In other instances, as in Egypt, we are using natives for certain administrative work, and this training in lower offices is doubtless not without its value. Our practical success in preserving order, securing justice and developing the material resources of many of our colonies is largely due to the fact that we have learnt to employ native agents wherever possible for detailed work of administration, and to adapt our government, where it can be safely done, to native conditions. The retention of native laws and customs or of the foreign system of jurisprudence imposed by earlier colonists of another race [32], while it has complicated government in the final court of the Privy Council, has greatly facilitated the detailed work of administration upon the spot.
Indeed the variety, not only of laws but of other modes of government in our Empire, arouses the enthusiastic admiration of many students of its history. “The British Empire,” we are told, “exhibits forms and methods of government in almost exuberant variety. The several colonies at different times of their history have passed through various stages of government, and in 1891 there are some thirty or forty different forms operating simultaneously within our Empire alone. At this moment there are regions where government of a purely despotic kind is in full exercise, and the Empire includes also colonies where the subordination of the colonial government has become so slight as to be almost impalpable.” [33]
Whether this is a striking testimony to the genius for “elasticity” of our colonial policy, or an instance of haphazard opportunism, one need not here discuss. [34]
The point is that an examination of this immense variety of government disposes entirely of the suggestion that by the extension of our Empire we are spreading the type of free government which is distinctively British.