Page:What I Know Of The Labour Traffic.djvu/17

14 or classical art, and beautiful mythology, or Christian fanaticism, or vulgar family pride, or military genius, but by a happy necessity, in the interests of humanity. That long hidden gold gave commerce wings, under whose shadow the world might not only find rest from tyranny and Governmental interference, but an ever growing freedom in which every individual unit of the world, while rejoicing in a sweet perennial liberty, might yet find a freedom greater still by being bound to the world's increasing work.

You do not need any other illustration of that being true than the result of George III.'s madness, by which England lost her great North American colony, in order that the British race might find a wider expanse of freedom, and the river of English liberty should seek and find the ocean of manful independence, and humanity assume a dignity which it had never known till then. Suffer one word more of exodium. Not only are we compelled to acknowledge the sway of intellect and the influence of science over a world awakened to a new sense of what the world is, but we see, as plainly as we see the Southern Cross, amid a galaxy of stars in the sky, that the growth of individual character and the development of purely local institutions, all in sympathy with the general advancement, have gone on so steadily increasing, that if we did not find that individual character and those local institutions when we sought for them, we should be as disappointed as if we found at the time of figs that our fig tree had no figs on it. Every town in every English colony is the fruit and outcome of that new individuality. Every new institution which new conditions of life call into being is a similar fruit and outcome—a fruit and outcome in which human nature has become, or has given signs or becoming, so moulded into fitness for the social state, that it will tolerate no interference save that interference which maintains the equal freedom of all.

And now, to leave the contemplation of these elevating generalities, let us come to something which is as simple and unrelenting as the multiplication table, something which deeply concerns ourselves as colonists, which involves our fame, the purity of our morals, and the quality of our humanity.

Why is it, that a very large number of highly respectable religious and educated people at home give such a ready ear and willing credence to murders and outrages which have been done on labour vessels and in sugar fields belonging to Queensland? How is it, that men in high command and office have wont only misrepresented this colony in the matter of the labour traffic? How came it to pass, that when the annexation of New Guinea by Great Britain came to be regarded by Queensland as a political and social necessity, the Imperial Government resented the action of Queensland as an impertinence, and went the length of saying, that if New Guinea were annexed, Queensland should have no control in administering its affairs?

If we can satisfy ourselves in the answer to these questions, we shall have made a discovery before which the discovery of gold will pale before it as so much ineffectual fire. Prove to yourselves that you have made