THE MODEL-KINGDOM.
A well-governed colony is the Model of a great kingdom. As in the case of other models, every part of the machinery by which it is moved is placed at once before the eye of the spectator. In a great empire, the springs of action are concealed; the public behold only the results, and can scarcely guess how those results were brought about. In a colony, every one stands so close to the little machine of Government, that he can readily discern how it is made to work, and therefore takes a more lively interest in the working of it. The model has its representative of a sovereign; its Ministers, who comprise the Executive Council with the Colonial Secretary as Premier; its Parliament, the Legislative Assembly; its Bishop of London, who is represented by the Colonial Chaplain, the dignitary of the Church in those parts. In the Legislative Assembly there are the Government party, consisting of the Colonial Secretary and the Attorney General, who prove their loyalty and devotion by adhering to His Excellency the Governor on every division, and (according to general belief) would rather vote against their own measures than against the representative of their Queen. Then there is the popular party, consisting of the popular member, who speaks at random on either side of the debate, but invariably votes against the Government, in order to maintain inviolate the integrity of his principles. We have also the Judge, or Lord chancellor, the great Law officer of the Crown, who sits silently watching the progress of a Bill, as it steals gently forward towards the close of the second reading; and then suddenly pounces upon it, to the consternation of his Excellency, and the delight of the popular member, and tears it in pieces with his sharp legal teeth, whilst he shows that it is in its scope and tendency contrary to the Law of England in that case provided, and is besides impossible to be carried out in the present circumstances of the Colony. The Model Nation has its national debt of one thousand pounds, due to the Commissariat chest; and this burthen of the State costs his Excellency many a sleepless night, spent in vain conjectures as to the best mode of relieving the financial embarrassments.
It is pleasant to learn from the model, how Government patronage is disposed of in the Parent country. Kindly motives, however, which never appear in the arrangements of the latter, are always conspicuous in a colony. A public work is sometimes created for the sole purpose of saving an unfortunate mechanic from the horrors of idleness; and a debt due to the State is occasionally discharged by three months' washing of a Privy Councillor's shirts.
Then we have the exact fac-simile of a Royal Court, with its levees and drawing-rooms, where his Excellency displays the utmost extent of his affability, and his lady of her queenly airs. There may be seen, in all its original freshness and vigour, the smiling hatred of rival ladies, followed by their respective trains of admirers; whilst the full-blown dames of Members of Council elbow their way, with all the charming confidence of rank, towards the vicinity of her who is the cynosure of all eyes. The early levees of the first Governor of Western Australia were held in a dry swamp, near the centre of the present town of Perth. His Excellency, graciously bowing beneath the shade of a banksia tree, received with affability those who were introduced to him, as they stumbled into his presence over tangled brushwood, and with difficulty avoided the only humiliation that is scorned by English courtiers—that of the person.
Ladies, in struggling through the thorny brake, had sometimes to labour under the double embarrassment of a ragged reputation and dress. To appear before the Presence, under such circumstances, with a smiling countenance, proved the triumph of feminine art, and of course excited general admiration. But this was in the early days of the settlement. We have now a handsome Government-house, where ladies who attend drawing-rooms incur no danger of any kind.
From the financial difficulties of a small colony you may form some idea of the troubles of the Chancellor of the Exchequer at home. And yet there is less financial talent required to raise five hundred thousand pounds in England than five hundred in an impoverished colony. In the former country only a few voices, comparatively, are raised in expostulation; and no one cares about them, if Mr. Hume could be gagged, and the other patriots in the Commons. But in a colony! threaten to raise the price of sugar by the imposition of another half-penny per pound, and the whole land will be heaved as though by an earthquake. Not only will the newspapers pour forth a terrific storm of denunciations against a treacherous Government, but every individual of the public will take up the matter as a personal injury, and roar out his protest against so monstrous a political crime. Those who called most loudly for the erection of a necessary bridge, will be most indignant when asked next year to contribute towards its cost.
The Governor of a colony should not only be a good financier, but if he would avoid the bitter pangs of repentance, must possess great firmness in resisting the innumerable calls upon the Government purse.
His Excellency may lay his account to being daily vituperated for not consenting to the construction of this or that national work, but he will be still more taken to task when the melancholy duty of paying for it becomes imperative, and is found to be unavoidable.
It is the general belief, that in a colony we are altogether out of the world; but it has always appeared to me, that within the narrow confines of one of those epitomes of a kingdom we may see more of the world than when standing on the outer edge of society in England.
A man thinks himself in the midst of the world in Great Britain, because he reads the newspapers and knows what is passing and being enacted around him. But the same newspapers are read with equal diligence in a colony, and the same knowledge is acquired there, though some three months later. To read the newspapers, and to hang, close as a burr, upon the skirts of society, is not to be in the world. The world is, in truth, the heart of Man; and he knows most of the World who knows most of his species. And where, alas! may this knowledge, so painful and so humiliating, be better acquired than in a colony? There we have the human heart laid open before us without veil or disguise: there we see it in all its coarseness, its selfishness, its brutality.
How many fine natures, cultivated, delicate, and generous, have gone forth from their native land, full of high resolves, only to perish in the mephitic atmosphere of a colony!
There we find whatever there is of good and bad in human nature brought immediately before our eyes. It is a school of moral anatomy, in which we study subjects whose outer covering has been removed, and where the inner machinery (fearful to see!) is left exposed.
A knowledge of the world! if we gain it not in a colony, it must ever remain a sealed book to us.
We shall leave but a bad impression on the mind of the reader in concluding this short chapter with these sombre observations; but we would not leave him without hope. Time will remedy all this. Some moral evils correct themselves; as the water of the Nile becomes pure again after it has gone putrid.