The separate colonies of Australia were all peopled and developed by immigrants, with the largest number being English. Unlike North America there was very little ethnic variety from place to place, despite the vast distances between the colonial capitals. The colonies were all managed from London through local governors until the 1850s. Supervision of assisted immigration remained with London until the 1870s, on the basis that only British subjects would receive passage money. This was supervised by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, which was not wound up until 1872. By the time the colonies became effectively self-governing – which was not until 1890 in Western Australia – their inhabitants were overwhelmingly British, with a growing majority of these being English by birth or recent descent. When immigration policy passed into the hands of locally elected governments, these naturally responded to their constituents by favouring the existing policy of reserving Australia for the British. As the United States was always more attractive to the Irish, and as the ratio between the English and the Scots greatly favoured the former, the English component in Australian immigration steadily increased.