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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of the empire would amount to anything more than red tape, frustrating local initiatives.

To make sure that everyone who read the prospectus, including Gladstone, understood

that unfettered local government would draw the empire together and not drive it apart,

Adderley followed his rather bold statement about ‘The general object of the Society

[being] the sole arrangement of all local affairs by the Colony itself’ with a whole

paragraph of qualifications:

According to the views of the Society, this municipal or local independence,

this entire relief of distant colonies from the inconvenience of being ruled in

local matters by a department of the Administration in London, instead of being

incompatible with allegiance to the Crown of England, is really calculated to

substitute from growing disaffection, and from the present danger of a

dismemberment of the British Empire, a loyal and devoted attachment on the

part of the colonies towards the mother country.

To these ends, in fact, Adderley and his friends had decided to introduce a Bill despite

Gladstone’s doubts about getting it passed. That way they could pre-empt further action

by Grey.

Adderley told Gladstone about it in the cover letter for the prospectus. Sir William

Molesworth would introduce a constitution bill for New South Wales, one giving the

colony complete self-government except in foreign affairs and judicial appeals; such a

constitution would leave ‘the colony to form as all will their own imitation of the English

Constitution, bound only by allegiance+their own certain inclination, interest, +similarity

of habits language+feeling−a healthy free attachment’.

In developing his own views

and pushing them beyond the by then discredited technicalities inherent in Wakefield’s

earlier land price theories, Adderley had worked himself into a good, general, if rathe

strangely punctuated facsimile of the better half of British imperialism. It would come

true soon enough, although in the event Gladstone was right—no Bill was passed until

1850.

Gladstone never did join the Colonial Reform Society, but he was idealistic and wide-

ranging in intellect, and his correspondence with Adderley on colonial subjects

continued.

The two men could not agree about the importance of the English-speaking

world overseas, but Gladstone was sufficiently interested to seek out other opinions. He

even had the benefit of seeing Adderley’s correspondence with other people. Lyttelton,

who had been Gladstone’s Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office and who was Mrs

Gladstone’s brother-in-law, forwarded Adderley’s letters to himself on to Gladstone.

this strange three-way correspondence between Gladstone, Lyttelton, and Adderley, a key

intellectual gulf was made plain. Gladstone’s continuing complaint against empire was

that it was based upon greed, exactly the complaint of Edwardian anti-imperialists half a

century later.

Adderley protested against the way Gladstone identified colonialism with national

greed, and emigration with expatriation.

Indeed, to combat the charge of expatriation,

Adderley had developed an idea of a larger British citizenship, an idea that Gladstone did

not share. Gladstone was less than excited about the future of some grand idea of the

worldwide English-speaking system. The parliamentary manoeuvres of Adderley and his

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 103

friends made Gladstone protest to Lyttelton:

against the idea that our Colonial Empire beyond the seas can be made an

equivalent for American self-extension within seas; against the whole notion

that the principal purposes of colonisation depend upon the indefinite

continuation of political connection; against making home and colonial

appointments interchangeable otherwise than according to circumstances in

each and rather by way of exception than otherwise; against all wars with nature

and the fundamental conditions of space and time.

Adderley and the Colonial Reformers did indeed want, again in Gladstone’s words, ‘ou

Colonial Empire beyond the seas [to] be made an equivalent for American self-extension

within seas’—just what Gladstone himself rejected.

n The Australian Colonies Government Bill Discussed,

a short work written at the

same time, Adderley attacked the Bill in question (and Grey) for not going far enough

and giving the colonists complete control over their own affairs. But the Bill gave them

control over everything but wastelands, official salaries, and tariffs. What was lacking?

Complete independence? Adderley simply argued that without tariffs to raise money and

without the explicit right to ban the further transportation of convicts, none of the

Australian colonies could support themselves independently. To escape the burning

question of just how independent the colonies were supposed to be, Adderley actually

egan to criticize the detailed nature of Wakefieldian plans themselves; fleeing from

Wakefieldian detail, he once again took refuge in a more abstract view of the

development of Anglo-Saxon countries in world history. He was at pains to assert that

independence was not what he was advocating:

With these views I would, by Act of Parliament, do no more than render public

and permanent the conditions, or rather permissions, and the reservations under

which the free spirit of British enterprise might safely form itself into new offset

nations under the allegiance of the British Crown.

