Colonial Office

“ The first desire of a colonial governor is not to get into a "scrape," not to do anything which may give trouble to his superiors—the Colonial Office—at home, which may cause an untimely and dubious recall, which may hurt his after career. He is sure to leave upon the colony the feeling that they have a ruler who only half knows them, and does not so much as half care for them. ”

“ All the chief colonial officers were to be appointed by the king, to hold office during his pleasure, to receive their pay from him. Such was the tenure of the executive officers who had a veto on all colonial legislation, and of the judicial officers. Thus the power of making and administering the laws fell from the people distributed everywhere, into the hands of the distant government centralized in the King.
2. A standing army of British soldiers must be kept in the Colonies to overawe the people, and enforce the laws thus made and administered. ”

“ After practising with success, accepted appointment of permanent counsel to Colonial Office and Board of Trade 1825, and was subsequently, 1826-47, permanent Under-Sec. for the Colonies, in which capacity he exercised an immense influence on the colonial policy of the empire, and did much to bring about the abolition of the slave trade. ”

“ Our obvious policy would be, to conciliate the leading men by titles of honour, to conciliate the rising generation by giving them the offices of their own country, and make it a principle of colonial government, that while the command of the forces, or the governor-generalship should be supplied from home, every office below those ranks should be given to those brave and intelligent individuals of the colony who had best earned them. ”

“ It is a constitutional sight like few.
And yet an instinct deeper than the Gospel of M'Croudy teaches all men that Colonies are worth something to a country! That if, under the present Colonial Office, they are a vexation to us and themselves, some other Colonial Office can and must be contrived which shall render them a blessing; and that the remedy will be to contrive such a Colonial Office or method of administration, and by no means to cut the Colonies loose. Colonies are not to be picked off the street every day ”

“ That mother-country which has been narrowed from the British Isles into the Parliament, from the Parliament into the executive government, from the executive government into the Colonial Office, is not to be sought in the apartments of the Secretary of State, or his Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Where you are to look for it, it is impossible to say. In some back-room—whether in the attic, or in what storey we know not—you will find all the mother-country which really exercises supremacy, and really maintains connexion with the vast and widely-scattered colonies of Britain. ”

“ No matter how pressing and immediate the wants of the colony, chance alone affords the opportunity of making their necessities known at home. Letters and despatches accumulate in the Post-office; no vessel arrives bringing intelligence from England, or offering to take away a mail: the Colonial Secretary, having exhausted every official resource in the way of mental occupation, looks out at the window, and meditates upon quail-shooting. ”

“ As the Imperial Government and Parliament gradually withdraw from legislative interference, and from the exercise of patronage in Colonial affairs, the office of Governor tends to become, in the most emphatic sense of the term, the link which connects the Mother-country and the Colony, and his influence the means by which harmony of action between the local and imperial authorities is to be preserved. ”

“ It would be much the best plan to put an end to all the Australian commissioners, to whom allusion is made in the bill before your lordships, altogether. A worse system was never adopted for the management of a colony. We ought to place that colony in the same position as the other colonies under the government of her majesty, and rule it in the usual way by the Colonial Office. ”

“ Such a complication, it is safe to say, never existed in any other region of the world, or in any other record of colonization and expanding empire. That government was possible at all reflects great credit upon the administrators, and shows that, as years passed on, the Colonial Office had at last risen to the level of its responsibilities, had grasped the true spirit and the absolute necessity of Imperial growth, and had learned that the men in charge of distant regions must have the confidence of rulers at home and a policy with some degree of continuity in plan and principle and detail. ”

“ Minds influential in the Colonial Office and elsewhere saw in this only a flamboyant patriotism. The Duke of Newcastle, when colonial secretary, had not shared the desire for separation, and he found it hard to believe that any one charged with colonial administration wished it. He had written to Palmerston in 1861:
You speak of some supposed theoretical gentlemen in the colonial office who wish {121} to get rid of all colonies as soon as possible. ”

“ Experience has proved again and again that a man who has failed in one administrative post is not likely to succeed in a higher and more responsible appointment. Without pretending to any attempt at exhaustive criticism, one other point may be mentioned. The machinery of Crown Colony government is based upon a set of cut-and-dried rules, called the Colonial Office Regulations, which cover a wide field and are applied impartially to all Crown Colonies. ”

“ In 1853 he published 'The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell's Administration' (2 vols.) in the form of a series of letters addressed to the late prime minister ; therein he boasted that during his period of office a remarkable development in both the population and the resources of the colonies had taken place, a commercial revolution deeply affecting the colonies had been safely passed through, and a great reduction of the colonial charges imposed on the treasury had been effected (Colonial Policy, ii. 303) . ”

“ Such good offices, it is the duty of every Colony to tender and to accept in turn.
The present colonial Minister who is forced to acknowledge the correct axiom that British colonists possessing a representative Assembly are of right freed from the legislation of the Imperial Parliament, is so attached to the privileges enjoyed by his predecessors in office of misgoverning these distant possessions, that he hesitates not to lay bare (in his instructions to Sir Francis Head) in all its naked diformity the Colonial system as it is understood and expounded in Downing Street. ”

