COLONIES AND THE MOTHER COUNTRY. 391 



with a nominated legislative council, further with the latter partly 

 elected, and finally with it wholly elective. At these successive stages 

 the colony is in a decreasing degree under the control of the Imperial 

 Government, and a scale might be drawn showing groups of colonies 

 indefinitely arrested at one or another of them. Only colonies destined 

 for complete freedom victoriously pass through them all and emerge 

 into full political manhood. 



The duration of their infancy and youth is determined by internal 

 and external circumstances: (1) AVhen a colony is systematically 

 founded and quickly peopled it may rapidly traverse the period of 

 dependence, and (like New Zealand or South Australia) be granted 

 responsible government in about fifteen years. (2) Convict colonies, 

 like Tasmania and New South Wales, may have fifty or sixty years of 

 pupilage. (3) A colony of retarded growth, like West Australia, may 

 be nearly as long a minor. (4) Colonies that have long to struggle with 

 an overwhelming mass of indigenes, like Cape Colony, may take half a 

 century to ripen, and even then, like Natal, may retain traces of the 

 earlier state. (5) When the mother country is herself despotically 

 governed, as England was under the Stuarts, the Commonwealth and 

 the early Hanoverians, colonies that possess every attribute qualifying 

 them for freedom, like many of the North American colonies, may be 

 forcibly retained in partial dependence. (6) The New England col- 

 onies, free from the start, were connected with Britain by a shadowy 

 tie of nominal allegiance, tightened at times into real subjection. 

 Lastly, a colony may revert, like Jamaica, after years of Parliamentary 

 institutions, to the dependent position of a Crown colony. 



So various and so intricate, so weak here, so strong there, and 

 withal so marvelously compacted, is the network of relations forming 

 'jhe anatomy of the wonderful new type of social organism constituted 

 by a mother country, its free and its subject colonies, its protected states 

 and its dependencies. 



The brain sometimes inhibits natural movements and enforces 

 injurious actions, as a morbid conscience often prescribes irksome 

 duties and forbids innocent pleasures. Fathers have misdirected the 

 career of their sons, and the unwisdom of mothers (Lady Ashton, in 

 'The Bride of Lammermoor,' is a tragic, but far from a rare example) 

 has destroyed the happiness of their daughters. So governments in- 

 evitably hinder and blunder, worry colonies by vexatious interferences 

 or goad them into insurrection. For more than thirty years Bishop 

 Fonseca, the president of the Council of the Indies, lay like an incubus 

 on the Spanish colonies in South America. His main object seemed to 

 be to throw impediments in the way of the great discoverers and rulers 

 — Columbus and Cortez. When Cortez planned the conquest of Mexico 

 he experienced protracted opposition from Fonseca, who "discourager! 



