management of the water courses has been of incalculable value, and many
have been the landslips arrested and prevented by seeking their causes
in the hidden erosive action of a small stream. In still another manner
does the water threaten the mountain sides, and that is by permeating
the soil (which is thus rendered much heavier), until it reaches a bed
of rock or other layer that it can not penetrate. There it forms a
layer of slippery mud on which the soil above slides bodily down. The
method pursued in such cases is sometimes that of a ditch dug to the
impermeable layer, sometimes that of a drain. In both cases there may
or may not be small feeding ditches. Another plan which appears very
contradictory of what has just been said is also employed. This consists
in preventing, by means of horizontal trenches, the water from flowing
off on the surface in the regions above the timber line. The water is
forced to percolate through the soil and so reaches the wooded portions,
where it would permeate anyhow, much more gradually than otherwise. The
soil thus escapes the enormous increase of pressure due to the sudden
absorption of great quantities of water, and consequently is less in
danger of leaving its fastenings.
One of the most difficult of the problems that these torrents give
rise to is that of their control where they suddenly enter a valley,
and where the slope is consequently greatly decreased. The decrease of
current entailed causes the deposit of stones and material at the mouth
of the gorge, and the water then spreads itself over the valley. This
occurs more or less regularly with certain torrents that are usually dry
and where it is impracticable to prevent the erosions above. It then
becomes necessary to build a stone canal from the mouth of the gorge
to the principal water course of the valley. As this must be built on
the alluvion (which presents the surface of a cone), it is often higher
than the rest of the valley, and one may find other small canals for
the draining of the valley passing under the larger one and meeting
the principal stream below. A similar action to that of the torrent on
entering the valley is that of a stream with a rapid current emptying
into one whose current is slower. Here the deposits will at times
force the smaller stream to seek another channel, and it frequently
occurs that the correction moves the mouth of the stream a considerable
distance.
The manner in which the streams in the valleys are made to aid in their
own correction is most interesting. Whereas in the mountains it is
usually desirable to decrease the erosive action of the water, in the
valleys the contrary is the case, as the deposits in the lowlands are as
dangerous to life and property as was their abstraction above. The great
desideratum to be attained is to have the mountain streams arrive in the
valleys in a purely liquid condition, and to give the valley streams
the power to carry to the lakes any material they may be so unfortunate
as to have taken in charge. To accomplish this latter purpose, the
sinuosities of the streams are often reduced to straight lines, an
increase of slope being thus secured. The new channels are made of a
cross-section to enable the water to carry on its alluvion and silt.
Where great freshets occur it is necessary to guarantee the artificial
beds against the enormous increase of the water's destructive action.
The usual plan is that of having the cross-section of the stream with
a deep depression in the center. This depression is of dimensions
to insure a proper flow under ordinary conditions. When the stream
becomes swollen it overflows the borders of this depression and spreads
over a much larger area until the banks proper are encountered. This
sudden increase of cross-section reduces the velocity of the water and
consequently its destructive power. When the water of a stream is
turned from its old channel into the new one that has been prepared for
it, the operation is generally very gradually performed, so as to enable
the water to fill up the old bed as much as possible by depositing its
silt.
A plan pursued with much success is that of building out from the
high bank of a stream (which it is desired to confine into a narrower
channel) insubmersible spurs, stopping at the points where the new bank
is to be situated. The water flowing in between these spurs deposits its
dirt and gravel, and gradually builds up the new bank. In many cases the
ends of the spurs are connected by low artificial banks of masonry over
which the water flows. These banks retain and protect the deposits, and,
when the latter have attained a sufficient depth, the artificial banks
are raised to their permanent height. Still another method pursued with
the same object in view is that of starting up stream and building the
banks to their permanent height until a point is reached where it is
desired to "fill." Here the artificial banks are left temporarily very
low. The water overflows them, and the reduction of its velocity entails
the deposit of its silt. When this has continued as long as necessary or
practicable, the walls are raised to their permanent height along the
section and the same process is repeated below. This gradual process
is also very advantageous from a financial point of view. When the
engineer finally reaches the mouth of the stream at one of the lakes,
we should expect to find his difficulties at an end, as the lakes are
usually so deep that the alluvion makes little impression on them, and
their areas are such that floods are not much to be feared. But he is
confronted here with a new difficulty, that of anchoring or securing the
foundation of his artificial river bank. The soil is generally alluvial
over a large area, and is very damp. He generally has to terminate the
masonry before he reaches the less stable alluvial soil and continue the
structure by means of wooden material, which retains its position much
better under such circumstances and is more cheaply replaced. It would
be natural to imagine that man's control of the water problem stops at
this point. But not so with the Swiss; he even controls its exit from
some of the lakes. This is notably the case at Geneva, where by means of
ingenious dams the lake is maintained at what is deemed a proper level.
