264 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
tralian) is to be elected by all taxpayers, residing in equal electoral districts. Parliaments are to be biennial. The representatives (again note the word) have "the supreme trust" and, as the United States and the Australian Commonwealth have done, will establish courts of justice and other institutions. The power of the assembly is for the first time limited by means of a distinction between the fundamental and the changeable articles of the con- stitution. The legislature is divorced from the executive. There is to be no compulsion in religion, and liberals are to be protected in the profession of their faith. Such details as the appointment of a commission for rearranging electoral districts and the hold- ing of all elections on one fixed day, anticipate usages now in force in Australia as well as the United States.
The ideas embodied in the socialist legislation of New Zealand and Australia are also derivative and have been drawn from German systems of state socialism, as expounded by English and American writers chiefly Gronlund and Bellamy and the Fabian socialists. The nationalization of the land had been advocated by Spence, Godwin, and Herbert Spencer (who became a rene- gade to the cause) before it was made a war-cry by Henry George. Old-age pensions had been proposed by Canon Blackley in Eng- land, and were in force in Germany and Denmark. Courts of industrial arbitration and the minimum wage had been incorpor- ated in a measure laid before the Reichstag. In their most auda- cious innovations colonies therefore still repeat the development, even if only speculative, of older countries. They rear and foster ideas they could not have originated, and which could less readily have germinated in the impoverished soil and harsh climate of the motherland or its congeners.
Such is the theory of colonization. Rapidly passing through the embryonic stages that repeat the prehistoric era in the history of the mother-country, or those it has in common with other nationalities of the same race, or even with other races, a colony cuts the umbilical cord, and then, in the few generations con- sumed by infancy and youth, it swiftly recapitulates the stages the motherland had slowly traversed till the time when the colony had come to the birth. Some colonies are arrested at this point
