On the 26th of June Sir William Molesworth moved an Address to the Queen begging for a Commission to inquire into the Administration of the Colonies, more especially with a view to lessen the cost of their government, and to give free scope to individual enterprise in colonising. He startled the House by quoting figures which showed that, in fifteen years, “a series of remarkable events in the Colonies” had cost England the modest sum of eighty millions sterling. It could not have cost more to settle 4,000,000 able and energetic emigrants in Australia alone; and yet in the whole Colonial Empire in 1849, it appears there were not more than 1,000,000 persons of British or Irish descent. Charles Buller some years before had condemned the Colonial Office for its arbitrary character, its indifference to local feeling, and its ignorance of local wants, its procrastination and vacillation, its secrecy and irresponsibility, its servitude to parties and cliques, its injustice, and its disorder. In this debate Lord Grey’s Administration was held to aptly illustrate all these vices; and yet Lord Grey had become Colonial Minister because he stood pledged to cure them. Lord Grey’s idea of Colonial government seemed to be either to rule the Colony with a high hand from London, or, if it had some semblance of representative institutions, to govern it by means of a violent Party minority in the popular Chamber, co-operating with a majority of the Council nominated by the Crown. Self-government for Colonies that were fit for it, and intelligent government for those that were not, were Sir William Molesworth’s remedies. A strong plea for reducing the extravagant outlay on official salaries and useless military expenditure was pressed; and protests against convict emigration, which, together with our misgovernment, drove honest English Colonists to the United States, were entered. Mr. Hume and Mr. Gladstone, on behalf of the Radicals and Peelites, gave a general support to the motion; but the indefatigable Mr. Hawes came smilingly to the defence of Lord Grey with his stereotyped “_Non possumus_,” and Lord John Russell declared that the scope of the reference to the Commission was too vast and wide for practical purposes. His novel argument was that to attempt to define the limits of Imperial and local questions must end in bitter disputes between the Colonies and the mother country. Undeterred by the failure of the Radicals to force a rational Colonial policy on the Whigs, the Peelites next took up the matter, and on the 19th of June Lord Lincoln moved an Address to the Crown expressing the opinion that the Hudson’s Bay Company, to which Vancouver Island had been granted by Royal Charter, was ill-adapted for ruling or developing the resources of a colony founded on principles of political and commercial freedom, and generally challenging the validity of the grant. One would have thought that it needed little argument to demonstrate the