I would not attempt to dictate system to constitutions, which the British are

accustomed to build up gradually out of the accumulating accidents of freedom,

and which, out of such materials, none can build so well as they.

It was not a system that he had in mind; it was an overall vision of imperial emotional

ties. ‘Still less,’ Adderley concluded, ‘would I so irritate and obstruct such tendencies as

to leave no vent but democratic emancipation to the thwarted yearnings of affectionate

dependence or the rejected sympathies of hereditary attachment.’

Adderley’s friend, neighbour, and patron, Sir Robert Peel—the departing giant who

had repealed the Corn Laws—also received advance word from Adderley on the new

Colonial Reform Society. Adderley passed along Gladstone’s ringing non-endorsement:

‘Mr Gladstone has twice very kindly written to me on the subject, declining to become a

member, but expressing great interest in the scheme, +offering to correspond with me

upon it.’

Adderley also pointed out that the Chairman would be the Hon. Sir Francis

Baring, of the banking family. Baring was a friend of Lord Grey, and the brother of a

former Chancellor of the Exchequer; Adderley was trying for reassurance by association.

Empire as the triumph of theory 104

Peel was no more pleased by the whole thing than Gladstone had been. In fact, he was

inordinately displeased. For decades, Peel had rejected any attempt to ameliorate poverty

through emigration.

Now he would not even go so far as to entertain a discussion o

colonial reform, as Gladstone had done. In the depths of his displeasure with Adderley,

Peel demonstrated the difference between the old indifference to any grand theory o

empire and the excited generalizations possible among the new generation of men. Peel

simply thought that the whole thing was political folly, and nothing to disturb a

arliamentary career over. His previous opinions on the colonies might help explain this

view. In 1845, he went so far as to complain to his Colonial Secretary that the North

American colonies, for their part, ‘might become an onerous possession’; he claimed that

he ‘always had misgivings’ about them, although he would not countenance their forcible

annexation to another power.

In Peel’s words, one hears the particularism of George

Keppel’s generation. Peel’s word was ‘colonies’, not ‘emigration’; he did not need to

think of them in general, as a system. Now, in responding to Adderley, Peel would not

even address the younger man’s arguments. All he would say was that Adderley should

drop all of this colonial nonsense at once. It could only hurt his career. The whole venture

was indiscreet, and in Peel’s view the Society was likely only to provoke Parliament to

greater inaction on Wakefieldian legislation (if greater inaction was conceivable). The

Society smelled of disloyalty to the former governments, including his own, whose

olicies it called into question. It was not, Peel believed, too late to let the Colonial

Reform Society die.

dderley’s response was one of respectful but thunderstruck disagreement.

Yet Peel was right about something. More was at stake in the prospectus than Adderley

was willing to admit. The kind of local government in the colonies that may have been

needed to institute a Wakefieldian land policy was desired for its own sake, with the land

policy almost forgotten.

Such colonial self-government would have an interesting effect

if it came to pass. Although the right to vote might not be extended beyond the uppe

one-third of the male population of Great Britain for some time to come (Peel had

promised that it would not be),

the prospectus assumed that the middle classes could

none the less vote with their feet. They could go off to the colonies, and soon enough

enjoy powers of self-government in their new homes that they could not enjoy in

England. They could join the Tocquevillean world.

Adderley after colonial reform

Colonial Reform as a specific system of emigration and investment may have faded away

y the early 1850s, but the colonies got reformed anyway. To most MPs, it seemed

strange that Great Britain should continue the direct supervision of obviously booming

colonies. As early as the eighteenth century, there was already a tradition of thinking

about the Australian colonies as another, younger USA in the making.

