MERIVALE ON COLONIZATION.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume I, Issue 20, 14 November 1861, Page 5 (Supplement)

MERIVALE ON COLONIZATION.

(From the Saturday Review, Aug. 10.)

When Mr. Merivale first gave these lectures to the world some twenty years ago, Colonial discussions wore a very different aspect from that which they wear now. They were then among the most important of those that occupied the thoughts of politicians. They were bound up with the most pressing questions of the day. As fields of emigration, the colonies were closely connected with all the anxious controversies of that time respecting the best mode of throwing off the superabundant population of which heavy poor’s-rates and Chartist riots gave such melancholy credence. As factors in the great “ colonial system,” they entered largely into the Fiec-trado controversy which was just then rising into importance. As areas of transportation they occupied the foreground in those exaggerated pictures of convict suffering by which the philanthopists were then beginning to discredit that valuable system. Pushed thus prominently before the public attention, our colonies had bred theories and controversies of their own. That superfluity of the constructive faculty with which civilized communities are periodically plagued was concentrating itself upon our colonial empire. Some schemers were building up new theories of government ; others digging out of antiquity or spinning out of their own imaginations systems of colonization that were new at least to modern times. It was a time when the colonies were honored with long debates and laborious Committees, and when many a rising statesman made his fame by the skill with which he pieced together some novel policy out of the ever-varying material furnished by Colonial witnesses and Colonial statisticians. All this is over now. It is an evidence of the rapidity with which wo live in these days, that the very ruins of many of these controversies have perished. Mr. Merivalc’s lectures were strictly appropriate to their time ; and rending them over again now is like reading an old volume of Hansard, or a collection of ancient polemical tracts. At times it is difficult to persuade oneself that any one ever entertained some of the views ho combats ; at others it is hard to understand how some of the questions on which he bestows so much labour were thought worth the trouble of discussing. The retrospect is, however, one to which he can look back with considerable complacency. The side which he adopted was generally the winning one ; and predictions which he hazarded have in most instances proved to bo correct. The colonial system, the intricate network of interlaced protections and prohibition, the product of so much ample stores of learning and logic, is dead enough to have appeased his bitterest animosity. The popular institutions which the enthusiastic Professor of 20 years ago coveted for the colonies have been accorded to them with a liberality the results of which seem to have a little startled the sobered and disenchanted administrator of the year 1861. The Wakefield theory has boon canned into practice with no sparing hand, and Mr. Merivale deserves the credit, of having pointed out from the beginning what part of it was true metal, and what was perishable alloy. The theory tnat a nxeu price for land could make a colony self-supporting from the very first has been torn to shreds by rude 'experience. The idea that the

