Again, too, on the selfishness of Parliament an extrinsic check is clearly more efficient than an intrinsic.  A Premier who is made by Parliament may share the bad impulses of those who chose him; or, at any rate, he may have made “capital” out of them—­he may have seemed to share them.  The self-interests, the jobbing propensities of the assembly are sure indeed to be of very secondary interest to him.  What he will care most for is the permanence, is the interest—­ whether corrupt or uncorrupt—­of his own Ministry.  He will be disinclined to anything coarsely unpopular.  In the order of nature, a new assembly must come before long, and he will be indisposed to shock the feelings of the electors from whom that assembly must emanate.  But though the interest of the Minister is inconsistent with appalling jobbery, he will be inclined to mitigated jobbery.  He will temporise; he will try to give a seemly dress to unseemly matters:  to do as much harm as will content the assembly, and yet not so much harm as will offend the nation.  He will not shrink from becoming a particeps criminis; he will but endeavour to dilute the crime.  The intervention of an extrinsic, impartial, and capable authority—­if such can be found—­will undoubtedly restrain the covetousness as well as the factiousness of a choosing assembly.

But can such a head be found?  In one case I think it has been found.  Our colonial governors are precisely Dei ex machina.  They are always intelligent, for they have to live by a different trade; they are nearly sure to be impartial, for they come from the ends of the earth; they are sure not to participate in the selfish desires of any colonial class or body, for long before those desires can have attained fruition they will have passed to the other side of the world, be busy with other faces and other minds, be almost out of hearing what happens in a region they have half forgotten.  A colonial governor is a super-Parliamentary authority, animated by a wisdom which is probably in quantity considerable, and is different from that of the local Parliament, even if not above it.  But even in this case the advantage of this extrinsic authority is purchased at a heavy price—­a price which must not be made light of, because it is often worth paying.  A colonial governor is a ruler who has no permanent interest in the colony he governs; who perhaps had to look for it in the map when he was sent thither; who takes years before he really understands its parties and its controversies; who, though without prejudice himself, is apt to be a slave to the prejudices of local people near him; who inevitably, and almost laudably, governs not in the interest of the colony, which he may mistake, but in his own interest, which he sees and is sure of.  The first desire of a colonial governor is not to get into a “scrape,” not to do anything which may give trouble to his superiors—­the Colonial Office—­at home, which may cause an untimely and dubious recall, which may hurt his