IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5537, 25 December 1878, Page 3

IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION.

: (From the Home Nem). ■ The literature of Imperialism is gradually approaching tho dimensions of a library, and tho'moat valuable contribution which we have yet had to tho subject is the address delivered by i Lord Carnarvon to the Philosophical Institute at Edinburgh on Tuesday, November 5. Imperialism has been defined by many different people as meaning many different things. According to Lord Salisbury, it represents the manly and deliberate preference of the English people for a big England over a little England; according to Sir Stafford Northcote, it is a form of political faith whose articles represent tho islands of Great Britain and Ireland ns standing in the same relation to India and tho colonies as the isles of the Hebrides do to the adjacent Scotch and English mainland.. 1 According to another school of critics, Imperialism means the fusing of Great Britain and India into the same political system ; if necessary of the centre of imperial gravity from London to Calcutta ; and the consequent application of Asiatic ideas to English administration at the promptings of Ministerial ambition or caprice ; according to Mr. Robert Lowe, Imperialism is the apotheosis of violence, and means nothing but an indefinate course of conquest and annexation, though limited by the nnforseen term of some signal retributive disaster. Lord Carnarvon arrived at his definition of Imperialism by an enumeration of negative instances. Imperialism, ho said, was' a word of sinister Continental associations, but he could not refuse it admittance - to our political vocabulary, if for no other, yet for the simple, reason that it had been used by Burks and consecrated by Shakspere. In the sense in which it had been employed in France, the speaker declared “the English Constitution could know nothing at all of Imperialism.” ; If we have an Imperialism it cannot he Ctcsarism —“ a second-hand copy of Continental despotism ; that bastard monarchy, begotten in the slime of political corruption.” He went on to explain that if, as has been asserted by Verax, in the current number of the “ Nineteenth Century,” Imperialism meant the concentration of exclusive or exceptional power upon any branch of the Constitution, least of all if it were what has been called personal government, it could have no place in England. The English, as a governing, race, owe duties to their fellow subjects beyond the four seas, and owe it also to breathe into the whole mass of the peoples bearing their . name a common spirit of unity. Hence Lord Carnarvon ventured to define Imperialism as the nearest approach to that sentiment which, in the case of the individual, we call patriotism. It is, in fact, from this point of view, nothing more nor less than patriotism writ large—the devotion to the welfare, the Institutions, and the prestige of the Mother Country, diffused among the various sections of its subjects in all quarters of : the world. This is a feeling which, as Lord Carnarvon showed, is perfectly consistent with entire self-government of the colonies, and with the systematic absence of any interference on the part of the Colonial Office with their internal affairs. In the case of colonies having self-government the duties and responsibilities of the Home Government are by no means effaced, and there must from time to time arise questions of Constitutional importance that can only be settled with tho help of the Home Government. . . . . The great problem, its inability to solve which was the ram of the only empire that furnishes any precedent for the Empire of England—the Empire of Rome—was to find out the true point of contact between the eastern and western minds, and to know what is the proper limit of our Imperial frontier. •