The only part of colonial society known in England, consisted of those West Indian proprietors who were resident here. They were highly educated--their stations were elevated--their wealth was great, attracting attention, and sometimes offending, by its display. It was a very prevalent supposition, that they constituted the whole of what was valuable, or wealthy, or respectable in West Indian colonial society; that those who were resident in the colonies could have no claim to either of these descriptions; and that they were the mere hired managers of the properties of the West Indians resident in England. This notion was entertained by the government. The hospitable invitations from the West Indians in England, which a Governor on the eve of his departure for his colony accepted, served to impress it strongly on his mind. He proceeded to his government with too low an estimate of the character, attainments, respectability, and property of those who composed the community over whom he was to preside. The nobleman or general officer on whom the government had been bestowed, entered on his administration, familiar, indeed, with the Parliament of Great Britain, and with what Mr Burke calls "her imperial character, and her imperial rights," but little acquainted with, and still less disposed to recognise, the rights and privileges of the Colonial Assemblies, although those assemblies, in the estimation of the same great authority, so exceedingly resembled a parliament in all their forms, functions, and powers, that it was impossible they should not imbibe some idea of a similar authority. "Things could not be otherwise," he adds; "and English colonies must be had on those terms, or not had at all." He could not, as Mr Burke did, "look upon the imperial rights of Great Britain, and the privileges which the colonies ought to enjoy under these rights, to be just the most reconcilable things in the world."