INTRODUCTORY

9

country, or to seek a permanent home elsewhere than in the Colony. This definition excludes the United States. According to common-sense notions, were Australia to separate, she would cease to be a British Colony. It ex­cludes India and most tropical settlements, because, in such, there is nearly always among Englishmen the animus revertendi. It excludes, for the same reason, Gibraltar and Malta, and the purely military Colonies or dependencies. It includes Colonies like Natal, where there is a bonâ-fide per­manently resident English community, whatever be the number of natives who surround them. It includes Cape Colony, where the original Dutch settlers and the English, who have emigrated thither during the last seventy years, are on the whole becoming fused into a common national type. It includes the West Indies, because, in spite of the climate, Englishmen have for generations found in them a permanent home. We might say that a Colony is a de­pendency administered by the Colonial Office; but the reason why the affairs of Ceylon belong to a different department from those of India are historical and not logical. In the same way, English statutes, until the In­terpretation Act of 1889, carefully guarded themselves against defining a colony, except for the purposes of the particular statute, and the most generic definition included even India, which is clearly inadmissible for present purposes. Under the Act of 1889, 1 the expression ‘colony’ means any part of the Queen’s dominions, exclusive of the British Isles and of British India. Looking at the question practically, if we remember that, side by side with the question of Colonial expansion, there is always the question of Imperial power, with which we are here only indirectly concerned, it will be enough if we fix our attention for the most part on the great self-governing Colonies, past and present, in America, Australia, and South Africa, and on the West Indies, although the importance of these last is not as great at the present day as it was in former times.

1 Tarring, Laws relating to the Colonies. Second edition, 1893.