INTRODUCTORY
In the following pages an attempt is made to give an account of British Colonial policy. The scope of the book is limited by its title: it is not sought to compete with the many works of authority, which narrate the history of the separate Colonies, nor do even the events, which were the outcome of British policy, concern us, except indirectly, and so far as they illustrate that policy. Viewed from this standpoint, the subject seems to fall into certain main natural divisions which we may term the period of beginnings, the period of trade ascendency, the period of systematic colonization and of the granting of responsible government, the period of the zenith and decline of laissez-aller principles, and the period of Greater Britain.
We have first the period of beginnings. A new strange (i.) Period thing is coming into being, viz :—Colonization as worked n[ n g e s e ‘ n ’ out by the Anglo-Saxon race, and the Mother State is puzzled how to deal with it. The problem is how, in days before steam and telegraph, to maintain the authority of the Crown in countries, separate by thousands of miles of sea. In this stage, the first naïve impulse is to give to the individual grantee full power to manage his own settlement in his own way, so long as he maintains, as far as possible, the English laws. As, however, the idea of colonization by Englishmen, as opposed to settlement by conquest of barbarians, becomes more apparent, the crudity of the early view is recognised. For the moment, as in the Charter to the Virginia Company of 1606, the theory is held that legislative authority may remain in the Crown, executive functions being delegated to a local Governor; and we may note in passing what a powerful instrument of despotism well-managed Colonies might have been in the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century