INTRODUCTION.

THE interest aroused by Mrs. Fawcett's "Life of Sir William Molesworth," published in 1901, showed that the British public, both at home and across the seas, have long memories for those "who have done the State some service." It has, therefore, been thought that at a time when the problems connected with the future of the British Empire are very present in the minds and thoughts of statesmen, and are being mooted in the market-place and wherever men of British race come together, a more select circle of readers may care to have before them in handy form the actual words, wherein one of the most distinguished of colonial reformers put forward his views with regard to the right relations between the Mother Country and the colonies.

For such purpose it is necessary to focus the attention upon one aspect of Sir William Molesworth's public life. He was, of course, much more than a colonial reformer. Besides the conspicuous part which he took in the general politics of his time, Molesworth, by his edition of Hobbes, did yeoman service on behalf of English philosophy. Amongst the most powerful of his speeches was the crushing reply which he made to Mr. Miall, at Southwark, in answer to the charge of having

countenanced infidelity. Fortunately the passage is set out in Mrs. Fawcett's Life (pp. 252-256). Were the object to appraise Molesworth's merits as an orator, another speech, also quoted by Mrs. Fawcett (at p. 304), would require to be given, wherein he showed himself no mean master of invective. It may be, however, that a more lasting memorial to Molesworth's greatness will be found in the speeches wherein he elaborated what was in fact a new system of colonial policy.

It may seem a rash thing to republish speeches delivered more than fifty years ago in the House of Commons. Whatever may have been the case with ancient oratory, modern speechifying is, in the nature of things, for the most part ephemeral, and it is significant that the one modern orator whose speeches are a permanent storehouse of political wisdom and philosophy, was known to his contemporaries as "the dinner-bell." Nevertheless, the new spirit which animates Englishmen in dealing with colonial questions may lend some interest to the ipsissima verba of one who was, so far as party politicians were concerned, perhaps the most distinguished forerunner and messenger of the new movement. But even after a perusal of Molesworth's speeches the ordinary reader will find it hard to realise the full extent of his superiority to contemporary thought in his view of the right relations between Mother Country and colony. We all know that the paradox of one generation becomes the platitude of the next, and so, unless we read, side by side with Molesworth's speeches, the actual language wherein statesmen of the calibre of Lord John Russell and Lord Stanley, as late as 1837,

declared responsible government in a colony to be outside the range of possibility, it is impossible to do justice to Molesworth's position. That the Governor of a self-governing colony should stand in a two-fold relation to his Colonial Ministers; that so far as purely local questions are concerned he should be something in the nature of a constitutional monarch, who only governs through his Ministers, while, at the same time, where Imperial interests are involved, he remains responsible to the Home authorities such a solution as this, obvious as it now seems to the mere tyro in politics, was not in their hearts accepted by English statesmen till some years after their hands had been forced by the publication of Lord Durham's epoch-making Report. In the same way the view that such local independence would tend not to disintegration but to greater union, by the removal of causes of friction, now seems trite enough: and yet, when fifty years ago local independence was advocated, it was generally with the underlying belief that it afforded a welcome euthanasia for the Imperial connexion.

It is curious to compare the present triumph of the ideas and principles of the small group of colonial reformers who in the early thirties undertook the task of finding a new final cause for the existence of colonies, with the ill luck which dogged them in their lifetime. Gibbon Wakefield, the most original and nimble-witted of them all, lived his whole life under the shadow of an early crime, which rendered him for ever impossible in English public life. It is true that with characteristic chivalry we find Molesworth suggesting the obtaining for him a seat in Parliament, but efforts in

this direction would, doubtless, have been made in vain. It was at once tragic and ludicrous that the moral force of Lord Durham's mission was in England to some extent weakened by the presence among his advisers, though holding no official appointment, of one of the few men who were capable of giving real help. Wakefield, of course, did valiant service with his pen for the cause of colonial reform, and in the public life both of Canada and New Zealand was able to fight for his principles. Nevertheless the final impression left upon the mind by the singularly fascinating Life of Wakefield by Dr. Garnett is one of disappointment.

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices

Make instruments to plague us."

Again, the haughty and difficult temper of Lord Durham, together with his early death, prevented his attaining to the place in public life which was the due of his natural powers and position. The brilliant and generous Charles Buller died just when men were beginning to realise that sterling sense is not always divorced from inexhaustible brilliancy and wit. Sir William Molesworth himself, throughout his life the victim of ill health, had hardly attained the post wherein it was possible to give practical effect to the views which he had maintained for about twenty years concerning colonial policy, when death again intervened, and the clock of Greater Britain was put back at least thirty years. Although valuable pioneer work had been previously done by books such as Sir Charles Dilke's "Greater Britain," and above all, Seeley's

Expansion of England," the period of Greater Britain may be said to date from about 1886, but

it is no disparagement to the distinguished men who initiated and carried through the Colonial Conference of 1887, to say that it was not till the accession of Mr. Chamberlain to the Colonial Office, in 1895, that the aspirations of Molesworth were really fulfilled and the conception of the Mother Country with her colonies as prima inter pares fully grasped. Considerable discussion has taken place with regard to the rival merits of English political parties in the past, where colonial questions were concerned. To the profane, who inhabit outside the ring of the political wire-puller, such discussion appears a little to savour of "Short's your friend, not Codlin"; but in any case the candid reader of Molesworth's speeches will arrive at the conclusion, always assuming that he agrees with Molesworth, that neither political party has very much to boast of in its past record upon colonial questions.

What, then, was there special in the attitude of Molesworth and of the colonial reformers, which differentiated them from either Whig or Tory statesmen and which makes good their claim to be the harbingers of a better day? Briefly, the whole difference lay in the spirit with which colonial questions were approached. That spirit sufficiently appears in the following speeches. The indictment of Lord Glenelg's administration of colonial affairs begins with a positive assertion of Molesworth's own belief in the advantages of a Colonial Empire, and the negative criticism is throughout charged with an underlying confidence in a more excellent way of colonial government. The speeches on transportation, emigration, the dealing with the public lands, colonial expenditure, and the right