ey are
practical, they attend to results, they guard jealously their own
privileges, but they are not so enamoured of constitutional theory that
they will patiently see their fellow-countrymen in less favoured
situations swamped under the votes of the coloured races. Australians,
Canadians, New Zealanders, will not be found enthusiastic for the
extension of self-government in the West Indies, when they know that it
means the extinction of their own white brothers who have settled there.
The placing English colonists at the mercy of coloured majorities they
will resent as an injury to themselves; they will not look upon it as an
extension of a generous principle, but as an act of airy virtue which
costs us nothing, and at the bottom is but carelessness and
indifference.

We imagine that we have seen the errors of our old colonial policy, and
that we are in no danger of repeating them. Yet in the West Indies we
are treading over again the too familiar road. The Anglo-Irish colonists
in 1705 petitioned for a union with Great Britain. A union would have
involved a share in British trade; it was refused therefore, and we gave
them the penal laws instead. They set up manufactures, built ships, and
tried to raise a commerce of their own. We laid them under disabilities
which ruined their enterprises, and when they were resentful and became
troublesome we turned round to the native Irish and made a virtue of
protecting them against our own people whom we had injured. When the
penal laws ceased to be useful to us, we did not allow them to be
executed. We played off Catholic against Protestant while we were
sacrificing both to our own jealousy. Having made the government of the
island impossible for those whom we had planted there to govern it, we
emancipate the governed, and to conciliate them we allow them to
appropriate the possessions of their late masters. And we have not
conciliated the native Irish; it was impossible that we should; we have
simply armed them with the only weapons which enable them to revenge
their wrongs upon us.

The history of the West Indies is a precise parallel. The islands were
necessary to our safety in our struggle with France and Spain. The
colonists held them chiefly for us as a garrison, and we in turn gave
the colonists their slaves. The white settlers ruled as in Ireland, the
slaves obeyed, and all went swimmingly. Times changed at home. Slavery
became unpopular; it was abolished; and, with