Beasley E. Empire as the Triumph of Theory: Imperialism, Information and the Colonial Society of 1868 (British and Foreign and Colonial Policy)

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a Scottish constituency. He had already sat for Wick from 1860 to 1865, when he had lost

to a former Finance Minister of India, a Scotsman named Samuel Laing. In 1868 they

once again stood against each other. The contest was therefore between two men who had

oth represented the area and who were both members of the Liberal Party. And both had

served in India; they both addressed colonial themes in their campaigns.

In accordance with his idea of what the empire was, Lord Bury encumbered his

speeches with lessons about American politics.

He had already prepared a speech on

that subject for public consumption in 1866. The handbill advertising it had announced in

dark letters more than an inch high that Viscount Bury would lecture on the ‘HISTORY

AND PRESENT POLITICAL CONDITION OF AMERICA’.

(Bury had also

incorporated what were at the time quite topical reflections on America into the 1865

election addresses to his constituents.

) Was this supposed to be a campaign speech or

part of a course of public instruction?

One local newspaper was more impressed with Laing’s Indian experiences than

anything Lord Bury had to offer in 1868, and made special note of his short attention-

span:

Lord Bury, like some long missing comet, has suddenly appeared among his

constituents in these northern parts. For long months his Lordship seems to have

totally disappeared from the realms of political existence, and though he must

have been aware of certain movements in the Burghs, of whose character and

influence he still seems to be greatly in ignorance, Lord Bury seems to have

looked on them with the greatest indifference, attaching to them as little

importance as he appears to have done to questions of the highest moment that

were under debate and division in Parliament during the last session….

There are certainly personal considerations that may be regarded as an

important element in the case. Mr Laing, for example, is one of ourselves. He is

a native of one of the burghs. He is a man whose abilities greatly outshine those

of Lord Bury, [and] whose brilliant services in India entitle him to high

regard.

100

Of course what preoccupied Lord Bury at the time was founding the Colo nial Society.

He was concerned with Canada, America, and the idea of empire in general—had he not

visited the remains of the Near Eastern empires?—rather than in the particular interests o

mere constituents or localities. And although neither he nor Samuel Laing was returned

for Wick, Bury was returned for another constituency (Berwick-upon-Tweed).

Lord Bury exemplified an intellectual trend towards focusing more and more on

societies as a whole, rather than on the particular classes, occupations, or social circles

within a society. A similar trend towards general laws was visible in the sciences

roperly so called; the future Lord Salisbury commented on it in 1862, ascribing it in part

to the influence of Darwin.

101

The use of grand generalities to describe human affairs,

and especially the affairs of the English-speaking world, is visible among many of the

founders-to-be who followed Tocqueville.

But apart from participating in this great trend, the founders were by no means united

in their non-Tocquevillean interests prior to 1868. They were notable instead for thei

Tocqueville and Lord Bury 93

diversity. Indeed, the English Tocquevilleans of the 1860s were the best evidence for the

intellectual diversity of England that Henry Adams, for one, could find. Adams, the son

and secretary of the American ambassador from 1861 until May 1868, was a dyspeptic

epicene and a scientific reductionist. A Boston Brahmin, he perverted Darwinism and

thermodynamics to support his own hatred of diversity, along with his hatred of any

achievement outside of or below his own circle in Boston. He noted (in the course o

making some rather dubious points about John Bright) that:

The class of Englishmen who set out to be the intellectual opposites of Bright,

seemed to the American bystander the weakest and most eccentric of all. These

were the trimmers, the political economists, the anti-slavery and doctrinaire

class, the followers of De Tocqueville, and of John Stuart Mill. As a class they

were timid,—with good reason,—and timidity, which is high wisdom in

philosophy, sicklies the whole cast of thought in action. Numbers of these men

haunted London society.

