term of years by the same classes of voters that elect the House of Assembly ; but up to this time there has been an aggregate election of the eleven members of the Council representing the western districts; and in like manner a separate return of the ten chosen altogether by the eastern districts. This division of the Legis- lative Council into two sections, the western and the eastern, with collective voting for the election of each, will henceforth be superseded. The constituency of both Houses of Parliament consists of the persons who have an income of .50 a year, or 25 with board and lodging besides. There are in all about fifty thousand registered electors. The franchise is not expressly denied to persons of Kaffir or other non- European race ; but it has been claimed by very few of them. The Assembly consists of sixty-eight mem- bers, two for each district or town, and four for the capital. An elector is allowed to give the votes at his disposal, whether for the Council or for the Assembly, cumulatively to a single candidate. The Ministers are the Colonial Secretary, who is Premier, the Treasurer-General, the Attorney-General, the Commissioner of Lands and Public Works, and the Secretary for Native Affairs. These form the Gover- nor's Executive Council. They hold office on the true 138 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. constitutional principle, during the pleasure of the Colonial Parliament. Continued peace with the native races, from 1853 to 1877, enabled the Colonial Government to under- take and to execute many public works of undoubted merit and usefulness. The harbour breakwater of Table Bay, and the commodious basins and docks, constructed between 1860 and 1870, at a cost of 443,000, are nowhere equalled in the southern hemisphere. The commencement of this undertaking and the opening of the docks, ten years afterwards, were favoured with the presence of our Queen's sailor-son, the Duke of Edinburgh. At Port Eliza- beth, and at East London, harbour works have been undertaken ; but there are in these instances some natural difficulties to be overcome. The making of railways has been proceeded with at intervals since 1859, to a considerable extent. The main line running eastward, from Capetown to Beaufort West, a distance of three hundred and thirty-eight miles, or rather to the north-east, has been opened for traffic. This system of railways now wants but a link of one hundred and fifty miles, for its connection at Graaf Reinet, with the Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown, and Cradock lines of railway a] ready constructed. Nearly a thousand miles of railroad have been made altogether, costing eight millions sterling. These facilities of inland communication, it may be expected, will soon put an end to the old political jealousy of East and West in the public life of the Cape Colony. The inter- communications of the colonists will no longer be re- SOUTH AFRICA. 139 stricted to passages from one seaport to another. East London has likewise extended its railways to King William's Town and Queen's Town. Other lines are designed to reach the far interior, the Orange Free State, and the Diamond Fields, which contribute a larger share of trade to the maritime ports than any other district. Government high roads, often constructed over the mountain ranges with bold engineering skill, have been long since made in different directions by order of the authorities at Capetown. The cost of constructing bridges has been 340,000. Telegraph lines overland having a total length of two thousand seven hundred and thirteen miles, connect all the principal towns with each other. The Cape Colony, as well as Natal, pays its share towards the cost of the submarine telegraph, by way of Mozambique, Zanzibar, and Aden, which connects South Africa with England. On alternate weeks the steamers of the Union Company's line start from Southampton and of Sir Donald Currie's line of " Castles " from London ; and these bring Capetown within three weeks' easy voyage to or from Great Britain. The financial position of the Cape Colony with a revenue of 2,820,000 has of late become significant. In 1872, when the Colony obtained parliamentary self- government, its public debt was scarcely one million sterling. The amount of the public debt is now twenty millions. From 1874 to 1880 the sum of eight millions and a quarter of borrowed money was spent in the construction of railways, which pay a small per-centage of interest on the capital invested. The "public 140 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. debt rose to about twelve millions before the settle- ment of accounts for the extraordinary expendi- ture in the Basuto war, and in other large under- takings of Mr. Gordon Sprigg's administration. The Basuto war, from September, 1880, to June, 1881, cost above two millions, and it was under- stood that another million would be required to keep the forces in the field during the protracted negotiations which ensued. A fourth million has been devoted to the completion of certain public works begun by the late Ministry. Yet notwithstanding these large and recently incurred expenses, proposals for additional railways, the cost of which is estimated at more than four millions, have been adopted by the colonial legislature in the present year. Speaking of South Africa generally, we cannot rate the provinces or territories of this region, in material wealth and productive resources, so highly as those of Australia and New Zealand. The diamond mines of West Griqualand, now incorporated with the Cape Colony, yield those precious stones to the annual value of three and a half millions sterling, and in 1880 it rose to close upon four millions ; but it seems questionable whether the value and the quantity of such a product, which is an indestructible article, not an article of consumption, is likely to be maintained through a long course of future years. The breeding of ostriches for their plumage, which has realised <65 0,000 in one year, would scarcely appear, in like manner, to be a secure staple of permanent industrial and commercial prosperity. It cannot be assumed SOUTH AFRICA. 141 with confidence that such commodities as these will, to all future time, be worth a very high price in the markets of the world. The Cape Colony possesses, however, in the fertile soil and genial climate of its districts near the coast, and in the wide pasturage of its upland plains and hills, considerable facilities for agriculture and for the production of wool. If it should ever become, like South Australia, a wheat- exporting country, it would have the advantage of being only half the distance from England. It might, also, with more scientific culture, be enabled to rival Southern Europe in fruit and wines ; but such pros- pects are yet remote from its present actual conditions. There is no remunerative gold-field, though some gold has been found. Other metals are got in some of the western districts. The copper from the mines of Port Nolloth, on the Atlantic coast of Namaqualand, is worth a quarter of a million yearly. Of the two sections of the Cape Colony, it may be said, in general, with respect to their products, and ex- clusive of traffic in the products of the interior region, that the western districts are more especially agricultural. Their old Dutch and French settlers are thrifty husbandmen. The eastern districts, chiefly occupied by Englishmen and Scotchmen since 1820, are better adapted to pastoral occupation. They have made great progress in sheep-breeding, and the yearly export of wool, including that sent by Port Elizabeth from the Orange Free State, has attained the value of from two to three millions sterling. We now leave the Cape Colony, and all that 142 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. properly belongs to it, and pass for several hundred miles round the south-east coast of Kaffraria until we come to Port Natal, on the shore of the Indian Ocean. The Province of Natal, which derives its name from Christmas Day, on which day, in 1497, its only harbour was discovered by Yasco de Gama, has been a British possession since 1845, and has been under separate colonial administration, apart from the Cape, since 1856. Its condition is not progressive, but cannot precisely be called retrograde. The fact is, that with the exception of certain townships adjacent to the main route of traffic between the seaport and the Transvaal, and with the exception also of a strip of sugar-growing lowlands on the sea-shore, this country of Natal is scarcely in the actual occupation of the European colonists. It is, for the greater part, a British Imperial Protectorate of Native Tribes. There are not less than 350,000 Zulus in Natal, settled under their tribal chiefs in the districts allotted to them, ruled by their own laws, with certain limitations, paying a few light taxes, and generally living quietly enough, but far from adopting any civilised ways of life. The British dominion in Natal exists, it must be supposed, mainly for their sake ; and so it does, for other native tribes, in the adjacent territories of Kaffraria and Basuto-land. These territories of south-east Africa jointly contain a quarter of a million people under British protection, with resident magistrates and missionaries doing a fair amount of philanthropic work. All this may be very commendable, like the pleas on grounds of humanity SOUTH AFRICA. 143 for our establishments at Sierra Leone and Cape Coast Castle ; but it is not British colonisation. It does not afford the prospect of an opening for popular emigration from our own over-crowded country. Natal as we have seen, is a small English colony, hitherto singularly unproductive and dependent on the transit trade of another country. The English reside chiefly in the towns of Durban and Maritzburg and other places up the high road to the interior table-land of South Africa. This colony is almost stationary in numbers, and may continue so for another generation, as it can never be attractive to our working classes. The European settled inhabi- tants, English and Dutch, do not much exceed twenty-three thousand altogether, which is little more than a fifteenth part of the Zulus and other natives. For industrial purposes, that is to say, for actual plantation work or any kind of agriculture, the immense native population is of no service whatever. The Zulus and all Kaffir tribes possess lands and cattle in abundance; they grow some kind of grain for their own food ; they want little clothing or other articles of British manufacture. The Zulus are, like most of the other Kaffirs, disinclined to become the hired field labourers of European farmers or planters. Our national conscience has solemnly and for ever abjured the principle of compulsory labour, of servi- tude when it is not based upon a voluntary contract. So that if the fertile coast-lands of Natal, situated in that semi-tropical climate, are to produce sugar, there is no help for it but to import Indian coolies. 144 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Nearly twenty thousand have therefore been fetched over from Madras and Calcutta, to work for the planters, as in Guiana and Trinidad. But the amount of sugar exported is only to the value of XI 69,000 in the year, which is about equal to that from one of the smaller West Indian Islands. The other principal commodities that nominally figure as Natal exports are the wool, the hides, the ivory, and other pro- ductions of the Transvaal, and those of other inland countries beyond the Drakensberg. The insecurity, as we cannot but regard it, of the economic and social conditions of Natal, is quite exceptional in our Colonial Empire. It is not for lack of a spirit of enterprise in the English colonists, whose recent works of railway construction from Durban towards Maritzburg deserve much com- mendation. It is not from any niggardness of Nat are, which has blessed the country with a fine climate and with much variety of soils, elevations, and aspects fit for diverse kinds of profitable cultivation. The geogra- phical position of Natal is twice as advantageous as that of New Zealand in its nearness to England and con- venience for trade. If it had been found vacant of a native population, it might have become, ere this, one of the most agreeable and remunerative of British colonies. But what has been the result of thirty or thirty-five years' trial ] While New Zealand, in the same period, having but forty thousand Maories, has increased its colonial population to 489,000, Natal shows an inverse proportion of the European set- tlers to the barbarian race. There is no apparent SOUTH AFRICA. 