As the colonies

grew in the nineteenth century, that vision seemed ever nearer. There was also the

question of how practical it would be to continue the colonial connection. In the 1850s,

communications between Great Britain and Australasia still took weeks or months.

(Although undersea telegraphy had been attempted, it would enjoy little success until the

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 105

1860s.

) Given delays like that, many people in the United Kingdom and in the colonies

alike simply assumed that routine colonial decisions could no longer continue to be

postponed until an answer could be received from London.

Meanwhile, many colonists certainly pushed for home rule. They pushed even harde

after the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851. The Colonial Office did not seriously

resist its loss of control over most of the colonies’ internal affairs. By the end of the

1850s, self-government was achieved in all but one of the colonies of white settlement

that the colonial reformers usually had in mind.

Thus there were multiple, self-

governing, bustling little English-speaking countries across North America to the Pacific,

all across the continent of Australia, in New Zealand, and, although without quite the

same powers of self-government, here and there in the Caribbean and in Southern Africa.

Suddenly, the empire was full to the brim with all the new capital cities and their cabinets

and prime ministers. Colonial reform was passé—the colonies were already reformed.

Mid-Victorian Britain and the mid-Victorian British colonists had achieved a record o

decolonization that seems astonishingly big and astonishingly peaceful.

The first step

was the tacit recognition by the governors of Canada and Nova Scotia of responsible

government in their colonies in 1846 and 1847. But this tacit recognition took place with

the approval of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Adderley’s nemesis Lord Grey,

who indeed, with his own now watered-down Wakefieldianism, deserves much of the

credit.

He was interested in colonial self-government and emigration, but no longe

erhaps in imposing every detail of a certain economic system on each colony. He bowed

to local pressure and allowed events to take their own course. Responsible government,

then, first came into operation on 2 February 1848 in Nova Scotia. To the West, the

Governor of what was then the colony of Canada also deserves some credit for helping

Lord Grey to get the ball rolling. That Governor was Earl Elgin.

The imperial government, as John M.Ward has shown, went on to impose responsible

governments of the kind developed for Canada and then New Zealand upon the very

different Australian colonies, and to do so well before many segments of Australian

society knew or cared what responsible government was. Indeed, few people really did

know what the term meant: Cabinet government responsible to the popular house of the

legislature, and serving at its pleasure, rather than at the pleasure of a colonial governo

or some other executive.

Westminster MPs, ranging from Colonial Secretary Lord Grey down to the

ackbenchers, assumed that the system of responsible government so recently entrenched

in the United Kingdom itself—the last of the interfering Hanoverian brothers had left the

scene less than twenty years before, leaving Parliament in command—must of course be

erected in the farthest reaches of the empire as soon as possible. The Imperial Act o

1850, the fruit of Westminster’s (or at least Lord Grey’s) wish to make the Australian

colonies follow the example of Canada and Great Britain, led to the achievement o

responsible government in New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia, and Victoria in

1855, and in Queensland in 1859.

English-speaking democracies were being erected in

a dozen outposts, most of them independent from Britain in all matters except foreign

olicy and large questions of defence. Canada even placed a tariff on British goods in

1858.

Democracy and the franchise tended to be further developed in these new countries

Empire as the triumph of theory 106

than in Great Britain. The colonies seemed to offer the same democratic lessons and

innovations that Tocqueville observed in America. Thus in Great Britain, to cite only one

example, the secret ballot was usually referred to as the ‘Australian Ballot’. Under that

name it was much discussed in Parliament for many years before it was adopted in the

United Kingdom itself.

In the 1850s, anyone who was interested in Tocquevillean or Wakefieldian issues

could have had a field-day with all of the newly self-governing colonies. Each new

colonial government bill gave Adderley, for one, plenty of opportunity to refine his ideas.

Yet while he had much to think about as self-government spread, he had little real role to

lay in the spread itself; even Wakefield, who was never an MP, had more direct

influence on the framing of legislation.

