Lord Rosebery made a speech at the Colonial Institute on
Wednesday, which was at once amusing and wise. He gave a laughable description of the burdens imposed on a Foreign Secretary by Colonial extension, declaring that he had at this moment twenty questions of delimitation of frontier in progress ; that the boxes of documents about them were full of unintelligible expressions about unknown localities, and that when "proper charts are submitted, it almost in- variably happened that the localities were not to be found." Nevertheless, he was in favour of the expansion of the Empire. The world is not elastic ; we have to think of the future, and at the present moment, in mining language, we are "pegging out claims" for that. That is felicitous ; but we hope Lord Rosebery does not forget that, by Australian miner's law, the man who has pegged out a claim must work at it, or submit to have it "jumped." Our great fear is that we should annex savage kingdoms, and then not attempt either to govern or improve them. If we do not benefit Uganda, we have no right to its protectorate.
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