the forefront of the consciousness of politicians. When Lord Rosmead spoke of the permanent presence of the imperial factor as “simply an absurdity,” and Mr. Rhodes spoke of its “elimination,” they were championing a “colonialism” which is more certain in the course of time to develop by inner growth into a separate “nationalism” than in the case of the Australasian and Canadian colonies, because of the wider divergence, alike of interests and radical conditions of life, from the mother nation. Our other colonies are plainly representative of the spirit of Imperialism rather than of colonialism. No considerable proportion of the population consists of British settlers living with their families in conformity with the social and political customs and laws of their native land: in most instances they form a small minority wielding political or economic sway over a majority of alien and subject people, themselves under the despotic political control of the Imperial Government or its local nominees. This, the normal condition of a British colony, was well-nigh universal in the colonies of other European countries. The “colonies” which France and Germany established in Africa and Asia were in no real sense plantations of French and German national life beyond the seas; nowhere, not even in Algeria, did they represent true European civilization; their political and economic structure of society is wholly alien from that of the mother country.
Colonialism, in its best sense, is a natural overflow of nationality; its test is the power of colonists to transplant the civilization they represent to the new natural and social environment in which they find themselves. We must not be misled by names; the “colonial” party in Germany and France is identical in general aim and method with the “imperialist” party in England, and the latter is the truer title. Professor Seeley well marked the nature of
