English Extracts. Earl Grey on the Colonial Policy of The Whigs. (From Bell's Weekly Messenger, March 22.)

Daily Southern Cross, Volume X, Issue 641, 19 August 1853, Page 3

English Extracts. Earl Grey on the Colonial Policy of The Whigs. (From Bell's Weekly Messenger, March 22.)

"We learn by the public prints, that emigration from Jamaica to Australia and the Isthmus is rapidly taking place, and that 90 persons of the better sort have already berths in one ship, the Glentanar, it being expected that a great many more applications would be made, and that above 200 passengers, among whom were many of the labouring classes, were about to- sail for the Isthmus; whilst so far from Earl Grey's assertion, that an opposition to the measures of the home Government had brought about the miseries of the colonies, in the remotest degree, being accepted as a fact in the colonies, a resolution was made to carry out the determination some time since expressed in Jamaica, of forcing down the public expenditure, and this resolution found but two dissentients. And no wonder, for our private correspondence from Jamaica informs us, that the negroes whom Earl Grey had hoped to compel to work at cheaper rates, have delined his lordship's mediation, and are emigrating to Chagres and Panama. The actual state of this ill-fated colony — a victim of Whig misrule and profitable-invest-ment-making Colonial Secretaries — may perhaps be in some degree conceived by a perusal of the Jamaica (Lawton's) Gazette of February 1, which gives the amount of abandonel and partially abandoned acreage from Jan. Ist, 1848, to Jan., 1853, in that island alone, as 391,187 acres ; whilst the amount of assessed taxes have fallen from £13,715 65., the average amount of the four years previous to the year 1848, to the sum of £7294 11s. 7d. for 1852. The same authority also states that, taking in the nine years since the altoration of the duties "on coffee, the aggregate deterioration of property in Jamaica, Calculated by Mr. Hosack, has been no les3 than £2,441,142 11s. 6d. Can we wonder at finding that this exposS of the effects of Lord John Russell and his Colonial Secretary's policy (persisted in, despite of the effects upon the slave trade and the colonies), is concluded by the following sentence : "We trust, however, that the debate on Mr. George Lyon's motion will result in such a manner as to convince the British Government that the prestige of a blind loyalty, which was w^nt to influence the people of

this island in submitting to any amount oi any oppression, is gone for ever " With the Editor of the 'Jamaica Commercial Gazette/ we think the time is gone by, when a blind feeling of loyalty to the mother country can overpower every and all other claims that may call upon the colonist for the exercise of his judgment. The intentions of the Government have been disclosed; the democratical feeling of the manufacturing classes has rather been urged on, fostered and preceded, than given way to ; the previous feelings of Great Britain towards her dependencies — viz., that of mutual advantage — have been discarded ; and when the colonists find that the mother country is grasping at all the advantages of the connexion, and repudiating all its claims, they will be as desirous of taking their affairs iv their own hands, as their resolute brethren of the Far West. Nor can this in justice be refused. And thus, by degrees, will come to pass the ominous prophecy of the Earl of Malmesbuvy ; and this nation, no longer a nation of statesmen, but of shopkeepers — shopkeepers both of habit and mmd — shorn of its prestige and its power, and self-denuded of its ancient nobility of sentiment, and of its place among the nations — will be left as a beacon to the world, a monument of Manchester ascendancy — "a weather - beaten island in the Northern Sea." ! We have been obliged to make so many quotations from the Work before us, that we are unable to do more than refer to one of the large remaining number of our colonies; and the reader, who will see that we view Earl Grey's policy, and his mode of carrying it out, with abhorrence, will naturally suppose that we should select Ceylon, with the ample opportunity it affords of showing the evil effects of the bullying system, even upon Asiatics, and thus impale the original author of all the horrors that occurred there, alive, like the poor priest who, after being goaded to madness by tyrranny, was sacrificed in his robes ; whilst the means of exposing the wickedness of the whole proceeding, like the doings of the Inquisition, were consigned to the oubliettes of the colonial powers. We shall not do this, but refer briefly to the Cape. Here Lord Grey enjoyed the assistance of a Governor, who was upon the best terms with the colonists, possessed of a military reputation of the highest order, and possessing also the skill of age j and the activity of youth, was of all others best qualified to conduct the affairs at the Cape. Of these advantages the overbearing, haughty, anl conceited noble failed to avail himself. Unaccustomed to accept advice, on account of an habitual and mulish pertinacity to his own opinions, and a spoiled j child's humour, that knew no mode of legislative administration but sic volo, sicjubeo, he did his best to destroy the happy understanding which existed between the Gover- ' nor and the colonists, and determined, con- j trary to obligations which r no mind but one j of a strange east of morality would have j dared to break, to locate the convicts of England by force upon the colonists. By j this arbitrary proceeding he so irritated the i stubborn but upright mind of the English, that he managed to put the Governor in a false position with those he ruled, stirred up a misunderstanding in the whole colony, arising from the language the Hottentot servants were accustomed to bear, and thus having played the bully till he had disgusted the colonists, he was compelled, against his will, to remove hi 3 pestilential importations from the shore, and then terminated his career by an unjustifiable attempt to visit his own sins on the head of his subordinate in so ungenerous a manner, that the first military authority in the kingdom could not restrain his indignation. With a word he removed the unjust odium, and attached it like a millstone round the neck of its real owner, dropping them together in the political ocean, as -Helen Campbell did the ganger Morris, to rise no more ; and nothing but a few air-bubbles, and the short-lived exposition of a colonial policy — false in its dealings, fallacious in its arguments, and fatal ! in its result — remain to mark the passing existence of either the one or the other ; except, indeed, the sufferings, the abhorrence, and the detestation of those who have been ill-used. We do not hesitate to say that, if the colonists had been considerately and reasonably dealt with, the necessities of their position would have induced them to accept the importation of convict labour as a blessing, instead of repudiating it as a curse, and that, judiciously sprinkled over that vast country, and merged in its population, the energy of the convict might still be directed to beneficial purposes ; but under feuch a Colonial Minister as Earl Grey, with the justly exasperated feelings of the colonists towards him — never. We cannot afford space to give more than one instance of the manner in which Earl Grey slurs over the important exertions of those who were so unfortunate as to be i under the directions of the Colonial Office at the Cape, " damning their, labours with faint praise," and looking upon the lives and fortunes of men as if they were experimental puppets kept for his amusement. In page 209 are these words:— "ln the August following the proclamation of sovereignty, some of the Booers revolted, but the Governor promptly assembled a small force on the Orange river, made himself an exceedingly rapid journey from Cape Town to meet it, and after a sharp skirmish put an end to this revolt." Will the reader believe that these six lines contain an account, and all the account the quondam Colonial Secretary deigns to give of the revolt of the Boers,— a people, who, in 1842, were bo exasperated against the Government as to necessitate the forced march of a body of our troops over a journey of 600 miles, which occupied four months,

