Colonie

“ The colonies are a hundredfold multiplication of the area of our own limited islands. In taking possession of so large a portion of the globe, we have enabled ourselves to spread and increase, and carry our persons, our language and our liberties, into all climates and continents. ”

“ Colonies, and to think of them as in a state of subordination to us, and as holding their existence in America only for our use, that it is no wonder the prejudices of many are alarmed, when they find a different doctrine maintained. ”

“ The nation at large, scarcely alive until now to the existence of the Colonies, was stung into Imperial consciousness by a national humiliation, for so it was not unnaturally regarded, coming from an obscure pastoral community confusedly identified as something between a Colony, a foreign power, and a troublesome native tribe. ”

“ This colony is successful in furnishing, as do the score of other colonies in Germany, a haven to the “brothers of the highway” who are stranded and unable to live honestly without our help. This colony is a colony not for the permanent rehabilitation of its inmates, but for the temporary succor of those who seek our help. ”

“ In the Colonies, as everywhere else in this world, the vital point is not who decides, but what is decided on! That measures tending really to the best advantage temporal and spiritual of the Colony be adopted, and strenuously put in execution; there lies the grand interest of every good citizen British and Colonial. Such measures, whosoever have originated and prescribed them, will gradually be sanctioned by all men and gods; and clamors of every kind in reference to them may safely to a great extent be neglected, as clamorous merely, and sure to be transient. ”

“ To fix upon their minds the fact that colonies were planted by different European nations, it is often advisable to purchase at a stationer's tiny adhesive stars of various colors. Each color [8] serves to represent a nation, and stars are pasted upon the spots where colonies once stood. ”

“ Had the colonies been communities of foreigners, over whom we wanted to acquire dominion, or even to extend a dominion before acquired, they are ready to admit that their resistance would have been just.—In my opinion, this is the same with saying, that the Colonies ought to be worse off than the rest of mankind, because they are our own Brethren. ”

“ I am not very superstitious, but I do solemnly believe that these Colonies are blessed with the smiles of Providence; and, if we may dare attempt penetrating the veil, by which he conceals his allwise dispensations from mortal eyes, that he designs that Africa shall be the refuge and the home of the descendants of its sons and daughters, torn and dragged from their native land, by lawless violence. ”

“ It is impossible to forget in the early history of the North American colonies, what facility the French displayed, in contrast with the English, in attaining communication with the children of the forest, in acquiring and retaining their confidence, in taking on their rude and uncultivated modes of life, and in shaping even their superstitions to their own selfish purposes. ”

“ We start then with colonies planted from a land which had no thought of systematic control over colonies or dependencies, whose government was at the time of colonization in a chaotic state, whose colonists went out in part, at any rate, intent on practical separation, and who all settled themselves or were settled in a remote region at a time when distance did not grow less. ”

“ Will they be of benefit to these grand and extensive colonies?—colonies enjoying perpetual summer—colonies of the richest soil—colonies containing within themselves everything necessary for their support—colonies, in fine, so varied in their quality and situation, as to be capable of bringing to perfection every tropical production ”

“ It occurred to me, and I said it then, that Great Britain has more than thirty colonies in different quarters of the globe, in which the numbers of civilized men are increasing, and the native tribes are wasting away—that the march of civilization is everywhere, as it is in America, a war of extermination, and that of our own species. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had the Pope's bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. ”

“ Even colonizing England has planted military colonies in Ireland, Nova Scotia, and Ohio, besides having temporary camps on her frontiers where towns grow up, as at Raglan and Otahuhu, in New Zealand; and the pensioner settlement of Onehunga may be taken as an image of an ancient Roman colony of veterans.
3. We seem to rise considerably in the scale as we leave behind us colonies founded on the lust of conquest, and arrive at colonies whose formation was governed by political motives. They are always more or less collective; they sometimes take place en masse ”

“ In this book American colonization is considered in the light of general colonization as a phase of history. Englishmen in planting colonies in America brought with them the institutions with which they had been familiar at home: it is shown what these institutions were, and how, in adapting themselves to new conditions of growth, they differed from English models. As prominent among the changed conditions, the physical geography of America and its aboriginal inhabitants receive somewhat extended treatment ”

“ Crown Colonies.There is another group of British possessions which are peculiarly under the government of the Colonial Office, and which have often reason to be dissatisfied with that Government—I mean the Crown Colonies, the most important of which are the Straits Settlements, Ceylon, the West Indian Islands, and Mauritius. In nearly every Crown Colony, the white population bears a very small proportion to the natives, and is composed mainly of merchants, bankers, a few officials, and, in the West Indies, of planters. ”

“ The colonies carry out with them a knowledge of agriculture and of other useful arts, superior to what can grow up of its own accord, in the course of many centuries, among savage and barbarous nations. They carry out with them, too, the habit of subordination, some notion of the regular government which takes place in their own country, of the system of laws which support it, and of a regular administration of justice; and they naturally establish something of the same kind in the new settlement. ”

