18 JANUARY 1851, Page 2

Lord Grey has the peculiar knack of doing right so

as to make it seem wrong ; of using that which is good in itself so as to pro- duce evil. No step can be more justifiable, or calculated to be more popular either in the Colonies or in England, than to withdraw any superfluous amount of the military from our settlements. Taken by itself, the withdrawal of soldiers from New South Wales and Victoria would be unobjectionable. It is true, as Lord Grey says in his military despatch, that the number of convicts is greatly lessened; it is true that the colonists are numerous, self- reliant, and in every respect physical and moral well able to de- fend themselves against all probable enemies. But the studiously captions language which Lord Grey employs—his hint that Ministers act under some compulsion of saving, rather than from any desire to do right by the Colonies—his intimation that if the colonists want troops they must pay for them—his raising of questions about the suzerainty and maintenance of bar- racks, and his threat to remove even the guard from Sydney and Melbourne unless the barracks be maintained—all these traits impart to a measure proper enough in the main such an air of peevish hostility and niggardly meanness as to make it at once in- sulting and contemptible. The measure that might have called forth all the pride of the colonists, have invited them to take their share in laz 1:14.3111ffi of the empire, and have gratified every feeling of manhood, love of the ii-otounti7, and pride in their own land, is converted into a new hint that the ties between the Mother- country and the Colonies are breaking loose, and made a new pro- vocative to "independence."

In the ill-tuned ear of such a man the deep note swelling home- ward from the Southern Colonies of Australia in stern objection to the convict aggression, original or continued, will, one fears, prove only hateful and irritating : the cry will be disregarded till it signify dangerous animosity as well as disgust.

As the session of Parliament approaches, our readers interested in Colonial subjects will be speculating on the Ceylon butcheries and ooncealments,—an affair m which the ascetic Colonial Minister is surmised to be pickling another rod for his own back : an hour or so may be profitably spent in conning the masterly sketch of the whole subject presented under the heading " Mysteries of Cey- lon" in the number of the Quarterly Review just published.