Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
the government is clothed with power delegated by the sovereign of
the mother country. The socialist theory of Locke is embodied in the
New England colonies; in the Carolina "Association" of 1719; in the
resolutions of the Liberal Association of Canada in 1841, which issued
in the compact between the crown and the Canadian people; in the New
Zealand whalers in 1840, governed by their own laws; in the New Zealand
Company's settlements (with a social contract previously drawn up by
the passengers, as by those of the Mayflower); and in the colonies of
Otago and Canterbury, and New Australia in Paraguay. Two intermediate
groups have a transitional existence. Many colonies have been founded
by commercial companies whose collective history might be written in
two lines--inception of vast enterprises, partial commercial success,
great collateral benefits, ruinous loss of capital, surrender of
charter to the crown. A set of colonies peculiar to the United States
were established by one or more proprietaries, from whose voluntary
concessions the form of government was derived, but most of these
merged, after a series of conflicts, in the popular group. They were
respectively bastard royal and bastard charter colonies.
From the origin of a colony is deducible its whole political and social
structure. Colonies of royal foundation, by a kind of moral pangenesis,
tend to reproduce all parts of the mother country that are suitable to
the new environment--its inequalities of _rank_, governors who are the
image of the sovereign, an executive, legislative, and judicature that
are the delegation of his authority. But these institutions must grow;
they can not be made. The attempt to create an aristocracy in Carolina,
and the proposal to manufacture one in New South Wales, necessarily
failed. Yet in both countries one grew or is growing up. In the South
there was an untitled aristocracy, with the aristocratic temper,
exclusive institutions, and four distinct classes (the descendants
of the lords of the manor, villeins or tenants, bond-servants,
and slaves, who had a brief existence in Virginia, Carolina, and
Maryland)--planters, overseers, mean whites, and negro slaves; the fall
of Richmond saw the happy ending of all that. In the British colonies,
as in England, there is an increasing passion for titles, and of about
sixty grades in the Byzantine hierarchy of the English monarchy at
least eleven have been transplanted to colonial soil. But it is on
one condition, abroad as at home--that honor shall be divorced from
power. In England the nobility is being edged out of office, and on Lord
Salisbury's grave might be written, "The last of the nobles"--the last
who governed his country. In her colonies one premier after another
resolutely refuses the forbidden dignity that would banish him from
the ministerial Eden. The same point has been reached in the United
States from the opposite side. Most of the charter and some of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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