Page:Two speeches of Robert R. Torrens, Esq., M.P., on emigration, and the colonies.djvu/23

19 not yet hopelessly, by the course of action pursued by the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was anxious to guard against being misunderstood on this point. He fully recognized the great abilities of the noble Lord the Secretary for the Colonies, and of his right hon. Friend who represented that Department in that House; and he was also satisfied that they were actuated by the best intentions. Their deficiency was one which they shared in common with their predecessors in Office—an unavoidable ignorance of the real condition and requirements and, what was of no less importance, the aspirations and sentiments of the great communities, in the administration of whose affairs those good intentions and great abilities were employed. What had occurred was the natural product of the departmental machinery under which the affairs of the Colonial Empire were administered. That Department consisted of a permanent staff imbued with a traditional policy, acquired not in the Colonies but in the office itself, in which policy it was their business to instruct the quasi responsible Minister, who was not always selected for any special qualification for that post, but rather as the convenience of political parties might dictate, and who was usually removed just about the time when he was beginning to gain an insight into the real condition and requirements of the communities whose interests were committed to his charge. Such a system was well adapted for its original purpose—namely, for enforcing the policy or the will of this country upon military posts, convict settlements, and plantations in which a few European masters or drivers accumulated wealth by the forced labour of numbers of a darker race; but its very aptness for that state of things constituted its unfitness for conducting the affairs of a great Empire, comprising powerful and intelligent communities of Englishmen in the enjoyment of constitutional government. Applied to such communities the precedents of the past assume the character of partiality, inconsistency, liberality, and an offensive assumption of superiority intolerable to communities which claim incorporation in the Empire on terms of equality or not at all.

This statement was susceptible of easy proof; and he claimed the indulgent attention of the House whilst he cited instances to show that he had not brought it forward rashly, or upon insufficient grounds. He would abstain from going back to any remote date, not because there was any lack of such instances in the history of past administrations—unfortunately there was an evil uniformity in that respect—but because recent