Such is the sketch of what has been done, and may be done again. And how can it be prevented? Can we quench the spirit of adventure which burns within the breasts of Englishmen ? Can we forbid our countrymen to settle in remote lands, and amid savage nations? Can we forbid them to profit by their superiority either of skill, intelligence, and industry, or of boldness, combination, and defensive courage? In a word, can we compel the countrymen of Drake, Cavendish, Raleigh, and Clive to forego the traditions of their race, and to adopt the policy and the principles of those who believe the whole duty of man is divided between spinning cotton and selling it?

The thing is wholly impossible. So long as Englishmen are Englishmen, so long will the love of enterprise and adventure lead them to remote and unfriendly regions, to the subjugation of savage tribes and savage forests, to the settlement of disturbed territories, and, as a consequence, to the foundation of colonies.

There is indeed one course open to us: we need only state it, and submit it to the judgment of the country. We can leave the vanguard of these self-relying rovers to make their own settlements as best they may, without aid or co-operation from England. We can leave them to perish in the first attempts to establish a factory and a market; but even this wise and politic neglect may not succeed in killing those whom we abandon. In spite of neglect and desertion, indifference and contempt, New Zealand and Southern Africa may grow and thrive as the New England States grew and throve before.

But has experience proved this to be the truest policy after all? It was inexpensive enough, Heaven knows. We left for many generations the colonists of North America to make their own way as best they could, to maintain a war of controversy with the Lords Proprietors and the Crown, and a war of arms with the wild Indians. They knew little of us till their militia saw English Guardsmen outwitted by the strategy of the Delawares on meeting in the array of battle the forces of Montcalm. Persons who have studied the history of those days know that the Colonists looked on the English troops with that mixture of admiration, curiosity, and jealousy with which men regard strangers and aliens, rather than with the warmth and sympathy with which they receive men of the same blood and lineage. And there was reason for this: the Colonies had grown up apart and distinct from England; the Imperial Government had done little for them in the aggregate; the points of contact between them and the mother-country had been points of collision rather than of sympathy. Such communication as the citizens of many of the Northern and Eastern States kept up was of a narrow and sectarian

sectarian kind: it was with the Nonconformists or Republicans of England-with certain sects in certain localities-rather than with the body of the English people, that they had the most frequent correspondence; and, save here and there the visit of a cadet of some Cavalier family to his kinsmen in Virginia or Carolina, the representatives of England whom the Southern States were accustomed to receive were not members of the most respectable classes. Altogether, the inaction and indifference of England as regarded her American Colonies tended to create and foster social habits and political notions not perhaps hostile to those of England, but certainly different from them. The independence of the Colonies had become a social and moral fact before it received a political recognition; and its political recognition was the ultimate result of a feeling long and generally predominant in the Colonial mind.

It may be or may not be that the loss of the American Colonies was an injury to England. This is an open question. But there can be no question at all that the manner of their separation was then, and has since been, highly injurious to us. And it must never be forgotten that the previous estrangement gave its tone and colouring to all the circumstances preceding and following that separation. The devout regret expressed by some of the leaders of the Revolution that the policy of Great Britain had not suffered them and us to grow up one great people together, was, we suspect, unshared by the mass of American colonists, whose sentiments were Provincial, not Imperial, because their whole previous training had been not Imperial, but Provincial. They reflected the habits of thought common to the sectarians and middle classes of England, unmodified and uncorrected by the manners of a superior class, or by the authority of venerable seats of learning. They had not an English, but a Colonial way of looking at things. They had few common points of interest with this country, and the native tone of thought was independent and antagonistic on most questions of civil and religious polity. A divergence so great at starting was more likely to widen than to contract, after the commencement of an open rupture. He would be a bold man who should assert that it has contracted.

There is no offence which either nations or individuals are so little likely to forgive as insult or contempt. A positive material injury may be forgiven; but contempt, never. It is recorded that when the Royal and the Revolutionary troops came into collision at Breed's Hill, the latter cried out to the nearest English colonel, Colonel Abercrombie, are we cowards?' A taunt uttered carelessly in the English Parliament, and repeated a hundred times in violent pamphlets, had

rankled

rankled deeply in the Provincial breast, and the recollection of it could be effaced only by bloodshed. The same feeling of wounded self-esteem may be perpetuated in the breasts of our Canadian and Australian fellow-subjects. To tell the Colonies that they are of no use to us-that we don't care for themthat we can do better without them-is to insult them in their tenderest and weakest point: for they dearly love the English connexion-they are proud of it. They speak of England as their 'home;' they send their children 'home' for education; they point with delight to them when they have been educated at home;' they have imported their habits of life and their habits of dress from England; they have closely imitated our public and political customs; they have their Parliaments, their Queen's Bench, their Speaker, and their Chief Justice. The forms of the English Parliament are the forms of the Australian Parliament; the law of the Queen's Bench at Westminster is the law of the Queen's Bench at Sydney; the tenure by which an English Ministry retains power is the same as that by which an Australian Ministry retains it. That there are points in which the Colonies differ from England, and in which we could wish that they did not differ, is too true; but there remain phases of resemblance strong enough to make us earnestly deprecate any rupture of our present connexion: above all, an arrogant, contemptuous, insulting rupture.

