Unfortunately this, though
the simplest mode of attempting to govern a dependency, is about the
worst; and betrays in its advocates a total want of comprehension of
the conditions of good government. To govern a country under
responsibility to the people of that country, and to govern one
country under responsibility to the people of another, are two very
different things. What makes the excellence of the first is that
freedom is preferable to despotism: but the last is despotism. The
only choice the case admits is a choice of despotisms: and it is not
certain that the despotism of twenty millions is necessarily better
than that of a few, or of one. But it is quite certain that the
despotism of those who neither hear, nor see, nor know anything
about their subjects, has many chances of being worse than that of
those who do. It is not usually thought that the immediate agents of
authority govern better because they govern in the name of an absent
master, and of one who has a thousand more pressing interests to
attend to. The master may hold them to a strict responsibility,
enforced by heavy penalties; but it is very questionable if those
penalties will often fall in the right place.
It is always under great difficulties, and very imperfectly, that
a country can be governed by foreigners; even when there is no extreme
disparity, in habits and ideas, between the rulers and the ruled.
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