England and Her Colonies.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4033, 1 December 1881, Page 3

England and Her Colonies.

The Grahamstown Journal (South Africa), in an article on the Imperial Government, says :—ln Hogarth's famous satirical painting of the " Election " there is one detail very instructive for these latter days. The scene is the Crown public-house, and the massive sign projects from the front of the building at a considerable height above the front of the ground by a horizontal .beam. A drunken voter has managed to scale this elevation, and sitting astride the beam, is busy sawing it in two between himself and the house. Being too muddled to reflect that in a few moments not only the Crown but himself also will, as the result of his misdirected industry, be precipitated to the ground. The emblem exactly fits Her Majesty's Ministry of today. Elevated to their present eminence by the frenzy of a general election, they are madly using their power to disintegrate the Empire; and before they can be displaced, before even 5 the general public is fully alive to the mischief, that mischief may be irreparable. We are not of those who doubt whether the wave of popular excitement which bore them to power will ever recede; it will close, and with a force, perhaps even with a rapidity proportioned to the suddenness of its rise. But ere that moment arrives they may have wrought an amount of to the British Crown which will stand in our annals as the great disaster of this century. Our abhorrence of their proceedings is founded upon no party dislike; it is not that we refuse to see a Liberal Government in office in England; it is because these men are the representatives of every political heresy which avers to break down the British Constitution, and break up the British unity, and because they are pursuing their work under the shelter of great and honored names, so that its fatal tendencies are not fully perceived. They enjoy the title of a Liberal Government, but their principles are not those of the great Constitutional Party which has so long* and so gloriously borne that name. Mr Gladstone, as a Liberal leader, forgetful that the same rapid change which converted him from Tory to Peelite, from Peelite to Liberal, has gone far beyond the bounds of safe statesmanship for an-English Premier. His colleagues, excepting a few Liberals of less penetration and ability, are now such men as Chamberlain, Bright, and Courtney —men who are determined to render the Lower House omnipotent in the Constitution, to give all power into the hands of the masses, to ruin every form of agriculture and manufacture that cannot bear the unrestricted application of Free Trade, and to shake off the Colonies as an encumbrance impossible and undesirable to be retained. The work that is being accomplished by such hands is not a reform but a revolution, however it may be disguised for English observers by the continuance of the old forms and appearances of political life. Colonists, however, whether they incline to the Liberal or Conservative school, are in a position to be more clear sighted, and to see more of the real tendency of things than our countrymen at home, politics suffer a sea-change by transmission to this land; thinkers of both schools become less extreme than at home, and the true bearings of many a contention are apprehended as soon as we are withdrawn from the noise and dust of party conflict. - Here in South Africa we hare bad, more disastrously than any other colony, to bear the brunt of Badical desbjictiveness. A year or two ago the prospect of a happy confederation of South ' Africa under the British'flag was still bright and feasible; it is now for ever lost. A foreign and hostile State, that will seek its commercial and political relations elsewhere than in Great Britain now bars the expansion of Colonial power and territory towards the interior. The lesson of disorder and rebellion has been taught to every race from Capetown to the Jimpopo. And all this has been accomplished by the present Imperial Government in about a twelvemonth, under circumstances which have made the truthfulness of British Statesmen, aud the inefficiency of British troops the common jest of South Africa. It is quite time that measures should be taken for the mutual interchange of opinion between the Colonies of that Empire which the madness of the central Government threatens with a general dissolution. We suggest that the Eoyal Colonial Institute affords the.means of assembling in London a Colonial Congress, where delegates from every British dependency should meet and exchange ideas. Such an assembly would, we are well persuaded, emphatically condemn the recent action of the Imperial Government in these lands. The delegates who would appear there would re-

present twelve millions of British subjects, and a commem 1 already approaching one hundred and fifty millions annually. A united representation from all the Colonies that the time has come when the administration and defence of the Empire must be shared by the Mother Country with its dependencies would do much to bring about a better state of things, and stay the ruin which » year of Eadical mis-government has inaugurated in several parts of the Queen's Domiuions,