Home rule -- Ireland; Ireland -- Politics and government
Let us add that Grey, like Duffy and most of the strongest advocates of
Home Rule for the Colonies, was a Federalist long before Federation
became practical politics, seeing in that policy the best means of
achieving the threefold aim of giving each Colony in a group ample local
freedom, of binding the whole group together into a compact, coherent
State, and of strengthening the connection between that State and the
Mother Country. As Governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861 he vainly
urged the Home Government to promote a Federal Union of the various
South African States, Dutch and British, in order, as he said, to create
"an United South Africa under the British flag," a scheme which, it is
generally agreed, could then have been carried out, and which would have
saved South Africa from terrible disasters. And he wished to apply the
same Federal principle to the Australian Colonies, and to the case of
Ireland and Great Britain.
He realized earlier than most men that the talk of "separation" and
"disloyalty" was, in his own words already quoted, the result of a
"vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect," and that to govern men
by their own consent, to let them work out their own ideals in their own
way, to encourage, not to repress, their sense of nationality, is the
best way to gain their affection, or, if we choose to use that very
misleading word, their loyalty.
Australia and New Zealand present remarkable examples of this beneficent
process, Australia in particular, because there, for a long time even
after the introduction of responsible government and, indeed, until a
dozen years ago, there was a large party of so-called "disloyalists" who
were never weary of decrying British influences and upholding Australian
nationality. Mr. Jebb, in his "Colonial Nationalism," gives an
interesting account of this movement and of its organ, the widely
circulated _Sydney Bulletin_, with its furiously anti-British views, its
Radicalism, its Republicanism, and what not. He shows amusingly how
entirely harmless the propaganda really was, and what a healthy effect
it actually had in promoting an independence of feeling and national
self-respect among Australians, to such a degree that when the South
African War broke out, there was a universal outburst of patriotism and
a universal desire, which was realized, to share to the full as a nation
in the expense, danger, and hardships of the war. Mr. Jebb adds the
interesting suggestion that the reluctance of New Zealand to enter the
Australian Federation may be partly due to the strong individual
sentiment of nationality evoked within her by the war and the
exceptional exertions she made to aid the Imperial troops.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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