the ordinary expenses of
their governments, instead of allowing them to bear their own expenses.
Instead of suffering them to judge what are the measures best adapted to
secure their peaceful relations with the aboriginal tribes, and
endeavouring to secure their good conduct--instead of telling them that
they must not look for help from you unless they maintain the principles
of justice, you tell them, 'You must not meddle with the relations
between yourselves and the natives; that is a matter for parliament'; a
minister sitting in Downing Street must determine how the local
relations between the inhabitants of the colony and the aboriginal
tribes are to be settled, in every point down to the minutest detail.
Nay, even their strictly internal police your soldiery is often called
upon to maintain. Then, again, the idea of their electing their own
officers is, of course, revolutionary in the extreme--if not invading
the royal supremacy, it is something almost as bad, dismembering the
empire; and as to making their own laws upon their local affairs without
interference or control from us, that is really an innovation so opposed
to all ideas of imperial policy, that I think my honourable friend the
member for Southwark (Sir William Molesworth) has been the first man in
the House bold enough to propose it. Thus, in fact, the principles on
which our colonial administration was once conducted have been precisely
reversed. Our colonies have come to be looked upon as being, not
municipalities endowed with internal freedom, but petty states. If you
had only kept to the fundamental idea of your forefathers, that these
were municipal bodies founded within the shadow and cincture of your
imperial powers--that it was your business to impose on them such
positive restraints as you thought necessary, and having done so, to
leave them free in everything else--all those principles, instead of
being reversed, would have survived in full vigour--you would have saved
millions, I was going to say countless millions, to your exchequer; but
you would have done something far more important by planting societies
more worthy by far of the source from which they spring; for no man can
read the history of the great American Revolution without seeing that a
hundred years ago your colonies, such as they then were, with the
institutions they then possessed, and the political relations in which
they then stood to the mother-country, bred and reared men o