145 probability of an alteration in this state of affairs. We much fear that the problem will ultimately arrive at a disappointing solution. It is the same, more or less, with all the south eastern territories of South Africa beyond the Kei, long since recognised as the proper natural boundary of the Cape Colony. Those territories, below the seaward slopes of the great Quathlamba and Drakens- berg mountain range, are very desirable lands, fertile and well watered ; but they are inhabited already by people who are not to be dispossessed. The native races of Africa, unlike those of Australia, or those of New Zealand unlike the Red Indians of North America in former ages will not perish before the advance of the white men. Their robust animal vitality, is shown by their comparative exemption from fatal diseases, and by their numerous offspring. They do not live by hunting, like the savages in the American prairies who perished when the bison and buffalo were driven away from their reach. They have ample means of subsistence in the pastoral life, and the " mealies," cultivated by the hands of their women, with the flesh and milk of their cattle, suffice for their simple wants. The European colonists may fight and defeat these South African nations, whose number is reckoned at a million and a half, and whose territory extends from the Cape Colony frontier to the Limpopo, north of the Transvaal. The Kaffirs and Zulus may be subdued, and their chiefs or kings may be deposed, but they cannot be expelled from this extensive region. It is not likely, therefore, to 146 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. be made securely available for an advancing European colonisation. The great upland plain, consisting of the interior table-land watered by the Orange and Vaal Rivers, with their tributaries, is already in possession of settlers. It was found by the Boers, when they first entered it more than forty years ago, com- paratively vacant and clear of native people, because it afforded no bush or forest to give them covert. It was therefore occupied by the emigrant Dutch farmers, whose political freedom was, after some contention, formally recognised in 1852 and 1854, on the part of the British Government. Colonisation, introduced by the independent Boers in the Orange State and the Transvaal, though its fruits and flowers have been neither rich nor fair to the eyes of their British neighbours, has thus taken firm root. It is not a British plant, but a Dutch, and one that sturdily refuses to be plucked from the ground. The question of the Transvaal will be discussed further on. The general conclusion to be formed from these views of the different portions of South Africa may now be clearly indicated. Looking to the positive interests of the Cape Colony alone, without reference to any temporary considerations of the administrative convenience of the Imperial Government, we may say that there are no solid arguments for the grand scheme of a South African Dominion. The Cape colonists may wisely refuse to have anything to do with Confederations or Protectorates to the east and north of their present frontiers. They are charged SOUTH AFRICA. 147 already, to their heavy cost, as has been seen, with the Basuto and the Trans-Kei Protectorate. It is not reasonable that, as some official persons seem to think, they should undertake any degree of political re- sponsibility for the native affairs of Natal, or of the Transvaal Border. CHAPTER VIII. NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. Naval Establishments Abroad Mediterranean Stations Gibraltar and Malta North Atlantic Stations Halifax, Bermuda, and Antigua South Atlantic St. Helena The Cape and Simon's Bay Falkland Isles Indian Ocean Mauritius, Aden, and Ceylon Eastern Archipelago Hong Kong Australian Station Cruisers in the Pacific Ocean South American Coast Esquimalt, Vancouver Island Combined Naval Defences for the British Colonies. THE protection of British colonies, navigation, and commerce abroad is facilitated by the regular distri- bution of the naval forces of Her Majesty in certain parts of the globe. Our men-of-war are, under ordi- nary circumstances, assigned to seven different stations (beyond that of the Channel Squadron), each of which stations is occupied by a separate squadron, under the command of an Admiral or other flag-officer, who occasionally cruises about and visits the chief ports of the region. These stations may be enumerated in the following order : 1. The Mediterranean. 2. North America and the West Indies. 3. The Cape of Good 148 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Hope and West Coast of Africa. 4. The East Indies. 5. China. 6. The Pacific Ocean, with South America. 7. Australia. In each geographical division, there are several places where establishments for the accom- modation of ships of the Royal Navy have been formed, and most of these places belong to Her Majesty's dominions. The following is a list of the stations, beyond the limits of the United Kingdom, at which the British Government maintains naval dockyards, stores and repairing appliances, victualling yards, coaling yards, naval hospitals and infirmaries : Gibraltar, Malta, Halifax (in Nova Scotia), Bermuda, Jamaica, Antigua, Sierra Leone, the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Trin- comalee, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney (Australia), and Esquimalt (in Vancouver Island). The Falkland Islands also serve the occasional needs of our ships on their way to or from the Pacific. Several other local establishments for similar purposes exist in the ports of foreign States, by virtue of treaties with their sovereigns ; but these need not here be considered. The aggregate yearly cost of all the establishments above named, amounts to less than 200,000, and is set down under the head of Admiralty expenditure. But when we look at the military garrisons that are per- manently maintained at some of our colonial stations, principally for the defence of these naval establish- ments, the cost is found to be nearly tenfold greater. The Army Estimates for 1879-80 show the total sum required for the service of the colonies was 2,338,252, only 223,000 of which would be repaid by colonial NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. 149 contributions. The cost of South Africa, including Natal and the Transvaal, was 642,000 ; that being a year of peace, intervening between the Zulu war and the war with the Boers, each of which would cost some millions. The other colonial military charges were, for Bermuda, 169,000; for Halifax, 132,000 ; for Jamaica, 70,000 ; for the Windward and Leeward Islands, 104,000; St. Helena, 22,000; Mauritius, 46,000; Sierra Leone, 29,000; Gold Coast and Lagos, 17,000 ; Ceylon, 103,000 ; Hong Kong, 97,000 ; Straits Settlements, 75,000 ; above all, Gibraltar, 365,000 ; and Malta, 387,000, with 38,000 for Cyprus, which was not reckoned as a British colony. The cost of maintaining two West India negro regiments, which serve occasionally on the West Coast of Africa, would have to be added to this account. The safety of our naval stations abroad must ob- viously be secured by means of efficient and permanent garrisons, if the fleet is to have freedom of movement. This is an object of such great national importance, with a view to the protection of our trade, that few Englishmen will be disposed to cavil at its cost. We may, however, first deduct from that large total of 2,338,000 the heavy charges lately incurred in South Africa, even when not actually at war, by the un- satisfactory state of our relations with the natives and with the Dutch colonists. The military expen- diture, also, at the two great maritime fortresses of Gibraltar and Malta, the one situated at the mouth, the other in the centre of the Mediterranean, is due 150 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. mainly to considerations of European policy. Deduct- ing two-thirds of the charges for the establishments at the Cape, at Gibraltar, and at Malta, as well as the expected repayments elsewhere, we shall find the ordi- nary cost of military service on account of our colonies and commerce not to exceed 1,200,000. It is not so easy to distinguish that part of the entire naval ex- penditure, which is devoted to keeping up the squad- rons on remote stations for the security of colonial and mercantile interests. The self-governing colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape, no longer receive military services from Great Britain, for any local purposes, without paying their cost. The garrison at such a station as Halifax is but an apparent exception. It is only those styled Crown colonies, including most of the British insular possessions in the West and East Indies, that require direct Imperial protection by the Queen's land and sea forces. The lucrative British trade in articles of tropical produce, and in our own manufactures exchanged for these, demands a very small per-centage of its value by way of insurance against risks of piracy or warfare. The charge of keeping up military garrisons is in the proportion of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions sterling, compared with the immense commercial interests of the nation, and it guarantees their safety in case of hostilities with any foreign power. It remains for us here only to take more particular notice of those colonies, officially so designated, which NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. 151 exist for this express purpose, but which may also, incidentally, be resorted to for private trading enter- prise. Gibraltar is a small town of 18,000 inhabitants, exclusive of our troops, built on a rock overlook- ing the bay where ships can anchor when they pass the Straits. It is useful, too, as an entrepot for our commerce with North Africa, and its port dues yield a revenue of .47,000. The Governor, who is the General commanding the garrison, rules the civil community without the aid of any Council. Malta, with the neighbouring island of Gozo, has a population of 154,000, partly of the Italian and mixed Levantine races ; its soil produces grain, fruits, and cotton ; and it affords many conveniences for trade. The Government revenue is 180,000; there is a Council of Government, partly official, partly of elected representatives, over which the Governor presides. Cyprus, though not formally annexed to the British dominions, has been placed under Colonial Office administration. It is third in size among the islands of the Mediterranean, and has a native population of between 200,000 and 300,000, two- thirds of whom are Greeks. The High Commissioner is assisted by a Legislative Council of his own ap- pointment. The products and exports of this island seem capable of being greatly increased. But its only good harbour, Famagusta, held in old times by the Genoese and Venetians, will not be of any use till the town has been made habitable once more. It52 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. The position of Cyprus, in the angle formed by the coasts of Asia Minor and Syria, and nearly opposite the projected starting-point of the Euphrates Valley Railway, and one day's steaming distance from the mouth of the Suez Canal, may perhaps prove hereafter to be of some political value. But it has not yet been definitively settled whether Cyprus shall be in- cluded in our Colonial Empire. In the North Atlantic, the British naval and military stations are most fortunately placed, with a view to the defence of our American trade, and of our Canadian and West Indian possessions. Nearly in the same line of longitude, or within about three degrees, and at nearly equal intervals of seven hundred or eight hundred miles, are Halifax, Bermuda, and Antigua ; the last, with the Bahamas, at Nassau, and with the lesser Antilles, commanding the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico. Nature and policy could scarcely have combined more successfully to furnish a maritime power like Great Britain with positions favourable for defending her trade with the Western world. She has little cause, in this respect, to envy Spain or Portugal their early conquests of the more beautiful and fertile islands on the nearer side of the Atlantic. Bermuda, the centre and key of her naval supremacy in the Western ocean, will never become a rich agricultural or commercial settlement, but it is, nevertheless, a possession of great national importance. Yet " the Bermudas," to use the more proper plural form of this name, are but a cluster of small NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. 