“ Such are some of the troubles and afflictions incident to the unenviable office of Governor of a colony. Those innocent country gentlemen who have expended the better part of their property on contested elections, and now weary heaven and Her Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State for colonial appointments, little know what they invoke upon themselves. ”

“ I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true.
The yellow, mildewed pages of the diary of a man long dead, and the records of the Colonial Office dovetail perfectly with the narrative of my convivial host, and so I give you the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.
If you do not find it credible you will at least be as one with me in acknowledging that it is unique, remarkable, and interesting. ”

“ He was indeed constantly impressing upon Ministers that gentlemen-settlers, encouraged by "extraordinary concessions," did not further the Colony's progress in agriculture, and that they were the most discontented, unreasonable and troublesome persons in the whole country. [18] Macquarie firmly believed that the best settlers were the emancipated convicts, and he put this view forward so often and so urgently that the Colonial Office naturally accepted it. ”

“ A Crown colony where the Government has it all its own way must be the paradise of officials, and the high sense of honor and the righteous esprit de corps which characterize our civil servants in the Far East, and a conscientious sense of responsibilities for the good government and well-being of the heterogeneous populations over which they rule, seem as good a check as the general run of colonial parliaments. ”

“ They felt, and justly so, that inexperience in the intricate problems of commerce and colonies and preoccupation with domestic politics and foreign affairs made it impossible for the Privy Council to be an alert, constant, and competent colonial department. They urged as a remedy the erection of a special board of skilled personnel, to sit continuously and aloof from politics, to advise the king and council on the affairs of trade and plantations. ”

“ Widely different was the case of the English colonies in North America. All these settlements started under some form of grant or charter, derived ultimately from the Crown: the Crown from time to time interfered and made a show of its supremacy; but there was no system of any sort or kind, and communities grew up, which in practice had never been governed from home but governed themselves. Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the full the spirit of colonial independence. ”

“ The colonial empire comprises over fifty distinct governments. It is divided into colonies of three classes and dependencies; these, again, are in some instances associated for administrative purposes in federated groups. The three classes of colonies are crown colonies, colonies possessing representative institutions but not responsible government, and colonies possessing representative institutions and responsible government. In crown colonies the crown has entire control of legislation, and the public officers are under the control of the home government. ”

“ All such forces are under the full control of the Colonial Governments, whether, as in the Australian Commonwealth and Canada, under the Federal Ministry of Defence, or, as in Cape Colony, under the department of the Prime Minister. An imperial officer may be lent, as in Canada and Australia to-day, for the command of the colonial force, but as soon as he enters upon his command he becomes a servant of the Colonial Government. ”

“ The colonial assemblies immediately after their formation shall signify, in the name of each colony respectively, their sentiments respecting that constitution, those laws, and the administration of them, which will best promote the prosperity and happiness of the people, conforming themselves nevertheless to those general principles by which the colonies and the mother-country are connected together, and by which their respective interests are best secured, agreeably to the decree of the 8th of March 1790 and instructions of the 28th of the same month. ”

“ In a great empire, the springs of action are concealed; the public behold only the results, and can scarcely guess how those results were brought about. In a colony, every one stands so close to the little machine of Government, that he can readily discern how it is made to work, and therefore takes a more lively interest in the working of it. The model has its representative of a sovereign; its Ministers, who comprise the Executive Council with the Colonial Secretary as Premier ”

“ We augur well of this Imperial arrangement, not merely because it forms a fitting acknowledgment of colonial enterprise, but because we may venture to see in it the beginning of a new policy, by which the Home Government frees itself, once for all, from the imaginary, or, at any rate, to it, the needless costs and difficulties of founding new colonies. Colonies already established and prosperous may be left to perform this duty, and they may be so left all the more readily when, as in this case, they are prompt to take the duty in hand, with all its outlay and trouble. ”

“ Parliament made no protest when the king divided up and gave away the New World. Parliament acquiesced when by charter he created trading companies and bestowed upon them powers of government. Down to 1765 Parliament seldom legislated for individual colonies, and it was generally held that the colonies were not included in English statutes unless specially mentioned. The Crown created the colonies, gave them governors, permitted the local assemblies to grow up, and directed the course of the colonial executive by royal instructions. ”

“ In what other colony, for instance, could one find a Colonial official, holding a high position and drawing a large salary, who advanced money to all applicants on the security of jewelry and such small portable articles of value, or in what part of the British Empire an officer, head of a Colonial department, who uses his influence to persuade his negro subordinates to insure their lives in a company for which he is agent, thereby pocketing a commission of twenty-five or thirty per cent. ”

“ It is, in its very essence, a pure democracy; and, in pursuance of it, the colonists proceeded soon afterwards to organize the colonial government, under the name of the Colony of New Plymouth, to appoint a Governor and other officers and to enact laws. ”

“ Every colonist had a right to inhabit, if he pleased, in any other colony, and as a British subject he was capable of inheriting lands by descent in every other colony. The commercial intercourse of the colonies too was regulated by the general laws of the British empire, and could not be restrained or obstructed by colonial legislation. ”