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