CHAPTER VI

AUSTRALIA AND IRELAND

I have described the Canadian crisis at considerable length because it was the turning-point in Imperial policy.  Yet policy is scarcely the right word.  The Colonists themselves wrenched the right to self-government from a reluctant Mother Country, and the Mother Country herself was hardly conscious of the loss of her prerogatives until it was too late to regret or recall them.  The men who on principle believed in and laboured for Home Rule for Canada were a mere unconsidered handful in the country, while most of those who voted for the Act of 1840 thought that it killed Home Rule.  No general election was held to obtain the “verdict of the predominant partner” on the real question at issue, with the cry of “American dollars” (which had, in fact, been paid); with lurid portraits of Papineau and Mackenzie levying black-mail on the Prime Minister, and quotations from their old speeches to show that they were traitors to the Empire; with jeremiads about the terrors of Rome, the abandonment of the loyal minority, and the dismemberment of the Empire, to shake the nerves and stimulate the slothful conscience of an ignorant electorate.  Had there been any such opportunity we know it would have been used, and we can guess what the result would have been; for nothing is easier, alas! than to spur on a democracy with such cries as these to the exercise of the one function it should refrain from—­interference with another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere else.  As it was, a merciful veil fell over Canada; Lord Elgin’s action in 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference to colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, we cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and the nation.

It was in this mood that the measures conferring self-government on the Australasian Colonies, 12,000 miles away from the Mother Country, and exciting proportionately less concern than Canada, were passed a few years later.

From the landing of the first batch of convicts at Botany Bay in 1788, New South Wales, the Mother Colony, was a penal settlement pure and simple, under military Government, for some thirty years.  The island Colony, Tasmania, founded under the name of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, was used for the same purpose.  Victoria, originally Port Phillip, just escaped a like fate in 1803, and remained uncolonized till 1835, when the free settlers set their faces against the penal system, and in 1845, acting like the Bostonians of 1774 with the famous cargo of tea, refused to allow a cargo of convicts to land.  South Australia, first settled in 1829, also escaped; so did New Zealand, which was annexed to the Crown in 1839.  Western Australia, dating from 1826, proceeded on the opposite principle to that of Victoria.  Free from convicts until 1849, when transportation to other Colonies