When a number of Peelites went back into

government in December 1852 (after more than six years as a splinter group in the

olitical wilderness), Parliament became unusually interested in things colonial. Some o

the Peelites were especially keen to spread the blessings of the Canadian system to the

antipodes, but they did not need the help or participation of the sometime Peelite

Adderley, annoying as his colonial reform outbursts tended to be.

Yet Adderley’s own career continued apace, largely because he could separate his

domestic views from his less than popular imperial ones. He refused the Secretaryship o

the (Indian) Board of Control in the ‘Who? Who?’ ministry of 1852, formed as it was jus

efore Disraeli brought the Tories around to free trade; he chose instead to remain

independent and vocal. In the brief Tory government of 1857–58, however, Adderley was

simultaneously vice-president of the Board of Health and vice-

resident of the Board o

Education; he had responsibility for the domestic rather than the imperial forms of social

amelioration.

Soon after the Imperial Act of 1850, Adderley began sorting out his imperial thinking

about the wishes of the ‘new offset nations’ from his still-Wakefieldian ideas about the

importance of getting rid of the surplus population at home. While some colonial

reformers kept up the focus on the control of wastelands and the construction of Englands

abroad, Adderley turned his attention to the continuing transportation of convicts. Here

was a wonderful issue on which to attack Lord Grey. It was a matter of concern to the

colonists who were already abroad. They had their own ideas about colonial gentility,

and those ideas did not include convicts from England. In taking up the anti-

transportation crusade, and in agreeing to serve as one of the London agents for the main

Australian anti-transportation pressure group, Adderley showed that he was willing to

listen to the ideas of democratic colonists, rather than treating them as Wakefieldian

ciphers. He saw English-speaking settlements everywhere as equal, with the same wants

and needs.

Soon enough Adderley was writing on punishments within England, too. He developed

a whole theory of punishment—touching on general rather than particularly colonial o

particularly English features of Anglo-Saxon civilization. In the jeremiad Transportation

not Necessary, both Greys (the Governor and the former Colonial Secretary) came in fo

a great deal of abuse, as did the whole policy of transportation, but this is abuse that is

worth quoting at length for the speed with which Adderley continually turned the

argument against England itself:

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 107

Our criminals are our most favoured children—we punish them with education,

and sacrifice the best interests of commerce and industry, in order to devote all

our extensions of empire to the exigencies of crime. To be well-instructed a poor

English child had better get into gaol—if his father seeks to emigrate, he can

only get a free passage as a transported convict.

Surely there is something vicious in this. If we mean our penal system to fall

back and altogether subside into its proper antecedent, a scheme of national

education, let us give honest industry an equal share in its advantages; and those

whom we dare not or cannot punish we had better cease to designate as

criminals. If we suspect that some of our prisoners are really honest folk, or, at

worst, what Sir George Grey called his Cape cargo, ‘technical convicts’, by all

means let us abandon the idea of correcting them, and supply them to any extent

with better education, or the means of emigration, or any other of the principal

benefits with which the nation can encourage an intelligent but ill-finished

industry.

he point of this essay, one learns soon after, is that Adderley was trying to rise to

hallenge that he had received from his opponents in the Cape debates, a challenge t

evelop a completely new system of criminal punishments and social services withi

nglan

—‘to complete the Cape argument, by showing the possibility of such colonia

ervices being dispensed with by this country’. Adderley devoted the parliamentary reces

o developing his domestic schemes.

Adderley was now thinking about social processe

ithin sel

-contained democratic societies, both at home and abroad. He was no longe

hinking about an imperial system that, alike for the old Mercantilists, for Wakefield, an

or Chamberlain in the 1890s, maintained a simple division of labour between the Mothe

ountry and those colonies which would receive the goods and emigrants.

When he published a speech by Godley in the same year, Adderley underscored th

ew generality of his ideas.

Adderley’s substantial introduction cited Tocqueville b

ame on the subject of what the constitutions of new societies ought to look like if th

ritish government were to arrange ‘for the retention of our present colonial empire’.

s Adderley said in the House of Commons, if the colonies were to be retained, les

oney ought to be spent on interfering with them—

efore Parliament grew tired of th

xpenditure and cut them off entirely.

