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PRINTED FOR THE EDITOR, AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS.

MDCCCXXVI.

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THE ORIENTAL HERALD.

No. 34.-OCTOBER 1826.-VOL. 11.

CONSIDERATIONS ON THE RELATIVE DUTIES AND INTERESTS OF MOTHER COUNTRIES AND COLONIES.

In a former article on this subject, contained in the Number for Angust last, we endeavoured to point out what were the duties of Mother Countries towards their Colonies. In the present, we shall endeavour to show what are the interests of the Colonies themselves, as well as what is the course of conduct towards the Mother Country which is most likely to secure the attention of the parent to its dependency, and consequently to promote the welfare of its inhabitants.

Without going again over the ground we have before explored, we -shall merely revert to the fact, that Colonies are in general either planted by discoverers, and brought, after a long series of years, from unpeopled wildernesses to highly cultivated countries filled with the descendants of those discoverers; or settled by emigrants, who carry with them the attachment natural to man for the country of his birth; or wrested, by fraud or force, from the aboriginal inhabitants, either by trading intriguers, or more open invaders who come with arms in their hands in professed search after conquest and spoil. In the first of these cases, it is the chief duty of the Colonists to see the natural resources of their newly-discovered country developed with the greatest rapidity and the fewest restraints. In the second, it will be their principal care to provide against an undue interference in the details of their self-government by the power from which they have separated themselves. In the third, it will be their constant duty to resist, as much as possible, the continual encroachment which all conquerors endeavour to make on the rights and privileges of those whom they have subdued. The earliest and most important pursuit of the first class would be the cultivation of agriculture and commerce; of the second, fortification, and the union of all classes for self-defence; of the third, a perpetual and never-ceasing endeavour so to combine the physical and moral energies of their countrymen, and so to increase their intelligence and patriotism, as to compel, by their union, those who Oriental Herald, Vol. 11.

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