To bid these and other colonies go-what would be the results of such a step? They would be no less costly to our resources than humiliating to our pride. The people so cast off would carry with them, not a grateful memory of the connexion which we had dissolved, or of the benefits which we had formerly conferred, but a vindictive memory of the slight and indifference which had accompanied and embittered the dissolution. If strong enough, they would establish an independent Government, the first principles of which would be hatred and antagonism to England. If too weak to do this, they would attach themselves to some strong European Government desirous of possessing colonies, and credulous of the advantages derivable from their possession. And we may rest assured that this desire and this credulity are common to more than one nation. Spain has never ceased to sigh for what she has lost, and France has never ceased to envy what we have acquired. French orators and statesmen have over and over again descanted on the easy escape from popular convulsions which England has obtained in her distant dependencies. The colonization of Algeria and of New Caledonia— humble imitations as they may be of our efforts—are tributes to our good fortune. Nor should it be forgotten that in certain respects

respects France, as a colonizing Power, has succeeded where we failed. France may not indeed have planted settlements where the people so soon acquired wealth as in our colonies; but in colonizing Canada she left a more true antitype of her contemporary self than any English colony has preserved of contemporary England. She formalized her colonies, as she has since formalized her constitutions; and that the former have not more exactly corresponded to her grand designs, may be attributed not perhaps to the inferiority but to the contentedness of her colonists. France -and especially the French Emperor-desires still to colonize; and we do not think that she would willingly forego the chance of bringing within her orbit an erratic satellite flung away from the colonial system of Great Britain. She knows well enough that a dependency already settled by some thousands of English artisans and labourers would, in an economical point of view, be the nucleus of a far more profitable possession than any planted by an unmixed French population; and the facility with which the American people, at the period of independence, adopted French ideas and French phrases, assures her that other English colonists would readily put themselves under the code of her laws and the protection of her flag.

We do not wish to exaggerate the loss or inconvenience to England which would be caused by such a transfer. By itself, it would not, perhaps, be of very great moment—at least, not in the eyes of those who regard economical results alone. Still, even in their opinion, it would entail material losses and grave inconvenience. With a foreign dominion and foreign protection would come a hostile policy and anti-English tariffs, to which some of the colonies are already sufficiently inclined. The spirit of offended nationality would combine with the spirit of hereditary hostility. Heavy duties would be imposed on English goods; a jealous eye would be kept on English residents, or prohibitions issued against the residence of fresh immigrants from England. Those who had been born in the Colonies, or had been first protected and then abandoned by us, would have to carry on their business, not, as heretofore, under the protection of their own flag and their own law, but under the menace of an alien flag, and under an alien law administered in an alien tongue. And this law and this tongue would become the inheritance of their children and the badge of their subjection.

This would be sufficiently sad and humiliating, but, by itself, it might not much affect the interests or the pride of the people of England. A few might feel the humiliation, while the mass of the population did not feel it at all. It would not, however, be a solitary or inconsequential injury. It would only be after

this double act of desertion and self-humiliation had been fully accomplished, and when we looked round to see what the world thought of it all, that we should learn what it is to lose the respect of our neighbours. As to the reception of the act there can be little doubt. We should awake from our little game of selfish economy, dinned by the tumultuous outburst of derision and reproach, the unparalleled vehemence of which would hardly equal the baseness of our treachery and our cowardice. We should, indeed, have fewer miles of sea and land to guard; and we should be saved the expense which their protection necessitates. But we should learn how much costlier than gold it is to maintain order and content in a polity the citizens of which have ceased to be respected by others and to respect themselves; and we should learn by a double experience how bitter is the enmity of alienated and exasperated friends.

There is one class of dependencies our desertion of which would be flagrantly mean and treacherous-we mean our tropical colonies. In these alone does the black or the mulatto enjoy the reality of that freedom, the shadowy name of which is his privilege in the colonies of other European States. In the colonies of France his pretended liberty does not shelter him from many burdens and some annoyances. He has exchanged subjection to a private master for subjection to the State. The State is now his master, and holds him at its disposal to order about, to send here and there, just as it chooses. Are immediate additions required for an expedition to Vera Cruz? a brigade of free black 'concitoyens' is despatched at once from Martinique or Guadaloupe. Are public works undertaken for which an immediate supply of fresh labour is demanded? the black 'concitoyens' must show their gratitude to the country which liberated them by a prompt assent to the task, the wages and rations fixed by a paternal administration. The French negro must never forget what he was; he must not presume to ape the airs and demeanour of his former masters. He must doff his hat to the white man, must get out of his way on the roads, and must not aspire to any participation in public employment, save the most menial, or of public voting, save of the most submissive kind. must always be prepared to explain how he gets his living, on pain of being set to work by the Government. Perhaps, all things considered, this is better than the negro's life in the northern part of the United States. There he is recognised as a free man by a Constitution which proclaims all men to have been born equal. But his freedom is mutilated and circumscribed in all directions. He is not, indeed, held to be the servant of the State. He cannot be marched off to build bridges Vol. 114.-No. 227.

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