When it is remembered that this lake is fifty miles long by ten broad,
an idea is gained of the amount of water controlled. Every few years the
level is lowered for a given period, so that repairs may be made to the
walls and structures along the shores.
THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES.
BY JAMES COLLIER.
V.--POLITICAL EVOLUTION.
The law that the evolution of a colony repeats the evolution of the
parent state would here be logically applied to the history of the
relations between colonies and the mother country. These would be
shown to have followed a similar course, though with new developments,
to those of the mother country with _her_ suzerain; and they would
be carried further back and deeper down to those universal animal
processes of lactation and rearing which they continue and which explain
them. The gradual settlement of a new country would next be exhibited
as a repetition (with necessary modifications) of the settlement of
the mother country, because guided by the same general laws--that
it dispossesses an earlier race, which had followed quadrupeds and
birds, which had followed trees, shrubs, and grasses, which again had
sown themselves along geographical lines. Chapters on both topics are
unavoidably omitted. The law has now to be applied to the political,
industrial, and social evolution of colonies. In so wide a subject only
_aperçus_ are possible.
There are traces in several colonies of a state anterior to the
establishment of a settled government. According to the unloving
Hobbes, such a state is necessarily one of war, and it is sometimes
that; according to the humane Rousseau, it is one of peace, and, to
the credit of human nature, it is oftener that. There were English
settlers in Pennsylvania before the Swedes arrived. The first immigrants
to Plymouth found predecessors on the coast who owed no allegiance.
Seventy years after the foundation of North Carolina the inhabitants
still led the lives of freemen in the woods. Prior to 1702 New Jersey
was considered one of those provinces "where no regular government had
been established." The Tasmanian farmers who colonized Victoria lived
for some time without any form of government, and lived peacefully.
Pastoralists were found on the Canterbury plains before the advent of
the Pilgrims, and were content. When the Pilgrims got into collision
with the central government, they said bitterly that they would
do better with none. Where it is otherwise the circumstances are
exceptional. Gold and silver fields everywhere are at first, and often
to the last, scenes of wild disorder, where a man's safety depends on
his ability to defend himself. Escaped Australian convicts, runaway
sailors, adventurers, and natives made up a community which turned the
natural paradise of the Bay of Islands into an earthly hell. Parts of
Texas in very recent days were the seat of anarchy. Government soon
arrives on the spot in the shape of the Texas Rangers, the Draconian
gold-fields mounted police, or a royal governor. Or an organized body
of immigrants absorbs previous settlers and evolves from within itself
all the agencies of government. On one or other of these two types
all colonial societies have been built up. The patriarchal theory
of Filmer is realized in those colonies--the great majority--where
the government is clothed with power delegated by the sovereign of
the mother country. The socialist theory of Locke is embodied in the
New England colonies; in the Carolina "Association" of 1719; in the
resolutions of the Liberal Association of Canada in 1841, which issued
in the compact between the crown and the Canadian people; in the New
Zealand whalers in 1840, governed by their own laws; in the New Zealand
Company's settlements (with a social contract previously drawn up by
the passengers, as by those of the Mayflower); and in the colonies of
Otago and Canterbury, and New Australia in Paraguay. Two intermediate
groups have a transitional existence. Many colonies have been founded
by commercial companies whose collective history might be written in
two lines--inception of vast enterprises, partial commercial success,
great collateral benefits, ruinous loss of capital, surrender of
charter to the crown. A set of colonies peculiar to the United States
were established by one or more proprietaries, from whose voluntary
concessions the form of government was derived, but most of these
merged, after a series of conflicts, in the popular group. They were
respectively bastard royal and bastard charter colonies.
