A Short History of Australia by Ernest Scott

British colonial policy--Grey--Disraeli--'A person named Rogers'--'The crimson thread of kinship'--Colonial Conference of 1887--Second Colonial Conference--Preferential duties--The old colonial system and the new-- Soudan contingent--Australia and the South African War--Anzac--Race sentiment among Australians--Poetry and painting.

The constitutions conferred upon the Australian colonies in 1855 contained the most liberal endowment of self government that had ever been secured in the history of colonization by dependencies from a mother-country. The attitude of British statesmen towards oversea dominions had recently undergone a rapid and sweeping change. Only a few years before, Lord Grey had maintained that Great Britain had a perfect right to ship her felonry to the colonies despite their reluctance to receive them. He could not understand the resistance offered by the Cape of Good Hope, by Victoria, and by New South Wales. But the same Lord Grey, having failed to perpetuate transportation, became the sponsor of measures which left the Australian colonies free to do as they pleased within very wide limits, while affording them complete protection. Not all British statesmen agreed with this liberal policy. Disraeli, for example, said some years later in a public speech, that self-government in the colonies ought to have been conceded as part of a great policy of Imperial consolidation. 'It ought to have been accompanied, ' he said, 'by an Imperial tariff, by securities for the people of England for the enjoyment of the unappropriated lands which belonged to the Sovereign as their trustee, and by a military code which should have precisely defined the means and the responsibilities by which the colonies should have been defended and by which, if necessary, this country should call for aid from the colonies themselves.' But Disraeli, who had also spoken of 'these wretched colonies' as millstones hanging round the neck of the mother-country, never understood the problem or the people whom it affected; and it is certain that attempts to control either the land or the economic policy of Australia from London would have resulted in failure. The colonies had to be free to work out their own destiny--making mistakes, perhaps, but paying for those mistakes themselves, and able to rectify them by their own means.