such cries
as these to the exercise of the one function it should refrain
from--interference with another democracy, be it in Ireland or anywhere
else. As it was, a merciful veil fell over Canada; Lord Elgin's action
in 1849 passed with little notice, and a mood of weary indifference to
colonial affairs, for which, in default of any Imperial idealism, we
cannot be too thankful, took possession of Parliament and the nation.

It was in this mood that the measures conferring self-government on the
Australasian Colonies, 12,000 miles away from the Mother Country, and
exciting proportionately less concern than Canada, were passed a few
years later.

From the landing of the first batch of convicts at Botany Bay in 1788,
New South Wales, the Mother Colony, was a penal settlement pure and
simple, under military Government, for some thirty years. The island
Colony, Tasmania, founded under the name of Van Diemen's Land in 1803,
was used for the same purpose. Victoria, originally Port Phillip, just
escaped a like fate in 1803, and remained uncolonized till 1835, when
the free settlers set their faces against the penal system, and in 1845,
acting like the Bostonians of 1774 with the famous cargo of tea, refused
to allow a cargo of convicts to land. South Australia, first settled in
1829, also escaped; so did New Zealand, which was annexed to the Crown
in 1839. Western Australia, dating from 1826, proceeded on the opposite
principle to that of Victoria. Free from convicts until 1849, when
transportation to other Colonies was checked at their own repeated
request, and came to an end in 1852, this Colony, owing to a chronic
shortage of labour, actually petitioned the Home Government to divert
the stream of criminals to its shores, with the result that in ten
years' time nearly half the male adults in the Colony, and more than
half in the towns, were, or had been, convicts. It was not until 1865,
under strong pressure from the other Colonies, that the system was
finally abolished which threw Western Australia forty years behind its
sister Colonies in the attainment of Home Rule.

The transportation policy has been unmercifully criticized, and with all
the more justice in that Pitt, when the American war closed the
traditional dumping-ground for criminals, had the chance of employing
the exiled loyalists of America, many of whom were starving in London,
as pioneers of the new lands in the Antipodes. "The outcasts of an old
society c