153 coral islets, standing in an oval ring over the mouth of a submerged volcanic crater, twenty-five miles long and ten miles wide. Their total extent of land is but twelve thousand acres, their population twelve thousand souls, and their exported produce worth 70,000 a year, the soil being thin and of poor quality. The two island ports and towns of Hamilton and St. George's do not show much aspect of thriving bustle ; they have, indeed, a little traffic with New York, as well as with Halifax and Jamaica. But the dockyard and naval establishments on Ireland Island, which lies in the centre of the enclosed space of sea, fifty miles in circuit, are wonderfully well situated. They are so defended by all the surrounding isles, coral reefs, and sunken rocks, as to be most difficult of approach for an enemy, while the only channel by which large vessels can enter is guarded by heavy guns behind casemated iron shields. The military garrisons and depots are in exclusive occupation of Boaz and Watford Islands, intervening between Ireland Island and the rest of the group, which is inhabited by the civil population. As a marine fortress, nothing more perfect can be imagined than this the chief British stronghold in the West Atlantic. The government of Bermuda is usually entrusted to a military officer commanding as General, with a nominated Council, and with a House of Assembly consisting of thirty-six members, four elected by each of the nine island parishes. There is a high property qualification for electors, as well as for representatives. The revenue is about ,28,000 a year ; but the 154 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Governor's salary, and all the naval and military expenses, are defrayed by the Imperial Government of Great Britain. The military and naval station at Halifax is a conspicuous feature in that city, which has, indeed, to be noticed also in this treatise as the provincial capital of Nova Scotia. Antigua and Barbadoes, likewise, have been mentioned in our account of the "West Indies, but are now brought under discussion as links in the chain of Imperial defensive positions. The military headquarters of that region are at Barbadoes, and the large expenditure allotted to those islands in the Army Estimates must be ascribed partly to the existence of the two West India Negro regiments. One of these is usually on service at Sierra Leone, or at some other part of the West Coast of Africa. In the South Atlantic we have the naval dock- yard, magazines, barracks, and forts of Simon's Bay, on the eastern side of the Cape promontory, which is probably more valuable to Great Britain than all the rest of South Africa. On the ocean route from England to the Cape, twelve hundred miles off the African coast, is the little isle of St. Helena. Though insignificant in population and in productions, it has romantic historical associations. It is still found serviceable for the convenience of shipping, and has a Governor and other officials. Ascension, a yet more diminutive islet, has only a naval garrison ; it has been a coaling station, but is so no longer. Far to the south, opposite the Strait of Magellan, lie the NAVAL AND MILITARY STATIONS. 155 Falkland Islands, which are capable of European colonisation, and suitable for sheep-farming, but have not yet invited many settlers. Their occupation by the British Government was intended chiefly to pro- tect the whalers in that sea. The number of inhabi- tants does not yet exceed fifteen hundred, though the climate is temperate and healthy, and there is much land fit for cultivation. In the Indian Ocean, and in the East Indian and Chinese Archipelagos, such commanding positions as Mauritius, Ceylon, Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea, and Rangoon, the Malay Straits, and Hong Kong, have not been neglected as the points d'appui of our maritime power. Garrisons are maintained at these places, and, in some instances, considerable ex- pense has been incurred for the accommodation of our ships of war, as well as in constructing barracks for the troops. The importance of our trade with India and China, as already observed, is a sufficient justifica- tion of these measures. It will not be disputed that the points selected for naval stations in those eastern seas, as well as in the Atlantic, have been judiciously chosen for the protection both of mail steam-ship and sailing routes of navigation. The Australian station, with its headquarters at Sydney, though of subordinate official rank, is of increasing national importance. It is understood that the present Governor of South Australia, who is a distinguished officer of the Royal Engineers, will shortly present a scheme for the land and sea fortifica- tions of this group of colonies. The Colonial Legisla- 156 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. tures may be expected willingly to vote their due shares of the outlay needful for this purpose. That of Victoria, indeed, has already provided floating batteries and torpedo-boats to defend the harbour of Melbourne. The duties of the British squadron on these coasts are increased by the necessity of watching over the transport of Polynesian labourers, and some- times of chastising the savage islanders for injuries done to their European visitors, of which several notable instances will long be remembered. It may here be observed, likewise, that in the Malay Archi- pelago, and on the African coasts, the British naval forces do more than all the rest of the world to repress the practices of piracy at sea, and of robbery and murder ashore, by which maritime traffic would otherwise suffer at the hands of barbarous people. The vast extent of the Pacific Ocean can hardly be patrolled by a British squadron with such ubiqui- tous efficacy as the less distant waters of the globe. But the South American westward ports, and those of Panama and the Isthmus, the Hawaiian or Sand- wich Islands, and other insular groups, are frequently visited, with results beneficial to the reputation and to the interests of this kingdom. The headquarters of this station are at the naval port of Esquimalt, adjacent to Victoria, the capital of Vancouver Island. It is a fine natural harbour, and a graving dock has recently been completed at the expense of the Canadian Dominion Government. It may not be long before all the British Colonies will be prepared to join in POLITICAL RELATIONS. 157 some combined plan of fortifications and marine forces, to ensure the safety of important naval and military positions, within their respective territories, against every possible foe. CHAPTER IX. POLITICAL RELATIONS. Constitutional Self -Government of Canada, Australia, New Zea- land, and the Cape Colony Limits of necessary Obligations to the Crown Command of Colonial Military Forces Diplo- matic Negotiations The Zulu War The Annexation of the Transvaal Colonial Office Administration Crown Colonies Colonies with Assisting Councils Self-Governing Colonies, with Parliamentary Ministries Appointment of Governors Schemes of Imperial Federation Reforms Desirable and Feasible The Agents-General and the Government Depart- mentsThe Court and Royal Family Titles Peerages. THE component members of our Colonial Empire have now been severally described. We have passed in review, briefly indeed, yet with some regard to statis- tical precision, first, the numerous and widely-scattered plantations and commercial factories of tropical pro- duce in the West and in the East Indies ; secondly, that vast federation of the provincial communities of British America, styled the Canadian Dominion; thirdly, the rapidly advancing colonies of Australia, with their wealth of wool and gold and their copious public revenues, colonies soon probably to form another great Federal Union; next to these, the insular Colonial Government of New Zealand, as recently 158 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. consolidated by the unification of the provincial govern- ments ; and, fourthly, the Cape Colony, which has been too long embarrassed by the unfavourable con- dition of Natal and other South African territories. We have surveyed, last of all, the widely-dispersed islands and points on remote ocean coasts, which are held as naval and military stations for the defence of British trade. These are national possessions which the people of Great Britain would at any moment rise up to fight for against any possible foreign attack. Yet the time has evidently come for us to consider, with regard to the self-governing colonies in British America, Australasia, and South Africa, which contain seven or eight millions of English freemen and citizens as good as ourselves, whether they are to be mere dependencies of this country ; or rather, whether they have not actually ceased to be so. It seems just and prudent for the Mother Country, now that so many of her tall strong daughters have grown up and come out in the world, to consider how much they owe to themselves as well as to her. They have now had full experience and practice of constitutional self-govern- ment for a quarter of a century or more. The idea of retaining those provinces by forcible conquest, in case of a secession being ever desired, has long since been dismissed from British counsels j but we have still to guard ourselves against any harshness of tone, or sense of suppressed indignation, which might be inspired by an undue estimate of our political claims upon them. Imperial allegiance, that which is owed, not merely POLITICAL RELATIONS. 