Part 4

"In our colonies," says Mr Wakefield, "government resides at what is called its seat; every colony has its Paris, or 'seat of government.' At this spot there is government; elsewhere little or none. Montreal, for example, is the Paris of Canada. Here, of course, as in the Paris of France, or in London, representatives of the people assemble to make laws, and the executive departments, with the cabinet of ministers, are established. But now mark the difference between England on the one hand, and France or Canada on the other. The laws of England being full of delegation of authority for local purposes, and for special purposes whether local or not, spread government all over the country; those of Canada or France in a great measure confine government to the capital and its immediate neighbourhood. If people want to do something of a public nature in Caithness or Cornwall, there is an authority on the spot which will enable them to accomplish this object, without going or writing to a distant place. At Marseilles or Dunkerque you cannot alter a high road, or add a gens-d'arme to the police force, without correspondence with Paris; at Gaspé and Niagara you could not, until lately, get anything of a public nature done, without authority from the seat of government. But what is the meaning, in this case, of a correspondence with Paris or Montreal? It is doubt, hesitation, and ignorant objection on the part of the distant authority; references backwards and forwards; putting off of decisions; delay without end; and for the applicants a great deal of trouble, alternate hope and fear, much vexation of spirit, and finally either a rough defeat of their object or evaporation by lapse of time. In France, accordingly, whatever may be the form of the general government, improvement, except at Paris, is imperceptibly slow; whilst in Old, and still more in New England, you can hardly shut your eyes anywhere without opening them on something new and good, produced by the operation of delegated government specially charged with making the improvement. In the colonies it is much worse than in France. The difficulty there is even to open a correspondence with the seat of government; to find somebody with whom to correspond. In France, at any rate, there is at the centre a very elaborate bureaucratic machinery, instituted with the design of supplying the whole country with government--the failure arises from the practical inadequacy of a central machinery for the purpose in view: but in our colonies, there is but little machinery at the seat of government for even pretending to operate at a distance. The occupants of the public offices at Montreal scarcely take more heed of Gaspé, which is five hundred miles off and very difficult of access, than if that part of Canada were in Newfoundland or Europe. Gaspé, therefore, until lately, when, on Lord Durham's recommendation, some machinery of local government was established in Canada, was almost without government, and one of the most barbarous places on the face of the earth. Every part of Canada not close to the seat of government was more or less like Gaspé. Every colony has numerous Gaspés. South Africa, save at Cape Town, is a Gaspé all over. All Australia Felix, being from five hundred to seven hundred miles distant from its seat of government at Sidney, and without a made road between them, is a great Gaspé. In New Zealand, a country eight or nine hundred miles long, without roads, and colonised, as Sicily was of old, in many distinct settlements, all the settlements, except the one at which the government is seated, are miserable Gaspés as respects paucity of government. In each settlement, indeed, there is a meagre official establishment, and in one of the settlements there is a sort of lieutenant-governor; but these officers have no legislative functions, no authority to determine anything, no originating or constructive powers: they are mere executive organs of the general government at the capital, for administering general laws, and for carrying into effect such arbitrary instructions, which are not laws, as they may receive from the seat of government. The settlers, therefore, are always calling out for something which government alone could furnish. Take one example out of thousands. The settlers at Wellington in New Zealand, the principal settlement of the colony, wanted a light-house at the entrance of this harbour. To get a light-house was an object of the utmost importance to them. The company in England, which had founded the settlement, offered to advance the requisite funds on loan. _But the settlement had no constituted authority that could accept the loan and guarantee its repayment._ The company therefore asked the colonial office, whose authority over New Zealand is supreme, to undertake that the money should be properly laid out and ultimately repaid. But the colonial office, charged as it is with the general government of some forty distinct and distant communities, was utterly incapable of deciding whether or not the infant settlement ought to incur such a debt for such a purpose; it therefore proposed to refer the question to the general government of the colony at Auckland. But Auckland is several hundred miles distant from Wellington, and between these distant places there is no road at all--the only way of communication is by sea; and as there is no commercial intercourse between the places, communication by sea is either so costly, when, as has happened, a ship is engaged for the purpose of sending a message, or so rare, that the settlers at Wellington frequently receive later news from England than from the seat of their government: and moreover the attention of their government was known to be, at the time, absorbed with matters relating exclusively to the settlement in which the government resided. Nothing, therefore, was done; some ships have been lost for want of a lighthouse; and the most frequented harbour of New Zealand is still without one."--(P. 212.)