102

Well, Lord Bury was no trimmer, nor was he timid—

ut nasty and inaccurate as Adams

was, he did manage to attest to the existence of England’s Tocquevilleans and to the

diversity or oddity of their beliefs, beyond what they had taken from Tocqueville. Here

only lay their unity until 1868; they did not all move as well within the international

fraternity of geologists or stamp collectors or radicals or aristocrats. In a modern society

and against the background of modern information flow, one always has the chance to

decide what to pay attention to, and around what groups to construct one’s identity. The

English-speaking world was what they chose.

Empire as the triumph of theory 94

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world

There was a further tradition of political analysis that, focusing as it did on the role o

America in world history, set some of the founders down the road towards thinking in

imperial categories. This was colonial reform, a movement founded by Edward Gibbon

Wakefield around 1830. Most of the key figures in colonial reform had died before 1868.

Those colonial reformers who are of interest here, those who joined the Colonial Society,

had by that time moved away from Wakefield’s categories and towards Tocqueville’s.

Their thinking traced out an arc, from Wakefield to Tocqueville to the broade

imperialism of 1868.

Wakefield and his vicars

Edward Gibbon Wakefield wanted to use American society as a model for promoting

further settlement in Canada, Australasia, and elsewhere. The New Worlds of the

Western and Southern Hemispheres, to be filled with democracies that would be

attractive to emigrants, would redress the over-

opulation of the Old World and

especially of Great Britain itself. Wakefield published his first important book in 1829.

What was the appeal of Wakefield’s thought? Wakefield addressed himself more fully

to English emigration questions than Tocqueville would. The Frenchman examined

America to understand the course of democracy in France; Wakefield examined America

to understand how to build countries that British people would emigrate to.

Wakefield began with the observation that Indian pressure had kept the North

American colonists bottled up in their towns, and those towns flourished. By contrast, the

colonists of Canada and Australia had not been blessed with a native foe strong enough to

keep the settlers huddled together. Therefore a dense and socially stratified colonial

society had not developed. People had gone off into the wild to settle hither and thither.

The problem was that without a sufficiently dense population, the colonies could not

absorb the English people whom Wakefield most wanted to get rid of, namely

underemployed tradesmen and servants. Such people could not go out into the wild to

farm. They needed to be employed as servants and labourers. That is, there had to be rich

colonists for the poor colonists to work for. The poor could be transplanted only i

English society in all its density and inequality could itself be transplanted. A colony o

socially equal backwoodsmen could not draw enough people away from overcrowded

England.

Accordingly—and differing mightily from Tocqueville, the ambivalent prophet o

social equality—Wakefield proposed a bottling strategy that was designed to preserve

social inequality. Land outside town would be sold to ranchers at a price guaranteed to

make them guard it from homesteaders, ‘the sufficient price’. The ranchers would

become a local aristocracy, helping to complete the colony’s social pyramid, and so there

would be healthy towns. Within these towns, there would be a balance between the spirit

of local self-government and the spirit of loyalty to the British nation. While loyalty

might not figure in the life of a cabin dweller on the unregulated, unbottled frontier, town

dwellers would retain the habit of deference.

It should also be noted that in his early works Wakefield stressed that his colonies

would be self-governing only on the municipal level. They would not be fully

independent, since they could not be allowed to succumb to the local pressure to give

away their rural lands—to do so would frustrate the emigration plan, which was to be

financed by the land sales.

All of these ideas appeared in Wakefield’s 1829 book, A Letter from Sydney…, which

he actually wrote during his three years in Newgate Gaol (he earned his three years by

eloping from Gretna Green to Calais with a young heiress). The emphasis on American

land use, American prosperity, the American townscape, and the nature of American

local government (all key themes in Tocqueville) may be found throughout the book. But

it was in his England and America: A Comparison of the Social and Political State o

oth Nations (1833) that Wakefield first probed more deeply into land tenure and town-

founding in the United States. The book appeared two years before the first half o

emocracy in America would come out in France, and it is full of examples from South

Africa and Canada as well as England and the United States.