159 collectively but individually, by all British subjects in the Colonies, equally with those dwelling in the United Kingdom, to the " person, Crown, and dignity of her Majesty Queen Victoria," stands above the questions here discussed. It signifies, on the whole, that they are not to be aiding or abetting the Queen's enemies, and that they are not to infringe the Crown prerogatives of declaring peace or war, and of making treaties or conducting negotiations with Foreign States. It does not bind any portion of the Queen's subjects, whether in England, Scotland, or Ireland, or in Canada or Australia, to levy armies and equip navies for the assistance of Her Majesty's Government. They may do so, if they choose, by the resolutions of their constitutional representatives in Parliament. It seems likely, in many instances that are within the range of probability, that some of the most powerful British Colonial States will sometimes prefer to remain neutral ; nor should we be able to resent such a policy. It would be treason, indeed, if they should lend any positive assistance to the enemy ; nor is a Colony entitled to claim neutral immunities for its territory, or for the persons and property of its citizens abroad. With these reservations, it will be competent, we suppose, for any community of British colonists enjoying self-government, to decline to take an active part in British naval and military opera- tions, and so perhaps to avoid direct molestation from the enemy. The wisdom, equity, and generosity of such conduct would chiefly depend upon the cause of war. If it were really a question of patriotism^ 160 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. there can be no doubt that the colonists would be ready enough to fight. It should, however, be dis- tinctly understood that they have a general right to be permitted to decide whether they shall fight or not ; and that they can legislate, in some particulars, with a view to avoid occasions for drawing them into active hostilities. The Governor appointed by the Crown to preside over such a colony, for instance, as that of the Cape, is instructed by the Colonial Office that " he is not to declare or make war against any foreign State, or against the subjects of any foreign State." This is a prohibition virtually laid upon the Colonial Govern- ment, its Ministers, and its Parliament ; since the declaring or making war is an act of the Executive that cannot be constitutionally performed but by the Governor's own hand. The Colonial Government of the Cape could make war on the Basutos, by treating them as rebels, without the consent of the Imperial Government. But Sir Bartle Frere, in 1879, held a twofold authority, not only as Governor of the Cape, but also as High Commissioner for South Africa; and it was in the latter capacity that, without waiting for the sanction of the Imperial Government, he declared and made war against the Zulu Kingdom, which was undoubtedly a foreign State. It was not in the capacity of Governor of the Cape Colony that he acted thus ; and the Govern- ment at Capetown was not responsible for what he did. In general, therefore, Colonial Governments are precluded from engaging in foreign wars upon POLITICAL RELATIONS, 161 their own account ; and it is well for them that they are so. They may repel aggression, subdue rebellion, or suppress piracy and brigandage ; the Governor is expressly commanded to do so of his own authority. Happy are the States which need undertake no greater martial feats than these! The command of any of Her Majesty's regular forces that may be stationed in the colony belongs either to the Governor, as the Queen's representative, or to the military officer who is appointed to this command by the Queen's Government. Local forces are disposed of by the Colonial Government ; but the orders of any colonial officer must not conflict with the military arrangements of the Commander-in-Chief of the Queen's troops. It is rather as federal auxiliaries than as portions of a single military administration, that the colonial forces jact with those of the regular army. These relations, however, became the occasion of a serious dispute, in the Kaffir war of 1878, between Sir Bartle Frere, as Governor, and the Ministry of Mr. Molteno, resulting in the dismissal of the latter. As a question of con- stitutional law, the point has not been formally determined. There can be no doubt that the colonies are pre- cluded also from diplomatic negotiations with foreign States, with a view to commercial treaties and other business not involving the issue of peace or war. It may fairly be admitted to be an open question for statesmen to consider whether this restriction might not be modified, with proper safeguards for the sovereign prerogative, by authorising a Governor to K 162 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. act as plenipotentiary for such business, under the direction of the Foreign Office. Why should not the Governor of New South Wales or of Queensland, for example, be empowered to treat directly with China, if it were desired by the Australian Government, concerning the regulations for the introduction of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps to negotiate for the adoption of any tariff reforms that might be sought for the furtherance of Australian trade with China ? The ratification of such treaties or conventions would of course be referred to the Queen's Government in Great Britain. On the other hand, there have been some occasions, notably in South Africa, where the Colonial Office agency has committed mistakes which Foreign Office agency would not have committed. The action of the High Commissioner and of the Secretary of State in 1876 and 1877, with regard to the independent Dutch Republic in the Trans- vaal, was utterly inconsistent with the ordinary procedure of Her Majesty's Government towards the feeblest and most helpless of foreign States. It was begun, moreover, with considerable lack of proper official information ; since there was no British consul at any time residing in the Transvaal, and little knowledge of the actual state of that country was to be gained at Capetown. Another fatal example of the 'want of Foreign Office control, and of the misleading reports which British consuls furnish to that department, was shown in the bewildering confusion of official purposes that preceded the POLITICAL RELATIONS. 163 Zulu war. The presence of a Foreign Office agent with King Cetewayo would assuredly have preserved peace; and one at Pretoria would not less certainly have excluded any conceivable pretext for the annexation of the Transvaal. Many millions of English money, and many hundreds of brave English lives, would have been saved by using in South Africa the same instruments and methods of international dealing which our Government uses in other parts of the world. The Colonial Office, indeed, has some defects of organisation, which not the most conscientious and laborious administrators can prevent from being injurious, sometimes to the colonies themselves, in many instances to the relations between them and the Imperial Government, and still more frequently to their position with regard to their uncivilised neigh- bours. It has too great a diversity of affairs to look after, with nearly forty colonial governments on its list, ruling above ten millions of mankind. Its work in detail is well performed ; and in dealing with about half this amount of colonial populations, namely those inhabiting what are classed under the title of Crown Colonies, its rule is wise and beneficent. The administration of these colonies is officially entrusted to some of the ablest and most diligent public servants of Great Britain. It is conducted by them, in general, with remarkable discretion as well as fidelity, and with a praiseworthy regard to equity and humanity in the treatment of inferior races. It is, moreover, financially, not very burthensome to this country, 164 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. which is really put to little or no expense for civil services performed in the majority of the British Colonies. The functions of the Colonial Office, however, in superintending the government of all the hetero- geneous dominions of the Empire, some of them, indeed, joined in federal unions, are of very mixed character. This office has to deal with three different classes of colonies. /There are, in the first place, those styled Crown Colonies, as above mentioned, in which the Governor, with a Council of his own nomination, responsible only to the Crown, has both administrative and legislative powers, and has the sole appointment of all public officials. The second class of colonial governments is that in which the laws are made by an elected Representative Assembly or by a Council partly elective, but in which the Executive or \/Ministry is not responsible to this representative body. Here the Governor, so long as he enjoys the confidence of his official superiors in England, may retain, if he chooses, Ministers and other public servants whose conduct is formally disapproved by the colonists, and may put his veto upon the acts of their legislature. It is with the perplexities and disputes of this class of colonies, that our statesmen are too often troubled. On the other hand, an able and conciliatory Governor, fully competent to despatch all executive business, may be glad in some cases of the assistance of an elective assembly. He may be strengthened in his authority by seeking from the colonial repre- sentatives, especially in matters of finance, a vote POLITICAL RELATIONS. 165 expressly confirming his measures. Many such discreet and efficient Governors have earned the esteem of all concerned in their administration. This form of government is perhaps the most suitable to such colonies as Natal, British Guiana, and the West Indian Islands, where the mass of the population is of native or Creole negro race, but where the revenue is derived from taxation of property or trade belonging to Europeans. The third class of colonies are those which enjoy full practical self-government, with a Parliament of their own, and with the Executive wholly dependent upon parliamentary support, as in our own country. The Crown has the appointment of the Governor, but not that of any other public officer employed in the civil administra- tion. Officers commanding the Queen's military forces are appointed by the Crown, but not those of the colonial militia. The Colonial House of Assembly, if so minded, could stop the supplies, and could perhaps even deprive the Governor of his salary, except in cases where this had been secured by an express stipulation. The Governor, on the other hand, may withhold his assent to acts of the Legisla- ture which he deems an infringement of the royal prerogative, and he must then refer them to the Crown for decision. This complex and extensive frame of administra- tive organisation has of late years undergone many partial reforms, with a view to greater consistency and regularity of action. The Department in White- hall has been relieved of much serious responsibility 166 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. by granting constitutional self-government to the Canadian Dominion, to the provinces of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand, and to the Cape Colony. In the West Indies, where the British or European residents have decreased, a reverse political change has meanwhile taken effect. Self-government has become impossible in Jamaica, and the smaller islands, with their reduced white population, have had to be gathered up by Crown officials into new collective areas over which direct rule is exercised. It is beyond question that the administration of the British Crown Colonies, as it has been conducted since the era of slave emancipation, though really despotic, is charac- terised by a spirit of enlightened beneficence which contrasts favourably with every instance of the rule of a small community of European planters over a large negro or native population. No such community is fit to be entrusted with full powers of legislative self- government, which have therefore been very properly refused to the British colonists of Natal. If any reform of the Department should hereafter be contemplated, a statesman of great administrative experience alone will be able to devise some adequate provision for claims and interests of extreme com- plexity in so many different mixed communities all round the globe. The internal distribution of the business in the Colonial Office seems rather arbitrary. There is an Eastern division, a West Indian division, one comprehending all the North American and Australian colonies, and one for the "African and Mediterranean." The only suggestion that can here POLITICAL RELATIONS. 