Not less whole-hearted or generous than the treatment of the problems of Canadian government was the treatment of the same problem in Australia.  Here, as a matter of course, all the colonies had been endowed, at the earliest possible date, with the familiar system of representative but not responsible government.  No such acute friction as had occurred in Canada had yet shown itself, though signs of its development were not lacking.  But in 1852 an astonishing step was taken by the British parliament:  the various Australian colonies were empowered to elect single-chamber constituent assemblies to decide the forms of government under which they wished to live.  They decided in every case to reproduce as nearly as possible the British system:  legislatures of two chambers, with ministries responsible to them.  Thus, in Australia as in Canada, the daughter-peoples were made to feel the community of their institutions with those of the mother-country, and the possibility of intimate and easy co-operation was increased.  Two years later, in 1854, New Zealand was endowed with the same system.  Among all the British realms in which the white man was predominant, only South Africa was as yet excluded from this remarkable development.  The reasons for this exclusion we have already noted:  its consequences will occupy our attention in later pages.

Very manifestly the empire which was developing on such lines was not an empire in the old sense—­a dominion imposed by force upon unwilling subjects.  That old word, which has been used in so many senses, was being given a wholly new connotation.  It was being made to mean a free partnership of self-governing peoples, held together not by force, but in part by common interests, and in a still higher degree by common sentiment and the possession of the same institutions of liberty.

In the fullest sense, however, this new conception of empire applied only to the group of the great self-governing colonies.  There were many other regions, even before 1878, included within the British Empire, though as yet it had not incorporated those vast protectorates over regions peopled by backward races which have been added during the last generation.  There were tropical settlements like British Honduras, British Guiana, Sierra Leone, and Cape Coast Castle; there were many West Indian Islands, and scattered possessions like Mauritius and Hong-Kong and Singapore and the Straits Settlements; there were garrison towns or coaling-stations like Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, St. Helena.  To none of these were the institutions of full responsible self-government granted.  Some of them possessed representative institutions without responsible ministries; in others the governor was assisted by a nominated council, intended to express local opinion, but not elected by the inhabitants; in yet others the governor ruled autocratically.  But in all these cases the ultimate control of policy was retained by the home government.  And in this general category, as yet, the South African colonies were included.  Why were these distinctions drawn?  Why did the generation of British statesmen, who had dealt so generously with the demand for self-government in Canada and Australia, stop short and refuse to carry out their principles in these other cases?