over an unknown country, by a party so small (280 men and two six-pounder gun 9), that it might have been cut off at any moment, made under much privation, and terminating in a hasty made entrenchment, surrounded on all sides by the enraged Boers ? So. open was his entrenchment, that a solitary female who happened to be there, was kept in a hole dug in the ground, the place being so exposed to the fire of the enemy, that the men were obliged to sleep in the trenches they had dug, were kept on the alert night and day, being besieged for six weeks, their waggons placed around forming great part of their defence ; while they were compelled to live for 14 days on oats and horseflesh dried in strips, expecting every hour to be their last. If the Boers had but possessed resolution enough to have stormed the camp, nothing could have prevented them from doing so, and annihilating every man in it; while under God the lives of the whole were only saved by the extraordinary enterprise and intelligence of the officers in charge, and the providential safe arrival of an express sent to the Cape for assistance, but for the approach of which all must have been sacrificed. Verily we want words to express our indignation at the dastardly conduct of the man who can endeavour to screen his own delinquencies by ignoring the labours and exertions of others, meanly endeavouring to escape the obloquy which he deserves, whilst utterly reckless, and taking no account of the dangers and sufferings of men who earn their livelihood, not, as experimental Majendia, upon others, but by the honest exercise of their own talents, the risk of their own lives, the privation of their own comforts, or rather necessaries, and finally, by an upright and manly course of conduct, which we believe the writer whose work is before us can neither understand nor appreciate. We conclude these comments with a quotation from the noble lord's work, observing only, that he himself and his colleague, Lord John Russell, have together done more than any human beings upon earth to bring about the national calamities he affects to deplore: — "With the consequences of the American revolution before my eyes, I certainly am not prepared to say that the loss of our colonial empire must necessarily be fatal to our national greatness and prosperity ; still I should regard such an event as a grievous calamity, and as lowering by many steps the rank of this country among the nations of the world. You, lam persuaded, will concur with me in this opinion, and will feel no less strongly than myself the desire that the great British empire may to a long futurity be held together, and preserve its station among the principal powers of the earth." If by possibility Great Britain escapes the fate thus more than shadowed out, it must be by a miraculous interposition of Providence, and according to the old and often-quoted line " If on tali auxilio nee defensoribus istis." We close this notice of the colonial policy with pain — of its writer with disgust.

The 'Galway Packet' states that a sulphur mine of very superior quality and unusual extent has been recently discovered at Glan, The lode, even at the surface, is of the extraordinary breadth of eight feet. If the deposit of sulphur be of a length proportioned to the breadth already ascertained, — which cannot be discovered until a considerable depth has been arrived at — this will be one of the most extensive and valuable sulphur mines in Europe. Poor Turkey.— ('Daily News.') Turkey has a " tyrannical past, a worthless present, and an extinct future." Clever words these. But idle and dishonest as clever. The real offence of Turkey is that surrounding circumstances — the cruel despotism of Austria and the hopeless barbarism of Kussia — have made it one of the liberal powers of Europe; have given it the means of disturbing the reign of political death in those empires ; have rendered it in a lesser degree another England — the refuge of the oppressed and persecuted. In England and Turkey alone in Europe is there local administration, local freedom, individual liberty. There, men may think, and act, and speak, without fear and without restraint. There, they mayworship God according to the dictates of their conscience. There, life, person, and property are secure. There, municipal rights and privileges still survive. There, trade and commerce are unrestricted. In Turkey, there are no towns in a state of siege, no military oppression, no police tyranny, no struggling under the weight of taxation. Christian rayahs do not fiy from the heavyhands of Turkish pashas. On the contrary, it is the Christians of Hungary, of Greece, of Poland, who seek freedom in Turkey. Austria. — ('Morning Chronicle.') In dealing with Switzerland and Sardinia, Austria plays alternately tiie bully and the robber, and then defends her conduct by appealing to " necessity" and public utility, after the manner of Mr. Jonathan Wild and other similar benefactors of the human race. Yet it may be doubted whether any personages of the htter class ever combined with their : obliquity of moral vision such obtuseness of perception as is displayed in the recent *m* perial manifestoes. The charges whioh Aus^> tria makes against her neighbours involve the confession that she is iroable to manage her own provinces, or, to conciliate her own subjects, and that she has brought matters to such a pass in her own dominions that she can only hope to save "law and order" by lawless attacks on the rights of her neighbours. Her inability to rule Italy is only made the more manifest by the cfaiiusy attempt to cast upon others to blame- for a state of things whioh is neither more nor less than the natural consequence of her otftV misgovernmen^ and tyranny.