The relations between a great state and its subject peoples will vary
according to the status of these, as the relations between father and
son differ according as the latter is self-supporting or still under
tutelage. Roman provinces under the empire were classed as imperial
when they were directly controlled by the Emperor, or senatorial
when they were governed by the Senate and possessed a simulacrum of
self-government. The dual status in this mother country of nearly
the whole world foreshadows all subsequent relationships between a
mother country and its dependencies. Spain and Portugal governed their
colonies imperially, appointing all officers, immediately or through
their representative mediately enacting all laws, and leaving almost
as little freedom to their own countrymen as to the down-trodden
indigenes. More humanely, indeed, but in spite of conceded French
citizenship and theoretical equality, the French have ruled their
scattered dependencies with as little of the reality of public life.
The Dutch colonies are similarly controlled. The British Empire
presents a variegated picture where every color is blended and every
form of policy known among men is displayed. From it alone an Aristotle
might delineate the metaphysics of government or a Spencer construct
its physics. In Egypt and Crete, with practical possession, imperial
England is vassal to the Sultan, and she now holds the conquered
Soudan jointly with Egypt, but acknowledges no suzerainty. She is
herself suzerain of the two South African Boer republics and regent of
Zanzibar. In her magnificent dependency of India, 692 sovereignties and
chiefships form a ‘protected’ girdle around her own possessions, or
interlace or approach them. Between these beneficent despotisms and the
free states of Australia, South Africa or North America there seems to
be every possible variety of mingled absolutism and self-government.
Certain territories are governed by chartered companies; one (Rhodesia)
by a chartered company under the control of the Crown. Three native
territories are governed by officers under the High Commissioner of
South Africa; four others by the officers of Cape Colony. The status
of Crown colonies administered more or less directly by the Imperial
Government is almost as various. One colony may be dependent on
another, as Natal was for years on Cape Colony. Others exhibit in an
ascending scale the acquisition of the attributes of self-government.
The governor rules at first alone despotically, then with an executive
council, next with a nominated legislative council, further with the
latter partly elected, and finally with it wholly elective. At these
successive stages the colony is in a decreasing degree under the
control of the Imperial Government, and a scale might be drawn showing
groups of colonies indefinitely arrested at one or another of them.
Only colonies destined for complete freedom victoriously pass through
them all and emerge into full political manhood.
The duration of their infancy and youth is determined by internal and
external circumstances: (1) When a colony is systematically founded
and quickly peopled it may rapidly traverse the period of dependence,
and (like New Zealand or South Australia) be granted responsible
government in about fifteen years. (2) Convict colonies, like Tasmania
and New South Wales, may have fifty or sixty years of pupilage. (3) A
colony of retarded growth, like West Australia, may be nearly as long
a minor. (4) Colonies that have long to struggle with an overwhelming
mass of indigenes, like Cape Colony, may take half a century to ripen,
and even then, like Natal, may retain traces of the earlier state. (5)
When the mother country is herself despotically governed, as England
was under the Stuarts, the Commonwealth and the early Hanoverians,
colonies that possess every attribute qualifying them for freedom,
like many of the North American colonies, may be forcibly retained in
partial dependence. (6) The New England colonies, free from the start,
were connected with Britain by a shadowy tie of nominal allegiance,
tightened at times into real subjection. Lastly, a colony may revert,
like Jamaica, after years of Parliamentary institutions, to the
dependent position of a Crown colony.
So various and so intricate, so weak here, so strong there, and withal
so marvelously compacted, is the network of relations forming the
anatomy of the wonderful new type of social organism constituted by a
mother country, its free and its subject colonies, its protected states
and its dependencies.