Colonial self-government was the key.

In 1851, still in the shadow of colonial reform, Adderley produced what was perhap

he most efficient of his early works on empire. It pointed in the most direct way possibl

owards the British Empire that would be extant from the 1860s until the Statute o

estminster of 1931, under which the dominions could take charge of their own foreig

ffairs. Adderley’s Statement of the Present Cape Case was an attack in only thirty-si

ages on Earl Grey’s attempt as Colonial Secretary to institute federation, transportation

nd a Wakefieldian scheme in South Africa.

What was wrong with this Wakefieldian plan? Earl Grey was not instituting a self

overnment of exactly the right kind. Grey did not seem to recognize the wishes or th

rand destiny of the sel

-contained democracies that he had spread around the world, o

ven of England itself. Not only would Grey’s plan harm the South African wing of th

ettler empire, but it would distract people from the need to replace transportation with

Empire as the triumph of theory 108

more constructive policy at home. So much for Wakefield’s insistence that colonies

offered the ideal solution to English overpopulation and crime. The colonies did not exist

to help solve English problems, Adderley now believed. He now cared more about the

separate domestic interests of England and the self-governing colonies. In each country,

social reform and political self-government were equally important. England and the

colonies were simply different parts of the same worldwide civilization.

From this conviction there arose in Adderley a vision of the destiny of the empire so

lofty (and so geographically accurate) that might have been written in the imperialistic

1880s. The fact that one of the colonies, South Africa, did not enjoy in full measure the

system of responsible government being instituted in the other colonies of settlement

distressed Adderley. After discussing how much better education was in South Africa

than in England, Adderley concluded the Cape pamphlet by claiming that education in

South Africa would be better still if the South Africans could be sure that they would

enjoy:

the rule of an English colony on English principles. Thus it [the Cape Colony]

may become a thriving outpost of empire instead of a jobbed location. Thus, we

may have a real pied-à-terre in our Indian and Australian route, where, if we

please, we may place our forts and naval stations, dockyards, or ports, amongst

friends and fellow-countrymen. And if a future, like that of India’s history

opens on our South African frontiers, we may find on the spot a self-acting

power controlling and regulating a destined extension of our empire, without

adding another chapter of peculation, and waste, and bloodshed, to the annals of

our country.

But if the representative institutions be withheld, or only partially given, still

more if the promise of them be retracted or neutralized, we shall not only have a

colony of dogged discontent to deal with, but there will spring up from our

irritations, and devolve on our incapable handling, endless questions of disputed

frontier, and rival sovereignties of subjects turned into rebel refugees.

Perhaps Adderley was right in his narrower political message. Two Boer wars and so

much else have come from South Africa’s frontier politics, and from the expansions and

contractions of British imperial control there; the responsibility of paying for their own

defence in the 1850s and 1860s might have been very good for the settlers.

As it happened, Parliament was for once convinced that Adderley was right about

Grey’s plans for the Cape. In the view of contemporaries, the government seemed ready

to fall on Adderley’s motion of censure against Grey—Adderley’s wonderful day ha

come—but Grey’s resignation pre-empted the debate, and saved many aspects of his

Cape policy from further enquiry or reform.

The six-year-old government had to fall

fairly soon anyway, but it was not about to fall over colonies, and Grey was allowed to

go. He had never been popular with his Cabinet colleagues, who did not understand why

his apparently unimportant colonial measures should bring forth so much carping in

Parliament from men like Adderley.

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 109

Adderley, 1861

Adderley was left to ponder a world dominated by ‘complete transmarine Englands’—a

hrase he would coin for his 1861 open letter to Disraeli on the colonies. This letter was

Adderley’s next and even more collectivist vision of the empire of the future.

