of colonies, finding in colonial history facts which have no answering stages in the history of the parent state, will point out the lacunae and predict that, when that history has been more closely studied, corresponding facts will be found. Only the surface of history has been scratched. Within the last thirty years the early constitutional history of France and Germany has been rewritten by Waitz, Roth, and Sohm. Yet the documents possessed by these scholars were, most of them, at the command of earlier scholars. It was the key that was wanting, the point of view that was false. So may colonial history (or may we call it coloniology?) furnish new means of reading the past.
It is necessarily only of the mother country that the colony repeats the development. The Phœnician, Greek, and Roman, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and Dutch colonies are radically unlike one another in their origin and growth. Where they resemble they are but repeating the story of universal humanity. There have been agrarian agitations in New York and Australia, and Gracchi in New Zealand, but they do not reduplicate those of Rome. Nor were the tribunes of New Amsterdam Roman tribunes.
It is, finally, in perfect consistency with the analogy that the colony should often outstrip the parent state. While still dependent, it may develop institutions in advance of any to be found in the mother country, and after emancipation it may be a social organism of a higher type. The Australasian colonies have far surpassed Great Britain in the liberal character of their legislation, and in the United States the feeling of equality between man and man has gained a vigor never likely to be attained in the countries which contributed to the colonization of North America.