The brain sometimes inhibits natural movements and enforces injurious
actions, as a morbid conscience often prescribes irksome duties and
forbids innocent pleasures. Fathers have misdirected the career of
their sons, and the unwisdom of mothers (Lady Ashton, in ‘The Bride of
Lammermoor,’ is a tragic, but far from a rare example) has destroyed
the happiness of their daughters. So governments inevitably hinder and
blunder, worry colonies by vexatious interferences or goad them into
insurrection. For more than thirty years Bishop Fonseca, the president
of the Council of the Indies, lay like an incubus on the Spanish
colonies in South America. His main object seemed to be to throw
impediments in the way of the great discoverers and rulers--Columbus
and Cortez. When Cortez planned the conquest of Mexico he experienced
protracted opposition from Fonseca, who “discouraged recruits,
stopped supplies and sequestered the property” Cortez sent to Spain.
The conqueror bitterly complained that he “had found it harder to
contend against his own countrymen than against the Aztecs.” The story
of Spain’s South American colonies is one of injustice, oppression
and downright robbery. The natives naturally suffered most. They were
condemned to forced labor in the mines under circumstances of extreme
barbarity, in order that large sums of money might be sent annually
to Spain. This insatiable demand neutralized all the efforts of the
best-intentioned viceroys and rendered all attempts at good government
nugatory. The Indians had further to submit to grinding oppression by
the local officials and to the exactions and tyranny of the priests.
The Spanish colonists had their own grievances. Articles of commerce
were excluded, or had their prices heightened by the monopoly of the
Cadiz merchants. They were oppressed by the military despotism of
the government. The political development of the colonies was made
impossible by the continued use of them for the purposes of the mother
country. What Spain was for three centuries, that was she till the
other day in her few remaining colonies. Lord Brassey writes of Cuba:
“The casual visitor can not fail to be impressed with the evidences of
inefficient administration. The fiscal policy is intensely exclusive.
The taxation is heavy, and the government absolutely despotic. The
police maintain a system of intolerable espionage. Every salaried
servant of the local government is a Spaniard, who regards Cuba as a
vassal state, over which Spain has unlimited rights, without reciprocal
duties or obligations. The system has already severed all her noble
settlements in South America from the mother country. In time it must
involve the loss of Cuba.”
If it were the case that the genesis and growth of the myriad buds
formed round a prolific hydroid were accelerated by magnetic shoots
(so to speak) from the parent zoöphyte, and ‘persons’ were thus
differentiated, we should have a true analogue to a kind of action
exercised by the mother country on its colonies. For it long supplies
them with the greater part of their brain power, governing force,
culture, science and experience of all sorts, and when these have
done their work a new political, intellectual and moral center is
created, which is henceforth self-subsistent; the colony has received a
soul, a mind, a heart. First, the governor is usually sent out by the
metropolis. Of six hundred and seventy-two rulers of South America,
from its conquest to its independence, only eighteen were Americans.
In French and Dutch colonies there are possibly no exceptions. Many
of the charter and proprietary colonies of North America elected
their own governors, and the insurrectionary governor of a Crown
colony, New York, was popularly elected. The lieutenant-governors
of the provinces of the Canadian Dominion are locally appointed.
With these and one or two other exceptions, the governor may be
considered as symbolizing (in so far as he has the capacity) the entire
civilization of the mother country. He brings much or little to the
colony he comes to govern. Sometimes, as in the case of Sir George
Gray, he brings intellectual superiority, and he may thus stimulate
its literary development, but that is rare. He oftener imparts an
aroma of gentility that is much appreciated by a certain class. He
may be of practical utility by applying the experience of a military
engineer, as did Sir William Jervois. He may have had large colonial
experience, like Sir Hercules Robinson, and use that to solve the
intricate political problems of his colony. If he is a collector, like
Sir George Gray, he may enrich it by bequests of libraries and museums.
If he possesses literary gifts and has passed through an eventful time,
he may enrich colonial history by dictating his biography, like one
colonial governor, or writing his reminiscences, like so many. And
lastly, after returning to the mother-land, he may continue to watch
over the interests of the colony or colonies he ruled; he may become
president or member of the Council of the Indies, like three viceroys
of Peru, or Parliamentary under-secretary for the colonies, like Sir
James Fergusson, or even his former colony’s agent-general, like Sir
W. Robinson. In Crown colonies the chief legal and administrative
officials are imperial appointees, and are only superseded by local
ministers when the colony is granted responsible government. In
a unique case, that of Queensland, after a constitution had been
conceded, the first governor took out with him the first premier; and
he too was afterwards able to safeguard its interests as permanent
under-secretary in London.
