Excerpt from The Colonial Question: A Brief Consideration of Colonial Emancipation, Imperial Federalism and Colonial Conservatism

*wealth of Nations, p. 256.statement, India, perhaps, forms an exception, but as that country does not rank with those free colonies, the relations of which to the Mother Country it is proposed to discuss, the qualification is unimportant. Such generous conduct deserves generous requital, but the best mode of making the latter has not been unanimously agreed upon by those whose attention has been engaged by colonial affairs. Some eminent pub licists and political philosophers propose to go to the root of the supposed difficulty and, by an unparalleled feat of national surgery, cut off the extremities of the Empire, and reduce it to a mere torso, believing as they do, that the colonies can best show their gratitude for the generous treatment they have te ceived from the Mother Land by consenting to the dissolntion of a partnership which is not only profitless, but actually dangerous. Others, again, keenly alive to the two-sided ad. Vantages arising from the maintenance of the colonial tie, and fearful that its present relaxed condition is but the forerunner of disruption, advocate the formation of a British Federation, including in its membership the Mother Country and all those colonies which enjoy representative government and free insti tutions, (to which class alone reference is hereinafter made under the generic title granting to each constituent propor tionate representation in a Federal Parliament, to be concerned alone with affairs of Imperial state, local concerns being re mitted to local legislatures. There are, thirdly, those who maintain that the subsisting relations are satisfactorily efficient, and who see in their continuance the best method of attaining the highest developement of both the United Kingdom and the Colonies, and for the working out of their noblest common destiny. These last are alike opposed to the disruptive theories of the Emancipationists, and to the scheme of Imperial Federa tion. To a brief consideration of these three views of the.

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