This list of emigrant

destinations makes up a working definition of the British Empire that would remain quite

serviceable in 1868.

A final basic idea of the Wakefieldians that appeared in these early works of thei

founder was the sense of their own wisdom and purity, certainly in comparison with

ordinary settlers. The Wakefieldians did not want the common folk to overrun the

colonies before paternalistic Wakefieldian estates could be set up. Therefore the common

people had to be controlled in accordance with the higher plan.

To Wakefield’s mind,

the opportunities offered by all that land had been ignored and wasted by allowing people

to live on it where they pleased. Not for the Wakefieldians a Lockean dream of the

aterfamilias clearing the forest and making value where none had existed before. The

Wakefieldians envisioned a utopia of title-deeds and cheap servants.

After some years, even Wakefield could see that his plans had failed to transform

English society. Well into the hungry forties, almost two decades after England an

merica, the poor were still with the English. In those colonies where Wakefield’s ideas

had been tried, the economics were found to be shaky; the land sales did not pay fo

emigration, and the lower orders were so impolite as to run off and squat where they

could not legally homestead. Wakefield’s response came in

View of the Art o

Colonization (1849). In it, his most substantial work, Wakefield went his deepest into the

subject of US land law and local government. He wound up disagreeing with Tocqueville

in a key way.

For Wakefield, whose chief concern had been making rural land expensive enough to

keep people in the towns, the precise details of town government had now become

everything. Wakefield had changed his mind. Now he thought that America’s advantage

lay not so much in land law in general or in absence of primogeniture, which Tocqueville

had stressed,

but in the nature of local municipal institutions. In Wakefield’s mind, self-

Empire as the triumph of theory 96

governing municipalities were the key to the social stability and to the attitude of self-

reliance in a new society. From that fact many others flowed. Local government in his

colonies had been compromised by constant meddling from Whitehall—on this he

lamed the financial instability of each colony. Local government had not been local

enough. This was to be the main preoccupation in later colonial reform writings—a

constant carping about the permanent officials of the Colonial Office.

Wakefield’s new focus on the independence of local government had important

intellectual consequences. If, like Tocqueville, one concentrated on the influence of land

law on inherited mores in a new settlement, then the details of the higher constitutional

ties of that new settlement to the metropolitan power would be less than crucial—royal

colonies and self-governing ones would have similar fates, since land would pass from

father to son (or to whomever) in the appointed way. But if the larger and more formal

structures of town and colonial government were the key, as Wakefield had come to

believe, then the structure of the imperial connections would matter more. Wakefield’s

new views invited the interest in the role of colonial governments within an imperial

system that marked imperial thought in the second half of the nineteenth century. To

Wakefield’s mind, nothing could be more inimical to local self-reliance than supervision

from the absurd figure of ‘Mr Mothercountry’, a Whitehall bureaucrat who specialized in

micro-management, and whose gender-

ending name could only add to his absurdity in

the view of someone who abducted young heiresses.

A View was written as an epistolary

dialogue between a ‘colonist’ and ‘statesman’

ack in England. They discussed the

various sins of Mr Mothercountry.

For all Tocqueville’s interest in overweening central authorities, the Frenchman did no

focus on overseas suzerainty by a metropolitan power. Britain’s overseas empire was not,

for Tocqueville, the natural place to observe important or interesting expressions o

central power. Independence was the natural course for a colony, and yet there need be

no worry, in the strict Tocquevillean view, that the Anglo-colonial connection would be

roken if it were not formalized in a clear imperial structure. Referring to the American

Revolution as ‘the most just of struggles, that of a people escaping from another people’s

yoke’, Tocqueville did not think that the Revolution had marked much of a break in ‘the

chain of opinions which binds around the whole of the Anglo-American world’.

Wakefield was not so confident. The question of what the British connection is, or might

e, and the not unrelated question of why it might or might not survive, vexed many o

the founders, as it vexes some Commonwealth citizens today.

Anglo-Saxon ties can

seem less binding from the inside.

