This sentence, jesting of the “millstone,” but sighing over the chance of severance, was penned in 1853--the very year after the New Zealand Constitution. It was a time of despondency, following on fourteen years of colonial crisis. During it both Canada and the Cape had rebelled. The former’s Constitution had been suspended. The repeal of the Sugar Duties had estranged mutinous Jamaica. Peel had been constrained to exclaim that in “Every one of our colonies we have another Ireland,” and Peel was an imperialist. In a raw state, and in the crudity of earlier hardships, the colonies always clash more readily with home government than when the mellowing progress of experience enables them to take a less partial view, and to accept help in working out their own salvation. Moreover, the choice still lay between pure democracy and democracy monarchical and national. The democratic idea during this period was working in absolute detachment from the ancient institutions which should have been easily transplanted. In the colonies these were all in danger. It was difficult here to find a rallying centre for them there, and that difficulty was heightened by the two new schools of Radical thought--the older, that of the philosophical Molesworth and the utilitarian Hume, who tested policy by the criterion of immediate success; the newer, that of the dry “Physical Equalitarians” of Manchester, which regarded Great Britain as a huge co-operative store. Disraeli from first to last urged the especial need in England for strong as well as good government. The faculties for government were being lessened and weakened. It was not one side only that despaired; Lord John Russell himself had no faith in the bare democracy of the colonial feeling. And yet we have seen what Disraeli wrote of Lord John in _The Press_ at this very period. The home example then was unpropitious for the colonies. Monarchy was yet far from popular. What Disraeli feared in England--what may still be dreaded in our midst--was the possible reaction--in the face of limited employment of labour and growing tyranny of capital--from detached democracy to moneyed despotism. “Nor is there”--wrote Disraeli, with premature penetration, in _The Press_ of March 21, 1853--“a country in the world in which the reaction from democracy to despotism would be so sudden and so complete as in England, because in no other country is there the same timidity of capital; and just in proportion as democratic progress by levelling the influences of birth elevates the influences of money, does it create a power that would at any time annihilate liberty--if liberty were brought into opposition with the three-per-cents.” The effects of this fermenting leaven both in England and among her colonies had to be weighed; and Disraeli many years afterwards avowed in a speech that for a moment he too had wavered. That moment was the one of this passing phrase. But it stood for a phase as momentary. Disraeli, like