local legislature, do to a much greater extent administer their own affairs than the others, called the Crown Colonies. But in all of these there is not a law or ordinance that can be passed which does not require the consent of the Home Government to give it validity; and, on the other hand, in many of the Colonies, the expense even of their civil institutions is in part defrayed out of taxes raised at home. I shall say a little more on this question presently; in this place I will only point out to you how it illustrates, in another way, what I said before, that we have hardly any parallel case in history to the British Colonial Empire. Rome had a vast empire, but not properly Colonial. The Greeks had Colonies extensive enough, relatively to the parent states, to be called an Empire; but an Empire implies a central power as well as large extent, and that did not, in fact, exist in the Greek system.

In these last considerations we approach the most serious part of the question, to which, as was said, I wish especially to draw your attention this evening: I mean the moral, the religious, responsibility of this country with regard to its Colonies. Such a responsibility, in the case of nations and Governments as well as individuals, is of course determined and measured by the amount of power and of influence which the superior party reserves and exercises over the inferior. Now this moral responsibility, in the Greek system, may be said to have ceased with the foundation of the Colony. The Greeks were of course answerable for the character of those whom in the first instance they sent forth, and the manner in which they sent them; but not, except as involved in this, for the subsequent career

Contrariwise, by

of themselves or their descendants. retaining its Colonists in real dependence on itself, the Government of this country, and this country through its Government, assumed as much responsibility, whatever that may be, for the welfare of Canada and New South Wales, as it had for that of Middlesex and Yorkshire; and this applies to all our foreign possessions. It is therefore on this country that we in great measure look as accountable, when we consider the motives that led to the establishment of our Colonies, their subsequent career, or their present state.

Now, it seems the proper place here to say, that I have no particular wish, by this Lecture, to flatter and inflate, in the minds of any of us, the feelings of pride and glorification with which we are apt to contemplate our enormous Empire. I do not say that all such feelings of satisfaction are wrong, or that much good may not be drawn from them. But they are sufficiently natural and spontaneous. They need very little pampering and fostering. Rather let us dwell on what I have already suggested: the responsibility, the duties, which this country has assumed when investing itself with this Empire. If such a view should fail to inspire as the other does, nothing but what is pleasant and flattering to our human feelings-if at best it should produce but mixed emotions-I cannot help that. Let us look at the truth. On the Colonial domain of England, it is said, the visible sun never sets. True. On how much, or how little, of that vast domain, has the Sun of Righteousness ever risen?

With such thoughts as these in our minds, perhaps we can do no better than attempt to follow, very briefly

and partially, the arrangement of the subject just indicated, and notice, with respect to our American and our Australian Colonies, and mainly in the religious aspect which we have before us-first, the motives which may be traced in the minds of their first planters; next, their progress; lastly, their present state.

On the first point it is material to observe that the formation of most, if not all, of our present Colonies, was the deliberate act of the State of England. In this respect it resembled the Greek colonization, which was the act of the collective nation which sent forth the settlers. It is not necessarily so. The Colony must, at some step or other, if it is to be a part of the Empire, be taken under the care and government of the mothercountry; but in its first formation it may have originated in the voluntary efforts of some of its inhabitants. This was in great measure the case in the first plantation of that renowned country, once our Colony, now no longer ours, but to which we will briefly refer, as having preceded the establishment of most of our possessions, and as eminently illustrative of some of the principles which we have in view—the United States of America. As to some of them, indeed, the first settlers from England obtained a Royal Charter at the very outset of their undertaking, which thus may be said to have become a national one. But with regard especially to the New England States, you are probably aware that their earliest origin was in the discontent of certain of the Puritans in the 17th Century with their religious condition at home; who in consequence, with nothing beyond the passive acquiescence of the King,* left their * Grahame's History of the United States, Vol. i. pp. 188, 190-1.

native shores, and founded Transatlantic communities which, whatever we may think of various circumstances in their history, were undoubtedly imbued in this their beginning with the deepest piety, and the purest wish to exhibit models of Christian commonwealths. But this private character, so to speak, only belonged to these Colonies in their very infancy. England very soon conceived hopes of being able to turn them to her own interest, especially by means of commercial restrictions, and accordingly bound them for this purpose by much closer ties to herself than existed at the time of their foundation. And from this time till the period of American independence, the main features of the connexion between this country and those Colonies, as far as belongs to our present purpose, may be said to have been close commercial restriction and monopoly of the Colonial trade, intended for the benefit of England, and neglect on her part of the religious state of the dependencies. Something further will be added hereafter on the former, as part of the general political question of Colonial relation; at present we will only remark that, as is well known, the end of that political system was the loss of the North American Colonies. But the latter, or religious question, is far from being unconnected with the chain of causes which led to that separation. The spirit in which the politicians of the early part of last century often regarded the religious state of North America is illustrated with such extraordinary force by the recorded saying of one of them, that I cannot but quote it; although in another point of view the anecdote refers not to the operation of this spirit, but to one of the exceptions to that operation which the English

Government sometimes permitted. His name, which deserves to be hung for ever on the gibbet of history, was Seymour; he was Attorney-General in the year 1703. The Colonists of Virginia had at length obtained from the Crown that which, after a century and a half, is now being attempted with more or less success in almost all our Colonial Dioceses; the institution of a Chartered College in the Colony, for the education of all classes, especially of Missionary clergymen and teachers; and towards its erection, the moderate contribution of £2000 from the Government. Against this contribution, however, the said Attorney-General remonstrated: "£2000?" he said; "you shall not have £2000; why do you want it?" A delegate from the Colony represented what seems a material and unquestionable fact in the case, that the Colonists had souls to be saved as well as their brethren in England. His reply has in it a degree of coarse humour, and perhaps on first hearing it we may be struck by a sense of the ludicrous; but I rely on the right feeling of this meeting that they will not for a moment dwell on this aspect of it, but rather think with shame on the truly fiendish spirit which could prompt such an answer from a Minister of State-an answer which only embodied with singular force a view far too prevalent in this country formerly on this subject. He replied, "Never mind your souls! grow tobacco !”*

The spirit of these words is indeed one which is to be traced in every instance where one man makes another a mere machine to get wealth for him, and not the least

* Franklin's Correspondence, quoted in Grahame's History of the United States, Vol. i. p. 135, n. The original expression is even stronger.