COLONIES AND THE MOTHER COUNTRY. 395 



in a manner enlarged. The policy of the mother country is even 

 now being modified by its colonies. "The paramount object in legis- 

 lating for colonies should be the welfare of the parent state," frankly 

 avows the law officer of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape 

 of Good Hope, in 1779. The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon 

 Agreement were entered into as if England and the United States were 

 alone interested in their provisions. Treaties are now concluded in the 

 interests of the colonies. Treaties are 'denounced' in order to allow 

 them freedom to tax foreign commodities. They are represented by 

 commissioners, on an equal footing with those of Britain, at conferences 

 preparatory to the conclusion of treaties, and colonial conferences are 

 summoned in order that the general views of the colonies may be 

 ascertained. 



There is a more direct reaction, resembling the adoption by an 

 admiring father of the sentiments and opinions of a son who is rising 

 in the world. The Greek cities that had planted colonies imitated the 

 republican institutions of these and deposed their kings. "The Amer- 

 ican colonists," says Bancroft, "founded their institutions on popular 

 freedom and 'set an example to the nations.' Already the . . . 

 Anglo-Saxon emigrants were the hope of the world." The filial free 

 colonies of Britain are exerting an influence on the domestic policy 

 of the father-land. An aged colonial ruler used to console himself for 

 exclusion from the English Parliament by cherishing the belief that 

 ideas and measures of his had passed into the public life of England. 

 Kuch of this is mere hallucination; some of it is reality. The testimony 

 of a sagacious and experienced statesman on this subject is decisive: 



"To the influence of the American Union must be added that of the British 

 colonies. The success of popular self-government in these thriving communities 

 is reacting on political opinion at home with a force that no statesman neglects, 

 and that is every day increasing. There is even a danger that the influence 

 may go too far. They are solving some of our problems, but not under our con- 

 ditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties. Still, the effect of colonial 

 prosperity — a prosperity alike of admirable achievement and boundless promise 

 — is irresistible. It imparts a freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to Eng- 

 lish political notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and 

 popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most eloquent 

 assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any other source whatever, 

 save practical experience carefully observed and rationally interpreted."* 



The New Zealand system of local government is a model which 

 Great Britain, at one time famous in that line, has not been ashamed to 

 imitate; the English county councils have been molded on those of her 

 colony. From the same colony the mother country borrowed her First 

 Offenders' act. The restriction of electors to the exercise of a single vote 

 — unimportant excepting in principle in populous England, but impor- 



* Morley, ' Studies in Literature,' pp. 126-7. 



