CONTENTS. 83 90 265 291 BILL, 365 ILLUSTRATIONS. PORTRAIT OF SIR WILLIAM MOLESWORTH, BART., M.P. Frontispiece BUST OF SIR WILLIAM MOLESWORTH (BY BEHnes) in the 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 |