“ In this way the balance is adjusted in favour of the colonies. It is a great deal more than redressed if the superior, social, and economic conditions, under which the colonists live, are also placed in the scale. ”

“ The absolute orthodoxy of this colony from its inception was in striking contrast with the freedom from religious restriction of the colonies planned by Coligny before the civil wars had forced the government to introduce rigorous conformity.
10. The company's rights over the colony were great: they could appoint officers of sovereign justice, who should be commissioned by the crown; and nominate military officials by sea and land over ships, troops, and fortresses, the king agreeing to appoint their nominees. ”

“ To give the greater weight to what I say, I may take the liberty to tell you, I have as little personal interest, as little to lose in the colony, as most of you. If I consulted either my safety or my temporal interest, I should soon remove with my family to Great Britain, or the Northern colonies, where I have had very inviting offers. Nature has not formed me for a military life, nor furnished me with any great degree of fortitude and courage ”

“ True British colonies are settlements where men from our own shores have been able to make a permanent home, found a family, and rear children in robust health. Men of our stock can only plant such colonies where a temperate climate prevails, where wheat and other cereals thrive, and where flocks and herds can be successfully reared; such colonies we have in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ”

“ Common danger alone produced occasional signs of common action. The New England colonies, whose borders were most within reach of French raids, and whose shores reached to Acadia, showed far the most public spirit, and far the most power of combination. ”

“ The social and economic condition of the people is described, and attention is paid to the political characteristics of the several colonies both in the conduct of their local affairs and in their relations with each other and the mother-country. It is shown that the causes of the Revolution were deep-seated in colonial history. Attention is also called to the fact, generally overlooked, that the thirteen mainland colonies which revolted in 1776 were not all of the English colonial establishments in America. ”

“ The other sort of colonies are for trade, and intended to increase the wealth and power of the native kingdom; which they will abundantly do if managed prudently, and put and kept under a proper regulation. ”

“ Notwithstanding their troubles with the Indians, the hardships and privations to which the first settlers of a wild country are always exposed, and the shameful neglect with which they were treated by the mother-countries, the French and English colonies went on growing and thriving in a way that was wonderful to behold. ”

“ If the Colonies will undertake the duties as well as the privileges of British citizens, we may go on together as members of one great Empire, each part habitually maintaining itself, and the whole ready to rally round any threatened point. ”

“ For the colonies in the Indies, they are yet babes that cannot live without sucking the breasts of their mother cities, but such as I mistake if when they come of age they do not wean themselves; ”

“ But it is just this which has made us successful colonists, and it is the absence of this which makes French colonies dead failures. Whereas we and the Germans pour forth tens of thousands of emigrants, France sends to her North African Settlements just over six hundred persons per annum—and they are nearly all officials. ”

“ Their prayer, in which the whole population in these Colonies most heartily join, is simply and most reasonably that we, the said Colonies, being an integral portion of the British Empire, and having, in intelligence and every form of civilized progress, outgrown the stage of political tutelage, should be accorded some measure of emancipation therefrom. ”

“ The Colonies adapt themselves more readily to change than the older civilisation; they represent a younger, more vigorous generation, and, if behind the mother country in many respects, are ahead of her in others of quite vital importance. ”

“ The thirteen American colonies, which in 1775 dared defy the might of Great Britain, and which in a stubborn struggle were able to win their independence, were settled at various times, and by colonists actuated by widely different motives. ”

“ New planted Colonies are generally attended with a Force and Necessity of Planting the known and approved Staple and Product of the Country, as well as all the Provisions their Families spend. ”

“ Resolved,⁠That these ^united Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the british crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved
NH.—— ”

“ In riding through those portions of our states that were the early settled colonies, it is pleasant to note where any old houses are still standing, or where the sites of early colonial houses are known, the good taste usually shown by the colonists in the places chosen to build their houses. ”

“ In appearance the labor system of all the colonies was the same. ”

“ In government as well as in trade a new era came to the colonies in 1763. ”

“ The participation of the people in their own government was the more significant, because the colonies actually had what England only seemed to have,—three departments of government. ”

“ In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States. ”

“ Our country presents on every side the evidences of that continued favor under whose auspices it, has gradually risen from a few feeble and dependent colonies to a prosperous and powerful confederacy. ”

“ The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability. ”

“ In the early days of the New England colonies no more embarrassing or hampering condition, no greater temporal ill could befall any adult Puritan than to be unmarried. ”

“ The staple of our Australian colonies, but more particularly of New South Wales, the climate and the soil of which are peculiarly suited to its production,—is fine wool. ”

“ The antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French in their part of the continent, and to which reference will be made later. In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian, whereas in the French colonies, as generally in all Colonial countries that had the Roman imperial tradition and the Roman Catholic religion, the half-breed was assimilated to the European group. ”