By the

time Adderley reissued the letter the following year, revising it somewhat, the world

looked more and more like it would belong to a multitude of English-speaking states;

what had been the USA would fragment, and the other settlements would retain their ties

to the British Crown. Yet although the United States had grown so big as to ‘exceed the

utmost possibility of human extension’ and of federal government, the American people

would continue to expand: ‘Manifest Destiny,’ Adderley explained, ‘…

ervades every

American breast.’ The process of Anglo-Saxon multiplication was the goal of history, a

history that had moved (as Adderley detailed it in the letter) stage by stage from Asian

despotism, through various forms of aristocracy, at last to the overly pure democratic

principle of cultural life that was rooted in North America’s soil.

The whole of this letter, with its ever more democratic stages of world history, was

pure and undisguised Tocqueville. Could these free Anglo-Saxon states live next to each

other peacefully, when they grew out of their isolation? This question occurred to

Tocqueville and to Adderley as well. Adderley simply elided the French parts o

Tocqueville’s introduction, and he had failed to pick up on the complex interrelationship

between democracy and equality. What was left when Tocqueville’s thinking was redone

without its French and egalitarian emphases was a vision of the spread of English-

speaking countries. Here is the descent from Tocquevillean thought into British imperial

ride. Adderley was four years away from taking a position in the Colonial Office, home

of the once dreaded Mr Mothercountry.

Soon after the beginning of the American Civil War (about which he wrote little, since

he had moved on to grander things), Adderley argued that Canada ought to be left to

organize and pay for its own defence in a mature spirit of self-government. For some

reason the Canadians balked at this level of maturity, as they would continue to do fo

some time.

Perhaps they did not take the large view, as Adderley did. Indeed, Adderley

was thinking about the whole half-imaginary category of the English-speaking world,

whose destiny could not be interfered with—even if its individual pieces had to be lef

open to American attack.

Disraeli took Adderley to task in the Canadian troop controversy for indulging in ‘mere

reasoning, however just and wise’.

But there was an important distinction between

Adderley’s position (an imperialism so lofty in its categorization of the empire that it was

undisturbed by such formalities as the existence or non-existence of actual political

connections among the parts of that empire) and the woolly-minded separatism tha

Disraeli accused him of. Adderley’s ‘separatism’ was a part of a collectivist world view

that was itself imperialistic. The world would belong to English stock, speaking the

English language. The Colonial Society was concerned, at bottom, with uniting the

Londoners who were moved by the worldwide spread of their own collective culture, as

they saw it, and rather less moved by British parliamentary control per se.

By contrast, there was Lord Salisbury. A future ex officio member of the Colonial

Empire as the triumph of theory 110

Society but not, as we have seen, a Tocquevillean, Salisbury thought Adderley’s proposal

that the Canadians should be asked to defend themselves and learn self-government was

ridiculous. For him, colonial self-defence had already been tried. It had led to the

independence of America—‘a nation which, in spite of unexampled material advantages,

has broken up from its own inherent rottenness after a national existence of eighty years’.

The rottenness Salisbury mentioned was not the presence of slavery but the absence o

the English upper classes. Cut loose from their connection to England, the colonies were

hardly civilized, and they had no decent future as independent countries—look at the

United States.

Adderley’s imperialism, in contrast, had grown large enough to include all continents

and races. As early as 1865, Adderley had extended his Tocquevillean thinking to cove

West Africans; he wanted to institute self-government and Tocquevillean mores among

them, and thus reduce the drain upon the British taxpayer. While Adderley’s criticisms o

West African garrisoning were indeed responsible for the 1865 parliamentary committee

that recommended the abandonment of most of the garrisons, abandonment was not

Adderley’s intention. He wanted to hand the garrisons off to some modernizing native

state—

erhaps one of the Muslim powers, or perhaps Dahomey, he was not sure which.

He had in mind a policy that would move the Africans towards eventual self-government.

Adderley was no anti-imperialist in the mid-1860s, but a self-government imperialist;

his empire was an empire of the mind, an empire of grand categories. He did not as ye

anticipate the Scramble for Africa, much less the centrality of Africa to the late Victorian

empire. In the period that led up to the founding of the Colonial Society, and which

encompassed his service as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Adderley usually

confined his imperialistic attentions to Asia, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and the

antipodes, rather than Africa—five continents rather than six.