This is a long extract, but it could not be abridged, and the importance of the subject required it. Mr Wakefield has some remarks upon the necessity of supplying religious instruction and the means of public worship to our colonies, with which we cannot but cordially agree. But we rubbed our eyes, and read the following passage twice over, before we were quite sure that we had not misapprehended it: "I am in hopes of being able, when the proper time shall come for that part of my task, to persuade you that it would now be easy for England to plant _sectarian colonies_--that is, colonies with the strong attraction for superior emigrants, of a peculiar creed in each colony"--(P. 160.) We thought that it was one of the chief boasts, and most fortunate characteristics of our age, that men of different sects, Presbyterians and Episcopalians, Independents and Baptists, had learned to live quietly together. It is a lesson that has been slowly learnt, and through much pain and tribulation. What is the meaning of this retrograde movement, this drafting us out again into separate corps? Possibly the fact of the whole settlement being of one sect of Christians may tend at first to promote harmony--although even this cannot be calculated upon; but differences of opinion are sure, in time, to creep in; and the ultimate consequence would be, that such a colony, in a future generation, would be especially afflicted with religious dissensions, and the spirit of persecution. It would have to learn again, through the old painful routine, the lesson of mutual toleration. We suspect that Mr Wakefield is so engrossed with his favourite subject of colonisation, that, if the Mormonites were to make a good settlement of it, he would forgive them all their absurdities; perhaps congratulate them on their harmony of views.

We have hitherto regarded colonisation in its general, national, and legislative aspect: the following passage takes us into the heart of the business as it affects the individuals themselves, of all classes, who really think of emigrating. It is thus Mr Wakefield describes "the charms of colonisation:"--

"Without having witnessed it, you cannot form a just conception of the pleasurable excitement which those enjoy who engage personally in the business of colonisation. The circumstances which produce these lively and pleasant feelings are, doubtless, counteracted by others productive of annoyance and pain; but, at the worst, there is a great deal of enjoyment for all classes of colonists, which the fixed inhabitants of an old country can with difficulty comprehend. The counteracting circumstances are so many impediments to colonisation, which we must examine presently. I will now endeavour to describe briefly the encouraging circumstances which put emigrants into a state of excitement, similar to that occasioned by opium, wine, or winning at play, but with benefit instead of fatal injury to the moral and physical man.

"When a man, of whatever condition, has finally determined to emigrate, there is no longer any room in his mind for thought about the circumstances that surround him: his life is for some time an unbroken and happy dream of the imagination. The labourer--whose dream is generally realised--thinks of light work and high wages, good victuals in abundance, beer and tobacco at pleasure, and getting in time to be a master in his trade, or to having a farm of his own. The novelty of the passage would be a delight to him, were it not for the ennui arising from want of occupation. On his arrival at the colony, all goes well with him. He finds himself a person of great value, a sort of personage, and can indulge almost any inclination that seizes him. If he is a brute, as many emigrant labourers are, through being brutally brought up from infancy to manhood, he lives, to use his own expression, 'like a fighting cock,' till gross enjoyment carries him off the scene. If he is of the better sort, by nature and education, he works hard, saves money, and becomes a man of property--perhaps builds himself a nice house, glories with his now grand and happy wife in counting the children, the more the merrier, and cannot find anything on earth to complain of, but the exorbitant wages he has to pay. The change for this class of men being from pauperism, or next door to it, to plenty and property, is indescribably, to our apprehensions almost inconceivably, agreeable.

