The Earl of Rosebery, in his very happy speeeh on
Wednes- day, at the Westminster Palace Hotel, to the Federation League, compared the colonisation of our Colonial Empire first to the tapping for underground rivers which has just been going on in Australia, and which has just ended in the springing up of the Barkledean Spring, till it has filled a large deserted area with a vast lagoon. "In that description it seems to me I find some image of this British race of ours, which, without any particular guidance or forethought on our part, has suddenly oozed out, and, adjusting itself to the accommodation the world can offer it, has covered so mighty a space on the globe." Then he went on to compare the process of modern colonisation to a game of chess,—only that Lord Rosebery appears to confound chess with whist, and to treat " knaves " as used in the former game, a procedure quite new to us. "Where formerly we had the game to ourselves, we suddenly find check, or at least stalemate, when we least expected it." Colonisation began with castles. "Our great object was to obtain fortresses like Malta, Gibraltar, Corfu, and Quebec. Then our ideas went in the direction of colonising by knaves" (an allusion, of course, to our penal settlements, though the chess metaphor fails). Then there came colonising by bishop and knight ; a highly competent gentleman was sent out with an ecclesiastical dignitary, as in the case, for instance, of the Canterbury settlement in New Zealand. When all these systems of colonisation were exhausted, "the Queen always remains." "But the future of our race rests largely with the pawns." We cannot tell where the pawns will be moved,—where they will move themselves,—but the colonisation of the future will be a pawn game. The metaphor, though leading to sad confusion between whist and chess, is an ingenious one, and is perhaps chiefly defective in this, that over and above all the English pieces we have no player. Germany plays her pawns, and often, as in a gambit, sacrifices pawns for a position ; but the English pawns are not played : they play themselves.
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