Adderley on democracy in Europe: the late 1860s

Adderley was Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies for two and a half years, from

mid-1866 to late 1868. One of the Secretaries of State for whom he worked, Lord

Carnarvon, thought Adderley so set in his opinions that he was prone to ‘inaccuracy an

confusion of mind’.

Indeed, Adderley’s contribution to the great imperial event of those

years, Canadian Confederation, was not as great as it might have been. There were the

colonial secretaries who outranked him (first Lord Carnarvon and then his successor, the

somewhat less than impressive Duke of Buckingham).

On the other side there was also

the brilliant permanent secretary, Frederic Rogers.

Adderley’s sweetest accomplishment in the Colonial Office was that he was able to

draw blood in the old battle—he helped to arrange Governor Sir George Grey’s

retirement in apparent disgrace. Grey, in his last period as Governor of New Zealand, had

disobeyed orders and had falsified his reports home. However, Adderley was unable to

get Grey summarily removed for these offences, and the Governor was allowed to serve

out the small balance of his term.

Neither in this matter nor in any other, therefore, did

Adderley enjoy decisive power in the Colonial Office. Still, surrounded as he was by the

old records of the office, he was in a fine position to second-guess the actions of his

Adderley discovers the pattern of the world 111

predecessors there. He began work on a big book.

The predecessor that he was fondest of second-guessing was Lord Grey, not Si

George. Still, Adderley had to wait till the end of the decade to publish his attack on the

former Colonial Secretary, for he could not very well expound his private views while he

was in office. When it came, the attack on Lord Grey turned out to be by far the largest

ook Adderley ever wrote. Published in 1869, it was a tome that Adderley none too

enticingly called Review of ‘The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration’,

by Earl Grey, 1853; and of Subsequent Colonial History.

Lord Grey’s book was 893

pages long, all directed against his colonial reformer critics. Adderley’s response, sixteen

years later, was 423 pages long. If nothing else, it was an object lesson in how not to

review a book.

Let the battle go unjoined. Neither Lord Grey’s book nor Adderley’s review of it need

detain us for very long, since Adderley’s review came out well after the founding months

of the Colonial Society, whose foundation might have further informed his views. What

matters is that Adderley was still citing Tocqueville explicitly. He was still basing his

arguments on a Tocquevillean appreciation, namely the importance of fitting the

constitution of a new extra-European state to the temperament of its population.

accordance with this long-held view, he thought that the best way to make a constitution

fit the people was to allow them to habituate themselves to the exercise of self-

governance. He did not think that small outposts taken for military reasons qualified fo

their own legislatures, any more than did ships at sea.

The Adderley of a few years before—the Adderley who helped to found the Colonial

Society—revealed himself better and far more briefly in Europe Incapable of American

emocracy (1867), a mere pamphlet far less preoccupied with twenty-year-old

controversies than the book on Earl Grey was to be. Here Adderley even managed to

include some tantalizing ideas about tropical empire, so general had his ideas become.

Adderley’s view of the sweep of history from East to West, and from monarchy to

democracy, was now identical to Bury’s, except for Adderley’s greater stress on the role

of Providence. Adderley put Bury’s central device, the exodus of the Western nations,

this way:

There is little of intricacy in the mighty plans of Providence. Broad-featured,

slow in process, and to be recognized by all, are the ways of God in the affairs

of men.

The world has plainly exhibited a regular development of social economy,

progressing from its first inhabitation by man, taking one westward direction as

the sun, never ceasing, and never retreating.

Political institutions have been based on one of three principles successively,

and in three several stages of experiment.

Human government naturally began as monarchy, and Asia was the first

scene of its action.

In its westward course, Europe saw its next development on the wider base of

aristocracy.

It is now spreading itself in broad democracy, over the gigantic areas

apparently prepared for its utmost expansion, in America.

Empire as the triumph of theory 112