Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress (18 page)

There were few Maoris in that part of New Zealand, so the Pilgrims wrote on a clean slate. They constituted from the start, as
Wakefield wished, a working cross-section of the English community—‘a complete slice of England’, so
The
Times
said, ‘cut from top to bottom’. The original intention to supply a nobleman and a bishop as spiritual and temporal heads of the colony unfortunately languished when no nobleman could be persuaded to emigrate and the bishop changed his mind after a month in the settlement: but they made a start with the church, the school and the library, they painfully worked out details of land tenure, grazing rights, Church endowments and squatting privileges, and they presently settled into a reasonably ordered and prosperous routine. It was all very English. Transplanted oaks and plane trees flourished, and in their branches chirped and procreated the skylarks, blackbirds, sparrows, greenfinches, yellow-hammers, magpies, plovers and starlings misguidedly brought from home.

It was not, however, much like the society Wakefield had envisaged. Few of his theories worked in New Zealand. Educated men would not go there, capitalists would not risk their capital there, poor men could neither buy land nor find jobs. Human nature betrayed the Doctrine of Sufficient Price. Wakefield had described the Canterbury pioneers as ‘not merely a nice, but a choice society of English people’: but not all of them were nice in the long run, rascals arrived among the regular communicants, and many of the more fastidious Pilgrims (who called themselves ‘colonists’, as against the steerage class ‘emigrants’) soon returned disillusioned to England.

The Canterbury plain was essentially grazing country, fine for sheep-farming, unprofitable for arable: but half the settlers had no capital to buy sheep, so they let grazing rights to less respectable kinds of New Zealander, or hired Australian stock-men whose devotion to the Thirty-Nine Articles was uncertain. Many more turned to sheep-farming themselves, and moved to the great sheep-runs beyond the settlement, where they soon lost any pretensions to gentility, and lived like wild free peasants, grazing their animals over the wide hummocky plains, and through the damp valleys of the foothills.

Even Christchurch itself began to lose some of its decorum, and showed signs of the rough colonialism Wakefield so despised. He
had always hated the idea of ‘New People’, claiming an equality that was ‘against nature and truth—an equality which, to keep the balance always even, rewards the mean rather than the great, and gives more honour to the vile than to the noble….’ Yet a New People the Canterbury Pilgrims presently became, not so New as the Sydneysiders indeed, but still a long way from the discreet hierarchy that the peers and prelates of the Association had foreseen. The simpler settlers, wrote an observer in 1853, soon became ‘mightily republican’—distinctly insolent, too, so a French visitor thought. They seemed to change almost as soon as they set foot in the Antipodes, straighter of posture, better of dress, plumper of figure, and no longer feeling it necessary, it appears, to refer to gentlemen as ‘Mr’ or touch their hats to ladies. As a cheerful Scot wrote of the process:

The truth was that settlement colonies were essentially for poor men. Educated people would find nothing in a place like New Zealand, except escape from personal troubles at home, and the ideals of the Colonial Reformers mostly faded in time. ‘No person who has ever enjoyed a life in England would, I think, profess to
prefer
a colonial life’, wrote E. B. Fitton in 1856, and for ever afterwards most educated Englishmen found New Zealand, though kind and beautiful, fundamentally a bore. Still, though Christchurch grew more egalitarian and less Tractarian over the years, it remained by colonial standards always a conservative city: its Cathedral arose as ordained among the plane trees, its Christchurch Club became alarmingly exclusive, and there were always citizens to recall, referring to rectory watercolours upon the drawing-room wall,
or indecipherable sepias of tennis-parties in family albums, that their forebears were those Mr Wakefield really had in mind, when he spoke of choiceness.
1

Such were two of the Empire’s white settlement colonies. They had this in common, with each other as with most of the British communities abroad, that they thought very highly of themselves. Most of their settlers were, by English standards, plain uncomplicated people—‘bare-minded’, Bagehot was to call them—but they were less than modest in their attitudes. ‘The people of this Colony,’ wrote an English official in Tasmania in the 1840s, ‘very much resemble the Americans in their presumption, ignorance, arrogance and conceit. They believe they are the most remarkable men on the Globe, and that their Island “whips all Creation”.’

It was not surprising that most of them had long been pressing for responsible Government. The Canterbury Pilgrims did so almost the moment they landed, Godley himself maintaining that he would rather be ruled by a tyrant on the spot than by a board of archangels 3,000 miles away, and some of the most passionate advocates of self-rule in Australia were men recently emancipated from the particular frustrations of Her Majesty’s prisons. In the Canadian colonies, in South Africa, even in the decaying Caribbean islands, self-rule was vociferously and sometimes scurrilously demanded. Successive British Governments, remembering 1775, and not at all sure what would be best for the colonists, for the subject natives or for Britain herself, muffled the issue and marked time: but in 1838 Lord Melbourne had placed the problem on the lap of Radical Jack, and presently received in response the Durham Report.