Wakefield was a very good salesman. He pointed out the looming poverty in England,

and he had convincing if high-handed plans for ameliorating it by shipping people

overseas. He changed the homesteading policy of much of the British Empire, and

inspired the foundation of the New Zealand cities of Wellington (1840), Wanganui

(1840), New Plymouth (1841), and Nelson (1842),

and, with the greater involvement o

Wakefield himself, Otago (1848) and Canterbury (1850).

Wakefield also deserves

credit for South Australia, whose organization in 1834 had marked the first real if ill-

fated attempt to put his ideas into practice.

On Vancouver Island, Wakefield-inspired

government land prices were so high as to give the colony a commercial rather than an

agricultural cast.

If few of these colonies were ever under Wakefield’s direct control, all

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 97

were founded on his principles and with the explicit use of his name, and England was

dotted with the emigration recruitment agents of his various companies.

But the man

himself eventually left for Canada, and then for New Zealand, where he fell ill and spent

the last seven years of his life as an invalid. He died in 1860.

The leadership of the

colonial reform movement had already passed to others.

Towards another imperialism: Charles Bowyer Adderley

The man was gone but not forgotten. ‘In face of Mormon prosperity’, Charles Dilke

wrote in 1868, ‘it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system,

though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population

grew up side by side in every valley, and the plough was not allowed to gain on the

machine-saw and the shuttle.’

In these words Dilke was testifying to the influence o

Wakefield—if not on Brigham Young then on young English writers such as himself, and

many other founders of the Colonial Society. As Dilke showed, ‘Wakefieldian’ and

‘Wakefieldianism’ remained common words in politics and popular economics.

But as a movement colonial reform was gone. Because it had been predicated on a fea

of the over-numerous poor, it was doomed in 1848 when the revolutions that broke out on

the continent stayed there. Britons of the better orders were relieved at the peacefulness

of their lessers. On the day when excited men of the upper and business classes patrolled

the city of London and the Thames bridges, what was to be the last large meeting o

Chartists ended peacefully in the drizzle some distance away.

The conclusion of the

upper classes was that England was not so full of undesirables after all.

Colonial reform did not immediately melt away in that drizzle, but it began to erode.

The British economy continued to improve. Good feeling spread, especially when the

masses who converged on the Crystal Palace in 1851 looked at the exhibits rather than

breaking the glass and over-throwing the monarchy. Some in the comfortable classes

continued to take an interest in colonial emigration, but colonial self-government became

a more popular theme. The adherents of colonial reform had to reformulate their interest

in the empire or abandon it. Chief among them was a man named Adderley. He began a

Wakefieldian. He ended up with beliefs very similar to those of Lord Bury and the othe

founders of the Colonial Society.

Charles Bowyer Adderley was uncomplicated enough to note that ‘The track of human

affairs, though traversed by a thousand cloudy theories of each passing day, comes out

wonderfully simple in review.’

Such simplicity came at the price of turning away from

detail and towards generality. Meanwhile he rose to a peerage, along the way playing an

instrumental role in Australasian and West African affairs and in the confederation o

Canada.

Adderley was born in 1819. He inherited sizeable estates when he was 12, at which

point he was taken out of school and given a low-church minister as his tutor. He entered

Christ Church, Oxford, where his DNB entry suggests that he excelled in piety, music,

art, horse riding, and tobacco smoking. Much that he would learn in his long life he

learned on his own or from his friends. This included his interest in Tocqueville and the

empire.

Empire as the triumph of theory 98

As had Wakefield, Adderley began by pondering what to do with England’s worse off.

His largest estate was near Birmingham, and on turning 18 Adderley built a new

neighbourhood for the poor of that city. It was called Saltley, and it swelled the

opulation of his estate from 400 when he began work in 1837 to 27,000 by the turn o

the century (Adderley died in 1905). Saltley was a complete town rather than a

speculative subdivision of the kind forming Georgian and early Victorian London.

