Page:Tracks of McKinlay and party across Australia.djvu/94

 new settlements so remote from head-quarters, these colonies must foresee the time when these, their far-off daughters, will demand separate establishments of their own. The Imperial mother may virtually go to sleep, until aroused at this stage of her children's and her grandchildren's growth by a call to adjudicate, as the supreme parent, upon the impending and, perhaps, contentious question of separation, while she finds at the same moment that a forty-fifth or a fiftieth member is about to be added to the world-wide colonial family.

Let us here advert to what may prove a very important contingency of the future, namely, the question of the particular form of government for these tropical regions. At the proper time this should form a special subject of Imperial consideration. The European may no doubt undertake various kinds of labour in these latitudes, but he is probably unsuited to field labour. The labouring hands of the dark races will be eagerly invited by the colonists, and, perhaps, the response on the part of the former will be as ready as the invitation. The superior race will then be exposed to the temptation of legislating for its own interests at the expense of the inferior. The temptation will ever lean in the direction of a coercive power in the hands of employers, and towards constituting a slave instead of a servant. The prevention of this possible evil will be much easier than its cure, and