1. Any supervising power retained, and to be exercised with respect to a colony, should be retained entirely in the hands of the imperial government alone. No part of it should be entrusted to a company, or to a single proprietor. A company may be made useful as a means of collecting many minute portions of capital into one large and effective mass, and may be permitted, by the aid simply of the advantages which that combined wealth confers, to act as private persons, and in that capacity to promote the plantation of the new settlement. But to the company there should be confided no government powers, no mercantile monopoly or privileges. Such facilities as a joint-stock company requires to avoid mere legal obstructions, may be granted to a company wishing to carry on commerce, or effect any legitimate purpose of gain, but not one atom of political power. I will not clog this assertion with one particle of exception; the rule ought to be as I have laid it down, stringent and universal in its negation.

That which is true as respects a company, is just as true and as necessary in the case of an individual, no matter what may be his wealth, no matter what may be his virtue. Were Lord Baltimore, with all his real wisdom and goodness, his unostentatious and thoroughly modest and tolerant spirit, to appear again, and with the same benevolent aims and sanguine hopes, ask for the privileges which his family enjoyed in Maryland, and so worthily employed, he would meet from me with the same peremptory refusal that I should give to a The powers grasping, mere money-getting company. of government must not be delegated. If they are to

be in any hands, those hands must be of the government To none others ought such powers to be con

itself. fided.

2. Having determined that the supervision should never be delegated to a company or an individual, but should always be reserved by the government, the next canon commands us to reduce this supervision as much as is possible, retaining only what is needed to maintain our metropolitan rule, and to confide to the colony the government of its own affairs. The more completely this is done, the more certain and marked will be the prosperity of the colony.

3. The next rule is, that, certain extraordinary cases being excepted, the metropolitan government should confine its office to attracting settlers to a colony, and ought not to occupy itself in actually carrying them out, and thereby take part in the active business of planting the settlement. The duty of the government is to create those facilities on the spot to be settled which, being known to exist, will of themselves bring the population. The manner of doing this I shall soon attempt to describe.

4. The next rule which I think my short history justifies, is, to insist upon the colony being self-supporting, in everything except defence against hostile aggression. It is the duty of England to say to all of her subjects that plant settlements within her colonial territories, "I will defend you in the quiet possession of your homes, and of the produce of your labour. No enemy shall attack you from without. But this perfect defence being afforded-and that it be afforded, the

government must provide you must yourselves be the architects of your own fortunes. My government has made the way clear for you in the first instance: there are the limits of the colony; make yourselves a community; sustain yourselves, and govern yourselves. Trade with other nations, with all whom you wish, that you may; fight with other nations or yourselves, that you shall not. Such is my will, and to it I shall enforce obedience."

These general rules, or conclusions, I shall now proceed to enlarge into something like a system. The description I am about to attempt is what might well precede a specific act of legislation, which would make law of what is here only suggestion. All my observations in this work, those which I have already made, those which I am about to make, point directly to an act of parliament, which I believe the necessary preliminary to any rational system. Our brethren on the other side of the Atlantic have adopted, as we have seen, this prudent course; and her colonies exhibit fairly the result of this wise act of legislation by Congress. They have had great difficulties to overcomefar greater than any which lie in our path as legislators. Those difficulties they have not feared to face; having faced, they have conquered them. Their seventeen or eighteen colonies, with their millions of thriving people, attest the practical wisdom of this conduct, and afford us an admirable reason for imitating and surpassing it. That we have the means of surpassing all that America has done or can do, I shall now attempt to prove. may, indeed, create one gigantic nation; that it should

She

be and remain only one, will be their greatest triumph. But we, if we be wise, and use the advantages which as a people we possess, (a tithe of which no other people ever enjoyed)-we, I say, may create many vast nations -nations which must be separate, and may be of almost fabulous greatness. Let not the reader call me a dreamer, till he has read the very unpretending scheme which I now proceed to explain; and which I believe would produce the great effects I describe, because it is unpretending, easy to be understood, and, if once put into motion, self-supporting.

There are two things which always present themselves to the mind of an emigrant, or one thinking of becoming an emigrant, and are always placed by him among the circumstances which are deemed to be reasons against expatriation: the one is the uncertainty that attends every step of his progress; the other is, the inferiority of the position which, as a colonist, he is to occupy.

When I speak here of uncertainty, I do not mean that uncertainty which attends, and ever must attend, an ignorant man; but I intend by it, that which every man, even the most instructed, must labour under, who endeavours to ascertain the various steps necessary to be taken by those who desire to become settlers in any of our colonies, and who endeavours also to discover the probable consequences to himself and his family of the acts which he is about to perform in the character of an emigrant. Let any one attempt to form for himself a conception of what would probably occur if he were to associate himself with a body of settlers, just about to emigrate, for the purpose of taking possession of a tract

of land purchased of the New Zealand Company.* Let us suppose that a band of friends have said to one another, "We will buy from the company a tract of land; we will together expatriate, and make on that land a new home for ourselves and our children." The land is bought,-it is some distance from any existing settlement, and when they reach the chosen spot, in what condition will they be? I do not mean what condition as to material, but as to social things. Friends though these men and their families may be, yet they cannot, as they are not angels, but merely men and women, live without law-without some rule, some order. Well, but where are they to learn what this rule or order is? Where are they to learn if there really be any rule? The fact is, that nowhere can they find it. Law will grow up in their new settlement, after the fashion in which it grew up among our savage ancestors by degrees, and be brought into existence, and reduced to shape, by necessity. At once this little band of adventurers will step out of light into darkness, out of the dominion of regularity and reason, into the domain of anarchy and chance. They do not simply leave a well-cultivated country, in which art and labour have conquered the powers of nature for man's service, and go thence to an uncultivated land, whose powers, though not yet brought under command, are in the vigour of youth: they do much more than this; for they go into a lawless, as well as a wild waste. The

* This Company has resumed its land sales, after years of most unnecessary, most unjust delay, created for it by the mischievous gratuitously mischievous-opposition of the Colonial Office.