FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 12:  Another has aptly illustrated the change by comparing such a man’s new condition to a hotel that has come under totally different and perfectly new management and controlling proprietorship.]

ENGLAND’S NATIVE AND COLONIAL POLICY

Until the earlier parts of this nineteenth century England has been conspicuous among other nations in tolerating slavery in some of her possessions, and in permitting her people to engage in systematic man-hunts, with the accompanying atrocities and horrors of a regular slave trade.  Manifestations of national abhorrence and condemnation of that inhuman traffic and of slavery in general appeared during the first quarter of this century.  The nation hid its shame and contrition in acts towards remedying its share of the evil committed.  These took the shape of expending some twenty million pounds sterling towards the emancipation of slaves and various other costly measures to repress the trade in human beings, and in proclaiming personal freedom for all slaves in her dominions.  The desire to do justice to coloured races was further exemplified in the adoption, dating some fifty years back, of a totally altered colonial and native policy.  Up to then the practice with all colonizing Powers had been to utilize their foreign dominions as preserves for financial exploitation, involving the most crying injustice to aborigines.  The departure then effected consisted in a policy of just laws instead, directed to ensure to those people equitable treatment and a recognition of their rights to fixed property and to a position before the law equal with that of white inhabitants.  The revenues produced by the Colonies were thenceforward all to be devoted to the advancement of their own local prosperity.  Free trade followed that regime of liberty and equity, and, as intended, such Colonial dominions began to partake of the character and were constituted off-shoots of the mother country, with a like status of liberty and enjoying the benefit of British protection at the same time.  Many were the auguries that the experiment would result in political and economic failure, but the good results to all concerned proved to be so far-reaching as to startle even its most sanguine advocates.  The extension of privileges and rights operated upon the natives as a magical incentive to labour and emulation for the improvement of their economic condition; people who had before preferred an indolent, semi-nomadic existence betook themselves more to agricultural and sedentary habits, living in much greater comfort and steadily increasing in wealth.

Civilization went on apace, and with it the moral improvement of the aborigines, paving the way as well for the spread of Christianity.  All this was accompanied with an immense and ever-advancing expansion of trade with England and the recognition of British prestige as a successful colonizing power.