167 be offered relates to the four great examples of political emancipation, namely, those of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony ; where the govern- ment has been definitively confided to legislative bodies representing the colonists themselves, and to the Executive Ministers of their own choice. It might possibly be thought, after a time, that these colonial constitutional governments, which are those of free English populations rapidly growing to the stature of young nations, would gain in dignity through being taken from under the supervision of the Colonial Office. Their practical independence of the Imperial Administration would then be more conspicuously displayed \ while the power of appointing their Governors, which might perhaps be vested in the Lord President of the Council, would be exercised without reference to merely personal claims acquired in the service of minor departmental offices. " Imperial Federation " is an idea which has frequently employed the speculative ingenuity of speakers and writers interested in colonial politics. It has been proposed, among a variety of other schemes, that the Agents-General in London, should constitute a permanent Council for the Colonies, to be consulted by the Secretary of State, or by the head of the Government, upon questions of policy affecting the whole Empire. Another project has been that of the admission of elected representatives of the Colonies into the British Parliament. A third mode of solving the problem has been contrived, by the erection of "a distinct Imperial Parliament of the 168 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. whole Empire, not the Parliament of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland." The existing Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland would be allowed to con- tinue ; but the newly-constituted Federal Legislature, as we are told, "would take over all the questions of common concern to the Empire, and would leave to the present insular Parliament full and exclusive control of the affairs of the United Kingdom." But we doubt the benefit or utility of any form of Imperial Confederation whatever, involving legislative or con- sultative deliberations with the Colonies relating to British imperial policy. We believe, indeed, that there is need of more thorough and authoritative mediums of political consultation between the British Govern- ment and each of the greater colonies, upon its own particular business, so far as this can be aided by measures of the British Government ; but Federal union is a different matter. The different groups of colonies in British America, in Australasia, and in South Africa, have really few interests in common, except their common liability to the risks of a state of war, and to the other effects of our foreign policy, consequent upon the international relations in which Great Britain stands to the rest of the world. These are not subjects upon which they could ever be jointly asked to express a common resolution, even though it should be deemed worth while, as their means of furnishing naval and military contingents or pecuniary contributions increase, to solicit the active co-operation of this or that colony upon a particular occasion. They might, in such an POLITICAL RELATIONS. 169 emergency, be separately and specially appealed to; but it would compromise the independence and integrity of British policy if our foreign transactions were to be made ordinarily dependent upon the approval of colonial delegates. Imperial Confederation means this or nothing; and such a scheme would be intolerable if it were not wholly impracticable. Nor would a Confederation serve, even if we could put up with it, either to enhance the security for our maintaining peaceable relations with foreign States, or to augment our available power in time of war. It would rather tempt an unfriendly and insidious foreign Government to sow dissension in time of peace in the minds of the colonists, in order that the measures jointly agreed upon should become abortive. Such a practice could be attempted by unofficial and irre- sponsible agents, whose proceedings would easily be disavowed by the Government which employed them. In case of war, the security for continued and active co-operation on the part of the Colonial Governments would be no greater if they were bound to us in a formal confederation, than if they were united with the British Government, as they might be in a special league. Habitual allies they should be, without such a formal bond, from their appreciation of the value of British protection; and they should always feel that it much concerns their own welfare, upon that score, to prevent any vital injury to the United Kingdom. To maintain British naval supremacy is quite as much their interest as ours. But we know that the degree to which British 170 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. interests are really concerned in European quarrels, such as the Eastern Question, and in all Continental affairs both of Europe and of Asia, is a subject of great difference of opinion in this country. There would be, we may well suppose, no less difference of opinion among colonial politicians ; and if they did not consider the particular war undertaken by Great Britain a necessary war for the security of her own dominion, they might very well decline to take an active part in it. Military preparations in the colonies would have to be voted by the Parliaments there, at Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane and Wellington, and afc Ottawa in the Canadian Dominion. Is it likely that upon a quarrel with Russia, for instance, about the Black Sea or Bulgaria, or about Afghanistan, all those Colonial Legislatures would adopt the same view as that of the British Government at Westminster ] But the expressed dissent of any one of them would cast a slur upon the war policy, and would be an encouragement to hostile intrigues. It would not o o close the colonial ports to our men-of-war, but our army would find no recruiting ground there. There might be other cases of war, arising in the neighbourhood of a particular colony, but not immediately or ostensibly undertaken for the colonial interest, in which the colonists would feel no disposition to fight. If the late war of the Transvaal had been prolonged several months, and if it had been driven towards the frontier of the Cape Colony, it is tolerably certain that the Dutch majority of the Cape Colonies would have refused to employ their burgher militia, and their POLITICAL RELATIONS. 171 other local forces, against the Boers. Any clause binding them to do so, in an Act of Imperial Con- federation, would have been treated, in that instance, with indignant contempt. To insist upon the fulfilment of such obligations by unwilling colonists would soon provoke them, and with some grounds of justification, to secede from the British Empire. Too much significance has been attributed to one or two examples of colonial readiness to volunteer for personal military service. It is said that, of late, there was a company of Volunteer Rifles at Adelaide, in South Australia, who announced their disposition to go to South Africa and to storm the Boer strong- hold at Laing's Nek. This only means that young men are as fond of fighting in Australia as they are all over the world. The English youngsters who formed a Volunteer Legion, in 1860, to fight under Garibaldi in the Two Sicilies, by no means implied an enduring confederation between Italy and Great Britain. The Spanish Legion we raised in 1834 is another example. A Canadian regiment was indeed placed at the disposal of the British Commander-in- Chief during the Crimean War; but that is an act far short of committing the whole colonial community to a proportionate share of the risks, exertions and burthens of warfare. It has been shown that the Governments of Colonies are inadmissible partners in the ordinary councils of the British Government with reference to foreign affairs. They are equally disqualified, in general, from holding conference with one another 172 OUK COLONIAL EMPIRE. upon affairs of purely colonial interest, because each of them knows its own affairs extremely well, but knows rather less than nothing of the others. The representa- tives of Canada and Australia, or British Columbia and British Guiana, could hardly be expected to understand each other very well in discussions affecting their own respective objects, or to agree in a lively appreciation of those of South African policy. There would be such an amount of inattention, that the debates of the Council of Delegates or Agents-General would soon come to an end. The Secretary of State for the Colonies would be little edified by their advice. There is a manifest inexpediency, and even impropriety, in the notion of their being called upon to interchange mutual representations concerning their own parti- cular business with Her Majesty's Government in the presence of each other. We are quite of the opinion of Mr. Childers, that "if you want to find a good cause of quarrel with the Colonies, this would be the method ; " and it would serve equally well to set them all quarrelling between themselves. The following remarks of the late Mr. John Stuart Mill, in his treatise on " Representative Government," seem to carry much weight upon this question : " Countries separated by half the globe do not present the natural conditions for being under one government, or even members of one Federation. If they had sufficiently the same interests, they have not, and never can have, a sufficient habit of taking counsel together. They are not part of the same public ; they do not discuss and deliberate in the same arena, but POLITICAL RELATIONS, 173 apart, and have only a most imperfect knowledge of what passes in the minds of one another. They neither know each other's objects, nor have confidence in each other's principles of conduct. Let any English- man ask himself how he should like his destinies to depend on an assembly, of which one-third was British- American, and another third South African and Australian. Yet to this it must come, if there were anything like fair or equal representation ; and would not every one feel that the representatives of Canada and Australia, even in matters of an Imperial character, could not know or feel any sufficient con- cern for the interests, opinions, and wishes of English, Irish, and Scotch? Even for strictly federative pur- poses, the conditions do not exist, which we have seen to be essential to a Federation." Rejecting, therefore, as vain, futile, and pre- judicial, every proposal of an organic and perpetual bond of union for deliberating upon the acts of legisa- tion and policy which the Colonial Governments are competent to perform, we still think it may be possible to improve their official methods and instruments of negotiation with the Imperial Government. They might be enabled to correspond, as has been suggested, with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, upon the business of commercial treaties, or border settle- ments with their foreign neighbours (the latter case was illustrated by recent experiences in South Africa) ; or with the Admiralty, if they wanted protection from a naval squadron ; or with the War Office, should they wish to borrow a couple of battalions or purchase 174 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. military stores ; or with the Treasury, for a loan, or with the Postmaster-General, for the improvement of their mail service. It would perhaps save the Colonial Office some trouble if the Canadian, Australasian, and South African Ministries we do not intend any others were allowed to transact more of their home business without its intervention. We do not perceive the need of any more extensive constitutional or administrative improvements. The political grouping of some colonies, however, yet remains to be perfected. An Australian Confedera- tion may come before long, and it may afford both Tasmania and "West Australia better chances of getting on in the world. The difficulty is to agree upon a common tariff of import duties ; but this is a problem for the colonial politicians to solve. Some parts of the West Indies, too, are still awaiting the completion of the process of consolidating their local governments. These reforms do not in general affect Imperial policy, or require the furtherance of British public opinion. But in considering any prospect that there may be of a close and intimate abiding union with our colonies, there are political institutions and influences outside of the colonial administration; and we believe there are very salutary influences of a social character. There are the occasional visits of our Princes and Princesses, which surely give much pleasure, and leave agreeable personal reminiscences. Their Royal Highnesses have always met with the most enthusiastic reception in our Colonies. The reception at Court, with some express POLITICAL RELATIONS. 