The Industrial Revolution

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1027928145

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-159926

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Cunningham, William http://d-nb.info/gnd/128907487

Title:: The Industrial Revolution

Place of publication:: Cambridge

Publisher:: The University Press

Year of publication:: 1922

Scope:: xxii S., S. 404-886

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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R52 LAISSEZ FAIRE A.D.1776 of the United States, and the rapidity of their growth, offered 10 striking contrast to the slow development of Canada, the on eoish West Indies, the Cape, and Australia. The laissez faire i wndifferent beyond the region of real responsibility, and are involved in the clouds of official mystery. That mother-country which has been narrowed from the British isles into the Parliament, from the Parliament into the executive government, from the executive government into the Colonial Office, is not to be sought in the apart- ments of the Secretary of State, or his Parliamentary Under-Secretary. Where you are to look for it it is impossible to say. In some back room—whether in the attic, or in what story we know not—you will find all the mother-country which really exercises supremacy, and really maintains connexion with the vast and widely-scattered colonies of Britain. We know not the name, the history, or the lunctions of the individual, into the narrow limits of whose person we find the mother-country shrunk. * * * The system of intrusting absolute power (for such it is), to one wholly irresponsible is obviously most faulty. * * * It has all the faults of an essentially arbitrary government, in the hands of persons who have little personal interest in the welfare of those over whom they rule—who reside at a distance from them—who never have ocular experience of their condition—who are obliged to trast to second-hand and one-sided information—and who are exposed to the operation of all those sinister influences which prevail wherever publicity and freedom are not established. In intelligence, activity, and regard for the public interests, the permanent functionaries of ‘the Office’ may be superior to the temporary head that the vicissitudes of party politics give them; but they must necessarily be inferior to those persons in the colony, in whose hands the adoption of the true practice of responsible government would vest the management of local affairs.” Mr Buller's Responsible Government Jor the Colonies, quoted by Wakefield, Art of Colonisation, 283—288, 1 Lord Durham's Report draws a vivid picture of the contrast, which he ascribes principally to the different systems adopted in the disposal of public land. “On the American side all is activity and bustle. The forest has been widely cleared; every year numerous settlements are formed, and thousands of farms are created out of the waste; the country is intersected by common roads; canals and railroads are finished, or in the course of formation; the ways of communication and transport are crowded with people, and enlivened by numerous carriages and large steam-boats. The observer is surprised at the number of harbours on the lakes, and the number of vessels they contain; while bridges, artificial landing-places, and commodious wharves are formed in all directions as soon as required. Good houses, warehouses, mills, inns, villages, towns, and even great cities, are almost seen to spring up out of the desert. Every village has its schoolhouse and place of public worship. Every town has many of both, with its township buildings, its book-stores, and probably one or two banks and news. papers; and the cities, with their fine churches, their great hotels, their exchanges, court-houses and municipal halls, of stone or marble, so new and fresh as to mark the recent existence of the forest where they now stand, would be admired in any part of the Old World. On the British side of the line, with the exception of a few favpured spots, where some approach to American prosperity is apparent, all seems waste and desolate. There is but one railroad in all British America, and that, running between the St Lawrence and Lake Champlain, is only 15 miles long. The ancient city of Montreal, which is naturally the commercial capital of the Canadas, will not bear the least comparison in any respect with Buffalo, which is a creation of yesterday. But it is not in the difference between the

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