On page 227 of the writer’s earlier book England, etc., the Colonial as well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Privy Council Judicial Committee was explained in detail. Since those words were written an important step has been taken under an Act passed some years ago by Lord Herschell. By this, the Chief Justice of the Cape Colony, Sir Henry de Villiers, Chief Justice Sir Henry Strong of Canada, Sir Samuel Way, Chief Justice of South Australia, have been added to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, in order to strengthen that body with special reference to the Roman-Dutch, French-Canadian and Australasian law, in legislation and practice. Here too, it is well to refer to the recent formation of the Society of Comparative Legislation. This body is actively engaged and has already done good work in classifying materials throughout the Empire, as well as in accumulating a compendium of information which will greatly promote the simplicity and uniformity of the laws of the world.
Some distinct idea must, however, be formed of the concrete reality connoted by the familiar expression ‘Colonial Empire,’ beginning, as in truth for our generation it did, with the founding of the Australasian capital called Adelaide, after his Queen, in the last year of William IV., but practically co-extensive in its growth with the reign of his successor. The area of the United Kingdom is 121,000 square miles. That of its possessions in foreign parts is 8,725,000 square miles. In other words the mother country is only in extent a seventieth part of the Empire of which that mother country is the nucleus.
To put the facts somewhat differently this British Empire, covering some 9,000,000 square miles, occupies a fifth part of the habitable globe. No other world power such as this has been known to past or can be found in present history. The British Empire of the Victorian age is five times as large as was the Empire of Darius five centuries before the Christian Era began. It is four times the size of the Roman Empire at its zenith. Among modern Powers, the Empire of Great Britain is larger by an eighth than that of Russia; it contains 230 millions more people. It is sixteen times as great as the foreign dominions of France; forty times as great as the Empire of Germany. Seven days and nights of continuous travelling are required to cross the American Continent. The lands which owe allegiance to the monarch of these Islands are three times as extensive as those composing the Republican Empire of the United States.
The relative progress, according to the population test, of the mother country, and the nationalities, voluntarily incorporated into her government, beyond seas will best be judged by the facts and figures of a comparatively recent contrast, such as is alone practicable in the case of an essentially modern experience. Between 1871, then, and 1881, the increase in the inhabitants of the United Kingdom was at the rate of 10 per cent. In the case of our American Colonies it was 19 per cent.; in the case of our Australasian it was 42 per cent. The same progress which has marked our recent history in other respects than numbers at home, has not been wanting with our kin beyond sea. Thus, in respect of education; in the single province of Quebec, then fairly typical of our other possessions, in 1837 barely one-fourth of the population could read; less than one-tenth could make even a pretence at writing. In 1897 there are in the same province 4,000 schools, with a total of 200,000 scholars, each of whom is periodically certified by examiners to be making gradual progress in the prescribed standards, according to age, and qualified individually to swell the claim upon the Government grant for efficiency.
As for higher teaching, all our principal Colonies have their Universities. In the mother country, corresponding progress since the legislation of 1870 was at work was shown by the ability of the framer of that measure, the late W. E. Forster, himself well known in the Colonies, before his death in 1885, to point to the fact that the school attendance from being seven per cent. before his Act was passed had within fifteen years’ operation of that measure risen to seventeen per cent. In the Australasian Colonies the results are not less striking than in the mother country or in the Canadian. In 1837 New South Wales was without a constitution as well as without any elementary education machinery of its own. Within rather less than half a century the institution of responsible government had been followed by an Education Act on the same lines as the English Act of 1870, but providing inter-mediate schools as well, with the result that the last census in Victoria shows that, of every 10,000 children of school age, 9,500 could read, and more than 8,500 could write.
These are specimen cases which establish the point that the extension of English power is accompanied by the spread of whatever advantages modern civilization can bring. As was seen in the preceding chapter, since the Colonial Bishoprics movement of 1851, religion has followed everywhere in the wake of our Empire. So, too, has education. These are the things which distinguish the Colonial methods of Great Britain from those of any other country whether in earlier or in contemporary times.
Dependencies, i.e. places necessary for the maintenance of Empire, but not suitable for permanent British habitation; Crown Colonies, controlled by a Governor, and legislated for by orders in Council, with, as soon as the soil is ripe for it, some representative Council on the spot, reduplications of the mother country under foreign suns, with Constitutions of their own and representative Government after the pattern of the United Kingdom; these are the different heads under which the Colonial Empire that has grown up in our age may be divided. As this Empire is in itself new, so the machinery for its central administration in the form in which it now exists is a product of the present reign. Evelyn the diarist, writing under date February 28th, 1671, mentions his appointment as a member of the Committee of the Privy Council, that had been established in 1660 for controlling the foreign plantations. This Council in 1672 was joined to the Council of Trade, the entire body being called the Council of Trade and Plantations. That was reconstituted in 1695, and again in 1748, when India came under its charge, continuing to remain under it until the appointment of the Board of Control in 1784.
At the beginning of our century, War and Colonies formed the province of a single Secretary of State and continued to do so till 1854. The first Colonial Secretary holding that office alone was Sir George Grey, followed in 1859 by the Duke of Newcastle. This was the Peelite duke whose father had founded the Newcastle scholarship at Eton, and who himself accompanied the Prince of Wales to Canada in 1859. The Colonies were not the department he had desired when Lord Palmerston formed his last Government, but he did his work not unsympathetically and bequeathed his post in good order to Cardwell. The ablest of the earlier Colonial Secretaries was without doubt Lord Grey, son of the Reformer, who held the office in Lord John Russell’s Administration. During the forties, especially in 1849, Colonial sensitiveness was wounded by the perpetual motions brought forward in the House of Commons by Joseph Hume and others of his party for reducing the salary of Colonial Governors,[119] accompanied as these motions were by language not complimentary to the new polities. Not without party criticism had the office of Parliamentary Under Secretary been created in 1810. The same opposition was called forth by the appointment of Permanent Under Secretaries, and Legal Advisers to the Home Government in 1867, in 1870, 1874, and by the vote for the new Colonial offices in Downing Street first occupied in 1876. In 1897 politicians of all parties take the same patriotic pride in the Colonial Empire, while an ex-Radical leader is that Empire’s Minister. The increased popularity of Colonial in preference to United States emigration is shown by the fact that in 1837 35,264 persons went to the Colonies, and some sixty years later the number was 52,029.
The pride that the Queen’s subjects take in the Empire beyond seas, created by Anglo-Saxon enterprise, and the honour they derive from it are accompanied by the growing interest with which the Colonies are regarded by political thinkers who see in their development an anticipation of the constitutional movements soon to be witnessed on British soil. The Australian legislatures have not only kept pace with, they have stolen a march on, the socialistic Radicals of the old country. New Zealand generally has led the way. This and three other Colonies, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, have adopted Woman’s Suffrage with the legislative freaks which seem to be its sequel. To the action of this franchise is attributed the proposal recently made in one of these Parliaments to give every domestic servant a statutory holiday once a week. Tasmania, too, will not apparently be satisfied till she has secured the Swiss Referendum for ending disputes between the two legislative Chambers by submitting the single point in issue to the constituencies. Tasmania, also, has made several efforts, as yet unsuccessfully, to acclimatise the Hare system of proportional representation which is now forgotten in England, save when some theorist uses a periodical re-adjustment of our franchise, to revive its interest. South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales, have also attempted, but not as yet carried, the establishment of national banks; perilous experiments enough for any new, or for that matter old, country.