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APPENDIX
265

anti-colonial, whenever the interests of the colony and the Empire are supposed to clash, is responsible to the clerks of the Colonial Office, who care as little as he, and know even less about us than himself. The clerks are responsible to the Colonial Secretary, who equally unknowing and uncaring, is besides, for our special benefit, a first-rate debater, whose head is full of Corn Laws, and Factory Bills, and Repeal of the Union—whose mornings are spent, not in going through that twentieth part of the business allotted to him as Colonial Minister, which it is possible for the most laborious of human beings to accomplish—but in excogitating sound pummellings for Cobden, stinging invectives for O'Connell, and epigrammatic repartees for Lord John Russell. This functionary is, in his turn, responsible to an Assembly, chosen for a great number of reasons—for wealth, for family connections, for moderate opinions, for extreme opinions, for every conceivable reason except one—their knowledge of colonial affairs. This Assembly is, in its turn, responsible to the people of the United Kingdom, in whose ears the name of colony is an abomination."

One must frankly confess that the latter charge in this diatribe is not in any sense true now.

In another article in the Atlas, the same writer was even more incisive, winding up thus: "Is not