With many readers it will add not a little to the piquancy of the work, that a considerable part is occupied in a sharp controversy with the Colonial Office and its present chief. Mr Wakefield does not spare his adversaries; he seems rather to rejoice in the wind and stir of controversy. What provocation he has received we do not know: the justice of his quarrel, therefore, we cannot pretend to decide upon; but the manner in which he conducts it, is certainly not to our taste. For instance, at p. 35 and p. 302, there is a littleness of motive, a petty jealousy of him (Mr Wakefield) attributed to Lord Grey as the grounds of his public conduct--a sort of imputation which does not increase our respect for the person who makes it. But into this controversy with the Colonial Office we have no wish to enter. So far as it is of a personal character, we can have no motive to meddle with it; and so far as the system itself is attacked, of governing our colonies through this office, as at present constituted, there appears to be no longer any controversy whatever. It seems admitted, on all hands, that our colonies have outgrown the machinery of government here provided for them. In the extract we lately made from Mr Wakefield's book, some of our readers were perhaps startled at meeting so strange an appellation as _Mr Mothercountry_. It is a generic name, which our writer gives to that gentleman of the Colonial Office (though it would seem more appropriate to one of the female sex) who for the time being really governs the colony, and is thus, in fact, the representative of the mother country. The _soubriquet_ was adopted from a pamphlet of the late Mr Charles Buller, in which he very vividly describes the sort of government to which--owing to the frequent change of ministry, and the parliamentary duties of the Secretary of State--a colony is practically consigned. We wish we had space to quote enough from this pamphlet, to show in what a graphic manner Mr Buller gradually narrows and limits the ideas which the distant colonist entertains of the ruling mother country. "That mother country," he finally says, "which has been narrowed from the British isles into the Parliament, from the Parliament into the Executive Government, from the Executive Government into the Colonial Office, is not to be sought in the apartments of the Secretary of State, or his Parliamentary under-secretary. Where are we to look for it?" He finds it eventually in some back-room in the large house in Downing Street, where some unknown gentleman, punctual, industrious, irresponsible, sits at his desk with his tape and his pigeon-holes about him. This is the original of Mr Mother-country.