EUROPE AND AFRICA 
home rule to the colonies. Up to that time the bureaucratic 
system of colonial rule employed by England, where every- 
thing — even to unimportant details — was controlled from 
Downing Street, had proved highly detrimental to the de- 
velopment and progress of the colonies. Not even the 
strong hand of a Lord Stanley or a Lord Grey, now and then 
in control of the Colonial Office, was sufficient to redeem the 
system. 
“In some back room,” wrote Mr. C. Buller, “you will find 
all the Mother Country which really exercises supremacy, 
and really maintains connection with the vast and widely 
scattered Colonies of Britain. We know not the name, the 
history, or the functions of the individual, into the narrow 
{imits of whose person we find the Mother Country shrunk. 
“There are rooms in the Colonial Office with old and 
meager furniture, bookcases crammed with colonial gazettes 
and newspapers, tables covered with baize, and some old 
and crazy chairs scattered about, in which those who have 
personal applications to make, are doomed to wait until the 
interview can be obtained. Here, if perchance you should 
some day be forced to tarry, you will find strange, anxious- 
looking beings, who pace to and fro in feverish impatience 
or sit dejected at the table, unable in the agitation of their 
thoughts to find any occupation to while away their hours, 
and starting every time that the door opens, in hopes that 
the messenger is come to announce that their turn is arrived. 
These are men with colonial grievances. . . . One is a recalled 
governor, boiling over with a sense of mortified pride, and 
frustrated policy; another, a judge, recalled for daring to 
resist the compact of his Colony; another, a merchant, whose 
whole property has been destroyed by some job or over- 
sight; another, the organ of the remonstrances of some colo- 
nial parliament; another, a widow struggling for some pension, 
on which her hopes of existence hang; and perhaps another