funds of individuals (at least those in Elizabeth's reign were so), were, according to the scheme both of the adventurers who fitted out the expeditions and the statesmen who sanctioned them, to be mere dependencies of the executive; permitted to trade only with England, and required to receive whatever outcasts the English statesmen might think fit to pour into them.

The scheme languished, because the true colonising element for that stage of English history, the youth of a military aristocracy, was otherwise employed; the colonies showed no signs of flourishing till they were resorted to by the ejected parties in the civil wars. If the early colonies had been flourishing and revenuepaying bodies like those of Spain and Portugal, they might have destroyed the English constitution, by enabling the crown to raise its standing armies, and supply the expenses of government without the leave of Parliament. As it turned out, however, the colonies were insignificant till the ejected parties settled there, and then the hold of the executive relaxed, and the colonists enjoyed greater freedom than the people at home, especially in being allowed to profess whatever religion they chose. Had this gradual relaxation been allowed, as it ought to have been, to go on till complete liberty in point of trade and taxation had been added to the political freedom which the American colonies of England had since the restoration of Charles II. always enjoyed, England would have been spared the American revolution, which was caused entirely by the attempted retention of a system of restriction suited to the original colonists, the rabble and scum of the towns, but not suited to the bold citizens and farmers who had emigrated for liberty.*

England had no colonies strictly belonging to the earliest class. The United States of America, so far as they were founded by ejected parties, belong to the second class in

*Heeren, Pol. Syst. ii. 89.

the order of time, and of the trading class we have several specimens, not a few of them converted into garrisons, some founded by English settlers, others acquired by conquest from the Portuguese, Dutch, and other nations who had founded them in their appropriate stages.

The present emigration from England to its colonies is of two kinds: first, that of traders or employés, who go out to become rich by adventure, and intend eventually to return to England, which is the case with our Indian merchants and functionaries; and, secondly, that of poor settlers, who go to settle abroad, because they are ill-to-do and discontented at home. Many of these need govern

ment assistance, and receive it.

After this general survey we are in a position to answer the question-What are the possibilities of colonial history? They are, speaking in the gross, but two. First the colony, no matter at what period of national progress founded, if it becomes commercial and thrives and obtains independence, will present at first the characteristics of a society where democracy is the sole element, and subsequently of a society where democracy and plutocracy are the two secular forces. A colony then deserves to be treated as a separate nation, and is in effect the same as those nations which have arisen without monarchy, theocracy, or aristocracy, or which, having originally possessed those elements, or some of them, have succeeded in shaking them off entirely. This is the success which colonies can enjoy. It is the point in national progress at which they as it were break into the ranks of progressive and competing nations, and after that, their progress is subject to the same laws and the same vicissitudes as those which regulate the further progress of any other nation after that stage. Secondly, the colony, at whatever period it is founded, may remain an integral part of the mother country, and may have sharply drawn the line of governors and governed, the governors being the functionaries of the central government at home, who, invested

with power and the prestige of coming from a country refined, wealthy, and great-that country to which the colonists look up as the model in all matters of taste and refinement-look down with still more than the usual contempt on the governed, and there is no rich territorial aristocracy, with the pride of descent from a conquering race, to regard with scorn the upstart underlings of office. It takes no place in the rank of nations nor even touches the torch of human progress, but perishes with the mother country, and though in the ruin of the mother country accident may sever the colony from it, no change in substance is made. The colony like the mother country is the scene of alternate despotism and anarchy, till it subsides finally beneath a conqueror.

Of the first, the most prominent examples are the colonies of Greece in Italy and Asia Minor, and the United States of America. Of the second, the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies. In the midst of them stand some of our present colonies, now hovering between two destinies, doubtful to complete the independence, which most of them have begun, and to proceed along the track of national progress, or slavishly adhering to England, to submit to English governors, and to acquire a familiarity with the broad distinction between governors and governed which never fails finally to debase and degrade a community.

CHAP. XXX.

CHARITY IN POLITICS.

"In what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened; and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."-Genesis iii. 5.

“ πάντα γὰρ καιρῶ καλά.”—SOPH. Ο. Τ. 1516.

THERE is no fruit of the Tree of Knowledge on which men pride themselves so much as upon the power to discriminate good and evil. If knowledge followed transgression proportionately, Adam must have sinned imperfectly in tasting this fruit; for our knowlege of good and evil is slight in the extreme, and the slighter because we think it solid; but if it is a punishment for sin to think we know what we do not know then is the human race still suffering severely in this respect above all others for the first transgression.

There is no one who on hearing of an action, in watching a course of policy, in viewing a system of government does not take upon himself to pronounce that it is good or it is evil, and yet men's judgments in such things are ever at variance, for each judges by the code of laws that his education, his habits, his companions have formed within his own mind. There may be perhaps abstract good and abstract evil, but who shall be sure when he knows it?

Now in this long course of change that we have traced, however imperfectly, phase after phase has come upon

the stage, and I have endeavoured to sketch it as dispassionately as may be, knowing full well that each has its admirers and its detractors, and that I am perhaps not more free from the prejudices of my time and country than those around me. The great chain of human events consists of an infinity of atoms; each atom, I make bold to say, has a good and an evil side to it. He who undertakes to describe the whole chain or any large portion of it, may pick out sometimes the good, sometimes the evil.-"Ogni medaglio a suo reverso," and thus a thousand persons describing a course of history, which is often a sequence of tableaux, each having, like a medal, its obverse of good and its reverse of evil, may describe the sequence in ten thousand different ways by perpetually interchanging the obverse and reverse of the medals, each choosing according to his taste the obverse of one and the reverse of another, and unless two men are all optimist or all dyslogist the chances are infinite against the agreement of their descriptions and opinions.

As Englishmen, we believe constitutional monarchy to be the best form of government; but are we sure that in thus erecting it into the abstract ideal we are not carrying into the tribunal, on which cosmopolites alone should sit, some of our English opinions and English sympathies? and shall we not be confirmed in this, if we find that other men of other nations have carried to the same tribunal the feelings and prejudices of their homes, and the common wish of discontented humanity to praise the absent and the half-known? and thus the judgments of mankind are various and uncertain, for the impartial judge exists not. Every phase that I have described has a decision in its favour. Is it Rousseau who pronounces ? Then we know that the tribe-stage is the only moral natural state of man; all others are morbid in proportion as they differ from it. Let the tribesmen settle into peaceful agriculturists, and then a thoughtful man who