"But the classes who can hardly imagine the pleasant feelings which emigration provides for the well-disposed pauper, have pleasant feelings of their own when they emigrate, which are perhaps more lively in proportion to the greater susceptibility of a more cultivated mind to the sensations of mental pain and pleasure. Emigrants of cultivated mind, from the moment when they determine to be colonists, have their dreams, which, though far from being always, or ever fully realised, are, I have been told by hundreds of this class, very delightful indeed. They think with great pleasure of getting away from the disagreeable position of anxiety, perhaps of wearing dependence, in which the universal and excessive competition of this country has placed them. But it is on the future that their imagination exclusively seizes. They can think in earnest about nothing but the colony. I have known a man of this class, who had been too careless of money here, begin, as soon as he had resolved on emigration, to save sixpences, and take care of bits of string, saying 'everything will be of use _there_.' There! it is common for people whose thoughts are fixed 'there,' to break themselves all at once of a confirmed habit--that of reading their favourite newspaper every day. All the newspapers of the old country are now equally uninteresting to them. If one falls in their way, they perhaps turn with alacrity to the shipping lists, and advertisements of passenger ships, or even to an account of the sale of Australian wool, or New Zealand flax; but they cannot see either the parliamentary debate, or the leading article which used to embody their own opinions, or the reports, accidents, and offences, of which they used to spell every word. Their reading now is confined to letters and newspapers from the colony, and books relating to it. They can hardly talk about anything that does not relate to 'there.'"--(P. 127.)

A man is far gone, indeed, when he has given up his _Times_! This zeal for emigration amongst the better classes, and especially amongst educated youths, who find the avenues to wealth blocked up in their own country, is, we apprehend, peculiar to our day, and amongst the most novel aspects which the subject of colonisation assumes. How many of these latter find their imaginations travelling even to the antipodes! _Where_ shall we colonise? is a question canvassed in many a family, sometimes half in jest, half in earnest, till it leads to the actual departure of the boldest or most restless of the circle. Books are brought down and consulted; from the ponderous folio of Captain Cook's voyages--which, with its rude but most illustrative of prints, was the amusement of their childhood, when they would have thought a habitation in the moon as probable a business as one in New Zealand--to the last hot-pressed journal of a residence in Sydney; and every colony in turn is examined and discussed. Here climate is so delicious you may sleep without hazard in the open air. Sleep! yes, if the musquitoes let you. Musquitoes--oh! Another reads with delight of the noble breed of horses that now run wild in Australia, and of the bold horsemanship of those who drive in the herd of bullocks from their extensive pasturage, when it is necessary to assemble in order to number and to mark them. The name of the thing does not sound so romantic as that of a buffalo-hunt; but, armed with your tremendous whip, from the back of a horse whom you turn and wind at pleasure, to drive your not over-tractable bullocks, must task a good seat, and a steady hand, and a quick eye. A third dwells with a quieter delight on the beautiful scenery, and the pastoral life so suitable to it, which New Zealand will disclose. Valleys green as the meadows of Devonshire, hills as picturesque as those of Scotland, and the sky of Italy over all! and the aborigines friendly, peaceable. Yes, murmurs one, until they eat you. Faugh! but they are reformed in that particular. Besides, Dr Dieffenbach says, here, that "they find Europeans salt and disagreeable." Probably they had been masticating some tough old sailor, who had fed on junk all his life, and they found him salt enough. But let no one in his love of science suggest this explanation to them; let us rest under the odium of being salt and disagreeable.

These aborigines--one would certainly wish they were out of the way. Wild men! Wild--one cannot have fellowship with them. Men--one cannot shoot them. In Australia they are said to be not much wiser than baboons--one wishes they were altogether baboons, or altogether men. In New Zealand they are, upon the whole, a docile, simple people. The missionaries are schooling them as they would little children. A very simple people! They had heard of horses and of horsemanship; it was some tradition handed down from their great discoverer, Captain Cook. When lately some portly swine were landed on the island, they concluded _these_ were the famous horses men rode upon in England. "They rode two of them to death." Probably, by that time, they suspected there was some error in the case.

