280 Colonial Policy : [MARCH, 



of like nature/' shews that the old leaven still continues to leaven the 

 lump. 



Perhaps, however, there is no government in Europe in which this 

 system of colonial possession has taken so deep a root as in that of 

 Great Britain. Whether this be owing to the number of influential but 

 sinister interests, which in this highly aristocratical country are promoted 

 by its existence, it is not our present object to inquire. That it occupies 

 a prodigious page in our history that it has dipped deeply into our 

 blood and our treasure that it has still very profuse demands on our 

 taxation and that it absorbs an enormous proportion of the time and 

 attention of our legisfetre are facts, however, which are totally beyond 

 the power of dispute. Any one of these facts is sufficient to provoke the 

 most serious inquiry as to the wisdom of the policy which has given 

 birth to them : yet men can continue to gaze on in stupid indifference ; 

 or, if their attention be a moment arrested, it is only to be captivated, by 

 a set of vague generalities and flashy sophisms, into a devoted advocacy 

 of a policy, of which in reality they know little more than its existence. 

 To remove as much as in us lies the general ignorance on this most 

 important subject, we propose to present our readers with as brief an 

 epitome as the nature of the case will permit of the true principles on 

 which this species of commercial policy is founded. 



It has been said that colonies and the mother country being but integral 

 parts of the same community, all the relationships exist between them 

 which exist between any other more closely connected departments of the 

 same empire,* and that the commercial intercourse of the two varies not, 

 accordingly, in principle, from that domestic interchange which takes 

 place between the more compact divisions of the mother country. This 

 is a fallacy, into which people have fallen from not observing, that, 

 while in reference to the whole all the parts are equally its component 

 members, yet, in reference to each other, 4he relationships of those 

 members may be widely different. Thus, as far as Lancashire and 

 Jamaica, both enter into the composition of the British empire, they are 

 equally parts of that empire ; but inasmuch as Lancashire and the other 

 counties of Great Britain form in themselves a community distinct and 

 independent from that of Jamaica and the other colonies a community 

 in the government of which (though owing to it an implicit obedience) 

 yet have they not the slightest participation ; Jamaica and the other 

 colonies can, in reference to Great Britain, as contradistinguished from 

 the entire British empire, be considered only in the light of foreign 

 dependencies, and the trade of Great Britain to those dependencies only 

 in the character of a foreign trade. And, in point of fact, notwithstanding, 

 whenever it has suited the purposes of interest, this ad captandum desig- 

 nation of colonies has ever been put forth, the policy in which they 

 have been governed has most completely stamped them with the charac- 

 ter of foreign dependencies. " The colonists have no right/' said Lord 

 Chatham, " to manufacture even a nail for a horse-shoe ;" rather a 



* See a specimen of this mode of reasoning in the Emigration Report of 1826, when, 

 contemplating the transfer of the emigrant to the colonies, it is urged as an argument, 

 that " it will be found that he produces infinitely more than lie consumes, and the 

 national wealth will be increased by the change, IF the colonies are to be considered as 

 integral parts of the nation at large." 