From the origin of a colony is deducible its whole political and social
structure. Colonies of royal foundation, by a kind of moral pangenesis,
tend to reproduce all parts of the mother country that are suitable to
the new environment--its inequalities of _rank_, governors who are the
image of the sovereign, an executive, legislative, and judicature that
are the delegation of his authority. But these institutions must grow;
they can not be made. The attempt to create an aristocracy in Carolina,
and the proposal to manufacture one in New South Wales, necessarily
failed. Yet in both countries one grew or is growing up. In the South
there was an untitled aristocracy, with the aristocratic temper,
exclusive institutions, and four distinct classes (the descendants
of the lords of the manor, villeins or tenants, bond-servants,
and slaves, who had a brief existence in Virginia, Carolina, and
Maryland)--planters, overseers, mean whites, and negro slaves; the fall
of Richmond saw the happy ending of all that. In the British colonies,
as in England, there is an increasing passion for titles, and of about
sixty grades in the Byzantine hierarchy of the English monarchy at
least eleven have been transplanted to colonial soil. But it is on
one condition, abroad as at home--that honor shall be divorced from
power. In England the nobility is being edged out of office, and on Lord
Salisbury's grave might be written, "The last of the nobles"--the last
who governed his country. In her colonies one premier after another
resolutely refuses the forbidden dignity that would banish him from
the ministerial Eden. The same point has been reached in the United
States from the opposite side. Most of the charter and some of the
proprietary colonies developed into republican societies, with political
equality as their badge, a popular legislature, an elected judiciary,
and a half-elected executive. Side by side with this democracy of power
there has grown up in the great cities--Philadelphia, Boston, New
York--an aristocracy of blood, culture, or dollars. This aristocracy of
fashion--as in France and England, so in the United States and (on a
small scale) in Australia--consoles itself for lifelong exclusion from
public affairs by addicting itself to literature, art, philanthropy,
and such like. But these are only its recreations. Its chief use is to
exist, to exhibit the civilization of a people at its flower, to give
pleasure to others and to itself. The proportion of this element to the
rest of the population will measure the age of the community.
The core of the _executive_ is the governor. The governor of the
monarchical colonies is the deputy of the sovereign, and the story
of his authority is the story in brief of the royal prerogative. The
governors of the Spanish colonies arrogated and abused a power far more
despotic than a Spanish king's. The French Governor of Illinois ruled
with absolute sway. The first Governor of New South Wales exercised
unparalleled powers. He could inflict five hundred lashes and impose a
five-hundred-pound fine; could sentence to death, execute, or pardon.
He regulated trade. He fixed prices, wages, and customs duties. All the
labor in the colony was at his disposal. He could bestow grants of land.
He appointed to all offices of honor or emolument. The administration of
justice was exclusively in his hands. The colonists were his subjects.
He was practically irresponsible. Thus an Anglo-Saxon community can
take on the characters of an Oriental satrapy. It can also become a
military despotism. For some years after the departure of one governor
and the deposition of another the government of the colony was in the
hands, or under the feet, of the officers of the New South Wales Corps,
who ruled it as the Sultan rules Turkey. The stage of pure absolutism,
which is necessitated in a colony, as in the mother country, by the
existence of a small band of immigrants in the midst of a hostile
indigenous population, or of a small number of free settlers among
a convict populace, is succeeded by that of limited absolutism. The
authority of the governor is checked by the appointment of a council.
Most of the early North American crown colonies were at this stage.
It answers to England under the later Tudors, and, as there, left
ample scope for oppression. Occasionally it blossomed or withered into
prodigies of tyranny on a small scale, as in the too celebrated Andros.
Sir James Craig, so lately as the beginning of the nineteenth century,
treated his Canadian Parliament as superciliously as a Stuart. In New
Zealand there were continual complaints that a certain governor had more
absolute power than a sovereign. In South Australia and South Africa
the same governor ruled like an emperor, his council not thwarting but
aggrandizing his authority. This second preconstitutional stage is
often unduly prolonged in colonies, as it commonly is in the mother
country, on the pretext of an enemy on the frontier or of troubles
with the natives, but really because of the forceful character of a
governor who is unwilling to lay down the dignity he may not have been
overwilling to take up. Its persistence in the North American colonies
can only be explained on Haeckel's principle that the development
of ancestral species is followed in the development of the embryo.
Despotism in the Old World was the parent of despotism in the New.
There is no other reason why colonies ripe for self-government, like
Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, should have been oppressed by
such men as Andros, Cornbury, and Harvey. The stage is ended by the
granting of a constitution or by a successful rebellion. The governor's
personal force will then be the measure of his power. The sagacious
and resolute Lord Elgin asserted that he had twice the authority in
constitutional Canada that he had enjoyed in Jamaica. Such a governor
is the colonial analogue of Queen Victoria, who, in consequence of her
association with the Prince Consort, the length of her reign, and her
strong character, has prolonged monarchical influence. But the day of
such sovereigns is passing; the day of such governors is past. The
office is by no means shorn of its prerogatives. The governor, like the
sovereign, selects his prime minister, and the act may have serious
consequences; the appeal of the minister for election as leader by his
party shows the blending of the popular with the monarchical strain,
but it is little more than formal. As George III in 1783, and William
IV in 1834, arbitrarily dismissed the Whigs, a Governor of Newfoundland
in 1861 dismissed his ministry; in 1858 the Governor of New South Wales
had resolved to dismiss his; and it is not many months since Mr. Rhodes
was cashiered. Like the sovereign, the governor sometimes refuses to
grant a dissolution. Like the Governor General of Canada last year, or
the Governor of New Zealand a few years ago, he may refuse to appoint
senators--successfully in the one case or only to be bowled over by the
Colonial Office in the other. Beyond these real but rarely exercised
prerogatives he has little else to do than sign his ministers'
documents. He ought to interfere in certain cabinet crises, but dares
not. His power, like that of the sovereign, is reduced to a shadow. The
premier of the colony is now its working king.
