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No penalty attaches to non-attendance at committees and meetings; nor are the onerous offices many of them fill undertaken because refusal would entail a fine. All that they do they do willingly. Moreover, they expect to generate in the mass of the community a similar disinterested zeal. They issue books and pamphlets, deliver lectures and speeches, with a view to make men join and help them. And by persevering in this course-by raising more subscriptions, acquiring more members, having more meetings, circulating more reports, issuing more tracts, getting-up more petitions, and so, gradually increasing the number of those who will devote time or money to the cause, they hope ultimately to create a public opinion strong enough to embody their project in law.

Bearing in mind which facts, let these gentlemen, when next they estimate the efficiency of voluntaryism, include in their estimate what they have done and hope to do. Let them remember that the agency by which they expect to rouse the indifferent, unite the jealous, persuade the adverse -in short, to educate the people into their views-is the agency which they think so ridiculously inadequate to educate the people's children. To determine what this agency can do, they must assume legislative aid to be out of the question, and then add all their own energy to the energy of their opponents. That this energy is of the same nature in both, they cannot deny. Zeal for popular enlightenment is the motive force in each case; in each case this zeal produces active efforts; and though different means are chosen, yet these efforts are directed to the same end. Clearly, therefore, to judge how far knowledge may be diffused without Stateaid, all the energy now directed, and to be hereafter directed, to the obtaining of State-aid, must be added to the energy expended in our present teaching organizations.

If the State-educationists are startled at being thus classed as practical though unconscious voluntaries, they will be yet more startled on finding how much they expect voluntaryism

to achieve. They wish to have, throughout the kingdom, a system of schools under local control, but supported by compulsory rates. This system they seek to establish by law. So to establish it they are carrying on an active agitation, in the hope of, by-and-bye, inducing a majority of the people to think with them. And when the majority demands it, their project is to receive legislative realization. To what state of feeling, then, do they hope to bring the majority? They hope so to interest them on behalf of this plan, so to impress them with the importance of education, so to rouse their sympathy for the uncultured and their pity for the depraved, that they may say to the Government-" Let us be taxed that there may be enough schools and teachers." This is what the advocates of State-education hope by their voluntary efforts to make the majority say: no small feat, too, if they succeed in it. But now let them just ask themselves whether it is not possible that the same persevering persua sion which shall make the majority say,-"Let us be taxed that there may be enough schools and teachers," might as readily make them say,-"Let us provide schools and teachers ourselves." If the majority may be made so anxious for the spread of enlightenment as to wish the State to put its hands in their pockets, may not a little more persuasion make them put their own hands in their pockets?

GOVERNMENT COLONIZATION.

A COLONY being a community, to ask whether it is right for the State to found and govern colonies, is practically to ask whether it is right for one community to found and govern other communities. And this question not being one in which the relationships of a society to its own authorities are alone involved, but being one into which there enter the interests of men external to such society, is in some measure removed out of the class of questions hitherto considered. Nevertheless, our directing principle affords satisfactory guidance in this case as well as in others.

That a Government cannot undertake to administer the affairs of a colony, and to support for it a judicial staff, a constabulary, a garrison, and so forth, without trespassing against the parent society, scarcely needs pointing out. Any expenditure for these purposes, be it like our own some three and a half millions sterling a year, or but a few thousands, involves a breach of State-duty. The taking from men property beyond what is needful for the better securing of their rights, we have seen to be an infringement of their rights. Colonial expenditure cannot be met without property being so taken. Colonial expenditure is therefore unjustifiable.

An objector might indeed allege that, by maintaining in a settlement a subordinate legislature, the parent legislature does but discharge towards the settlers its original office of protector; and that the settlers have a claim to protection at its hands. But the duty of a society towards itself, that is,

of a Government towards its subjects, will not permit the assumption of such a responsibility. For, as it is the function of a Government to administer the law of equal freedom, it cannot, without reversing its function, tax one portion of its subjects at a higher rate than is needful to protect them, that it may give protection to another portion below prime cost; and to guard those who emigrate, at the expense of those who remain, is to do this.

In one way, however, legislative union between a parent State and its colonies may be maintained without breach of the law; namely, by making them integral parts of one empire, severally represented in a united assembly commissioned to govern the whole. But, theoretically just as such an arrangement may be, it is too palpably impolitic for serious consideration. To propose that, while the English joined in legislating for the people of Australia, of the Cape, of New Zealand, of Canada, of Jamaica, and of the rest, these should in turn legislate for the English and for each other, is much like proposing that the butcher should superintend the classification of the draper's goods, the draper draw up a tariff of prices for the grocer, and the grocer instruct the baker in making bread.

It was exceedingly cool of Pope Alexander VI. to parcel out the unknown countries of the Earth between the Spaniards and Portuguese, granting to Spain all discovered and undiscovered heathen lands lying West of a certain meridian drawn through the Atlantic, and to Portugal those lying East of it. Queen Elizabeth, too, was somewhat cool when she empowered Sir Humphrey Gilbert "to discover and take possession of remote and heathen countries," and "to exercise rights, royalties, and jurisdiction, in such countries and seas adjoining." Nor did Charles II. show less coolness, when he gave to Winthrop, Mason, and others, power to "kill, slay, and destroy, by all fitting ways, enterprises, and means whatsoever, all and every such person or

persons as shall at any time hereafter attempt or enterprise the destruction, invasion, detriment, or annoyance of the inhabitants," of the proposed plantation of Connecticut. Indeed, all colonizing expeditions down to those of our own. day, with its American annexations, its French occupations of Algiers and Tahiti, and its British conquests of Scinde and of the Punjaub, have borne a repulsive likeness to the doings of buccaneers. As usual, however, these unscrupulous acts have brought deserved retribution. Insatiate greediness has generated very erroneous beliefs, and betrayed nations into most disastrous deeds. "Men are rich in proportion to their acres," argued politicians. "An increase of estate is manifestly equivalent to an increase of wealth. What, then, can be clearer than that the acquirement of new territory must be a national advantage?" So, misled by the analogy, and spurred on by acquisitiveness, we have continued to seize province after province, in utter disregard of the losses entailed by them. In fact, it has been inconceivable that they do entail losses; and though doubt is beginning to dawn upon the public mind, the instinctive desire to keep hold is too strong to permit a change of policy. Our predicament is like that of the monkey in the fable, who, putting his hand into a jar of fruit, grasps so large a quantity that he cannot get his hand out again, and is obliged to drag the jar about with him, never thinking to let go what he has seized. When we shall attain to something more than the ape's wisdom remains to be seen.

While the mere propensity to thieve, commonly known under some grandiloquent alias, has been the real prompter of colonizing invasions, from those of Cortez and Pizarro downwards, the ostensible purpose of them has been either the spread of religion or the extension of commerce. In modern days the latter excuse has been the favourite one. To obtain more markets-this is what people have said aloud to each other, was the object aimed at. And, though second

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