The Greek metropolis sometimes sent priests to its colonies, and
bishops are long appointed by the mother church. During the three
centuries of Peruvian dependence fully one in seven bishops--one
hundred and five against seven hundred and six--were native Americans.
Canada seems to have at length arrived at complete independence and
appoints Canadians. In Australasia and South Africa the metropolitans
and most of the suffragans are still nominated in England; a dean may
be transferred from one colony to another as a bishop; or a small and
poor diocese may elect one of its incumbents. Local jealousies and
possibly the absence of a commanding spirit combine with the desire
to have the best the home church can afford to give or the colonial
church procure to dictate the extraneous selection. The stream of
ecclesiastical culture flows likewise through the immigration or
importation of ministers of all denominations. It means, among
Catholics as among Protestants, the periodical addition to the
spiritual wealth of the colonies of an amount of talent and high
character which they would have been slow to acquire by natural growth.
University or collegiate professors are for quite as long appointed
by a committee of selection in the mother country. Such men--some
of them brilliant, laborious, enthusiastic--are a real acquisition
to communities immersed in material pursuits and cut off from the
movement of science in Europe, and their position is deservedly high
and well remunerated. Doctors, lawyers, artists, teachers, experts in
many departments, place the colonies in the same position relatively
to less-favored communities, as the sons of a squire relatively to
the sons of an artisan. In this respect, as in most others, a colony
follows the example of the mother country. The introduction of
literature, the sciences and the arts into the mother-land was to a
large extent at all stages in its history the work of aliens. It is so
still; the names of Bunsen, Rosen, Max Müller, Goldstücker, Aufrecht,
and a score of others, are proofs that men as well as things that are
‘made in Germany’ are still imported into England. To descend to the
mechanical arts, “the ranks of skilled workmen in America were and
are renewed from the more fertile soil of Europe”; even the workmen
in the Portland stone-quarries are imported from England. The second
mode in which foreign culture was introduced into the mother-land
in common with all others--visits made abroad for discipleship or
instruction--has all along been, and is now increasingly, maintained.
Colonial students go to Europe to be trained in medicine and law.
Experts go to become acquainted with advances in science and medicine,
or with recent improvements in mechanical processes. The wealthier
colonists who spend occasional seasons in Europe bring back new (or
antiquated) social or political notions, and Americans who thus try
to import into the United States an aristocratic style of living have
to be ridiculed out of it. The third method by which an infusion of
foreign civilization may pass into another community is by books, works
of plastic art, music, tools, implements and instruments, and into
this vast inheritance of the mother country the daughter colonies have
entered. They participate in the advances made by other countries as
well. The Canadian colonies owe only less to the United States than
to England, and American railway cars, agricultural implements and
household utensils are in use in Australasia. In New Zealand a French
Masonic lodge has struck root.
The new colonial centers thus formed react on the father-land, as we
may conceive the daughter buds to react on the parent hydroid. The
discovery of the New World and the successive entrance of the five
great maritime powers upon a long and fierce rivalry for its possession
transformed the politics of Europe. Great wars were undertaken solely
with this object. The political center of gravity was shifted from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic. New industrial interests were created.
Insular and stagnant powers, isolated Continental powers, received a
fresh lease of life, and, along with warlike Continental powers, were
expanded to the measure of the globe. New sympathies were generated.
Wider horizons were opened out. The heart and brain of all were in a
manner enlarged. The policy of the mother country is even now being
modified by its colonies. “The paramount object in legislating for
colonies should be the welfare of the parent state,” frankly avows the
law officer of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope,
in 1779. The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Agreement were entered
into as if England and the United States were alone interested in
their provisions. Treaties are now concluded in the interests of the
colonies. Treaties are ‘denounced’ in order to allow them freedom to
tax foreign commodities. They are represented by commissioners, on an
equal footing with those of Britain, at conferences preparatory to the
conclusion of treaties, and colonial conferences are summoned in order
that the general views of the colonies may be ascertained.
