Whoever wishes to form an accurate idea of the power and might of the British nation, and is desirous to discover the sources of the all-important influence the "island race" exercise over the destinies of humanity, should visit, not England, but her colonies in America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. In these he will see in full and beneficial operation, that system which one of the greatest of German political economists, the ingenious Fredrick List, recommended more than thirty years ago to the German Government, when he spoke of the serious detriment the Northern country sustained year after year by the emigration _en masse_ of skilled German labourers, and when he repeatedly urged to make agriculture under the tropics reciprocally beneficial to the manufacturing industry of the temperate zone.[1]
England has comprehended better than Germany how to utilize the energies of such of her children as emigrate to distant quarters of the globe, and to make them subservient to her own advancement as well; she evinced the most anxious solicitude for these pioneers of progress, extended her protection to them, flung the aegis of her own power over their adopted home, regarding each new settlement as but an extension of the limit of her empire, as an enlargement of the sources whence she drew the materials for her industrial handicrafts, as a new market for her manufactures! In all parts of the inhabited earth English activity has thus displayed itself, busily engaged in supplying the demand for raw materials in her home market, by exchanging for them her own manufactures, till English ships have become the all but universal carriers of the commerce of the globe, while the English language has been adopted as the medium of intercommunication of all seafarers.
Australia, or New Holland,[2] as it was originally termed by its first discoverers, proud of their nationality, furnishes of all the British colonies the most conspicuous and instructive example of this policy. England has not merely thrown open this immense continent to European civilization, peopled it with hundreds of thousands of her sons, and created a new market for herself and all navigating nations,--she has also in this colony furnished the solution of a psychological problem, namely, that it is by no means an innate natural propensity to do evil, but rather the force of circumstances which drives man to vice and crime, and that the diviner portion of his nature forthwith re-asserts itself, so soon as he is provided with another more favourable sphere of action, and a fair opportunity is offered to him of earning his livelihood in an honourable, independent manner by the free, unshackled development of his mental and physical powers.