Adderley planned for the employment and the recreation of his new tenants; he also used

writs to keep the sewage outflows off of the estate.

Adderley was at one point President

of the National Sanitation League.

In 1856, he gave Birmingham its first important municipal park; again it was carved

from his estate. The city took some time to agree to the terms, which included his

continuing right to plan the public facilities.

The conditions he placed on the gift were

in character; Adderley was not one for charity at a distance. He wrote: ‘The only

superiority in upper classes over lower in human society, giving any reason whatever fo

a difference of station in a common probation, must consist in their having been, and

always being, trained for higher social services, and greater services make greater men.’

Adderley’s interest in empire began at university. He became a Wakefieldian at Oxford

through his friendship with John Robert Godley (1814–61). They read together, and afte

leaving university they travelled together.

Godley was a Leitrim magistrate, and he and

Adderley had both studied Irish overpopulation. Indeed, on their 1840 summer holiday

the two young friends went on a riding tour of Killarney, paying an accidental visit to

Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator. Adderley’s horse fell near O’Connell’s house, where the

young Oxonians presented themselves for comfort and assistance. O’Connell did receive

them, but not very warmly. His sudden guests returned the coldness. Adderley recalled o

the Liberator that ‘the great man was treated as royalty’. ‘He sat at dinner with a cap o

maintenance on his head.’

Indeed, the young men were not in favour of Irish nationalism, but of colonial and

imperial growth. After they left university, Adderley helped to edit and promote Godley’s

first book, an 1844 work called Letters from America that refers explicitly to Tocqueville.

(Adderley, who had entered Parliament as a Tory in 1841, did not go with Godley on this

post-Oxford trip across the Atlantic.) Adderley sent the book to Sir Robert Peel and to

W.E.Gladstone, among others.

One reason that Adderley cited for recommending the

book all round was its timely treatment of Irish poverty.

Indeed, mass starvation soon gave a special poignancy to this issue—the issue of the

relevance of America and the colonies to conditions in Ireland. Witness the case o

another young man who was on the same undergraduate riding tour, who was part of the

same discussion circle about Tocqueville and Wakefield, and who was with Godley and

Adderley in O’Connell’s house that night in 1840. His name was William Monsell. Long

in favour of some variety of reform in Ireland,

he was a staunch Roman Catholic who

would one day attempt to resign from the Aberdeen government over an anti-Catholic

speech by the Foreign Secretary (and former Prime Minister) Lord John Russell.

Yet

the Famine did not make this Irish Catholic and reformer a nationalist and a follower o

O’Connell. Like Adderley, Monsell became instead a follower of Wakefield; and also

like Adderley, Monsell would maintain and develop his interest in Wakefieldian

emigration for long enough to become an early member of the Colonial Society.

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 99

For Monsell, there was a global context that put to shame O’Connell’s narrow

nationalism; this was the Roman Catholic Church, in whose universal, 200,000,000-

strong reach (as he put it) Monsell took great pride.

For Godley and Adderley, the

global context that could be used to dismiss O’Connell’s nationalism as niggling and

parochial was a different one. England was a part (and the major part) of the Anglo-

Saxon vanguard of civilization and self-government. Surely emigration within the large

empire could solve the problems of Ireland. For O’Connell, England was instead the

obstacle before a more localized advance.

Irish events moved quickly, further and further out of control. Local solutions appealed

first. Godley and his family stored grain for their dependants.

When the crisis

continued, Godley and Monsell, together with O’Connell and many others, formed a

committee to consider reforming Irish land tenure and thus alleviating starvation

ermanently. The committee met in Dublin in January 1847 (Adderley lived in London,

and was not involved).

When nothing came of its report—calling as it did on the whole

empire to send food and relief—Godley (on 31 March 1847) went further. He published a

lan for sending 2,000,000 Irish to Canada. He would send the people to the food since

the food could not be sent to the people.

