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 _régime_ 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