Hapless aborigines! How it comes to pass we cannot stop to inquire, but certain it is they never prosper in any union with the white man. They get his gin, they get his gunpowder, and, here and there, some travesty of his religion. This is the best bargain they make where they are most fortunate. The two first gifts of the white man, at all events, add nothing to the amenity of character, and happen to be precisely the gifts they could most vividly appreciate. Our civilisation seems to have no other effect than to break up the sort of rude harmony which existed in their previous barbarism. They imitate, they do not emulate; what they see of us they do not understand. That ridiculous exhibition, so often described, which they make with our costume--a naked man with hat and feathers stuck upon his head; or, better still, converting a pair of leathers into a glistening helmet, the two legs hanging down at the back, where the flowing horse-hair is wont to fall--is a perfect emblem of what they have gained in mind and character from our civilisation.

These poor New Zealanders are losing--what think you says Dr Dieffenbach?--their digestion; getting dyspeptic. The missionaries have tamed them down; they eat more, fight less, and die faster. One of the "brethren," not the least intelligent to our mind, has introduced cricket as a substitute for their war-dances and other fooleries they had abolished.

When we want the soil which such aborigines are loosely tenanting, we must, we presume, displace them. There is no help for it. But, in all other cases, we could wish the white man would leave these dark children of the earth alone. If there exists another Tahiti, such as it was when Cook discovered it, such as we read of it under the old name of Otaheite, we hope that some eternal mist, drawn in a wide circle round the island, will shroud it from all future navigators. Were we some great mariner, and had discovered such an island, and had eaten of the bread-fruit of the hospitable native, and reclined under their peaceful trees, and seen their youths and maidens crowned with green boughs, sporting like fishes in their beautiful clear seas, no mermaid happier--we should know but of one way to prove our gratitude--to close our lips for ever on the discovery we had made. If there exist in some untraversed region of the ocean another such spot, and if there are still any genii, or jins, or whatever sea-fairies may be called, left behind in the world, we beseech of them to protect it from all prying circumnavigators. Let them raise bewildering mists, or scare the helmsman with imaginary breakers, or sit cross-legged upon the binnacle, and bewitch the compass--anyhow let them protect their charge. We could almost believe, from this moment, in the existence of such spirits or genii, having found so great a task for them.

We have no space to go back to other graver topics connected with colonisation which we have passed on our road. On one topic we had not, certainly, intended to be altogether silent. But it is perhaps better as it is; for the subject of transportation is so extensive, and so complicate, and so inevitably introduces the whole review of what we call secondary punishments--of our penal code, in short--that it were preferable to treat it apart. It would be very unsatisfactory merely to state a string of conclusions, without being able to throw up any defences against those objections which, in a subject so full of controversy, they would be sure to provoke.

In fine, we trust to no ideals, no theory or art of colonisation. Neither do we make any extraordinary or novel demands on Government. A great work is going on, but it will be best performed by simple means. We ask from the Government that it should survey and apportion the land, and secure its possession to the honest emigrant, and that it should delegate to the new settlement such powers of self-government as are necessary to its internal improvement. These, however, are important duties, and embrace much. The rest, with the exception of such liberality as may be thought advisable, in addition to the fund raised by the sale of waste land, for the despatch and outfit of the poor labourer or artisan--the rest must be left to the free spirit of Englishmen, whether going single or in groups and societies.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] _A View of the Art of Colonisation, with present reference to the British Empire; in Letters between a Statesman and a Colonist._ Edited by (one of the writers) EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD.

THE REACTION, OR FOREIGN CONSERVATISM.

BOSTON, _February 1849_.

It is the sage remark of Montesquieu, that, under a government of laws, liberty consists simply in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in freedom from any constraint to do what we ought not to will. The true conservative not only accepts this maxim, but he gives it completeness by prescribing a pure religion as the standard of what a people ought to will, and as the only sober guide of conscience. And this may be added as a corollary, that so long as a free people is substantially Christian, their conscience coinciding with absolute right, their liberty, so far as affected by popular causes, will preserve itself from fatal disorders. Such a people, possessed of liberty, will know it and be content. But where the popular conscience is morbid, they may have liberty without knowing it. They will fancy that they ought to will what they are not permitted to will, and the most wholesome restraints of wise laws will appear tyrannical. For such a people there can be no cure, till they are restored to a healthy conscience. A despotism successfully established over them, and then moderately maintained, and benevolently administered, is the only thing that can save them from self-destruction.