175 favour and regard, of distinguished colonists holding dignified official rank, would not be amiss ; Queen Elizabeth would have done it, if she had reigned in this age. Honorary personal distinctions, bestowed on colonists by Her Majesty the Queen, are not thrown away. There are, of persons now living, two peers, ten Privy Councillors, five baronets, and about three hundred knights, including some of the Bath as well as all those of St. Michael and St. George, who owe these titles to the recognition of services performed by them "in and for the Colonies." The Knights and the Companions of " Sb. Michael and St. George," mostly reside in the colonies, not reckon- ing the military men who have held temporary commands. However republican their spirit may be, the members of Colonial Legislative Councils, whether nominated or elected, have never disdained the title of " Honourable." It is conceivable, without any incongruity, that some honours for life, though mo- narchical and feudal traditions would disown their style, might be conferred by the authority of a President or Senate. A courtesy title is thus retained by Senators and Governors of States in the American Republic. If a man likes to be called " Honourable " for civil services, and his fellow-citizens allow him the title, there is no great harm in it. But hereditary social distinctions, especially those accompanied with political privilege, could never be tolerable in a new country. They are rendered agreeable to English sentiment by their association with the history of England. Those stately old 176 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE* lordships, earldoms, and dukedoms still bear witness to the events of Plantagenet and Tudor reigns, though many have passed to respectable country gentry, whose ancestors never performed any conspicuous deeds of valour. In Canada and Australia there can be no such historic associations; an hereditary peerage would there be a ridiculous and odious institution. Nevertheless, if we regard the political value of our House of Lords as a branch of the de- liberative Legislature, we would gladly see colonial interests represented in the House of Lords. Is not the time approaching for the reform of that House, by the creation of some twenty-five life peerages'? Among those life peers should be found the retired veterans of the Government Offices Home, Indian, and Colo- nial ; of the Foreign Office service abroad ; of the Army and Navy, and of the High Court of Justice. We venture to think it would be feasible to give half-a-dozen life peerages to eminent colonists, whether resident in England or in the Colonies to such men, for example, as the late Mr. Went worth, of New South Wales, and some now living who could be named. They could probably afford to spend a part of their lives in England during our Parliamentary sessions ; to those living in Canada it would not be difficult to come over here almost every year. They would not, of course, be regarded as the authorised representatives of their several colonies but their sentiments would be received with great attention. Their position would be truly noble, as the unofficial mediators, in Parliament and in high English society, COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS. 177 between this ancient kingdom, with its aristocratic traditions, and those rising commonwealths that are content to let their liberties be crowned with a royalty which is the symbol of national freedom. CHAPTER X. COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS. Mutual Interest of the Colonies and the United Kingdom Com- mercial Importance of the Colonies to Great Britain Complaints of their Restrictive Tariffs Objections to Reci- procity Treaties of Commerce, and to an Imperial Customs' Union Absolute Dependence of this Country on Foreign or Colonial Supplies Food and Raw Materials Assured by the Colonies to Great Britain Prospects of Manufacturing Industry in the Colonies Conclusion. THERE is probably, for the reasons just now discussed, nothing to be done towards a closer political union of the Colonial Governments with that of the British Islands by any new form of Imperial federation. It is in vain to lay much stress on the title of Empire, which would, strictly speaking, imply an absolute command held by the Sovereign State over the military forces of its vassals. This does not in reality exist, and the ordinary conditions of the colonies will not admit of such an organisation. But we trust that its legitimate end, the security in future of all English communities 178 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. 011 the globe from any foreign molestation, will be attained by cherishing the sense that they have substantial interests in common with the United Kingdom. Their active co-operation, in case of need, to defend these interests beyond the limits of Europe may then be always relied upon, while they would also be disposed to come to the assistance of Great Britain, if she were in peril nearer home, from their perception that she alone can help them, by her naval supremacy, to abide in perfect safety. A policy of free mutual assurance will thus be developed, which could, upon sufficient occasions, become the ground of effectual efforts in the way of defensive warfare. The entire protection of British maritime com- merce, and that of the Mediterranean and Suez Canal route to the Indian Ocean, with the maintenance of all our naval and military stations described in a pre- ceding chapter, are objects in which the colonists of Australia and New Zealand, of Canada and South Africa, are greatly concerned. These and other British possessions, including the West Indies, the East Indies, and those of the East Asiatic Archi- pelago, and our Indian and Chinese trading connec- tions, have already begun to have some dealings with one another. With the future development of their industrial and mercantile economy, they will find themselves bound together by manifold ties of profit- able intercourse, which the imperial patronage of Britain will render secure against foreign interference. It is therefore the community of material interests, as well as the bonds of social sympathy and the COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS. 179 identity of principles and sentiments, that should incline England and the English colonies to mutual aid. In the first place, however, let us make it clear that we repudiate the mere shop-keeping view of our colonies, which regards them chiefly as markets for the sale of our manufactured wares. There is some- thing ignoble in the idea of our having created several new English nations for this purpose. The fiscal policy of Victoria, as we have observed, and as the wisest public men of that province have recently testified, is injurious to her own prosperity, while New South Wales, with free trade, makes more satisfactory progress. We note this result, in com- paring the management of their affairs ; but we have no right to bring a reproachful complaint against Victoria on behalf of our merchants and manufacturers whose goods are there handicapped by a high pro- hibitive tariff; though we may tender advice on the subject. Canada, again, while ' professing her attachment to the abstract principle of free trade, resorts to fiscal measures which are ostensibly de- signed to enforce certain reciprocity concessions from the United States, but which have a prejudicial effect upon British commercial interests. We believe such measures to be inexpedient and improper, though they are much in vogue just now among some of our own politicians as fancied means of driving foreign nations to accept more equal terms of doing business. It is too much like carrying on an aggressive war, for the purpose of inculcating a peaceable disposition in the 180 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. minds of neighbouring people ; it is " doing evil that good may come." But the United States' citizens and their Government must be aware that it is not England that is acting thus. The responsibility of it belongs to Canada alone, while England suffers her share of the inconvenience. We should not, of course, think it right for Canada to exclude our own manu- facturers and to admit those of the United States, but we have no pretension to restrict or to enlarge the Canadian trade with America by a compul- sory modification of Canadian tariffs. It is still to be hoped that not only our Australian and Canadian fellow-subjects, but also the citizens of that Republic, will ultimately find out the advantage of buying whatever they want in the best and cheapest market. Our legislature has no more faculty of coercing the one set of customers than the other. Economic and fiscal liberty is enjoyed by each self-governing British colony to the fullest extent. We have advanced far beyond the era of the "Board of Trade and Plantations," which preceded, in the last century, the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies, and whose main endeavour was to keep up the monopoly of colonial trade. Not only were the colonies prohibited from all foreign trade, but the inter-colonial commerce, as between New York or Boston and the West Indies, was vexatiously impeded. It was to the just resentment excited by this system, more than to England's claim of a power to impose taxation for revenue purposes, that the revolt of our American colonies was principally due. The same fatal error had been committed by COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS, 181 Spain and Holland, our foreign precursors in American and tropical colonisation. Earl Grey, who is a consistent free trader, but not always friendly to the political liberties of the Colonies, has lately expressed his displeasure with some of them for the use they have chosen to make of the power to fix their own tariffs, without regard to the accepted principles of British policy. He deems that they have been guilty of a sort of apostasy or treason to the cause embraced with such earnest faith by the political leaders of our nation. The Australian Government Act of 1850 contained some clauses by which the provincial legislatures were expressly restrained from imposing differential duties upon imports, but these clauses were repealed by an Act of the Imperial Parliament in 1873. In Canada, under the Dominion Act of 1867, there was no statutory prohibition of that kind, but it was usual, as a general rule, for the Im- perial Government to instruct the Governor-General to disallow any bill passed by the Dominion Legislature for imposing such differential duties. It mattered not, of course, whether they were designed for pro- tection of Canadian