Here, he had reached a truly global and quite

Wakefieldian plan for ending the suffering. Despite O’Connell’s ideas, this solution was

predicated upon the continuation of the British Empire rather than its end.

Parliament rejected the plan, perhaps because Godley proposed that the Roman

Catholic Church be invited to sponsor the scheme; neither the Roman Church nor the

British state was enthusiastic. Meanwhile, as one historian has put it, ‘While the

[Parliamentary] Committee sat considering these limitations, one-sixth of the people o

Ireland died, and one-sixth fled to America in poverty and degradation.’

Since shipping

eople out of the country was by no means a popular idea even in Ireland, in August 1847

Godley lost what would be his only bid for a parliamentary seat. Monsell, a future

Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Colonies under Gladstone, stressed relief not

through emigration but through public works, and he was indeed elected.

(Once again,

Adderley had been in Parliament since 1841, and for an English seat.)

Finally in 1848 the potatoes came in. Where did that leave the three Oxford friends,

Godley, Adderley, and Monsell? After the mass destruction of the Irish people, they had

the rest of their lives to think about emigration, and the empire needed to make it work.

We do not know whether, all the while, they had in their minds a category analogous to

the modern idea of holocaust, but they must have thought about something of the kind.

That was the main difference between their imperial thinking and the more abstract,

generalized kind of thinking indulged in by younger men such as Lord Bury.

Adderley on the Colonial Reform Society and why Gladstone ought to join

In 1847, Godley introduced Adderley to Wakefield. Adderley later called Wakefield ‘the

strangest genius I ever met, though intriguing and without scruple in carrying out his

designs’, as well as ‘sulky’, ‘satanic’, and ‘machiavellian’.

Late in 1849, these three

men, plus Francis Baring and Lord Lyttelton, together planned the Colonial Reform

Empire as the triumph of theory 100

Society. It was to be a more effective pressure group for Wakefieldian policies than the

separate settlement companies could be.

The most carefully planned of the Wakefieldian settlements, Otago and Canterbury,

were being founded in the late 1840s, and Wakefield was more involved in the

reparations for these settlements than he had been in preparing any of the others. Thus it

was Adderley who took the initiative in founding the Colonial Reform Society itself, to

push for Wakefieldian schemes generally and for reform at home.

Soon Wakefield

would be obsessed with yet another specific project in 1849, this time the society

colonizing Canterbury, New Zealand, while Adderley continued to work on establishing

the more general organization.

Adderley had entered Parliament on the urging of his neighbour Sir Robert Peel, whose

government needed all the reforming Tories it could get. Adderley’s position in the Tory

ascendancy of Staffordshire assured him of a seat. Indeed, Peel and Adderley often

reakfasted together in the country. Adderley told one story about Peel getting up from

the breakfast table to herd a covey of partridges into his own breakfast room, so as to

show them to Adderley. When the two neighbours weren’t looking at Peel’s partridges

indoors, they were shooting Adderley’s pheasants outdoors.

Despite his connection to Peel, however, the young member remained a Tory

throughout the political confusion of the 1840s and 1850s, abandoning Peel over the

repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Yet Adderley himself would go on to abandon

rotectionism in 1851, about a year before the rest of the protectionist rump of the Tory

Party. The constant factor in his changing position on the Corn Laws was this: Adderley

could not help agonizing over what might actually be done to help the poor.

Meanwhile there was the question of empire—a place where the poor might be sent.

Early in his career, Adderley was one of the few MPs in favour of Colonial Reform or o

the empire in general.

In 1849, he spoke a great deal on matters having to do with

Ceylon and the Cape. Neither area would prove to be fertile ground for Wakefieldian

emigration. Yet both of these places were fertile enough for Adderley—he could use

them to raise a great many Wakefieldian objections to the policies of the Colonial

Secretary. That Colonial Secretary was Lord Grey.

Adderley also asked questions in the

House about the policies of Lord Grey’s kinsman, Sir George Grey, who was hated by

colonial reformers in New Zealand (among them, by this point, Godley) and in England

alike.