Durham himself had been recalled from Canada because he exceeded his constitutional powers in dealing with the leaders of a rebellion, but his report was among the most important documents in the whole history of the Empire. It formulated a new relationship
between London and the white colonies, and thus shaped the pattern of the Victorian Empire as a whole. Durham was an imaginative man, and he took with him on his Canadian mission the ubiquitous Wakefield and another well-known Colonial Reformer, Charles Buller. The Report was presented to Parliament in February 1839 (but much of it had already been leaked to
The
Times
, perhaps by Wakefield). It was in effect an endorsement of the fundamental Wakefieldian thesis—that the colonies should be cherished as extensions of English society, and therefore competent to govern their own affairs. Not everyone admired it. Lord Brougham the law reformer observed to Macaulay that its matter came from a swindler (Wakefield), its style from a coxcomb (Buller), while ‘the Dictator furnished only six letters, D-U-R-H-A-M’. Much of it was concerned only with the more immediate object of Durham’s mission, the settlement of differences between French and English Canada. But it became a charter for British colonial development, a fresh start after the disasters of half a century before. The Durham Report advocated nearly complete self-government for the advanced white colonies, with only foreign relations, constitution-making, overseas trade and the disposal of public lands left in the authority of Westminster. Colonial governors would no longer be local autocrats, but would be responsible directly to the elected legislature of the colony, and thus no more able to decree the course of local events than was the Queen herself in London.

Radical Jack never saw it implemented, for he died in 1840, aged 48: but its genius was soon recognized, and in his own home country, between Durham and Sunderland, they built in 1844 a proper memorial to its meaning—a many-columned Doric temple, proud, high and lonely on Penshaw moor.
1

It was because of this now celebrated report that Sir John Harvey of Nova Scotia, not the most distinguished of Colonial Governors, not
indeed remembered for anything else at all, received his instructions from London that November day in 1846. The publication of the Durham Report had caused excitement throughout the Empire, the Colonial Reformers hailing it as the start of a new era, the evangelists wondering if it would mean abandoning the heathen to colonial brutalism, the petty grandees of Nassau or Toronto fearing it might mean the end of their happy hegemonies. For years nothing came of it. Successive British Governments, Whig and Tory, doubted whether it was practicable as a programme for colonial progress. Could responsible Government be anything but independent Government? Would it not mean the end of the white settlement Empire anyway? Would abandonment be more profitable? Would it be better to wait and see?

But in 1846 Lord John Russell’s Government came into office. Its Colonial Secretary was Lord Grey, Durham’s brother-in-law, and among his advisers was Charles Buller. Now at last the Report was accepted as imperial policy, and the ideas of the Colonial Reformers were vindicated. In November Sir John Harvey received his dispatch from home. ‘I have to … instruct you,’ it said, ‘to abstain from changing your Executive Council until it shall have become perfectly clear that they are unable, with such fair support from yourself as they have a right to expect, to carry on the government of the province satisfactorily and command the confidence of the Legislature…. It cannot too distinctly be acknowledged that it is neither possible nor desirable to carry on the government of any of the British provinces in North America in opposition to the wishes of the inhabitants.’

In this historic instruction, the first of its kind in imperial history, the British formally recognized that the Victorian Empire was to be different in kind from the settlement empire of the eighteenth century. Its overseas Britons were to be trusted not to break away from the Crown, but to adhere to it in liberty, and to live in the British way without coercion, as they would at home. The doctrine was formulated that an Englishman took with him to the colonies ‘as much of law and liberty as the nature of things would bear’. Within twenty years all the bigger white settlements would have responsible Government, only the plantation colonies of the West
Indies continuing with their quaint old constitutions, and would become in most respects sovereign nations, distant diagrams or figures of Britain, honouring the Queen independently and at a distance. Here is the oath of allegiance sworn by the parliamentarians of Tasmania, then called Van Diemen’s Land, when the first self-governing assembly met in Hobart:

The new nations overseas would prove the most durable, and the most noble, of the imperial achievements, as the American Ralph Waldo Emerson realized: ‘I have noted the reserve of power in the English temperament. In the island, they never let out all the length of all the reins, there is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or ecstasy of will or intellect…. But who would see the uncoiling of that tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces, must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hundred years from the British islands, have sailed, and rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates … carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and law, for arts and for thought—acquiring under some skies a more electric energy than the native air allows—to the conquest of the globe’.

Sir John Harvey was not at first pleased by the prospect. He had no faith in responsible government for colonials, had trouble enough already with the Nova Scotians, and recognized in the Durham Report irritating echoes of local agitations. He obeyed his orders
nevertheless. When, at the next election, the Nova Scotia Reformers returned a handsome majority, and Sir John’s nominated Ministers were obliged to resign, instead of naming another Government of his own he did what constitutional figureheads must, and called upon the Opposition to form a Government. Now everything really did go on, as Dickens had prematurely judged, ‘just as it does at home’.