special interests, or to furnish a weapon of retaliation against the United States in the dispute concerning a reciprocity treaty. Those royal instructions were discontinued in 1879, on the appointment of the Marquis of Lome. Lord Grey sees in this much cause for lamentation, and is evidently disposed, even now if it were possible, to replace the colonies in a state of tutelage or pupilage 182 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. sucli as they endured above thirty years ago, under his own guardianship at the Colonial Office. But he is aware that a Departmental Minister in these days is no longer autocratic as he was then ; so a new device has occurred to him, that of creating a permanent consultative Committee on Colonial Affairs, to which the London Agents-General of the Colonies, being made Privy Councillors of the Crown, shall be ex ojjicio admitted. This official authority, somewhat resembling the Council for India, would support the decisions of the Secretary of State, who would also consult the Board of Trade upon, all measures of the Colonial Legislatures having to do with tariffs and "Customs' business. But the extent to which our exports to the Colonies may have been affected by any protectionist legislation on their part seems to have been much exaggerated. The Australasian populations, includ- ing New Zealand, amount to 2,745,000, of which that of Victoria is but 858,000, indeed not very much less than the third part of the whole. Those Australasian Colonies, taking them all round, yearly consume British manufactures to the value of above eleven millions sterling, which is at the rate of more than .4 a head for every man, woman, and child among them. We may feel pretty sure that the example of Victoria will not readily be followed by the other colonies, which are just now congratulating them- selves upon their increased prosperity, which they ascribe to their different line of conduct. To Canada, with her four millions of people, our manufacturers sell COMMUNITY OF INTERESTS. 183 tlieir goods at the rate of 1 12s. ahead yearly, taking the average of three years past, for every person in the Dominion. There has been a sad falling off in our exports to the United States, some portions of which were formerly sent there through Canada ; we sell to their people only at the rate of 8s. 4d. a head. British colonists, in proportion to their numbers, are incomparably the best customers we have in the world. They purchase of our wares to the amount of above seventeen millions sterling ; and if we reckon India and the Colonies together, our total exports to all parts of the British Empire exceed fifty-eight millions sterling, which is six millions above our total exports to the Continent of Europe. And while our foreign export trade, both to Europe and to America, has somewhat diminished in the past ten years, the exports of Great Britain to India and the Colonies have increased by one-fourth of their present amount. Australia is now a better customer than France. The proposal of an Imperial Customs' Union by which these advantages might be secured for ever, and in spite of every change of circumstances, is not less impracticable than that of obliging foreign nations to enter into treaties of commercial reciprocity. It is unjust, we think, to require of free agents, dealing with their own affairs, a formal engagement to con- tinue dealing with us any longer than it may seem worth their while to do so. Conventions and formal obligations to such an effect are no sooner ratified than they begin to provoke the hostility of 184 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. disappointed class interests, which soon raise the cry that native industry has been sacrificed to alien greed of gain. Secession, revolt, and sometimes a war prompted on both sides by base and degrading motives, have in former ages resulted from this selfish policy. But in the present situation of England, her own economic wants, more especially those of external supplies of food and of raw materials, render her incapable of bargaining with foreigners, so with her colonists, for a reciprocity of mercantile privileges. She would greatly miss French wines, French silks, and clocks, all of which would immediately become most expensive luxuries. England cannot live without eating ; and the bread and butter, the beef and mutton, the pork and cheese, the fruit and sugar that she consumes are mainly imported from abroad. She cannot live without working ; and the cotton, the wool, the timber, some of the metals, the dye-stuffs, and sundry articles used in her manufactures, are of Colonial or American, of Indian or African production. It is impossible, then, for her ever to say to the pro- prietors of these commodities, which are so needful to her existence. " You must promise always to buy manu- factures from me, or else you cannot expect me to buy what grows by favour of nature in your country/' The Americans and the colonists know better j they perceive that she can never, with the small area of land and the dull climate she has at home, subsist as a populous industrial community without constant supplies from them. The eflect of a cessation of mercantile exchange upon the people of the United COMMUNITY OP INTERESTS. 185 Kingdom, thirty-five millions and a quarter according to the recent census, would be inconceivably terrible. It would mean utter destitution for millions of the inhabitants of our large towns, who could neither be employed nor fed for many days without supplies fetched from beyond the ocean. All the money and credit in England, all the power of the Imperial Government, could not keep our people long alive, when deprived of those resources. It appears from the above remarks, that the greatest importance of the British colonies to the mother country does not lie in their capacity of receiving her commercial exports. It is rather in their capacity of producing and supplying to her those commodities, few and simple but of enormous quantity, which are needed to support her artificial industries, and her quickly increasing town population. We have, upon this account, purposely confined our separate notices of the commercial statistics of different colonies to the amount of their own respective exports. The amount of their imports from Great Britain, though it may be interesting to our manufacturers, merchants, and shippers, is of secondary national importance, in a true economic point of view. That which is most essential to the general welfare is an unfailing supply of cheap food and the materials of industry. We do not perceive any necessary condition, except the cost of freight, which may yet be greatly reduced by economic improvements of navigation, that should put a limit to the abundance and cheap- ness of this supply from our colonies of North America, 186 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. Australia, and New Zealand ; and South Africa may supply cattle and fruit, as well as wool, like the Australian provinces. The different experiments that have been made, by the freezing process and others, in the art of preserving animal flesh and vegetables for conveyance on a long voyage, have attained perfect scientific success j and their economic and commercial success is probably assured for Australian not less than for Canadian traffic. British householders, who now find their weekly butcher's bill four times the sum of their baker's bill, may thus hope for a considerable amount of relief. It is by no means impossible, that a cheap and abundant supply of wool from our colonies may eventually reduce the cost of our ordinary clothing, so as to allow more frequent changes of wear, contributing much to health and personal comfort. The effect of lessening the price of broadcloth, flannel, and worsted, by cheapening the material, would be quickly seen in a largely increased home consumption. We look to Australia and other southern colonies for this great social benefit, as we have already received from America the inestimable gift of cheap cotton for our shirts and bedding. It is no small advantage of modern life in Europe to be clothed and fed by these contributions from the New World and from the Antipodes ; and it seems to us that Great Britain, with this opportunity of getting the necessaries of life at moderate cost, ought to thrive better than any other thickly-peopled country in the world. We decline, therefore, to join in the com- plaints of our advocates of " reciprocity " and " fair COMMUNITY OP INTERESTS. 187 trade," and of those retrograde politicians who would have the Crown put a veto on colonial tariffs. Let us boldly face the prospect before us. Some of the colonies as well as some provinces of our Indian Empire will set up a variety of manufactures, as fast as they get the capital to spare, and will soon be able to supply their own markets. And why should they not 1 They have been endowed by the bounty of Nature with the same materials, coal, iron, and other useful ingredients or appliances, that have made England and Scotland wealthy. If we esteem our own country as obviously favoured by the Creator's Provi- dence, with the means of manufacturing prosperity, why not think so of New South Wales, of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, and possibly of New Zealand] Their own people, at least in the next generation, will assuredly think so; and will utterly disregard the claim of our manufacturing districts to furnish their textile fabrics, their hardware, their steel rails, machines, or whatever they can make for themselves. And, further, it is to be expected that wherever they can push this kind of trade upon their own account, they will do so without any scruple about competing with our foreign commerce. The Canadian exports will soon find their way to Brazil and the River Plate ; while those from Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland will arrive at the Chinese and Japanese ports, at Valparaiso and San Francisco. And why should they not ] JFair play, free action, clear ways opened to enterprise in every direction, are demanded alike for all. That each country and people should produce 188 OUR COLONIAL EMPIRE. the best it can, and should offer it to any who want the like at the most reasonable price, is a dictate of natural justice, superior to all traditions of an exclusive national policy. It is due to the / common interest of mankind that this principle of ! commercial liberty should be acknowledged. Great Britain and her colonies will remain a happy family upon such an understanding, if the junior common- wealths rely upon being allowed to do the best they can for themselves in the world's markets of trade, and to regulate their own markets by notions of their Domestic convenience. We feel sure that misapprehensions regarding these topics have an injurious tendency, in the present state of public opinion, as they preclude the frank and fair recognition of the internal autonomy of these rising English commonwealths happily and honourably associated with the United Kingdom under a glorious monarchy. England has never possessed or desired, and she never will desire or could possess, any dominion resembling that which oppressed the Spanish Colonies. Her ambition is satisfied as the mother and the nurse of free nations. " Her children shall rise up and call her blessed," through the ages of a remote future, admiring in her the author of their peace and freedom. INDEX. ABSOLUTE POLITICAL EQUALITY, 85 Not to be Regretted in A ustralia, 86 Aden, Ceylon, and Mauritius, 155 African Labour, why brought to Ame- rica, 22 Agricultural Colonial Settlements, 31 Antigua a Military Station, 154 Ascension, Naval Garrison at, 154 Assam Tea Plantations and Exports, 50 Auckland and Wellington, 114 , Progress of, hindered by Maori War, 114 Australasia, a Field for Tropical Pro- duce, 50 Australia and New Zealand compared, 118 Compared with Canada, 79 , Early Colonisation and Progress of, 78. 