same machinery would secure a due proportion between capital and labour was proved to be a student’s dream. Even the particular price ou which theorists of this school originally fixed lias not survived the practical experience of the colonist themselves. The whole theory of a uniform price has broken down. In Australia and in Canterbury, where the clearing has been ready done by nature the high price of land has answered tolerably well. The land which required but little expenditure, and yielded a rapid return, was found to be worth a large outlay in purchase money ; and therefore it found purchasers. But in the Northern Island of New Zealand, where the land was thickly wooded, the high price utterly broke down, and iii Canada which was similarly circumstanced it was never even tried. The practical difficulty, if there had been no other, was the competition of the United States. As long as an acre of American forest could be got for five shillings, people would not give a pound for an acre of New Zealand forest. The one feature of the Wakefield scheme which has survived experience, and has proved a valuable discovery in the art of colonization, was the plan of using the purchase-money of land as a means of bringing out poor emigrants to people the colony. It did not have the effect which Mr. Wakefield anticipated of attracting large capitalists to the colony ; but it operated in swelling its population with a rapidity utterly unknown to earlier colonies which had relied wholly upon spontaneous emigration. This result the Wakefield school have unquestionably-produced. But Mr. Merivale is a little too kind to a school of which he no doubt cherishes an affectionate remembrance in treating this result as a triumph of their theory. It is rather an accidental consequence, or at best a very secondary success. It had very little to do with the finely-drawn speculation of which the theory is principally made up. And even that amount of success was not attained without a very material modification of the original doctrine. Mr. Wakefield strongly insisted that all the purchase-money of land should go towards emigration, and repudiated the idea that any of it should be applied for surveying and road making. In practice it has been found indispensable to apply at least half of it to these purposes. The sale by auction and the lease of pastoral runs are equally bold departures from the original scheme. In these busy times men are not fond of slaving again slain heresies ; and save as illustrating one chapter in the great history of human error, much of the interest of these lectures has passed away-. The historical parts of them, lucidly and learnedly put together, will always retain their value. But for the purposes of present political discussion, the colonies have lost the pi-ominence they- once held. They can no longer claim the first, or even the second rank among the subjects of the day. If any man presses them on the House of Commons, he is met only by the unanswerable rejoinder of a count-out. 'ln truth, their tie to us now is a gossamer thread. They have ceased to form a component part in our protective or navigation system. They no longer furnish us with an outlet for our convicts, and we have ceased to need them as a field of emigration. The account between us and them is now a very simple one. On their side they furnish us with a market for our exports, which some economists think would be straitened, and others think would be widened, if their connexion with England were to cease. Ou our side, wo spend about a million and a half yearly- on their defence—an expendiwliich enables us to furnish an agreeable variety of station to onr soldiers, and to indulge in the sentiment that the sun never sets on our Empire. Under these circumstances, there arc but two subjects touched on by Mr. Merivale which command any considerable attention at the present moment. Both of them are involved in the present —or the late—New Zealand war. One of them is the extent to which the mother country is bound to the defence of her colonies. The other is the mode in which subject savage tribes should be dealt with. With respect to the first, Mr. Merivale does not take a very decided view. He admits the logical force of the argument, that if we make native wars a ground for bringing a large commissariat expenditure into a colony, native wars arc not very- likely to cease. On the other hand, he calls attention to the fact, somewhat overlooked in this controversy, that colonies only thrive as good markets for our exports when they- are at peace. The New England colonies, to which reference is frequently made, cost England nothing, it is true, for defence against the natives. But then they brought in very little in the way of trade. Their growth was precarious and very slow, compared to that of those modern colonies which we have spared no expense to foster. The colonies may have no right to our assistance ; but it may be still good policy in us to give it,ou the principle that a judicious banker will often help an insolvent debtor out of temporary difficulties. But Mr. Merivale very earnestly- protests against the thriftless combination of the two hues of argument which at present governs our colonial policy. Wc maintain in theory the view that the colonies must help themselves ; but we never have the courage to adhere to it when the time of trial comes:—

The consequence of these opposing political tendencies is a vacillation of purpose greatly to be regretted. The same series of events continually recurs in colonies thus circumstanced. In every period of tranquillity some preparation is made for weaning colonists from their reliance on Imperial arms. Tyoops are gradually withdrawn. But the colonists—pretty well assured of what is coming—make very slight effort to create a defensive force. Then comes a rebellion or a border war. Troops are hurried back from England, and the danger is at length averted at an expense greatly exceeding what would have occurred if they had remained in tlu? cnloiry. Tiion ilio old process of withdrawal begins again. The colonists are again threatened with being left to themselves, and again exhorted to military preparation—threats which they have learnt to estimate at their just value, and exhortations whieh have no power to stir them from their inertness produced both by habit and by calculation. For there is a principle in their resistance. The same community which will cheerfully contribute, with a generosity far outstripping its apparent means, to any object of public munificence in which Old England is interested, will hold out as long as it can against any

