es. A governing
class was reared up for the purposes which the colony ought to fulfil
itself; and, as the climax of the evil, a great military expenditure was
maintained, which became a premium on war. Our modern colonists, he
said, after quitting the mother country, instead of keeping their
hereditary liberties, go out to Australia or New Zealand to be deprived
of these liberties, and then perhaps, after fifteen or twenty or thirty
years' waiting, have a portion given back to them, with magnificent
language about the liberality of parliament in conceding free
institutions. During the whole of that interval they are condemned to
hear all the miserable jargon about fitting them for the privileges thus
conferred; while, in point of fact, every year and every month during
which they are retained under the administration of a despotic
government, renders them less fit for free institutions. 'No
consideration of money ought to induce parliament to sever the
connection between any one of the colonies and the mother country,'
though it was certain that the cost of the existing system was both
large and unnecessary. But the real mischief was not here, he said. Our
error lay in the attempt to hold the colonies by the mere exercise of
power.[218] Even for the church in the colonies he rejected the boon of
civil preference as being undoubtedly a fatal gift,--'nothing but a
source of weakness to the church herself and of discord and difficulty
to the colonial communities, in the soil of which I am anxious to see
the church of England take a strong and healthy root.'[219] He
acknowledged how much he had learned from Molesworth's speeches,[220]
and neither of them sympathised with the opinion expressed by Mr.
Disraeli in those days, 'These wretched colonies will all be independent
too in a few years, and are a millstone round our necks.'[221] Nor did
Mr. Gladstone share any such sentiments as those of Molesworth who, in
the Canadian revolt of the winter of 1837, actually invoked disaster
upon the British arms.[222]

THE TWO SCHOOLS

In their views of colonial policy Mr. Gladstone was in substantial
accord with radicals of the school of Cobden, Hume, and Molesworth. He
does not seem to have joined a reforming association founded by these
eminent men among others in 1850, but its principles coincided with his
own:--local independence, an end of rule from Downing Street, the relief
of the mother country from