79 , Gold and Wool the Staple Riches of, 80 , Her Remoteness her Best De- fence, 81 , its Position, Extent, &c., 78 , its Six Provinces, 79 , Leading Colonies or Provinces of, 82 Native Races not Formidable, 81 , Resources and National Debt of, 80 , Splendid immediate Future of, 80 , Political Detachment of, si , Protection of, in case of War, 81 Australian Colonies divided on Ques- tion of Federal Union, 103 Politics lack Steadiness, 86 Explanation of this, 86, 87 Apologies and Excuses for, 87 BAHAMAS, TILK. 44 BarlKulocs, a Military Station, 154 , how Colonised, 33 Basuto War, Cost of, 135 Bengal Indigo Districts 50 Bermuda-, the, Dockyards and For- tresses of. 153 , Government of, 153 , their Importance to Great Bri- tain, 152 Brisbane, its Influence in Greenland, 90 British Colonial Empire, 28 , how to be Regarded, 28 Colonists our best Customers, 183 Columbia and Vancouver Island, , Great Natural Wealth of, &c,, 74 Guiana, Resources of, 40 , Peculiar Constitution of, 40 Honduras, and its Products, 45 Institutions impossible in Aus- tralia, *5 Mercantile Communities in China, 5C British North Anieri Colonial Freedom not Severance from the British Empire, 25 Life Peerages suggested, 176 Office, Defects of, ]6:!, 164 Parliaments, Si-ando|s, &c., of, 83 Readiness to Volunteer, 171 Colonies concerned in Protection of Commerce, 178 must Supply Europe with Food and Raw Material, 127 possess few Interests in Common, 163 will ultimately Manufacture their own Goode, 187 Colonisation of America and Ne,v Zea- land Compared, 111 190 INDEX. Colonists not Bound to Aid Mother Country in time of War, 159 "Combined Court" in British Guiana, 41 Commercial Liberty, 188 Policy, Changes in, 25 Stations, or " Factories," 32 Composite Nationality, 28 Conquest of Spanish Colonies by the English, Dutch, and French, 23 Constitutional Self-government in British Colonies, 1.08 Coolie Immigration Question, 37 Coolies in British Guiana, 42 , Cost of Importing, 43 "Court of Policy" in British Guiana, 40 Crown Colonies, Constitution of, 164 *" /"Cyprus : its Size, Population, &c., 151 , not Definitely a British Colony, 152 , Position and Political Value, 152 DEMERARA, Superior to West India Islands for Sugar Culture, 35 Development of Mutual Support be- tween England and Colonies, 178 Diplomatic Negotiation by Colonies, 161 Distribution of British Plantation Colonies, 32 Dockyards, &c., Abroad, 148 , Composition of, 57 Dominion of Canada, Establishment of, 57 , Government, Senate, and House of Commons of, 76 , Governors of, and what they have done, 76 , Population, Revenues, National Debt of, &c., 76 , Reflections on, 75 Duke of Edinburgh at the Cape, 138 Dutch Colonisation in Early Times, 21 EDUCATION IN NEW SOUTH WALES, 101 Emancipation of the Colonies, 25 9'f various kinds effected by Bri- tish Statesmen, 27 Empire, a Solemn and Sacred Trust, 29 England and the " Spanish Main," 23 , Dependent on Colonies or Fo- reigners, 184 English Communities, Imperial but yet Republican, 27 Political Life, the Source of Wide Reforms, 26 , Progress of, exhibited, 27 Race in the Great South, 131 Earl Grey on Colonial Tariffs, 181 Espeut on Cost of Sugar-growing, S8 Esquimau a Naval Port, 156 European Colonisation unlike that of Greece and Rome, 17 FALKLAND ISLANDS, 155 Fanatical Democracy in Australia, 84 Federal Union of Australian Colonies only a Question of Time, 108 Federation in Australia, 82 Fedora Li on of New Zealand Provinces. 115 , Form, of Government adopted in, 115 Fiji Islands : their Resources, &c., 51 First Order of Colonial Plantations, 18 , A Provisional Settlement for Specific Commercial Objects, 19 , Labour therein not Performed by European Settlers, 19 Free Negro Labour, how regarded, 37 " Selectors " in New South Wales, 93 Trade in Colonies, 179 Trade only Natural Justice, 188 Erench Colonisation in Early Times, 21 - Rule in India, 23 Frere, Sir Bartle, 160 GALEKA AND GAIKA WAR, 135 Gambia and Sierra Leone, 52 Gibraltar, its Utility, &c., 151 Gold Coast and Lagos, 52 Discoveries, Influence of, on New South Wales and Victoria, 89 Gordon, Sir Arthur, at Fiji, 131 Government Life Assurance in New Zealand, 122 of New Zealand, Centralisation of, 115 Governors of Colonies, their Powers, Difficulties, &c., 164 Grant and Foster on New Zealand, 119 Gravesend, 9, 10, 12 Great Britain's Highest Office, 29 Growth of English North American Colonies, to what due, 56 HALIFAX, A MILITARY AND NAVAL STATION, 154 Harbours of New Zealand, 131 Hayti, Abolition of Slavery in, 26 Hector on New Zealand, 129 Hokitika, Gold Fields of, 125 Homeward Orient course, 14 Hong-Kong, Position, &c.. of, 49, 50 Hottentots at the Cape, 134 Hugest Island on the Globe, 78 IMPERIAL ALLEGIANCE, MEANING OF, 159 Customs' Union, 183 Federation, 167 , Evils likely to arise from, 169 , No Security for Co-operation of Colonies m War, 169 , Various Projects for effecting, 1G7 Improvement of Connection between Mother Country and Colonies, 173 , Political Grouping a means to, 174 , Royal Visits as a means to, 174 . by Personal Honours, &c., 175 India, 27, 52 Indian Ocean, Garrisons on, 155 JAMAICA, FAILURE OF COLONISATION IN, 33 , her Present Condition, 36 . Surrender of Political Liberties in, :-:6 becomes a mere Crown Colony, 37 INDEX. 191 Jeffray : on Colonial Interests in Vic- toria, 99 KAFFIRS ix CAPE COLONY, 135 Keewatin, District of, 70 Kidnapping in Melanesia, 131 LABUAN AND ITS PRODUCTS. 50 Land Laws in New Zealand, 121 Question in New South Wai OP, 93 , Mischievous Legislation on, 95 , Losses arising from, 96 Leeward Islands, The, 44 Grouped in Federal Union, 44 Lesser Antilles, The, 41 , Social Condition of, 42 Life Peerages in House of Lords, 176 Lusitania, Arrival of, 14 MALTA AND Gozo, 151 Manitoba and North-west Territory, 70 , Conditions of Land in, 73 , Extent and Government of, 72 , Future Condition and Advantages of, 71 , Price of Agricultural Land in, 73 , Provisions for Settlement of, 73 , Rapid Progress of, 70 Maories, The, 107 likely to Die out in time, 108 Maritime Provinces, 65 , Invaluable to British Ame- rica, 65 Traffic likely to reach a high pitch in New Zealand, 131 Mauritius, or Isle of France, 45 , its History, Exports, Govern- ment, &c.,46 Meat, Price of, in Australia, 128 of Australia required by European Populations, 128 Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, 99 , Exports of, 88 Mennonites in Manitoba, 72 Mercantile Colonial Settlements, 82 Factory Colonies, 31 Mill on "Federation," 172 Monopoly of Colonial Trade, 180 Morant Bay, Massacre of, 36 NATAL, CONDITION AND PROSPECTS OF, 143 , Coolie Labour necessary in, 143 , Exceptional as a Colony, 144 Offers no Suitable Opening for Emigration, 143 , Slow Progress of, 142 , Sugar-growing in, 48 , when a British Possession, 142 , why so called, 142 , why unlikely to be successful, 144 , Zulu Population in, 142 Naval Establishments abroad, 147 , Annual Cost of Maintenance of, 148 Necessary for Protection of Trade, 149 , Safety of, how Secured, 149 , Stations enumerated, 147 Negro Slave Trade, why Invented, 21 , why a Necessity, 22 New Brunswick, 65, 67- and Princw Edward Island, 68 Law regarding Execution for Debt, 68 , Liberality of, to Settlers, 67 New Zealand, a "Geographical Expres- sion," 112 , Best Land in, 114 , Agricultural Capacity of, 126 Antipodes of Great Britain, 104 Association, 108 , Commercial Disadvantages of, 127 , Distance of, from England, 104 , Early Condition of, 105 , Financial Policy of , 91 , First Governor of, 109 , History of, for Forty Years, 108 , islands of, 104 , Large Public Debt of, 117 Legislative Council and House of Representatives, 116 , Museums, &c., in, 124 , No Established Church in, 123 , Not a Britain of the South, 107 , Present Government of, 116 , Public Education in, 123 , Public Works carried out in, 116 , Revenues of. 118 , Settlements in, 108 , Social Condition of, 124 ' , Soil and Aspect of, 106 , in what Differing from United Kingdom, 106 , South Island of, 110 , Statistics of Trade in, 124 , Unequalled for Cattle Farming, , University of, 123 New South Wales, 78, 79, 82 , Form of Government in, 83 Newfoundland, Fisheries and Trade of,G9 , Government of, 70 , Island of, 69 Nova Scotia, 65, 66 , its Maritime Importance, 66 , Natural Wealth and Products of,67 ONTARIO, ADMINISTRATION OP, 59 , City of, how Constituted, 60 , Early History of, 58 , Elective Franchise in, 60 , Extent, Temperature, Produce, &c., 59 , Land Laws in, 60 , Municipal Incorporation In, 60 , Popular Education in, 61 Orange State and Transvaal, 146 , Dutch Colonisation in, 14G Orient at Gravesend, 9, 10 Otago, Dunedin, and Canterbury, Founding of, 110 , Gold-fields in, 114, 125 , Public Works in, 113 , University of Dunedin in, 113 Outward Bound the Route, 13 PEASANT PROPRIETARY IN JAMAICA, 39 Peerages, otit of place in Colonies, 170 Plantations, with what Associated, 18 192 INDEX. Popular Education in Canterbury, 113 Population in Australian Colonies, 87 Portugal, Loss of its Maritime Ascen- dency, 23 Portuguese Adventurers, 17 in Madeira, the Canary Islands, and Brazil, 81 Preparations for Departure, 12 Prince Edward Island, 65, 69 Henry of Portugal, 16 , his work at Sagres, 17 Protection in Colonies, 179, 183 , Impossibility of, 184 QUEBEC, CONSTITUTION OF, 63 , Larere Towns and Trade of, 62 , Legislative Council and Assembly of, 64 , Municipal Arrangements in, 64 , Popular Education in, 65 , Population of, their Loyalty, 62 , Province of, 61 , Religion Prevailing in, 63 taken by Wolfe, 56 Oueen of the West Pacific, 131 Queensland, 79, 82 , Adapted for Sugar, 50 , Coolie Labour desirable in, 51 , Danger to Prosperity of : 90 , Diffusion of Enterprise in, 90 , Form of Government in, 83 , Land Laws of, 91 RAILWAYS IN CANTERBURY, us Recognition of Old Friends, 15 Reforms in Colonial Administration, 165 Registration and Transfer of Land in New Zealand and South Australia, 122 Regular and Colonial Forces, 161 Relations between Great Britain and her Colonies, 158 ST. HELENA, A SHIPPING STATION, 154 Secession of the Colonies, 29 Second Class of Colonies, 164 Order of Colonial Plantations, 20 , a Transplanting of European Society, 20 , Each a Young Nation, 20 Self-government, 28 , the Right of every Common- wealth. 25 Ship-building in New Zealand, 131 Shop-keeping View of Colonies, 179 Simon's B.'.y a Naval Station. 154 Singapore ihe Centre of British East Asiatic Commerce, 49 , Revenues, Imports, Exports, &c., of, 49 Slave Emancipation, 24 , Effect of, 35 Small Freeholds in New Zealand, 119 Social Progpects of the Colonies, 10 South African Dominion, 146 , No Solid Arguments for, 146 South Australia 79,82 South Australia, Form of Government in, 83 , Land Laws of, Favourable to Agricultural Enterprise, 92 , Land Question in, S3 , Explanation of Controversy respecting, 94 , Overland Telegraph-line in, 92 , Progress of, in Domestic Im- provement, 93 South Eastern Africa, 145 , why Unsuitable for Colonisation, 145 South Seas, Maritime Traffic of, 130 " Squatters" in New South Wales, 93 Starting for New Zealand, 10 Straits Settlements and Singapore, 48 Sugar Plantations, how Managed, 34 Sydney a Naval Station, 155 TARANAKI, OK NEW PLYMOUTH, 114 Tasman and " New Holland," 105 Terrace Pier, Gravesend, 9 Third Class of Colonies, 165 Enjoy Practical Self-government, 165 Tilbury, in Essex, 9 Trading " Factory," or Agency, 18 , for whose Benefit established, 18 Transvaal and Zulu Wars attributed to want of Foreign Office control, 162 Trinidadiind British Guiana, 40 , Coolie Immigration in, 40 , Produce and Exports of, 40 Tropical Produce Colonies, 31 , their Different Classes, 31 VANCOUVER ISLAND, 74, 75 , its Coal, Harbours, &c., 75 Victoria, 79, 82 , Defences at, 156 , Education in, 101 , Form of Government in, 83 , Gold and Wool in, 97 , Increase of Population in, 98 , Industrial Classes in. 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