There is a more direct reaction, resembling the adoption by an
admiring father of the sentiments and opinions of a son who is rising
in the world. The Greek cities that had planted colonies imitated
the republican institutions of these and deposed their kings. “The
American colonists,” says Bancroft, “founded their institutions on
popular freedom and ‘set an example to the nations.’ Already the ...
Anglo-Saxon emigrants were the hope of the world.” The filial free
colonies of Britain are exerting an influence on the domestic policy
of the father-land. An aged colonial ruler used to console himself
for exclusion from the English Parliament by cherishing the belief
that ideas and measures of his had passed into the public life of
England. Much of this is mere hallucination; some of it is reality. The
testimony of a sagacious and experienced statesman on this subject is
decisive:
“To the influence of the American Union must be added that of
the British colonies. The success of popular self-government in
these thriving communities is reacting on political opinion at
home with a force that no statesman neglects, and that is every
day increasing. There is even a danger that the influence may go
too far. They are solving some of our problems, but not under our
conditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties. Still,
the effect of colonial prosperity--a prosperity alike of admirable
achievement and boundless promise--is irresistible. It imparts a
freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political
notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and
popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most
eloquent assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any
other source whatever, save practical experience carefully observed
and rationally interpreted.”[I]
[I] Morley, ‘Studies in Literature,’ pp. 126-7.
The New Zealand system of local government is a model which Great
Britain, at one time famous in that line, has not been ashamed to
imitate; the English county councils have been molded on those of her
colony. From the same colony the mother country borrowed her First
Offenders’ act. The restriction of electors to the exercise of a
single vote--unimportant excepting in principle in populous England,
but important in young countries where property is widely held--was
perseveringly proposed, and at length carried, by the aristocratic
leader of the democratic party in New Zealand, whence it is spreading
to the adjacent colonies; it has been for some years adopted by the
British Liberals as an article in their programme, and it is also a
plank in the European socialist platform. The general adhesion to an
eight hours’ day in the Australasian colonies is having an effect in
England and is probably the measure to which Mr. Morley refers as
likely to be dangerous; his opposition to it cost him his seat at
Newcastle. The adoption of female suffrage in two of these colonies
and the certainty of its adoption in others are habitually cited by
the advocates of the cause in England as an argument for its adoption
in England. The nationalization of the land has been a popular notion
in these same colonies ever since Henry George’s famous book was
published, and the large extent of private lands bought back by the
governments of New Zealand and Queensland has strengthened the hands of
the land-nationalizers in Europe. The advanced government socialism of
most of these colonies, made inevitable by the lack of private capital,
and its apparent success, furnish socialists of the German type with
weapons and encourage them to prophesy ‘the dawn of a revolutionary
epoch.’
The spiritual reaction of the colonies on the mother-land is much
less considerable, yet is not nil. One or two instances stand out
prominently. Jonathan Edwards is one of the giants of British as
well as of American theology, and his treatise on the freedom of the
will has counted for as much as Butler’s Analogy in the development
of English theological thought. Sam Slick has been the father or
foster-father of the portentous overgrowth of humor by which the United
States balances the devouring activity of its public and the overstrain
of its private life, but he has been practically inoperative on the
very different quality of English humor. From South Africa have come
influences of a sterner sort. “Who could have foreseen,” asks Mr.
Stead, “that the new, and in many respects the most distinctive, note
of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century would
be sounded by a little chit of a girl reared in the solemn stillness
of the Karoo, in the solitude of the African bush? The Cape has indeed
done yeoman’s service to the English-speaking world. To that pivot of
the empire we owe our most pronounced types of the imperial man and the
emancipated woman”--Cecil Rhodes and Olive Schreiner.