6. Even in philanthropic colonies religion is an auxiliary. Georgia was projected partly in the interests of “the persecuted Protestants of Europe,” and was promoted by the Society for Propagating the Gospel. Whitefield and the two Wesleys were among its first evangelists, and a body of German Moravians formed a settlement in its territory. These religionists even sought to turn it into a religious society, but found their heterogeneous materials refractory. It was the flame of philanthropy, burning strong and clear in the breast of James Oglethorpe, that gave the colony its distinctive character. The relief of the poor and the oppressed is a motive that places it higher than any ecclesiastical foundation. Baron Hirsch’s Jewish colonies may be equally religious and humanitarian. Miss Rye’s and other Canadian settlements are the offspring of pure philanthropy, still subsidized mainly by the orthodox and the devout.
7. Lastly, there is a type of colony peculiar to our own time and impossible earlier, which we may call (for want of a better name) sociological. It was the invention of one who to the reflective faculty of a De Tocqueville joined the executive capacity of a Turgot, and who had the good fortune, denied to both, of seeing his conceptions realized. We shrink from the Darwinian ascription of so much to “accident,” but accident plays as large a part in history as in nature, and it was accident which constrained Edward Gibbon Wakefield to throw his energies into the work of colonization. Having examined minutely and considered profoundly the origin and circumstances of existing colonies, he came to the conclusion that a colony, to be successful, must faithfully reproduce the essential members of the mother country—a conclusion in strict conformity with the biological analogy. The superior classes had been lacking to previous emigrations; to induce them to emigrate, and to keep the whole administration in their hands, he proposed to abolish the wholesale granting of lands, or the selling of them at a cheap rate, and to dispose of them at a price which would reserve them for the rich; with the proceeds of the fund so raised the poor were to be sent out as laborers and artisans. State churches and an aristocratic form of government were necessary corollaries. Five colonies were (1837—1851) actually founded on this basis in South Australia and New Zealand. They were administered by men the most capable who have ever governed these countries; the settlers were of the best kind; and they were powerfully aided in England. But the circumstances were unfavorable. The natives in New Zealand were hostile, and the local government was implacably opposed to the growth of an imperium in imperio. The attempt to reproduce in a new country a moribund artistocratic society was foredoomed to