Soon Adderley began trying to recruit to the Colonial Reform Society Lord Grey’s

immediate predecessor as Colonial Secretary, none other than William Ewart Gladstone.

In January 1846, Gladstone had been the first imperial official to frame as a policy the

idea that the New Zealand colonies would become self-governing (although not many

colonial secretaries had had the chance, since Great Britain had taken control of New

Zealand only in 1840).

Given Gladstone’s actions, Adderley thought he would make a

fine chairman of the new Society. Yet Gladstone was not sure of the need for a Colonial

Reform group. He suspected that it would simply attack Lord Grey. So Adderley tried to

convince him otherwise.

Adderley began to reassure Gladstone by listing the membership, and by promising in

very calm tones that he and his friends would be constructive; they would even produce a

government scheme for Australia by Easter. But before very long, Adderley’s letter had

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 101

turned into an attack on Grey over affairs in the Cape of Good Hope. Grey had hoped to

settle convicts there, to the horror of, among others, colonial reformers—with their plans

for the careful social engineering of British colonial society. The convict plan was

thwarted in South Africa by joint mass meetings of the Boers and the English-speakers

alike, one held on the auspicious occasion of the Fourth of July.

Adderley assured

Gladstone that self-government in the Cape would stop the Boers and the English-

speakers ‘combining only for separation’—self-governing colonists would remain loyal.

Adderley went on to set out for Gladstone a rather ambitious programme for the

Colonial Reform Society: ‘The intention of such a Society as is proposed, with agents o

correspondents keeping it informed, and a systematic line of action of its own…is not so

much to correct the individual mischiefs of the [Colonial] office, as to replace the whole

system, and introduce a new one.’

So much for keeping the Wakefieldian focus on

emigration to Australia. Colonists everywhere, not just in the settlements founded unde

Wakefield’s supervision, were pulling away from England anyway, for such was the

democratic tendency of all settlement colonies, said Adderley—

ut he believed that the

tendencies towards separation could be acknowledged, contained, and redirected towards

building a new imperial system based upon self-government.

Perhaps Adderley understood that this letter of mollification had run off the rails in

embarking upon an anti-Grey screed, so he hastily (and rather inconsistently, given all

that he had said) added that the Society would be ‘free and elastic’, and even non-

political.

In any case, Gladstone proved quite unwilling to join the movement that Adderley had

described, much less lead it; nor did he think that an Australian government bill, from

whatever source, would get very far in the coming year.

Gladstone obviously needed more convincing, so Adderley sent him the Society’s

rinted prospectus. Adderley should have known better than to think that it would help

very much: ‘The general object of the Society,’ the prospectus read, ‘is to aid in obtaining

for every dependency, which is a true Colony of England, the real and sole arrangement

of all local affairs by the Colony itself, including the disposal of the Waste lands, and the

right to frame and alter its local constitution at pleasure.’

(Again, the Wakefieldians had

moved from wanting to lock up Crown lands to a strong focus on the unfettered rights o

local government.) If all this seems like a loyalty to the Crown that Patrick Henry would

have been proud of, Adderley did not see it that way. The prospectus went on to look to

the economic benefits of all of this to England herself. The Society ‘also [wanted] to

romote the advantage of both Colonies and the mother country, by removing the worst

impediment and affording a new and powerful encouragement to Colonization’. Tha

encouragement was to be a new political arrangement, that of self-government under the

Crown, with which the colonies would be satisfied; they would never seek furthe

independence.

The 1848 prospectus showed that at a time when most people ignored the empire, and

may have assumed that it would go away, Adderley for one was trying to put it on a more

ermanent and productive footing. As in South Africa, as Adderley saw the situation

there, colonial ties that were looser would bind longer. The attachment of colonies to the

Mother Country should be social and economic, rather than formal and illusory

—

Adderley did not think that Secretary Grey’s many federation schemes for different parts

Empire as the triumph of theory 102