As the governor's authority wanes, his dignity waxes. After 1632 a
viceroy of high rank was sent to New Spain. In 1867 Disraeli, half
genius and half charlatan, commenced a policy of ostentation by
announcing that only those would in future be appointed colonial
governors who had been "born in the purple," or were peers, and
notwithstanding two or three Liberal reactions the policy has been
confirmed, in regard to all the more important colonies, by the demands
of the colonists. On arriving in his dominions the new ruler has a
royal reception. He becomes the head of the ceremonial system in the
colony, and if he ceases to govern he reigns (according to Bagehot's
theory of the monarchy) by impressing the popular imagination. And as
loyalty to the Queen is passing into loyalty to the imperial tradition,
so is loyalty to her representative being transmuted into the pride of
imperial connection.
The governor completes the parallel with sovereignty by undergoing all
its vicissitudes. As monarchs have abdicated, been imprisoned, banished,
restored, tried, and beheaded, colonial governors have resigned,
been imprisoned, expelled, recalled, restored, impeached, dismissed,
and hanged, and in both sets of cases for similar reasons. They have
resigned because of ill usage at the hands of their ministers, because
things were done in their absence of which they disapproved, or because
they were entrapped into approving of their ministers' wrongdoing. La
Bourdonnais was sent to the Bastille, Andros was imprisoned for tyranny
in Massachusetts, and in North Carolina it was the "common practice"
to resist and imprison their governors. Depositions were frequent in
the North American colonies. An oppressive Governor of Virginia was
banished to England, but sent back; a Governor of New South Wales was
deposed for rectitude by a military mutiny and shipped to Tasmania; a
Governor of New Zealand was placed on board a ship for England because
he had excited the ill will of a powerful company, and had indiscreetly
realized the dream of free traders by making the colony a free port. As
Pericles dreaded being ostracized, early Governors of New South Wales
feared being placed under arrest. Recall is the sentence that governors
of British colonies had most to shun in the days when they were still
irresponsible. The first four Governors of Australia, and possibly
the sixth, were lied out of office. One was recalled because of the
financial embarrassments of his colony and his own devotion to science;
another, on the better grounds of tyranny and red tape. A Governor of
the Cape of Good Hope was recalled because he was unpopular. Another
governor of that colony was recalled for incorrigible insubordination,
and again, when he had been pardoned and sent to a more distant colony,
for hopeless incompatibility. How so serious a step may be contrived by
a mere clerk in the Colonial Office may be read in the autobiography of
Sir Henry Taylor, who procured the recall of an obnoxious governor by
submitting to a compliant Secretary of State a dispatch recalling him.
An outbreak of public indignation, like that against Governor Eyre,
may be needed to bring about the same result. Dupleix and Frontenac
fell before the machinations of their enemies, and the former was
allowed to die in misery. Hastings was impeached. Articles equivalent
to impeachment were drawn up against a Governor of New South Wales,
who, like Clive, suffered the indignity of having his administration
scrutinized by a committee of the House of Commons. Lastly, as a single
English king was brought to the block, so has a single governor, and he
the creature of an insurrection, expiated his rebellion on the scaffold.
The election of governors recalls the election of Frankish kings, but
really repeats that of the governors of commercial companies; how
powerful such elected functionaries may become is shown by the chairman
of an English railway company and the American boss. Leaders like Smith
or Winthrop, Cargill of Otago, or Godley of Canterbury, who give to
young colonies cohesion and the power to survive, or carry them through
perils, are their rulers by indefeasible sovereignty; in form they may,
as in Massachusetts, be only the presidents of the company out of which
the colony has sprung. Re-elected for twenty years, like Winthrop,
or thirteen, like Endicott, they may confer on the office a duration
equal to that of inheritance, and may show an independence greater than
a hereditary or an appointed officer can safely assume. Creators of
colonies, like Baltimore, Penn, and Oglethorpe, repeat a type that must
be rare in history, if indeed they do not originate the noblest of all
types of ruler, and are kings by a diviner right than that of any known
sovereign.