invitation to take on itself its own charges hitherto defrayed mother country. And thus the course of affairs goes on, period after period, in the same vicious circle. The principle of military protection from home, openly avowed and consistently acted on, would have cost far less money than the opposite principle maintained in theory, and perpetually departed from in practice. The treatment of the native tribes is, in practice, a branch of the same question. One of the considerations that have acted most powerfully with the English Government in preventing them from abandoning to the settlors their own defence against the natives, has been the fear that they would provide for it with more efficiency than humanity. Mr. Merivale does not seem to think it is so much the settlers as those who precede the settlers that are to bo dreaded. Elis forebodings with respect to the future fate of the aborigines were disheartening enough when the lectures were first delivered, and later experience seems to have confirmed his darkest anticipations. !I c does not take the view that it is the mission of the AngloSaxon to improve the native races off the face of the earth ; nor does he believe that there is any truth in the mysterious law with which Europeans have been wont to console their consciences, that wherever the white man shows himself the native tribes, under some occult influence, begin to dwindle. The influences which sweep them away are, to his mind, the very reverse of occult. The passage in which he describes them contains so much more passion, therefore so much more eloquence, than he usually permits himself, that it is worth extracting:—■

And in truth thereissomethingextremely painful in the reflection with which wo are driven to conclude all our speculations on this subject—namely that the evils with which we have to contend are such as no system, however humane, can correct. Our errors arc not of conception so much as of execution. Ko thing is easier than to frame excellent theories which if they could be carried out, would go far towards removing the stigma under which we lie, and redressing the miseries which we have occasioned. But we cannot control the mischief which is going on at a far more rapid rate of progresss than we dare expect for the results of our most practicable schemes of improvement. Of what use are laws and regulations, however Christian and reasonable the spirit in which they are framed, when the trader, the backwoodsman, the pirate, the bushranger have been beforehand with our legislators, poisoning the savage with spirits, inoculating him with loathsome diseases brutalizing his mind and exciting his passions for the sake of gain ? Desolation goes before us and civilisation lags slowly and lamely behind. We hand over to the care of the missionary and the magistrate, not the savage with his natural tendencies and capacities and his ancestral habits, but a degraded, craving, timid, and artful creature, familiarized with the powers and the vices of the whites, rendered abject or sullen by ill-treatment, and with all his remaining faculties engrossed by the increasing difficulty of obtaining subsistence in his contracted hunting-grounds. "What success could the ablest and most zealous philanthropist promise himself out of such materials? And what must he our expectations, who have mainly to rely on an-ents necessarily removed from close control and responsibility, and often very imperfectly qualified lor the work we have to undertake? All the anticipations of success which a reasonable man can frame himself from schemes of reform and amelioration must necessarily be subject to one reservation—namely, if they be not thwarted by the preverso wickedness of those outcasts of society whom the first waves of our colonization arc sure to bring along with them. It their violence and avarice cannot be restrained by the arm of power and it must be confessed that there appears scarcely any feasible mode of accomplishing this it is impossible but that our progress in the occupation of barbarous countries must be attended with the infliction of infinite suffering. Ivor is this state of things peculiar to our own times, though increased demoralization, as well as increased energy and activity in colonizing, may of late have rendered it more conspicuous than heretofore. The history of the European settlements in America, Africa, and Australia presents evervwhere the same general features—a wide and sweeping destruction of native races by the uncontrolled violence of individuals, if not of colonial authorities, followed by tardy attempts on the part of Crovernmcnts to repair the acknowledged crime.

Apparently liis later experience lias given him reason rather to deepen than to relieve the darker tints of this picture. In the original text, he mentions the attempts that had been made to civilize the natives of Van Diemen’s Land, as a hopeful instance of efforts m this direction. In a note dated in the present year, he states, “ as a testimony to the futility of sanguine expectations,” that these humane labours have resulted in reducing the number of the aborigines from 111 to IG. Unhappily there is as yet no exception to the unanimity with which all experience foretells the same melancholy end to all similar undertakings. The secret of saving a savage race to which the white trader has had access is yet to be discovered.