THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 59 



earliest laws, like the capitularies of Charlemagne, were public 

 orders or proclamations. Under the sixth governor, when civilian 

 officials had arrived, his authority received its first limitation: a 

 small council was instituted, consisting of the chief justice, the 

 attorney general, and the archdeacon of Sydney. A few years 

 later the council was enlarged by the inclusion of new officials, and 

 an equal number of unofficial citizens, who were, however, nomi- 

 nated by the crown. So far, we are still in the twelfth English 

 century. In 1828 began fourteen years of agitation for an elective 

 council, and with 1842 we arrive at the colonial Magna Charta. The 

 concession had hardly been made when, with the influx of fresh 

 settlers, another agitation for all the rights of self-government was 

 begun. It was complicated with the convict question, as the politics 

 of the United States was long complicated with the slavery ques- 

 tion, but was not settled with, though it may have been accelerated 

 by, the settlement of that in 1848. Eight years later full self-gov- 

 ernment was granted, largely through the agency of one man. As 

 a Wentworth had aided in subverting the liberties of Englishmen, 

 a second Wentworth redeemed the honor of his name by proving 

 the Shaftesbury of a second revolution, and procuring freedom for 

 their Australian descendants. Subsequent developments repeat the 

 English reforms of 1832, 1867, and 1881. Thus the colony de- 

 scribed in less than a century the evolution which it had taken the 

 mother country fourteen hundred years to accomplish. Younger 

 colonies, omitting the earlier stages, ran the same distance in far 

 shorter periods. 



They are not only repeating, they are anticipating, the history of 

 the parent state. Eemale suffrage has been conceded in two Aus- 

 tralasian colonies, and it is inevitable in the rest. The domination of 

 a socialist democracy is far advanced in the two former. The refer- 

 endum, or direct appeal to the people on specific issues, is on the eve 

 of general enactment. Ministries elected by the legislature are pos- 

 sibly in the near future. Thus legislative bodies which sprang from 

 the crown are more democratic than those that sprang from the 

 people. Withal, the former retain an anomalous vestige of their 

 origin. While the business of legislation in Congress is necessarily 

 conducted by members who have no official connection with the 

 executive, as it was originally in the English Parliament, the British 

 and colonial ministries claim an ever-increasing monopoly of legisla- 

 tion on all questions of any magnitude. It has long been recognized 

 as impossible for a private member to carry through the House of 

 Commons a measure of any consequence, and a colonial ministry 

 arrests the progress of a successful bill by intimating that the subject 

 of it can only be legislated upon by the Government. 



