The statement in the passage which we quoted, that underneath the fluctuations of our colonial policy throughout the nineteenth century lay the “fixed rule” of educating the dependencies for self-government, is so totally and manifestly opposed to historical records and to the testimony of loyal colonial politicians in all our colonies as to deserve no further formal refutation. The very structure of our party government, the ignorance or open indifference of colonial ministers of the elder generations, the biassed play of colonial cliques and interests reduced the whole of our colonial government for many decades to something between a see-saw and a game of chance; the nearest approach to any “fixed rule” was the steady prolonged pressure of some commercial interest whose political aid was worth purchase. That any such “beneficent spirit” as is recorded consciously presided over the policy applied to any class of colonies during the larger half of the nineteenth century is notoriously false. To those statesmen to whom the colonies were not a tiresome burden, they were a useful dumping-ground for surplus population, including criminals, paupers and ne’er-do-wells, or possible markets for British trade. A few more liberal-minded politicians, such as Sir W. Molesworth and Mr. Wakefield, regarded with sympathetic interest the rising democracies of Australasia and Canada. But the idea of planning a colonial policy inspired by the motive of teaching the arts of free representative self-government not merely was not the “fixed rule,” but was not present as a rule at all in any responsible Colonial Secretary in Great Britain.
When the first dawn of the new Imperialism in the seventies gave fuller political consciousness to “empire,” it did indeed become a commonplace of Liberal thought that England’s imperial mission was to spread the arts of free government, and the examples of Australia and Canada looming big before all eyes suggested that we were doing this. The principles and practices of representative government were “boomed”; Liberal proconsuls set on foot imposing experiments in India and in the West Indies; the progress of the South African colonies