Eight or nine years ago Mr. Forster delivered an important address at Edinburgh on our Colonial Empire. It was a weighty attempt to give the same impulse to people's minds from the political point of view as Mr. Seeley tries to give from the historical. Mr. Forster did not think that 'the admission of colonial representatives into our Parliament could be a permanent form of association,' though he added that it might possibly be useful in the temporary transition from the dependent to the associated relation. In what way it would be useful he did not more particularly explain. The ultimate solution he finds in some kind of federation. The general conditions of union, in order that our empire should continue, he defines as threefold. 'The different self-governing communities must agree in maintaining allegiance to one monarch—in maintaining a common nationality, so that each subject may find that he has the political rights and privileges of other subjects wheresoever he may go in the realm;[4] and, lastly, must agree not only in maintaining a mutual alliance in all relations with foreign powers, but in apportioning among themselves the obligations imposed by such alliance.'[5] It is, as everybody knows, at the last of the three points that the pinch is found. The threatened conflict between the Imperial and the Irish parliaments on the Regency in 1788, 1789 warns us that difficulties might arise on the first head, and it may be well to remember under the second head that the son of a marriage between a man and his sister-in-law has not at present the same civil right in different parts of the realm. But let this pass. The true question turns upon the apportionment of the obligations incurred by states entering a federal union on equal terms. What is to be the machinery of this future association? Mr. Forster, like Mr. Seeley, and perhaps with equally good right, leaves time to find the answer, contenting himself with the homely assurance that 'when the time comes it will be found that where there's a will there's a way.' Our position is that the will depends upon the way, and that the more any possible way of federation is considered, the less likely is there to be the will.

It is not in the mere machinery of federation that insurmountable difficulties arise, but in satisfying ourselves that the national sentiment would supply steam enough to work the machinery. Of course we should at once be brought face to face with that which is, in Mr. Forster's judgment, one of the strongest arguments against giving responsible government to Ireland, the necessity for a written constitution. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council were engaged only the other day in hearing a dispute on appeal (Hodge v. the Queen), turning on the respective powers of the legislature of Ontario and the Parliament of the Dominion. The instrument to be interpreted was the British North America Act, but who will draft us a bill that shall settle the respective powers of the Dominion legislature, the British legislature, and the Universal Greater British legislature?

It would be interesting to learn what place in the great Staatenbund or Bundes-staat would be given to possessions of the class of the West Indies, Mauritius, the West Coast, and such propugnacula of the Empire as Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, or Hong-Kong. What have we to offer Australia in return for joining us in a share of such obligations as all these entail? Are her taxpayers anxious to contribute to their cost? Have her politicians either leisure or special competency for aiding in their administration? India, we must assume, would come within the province and jurisdiction of the Federation. It would hardly be either an advantage or a pleasure to the people of a young country, with all their busy tasks hot on their hands, to be interrupted by the duty of helping by men or cash to put down an Indian Mutiny, and even in quiet times to see their politicians attending to India instead of minding their own very sufficiently exacting business.

The Federal Council would be, we may suppose, deliberative and executive, but we have not been told whence its executive would be taken. If from its own members, then London (if that is to be the seat of the Federal Government) would see not only two legislatures, but two cabinets, because it would certainly happen that the Federal Council would constantly give its confidence to men sent to it from the colonies, and not having seats in the British Parliament. In that case the mother of parliaments would sink into the condition of a state legislature, though the contributions of Great Britain would certainly be many times larger than those of all the colonies put together. If, on the contrary view, Great Britain were to take the lead in the Council, to shape its policy, and to furnish its ministers, can anybody doubt that the same resentment and sense of grievance which was in old times directed against the centralisation of the Colonial Office, would instantly revive against the centralisation of the new Council?

Nobody has explained what is to be the sanction of any decree, levy, or ordinance of the Federal Council; in other words, how it would deal with any member of the Confederacy who should refuse to provide money or perform any other act prescribed by the common authority of the Bund. If anybody supposes that England, for instance, would send a fleet to Canada to collect ship-money in the name of the Federal Council, it would be just as easy to imagine her sending a fleet in her own name. Nothing can be more absurd than any supposition of that kind, except the counter-supposition that no confederated state would ever fail to fall cheerfully in with the requirements of the rest of them. Mr. Forster has an earnest faith that the union would work well, but that does not prevent him from inserting a possible proviso or understanding that 'any member of the Federation, either the mother country or any of its children, should have an acknowledged right to withdraw from the mutual alliance on giving reasonable notice.' No doubt such a proviso would be essential, but if a similar one had been accepted in America after the election of President Lincoln, the American Union would have lasted exactly eighty years, and no more. The catastrophe was prevented by the very effective sanction which the Federalists proved themselves to possess in reserve.

What is the common bond that is to bring the various colonies into a federal union? It is certain that it will have to be a bond of political and national interest, and not of sentiment merely, though the sentiment may serve by way of decoration. We all know how extremely difficult it was to bring the provinces of Canada to form themselves into the Dominion. It is within immediate memory that in South Africa, in spite of the most diligent efforts of ministers and of parliament, the interests of the Cape, of Natal, of Griqualand, and the two Dutch republics were found to be so disparate that the scheme of confederation fell hopelessly to pieces. In Australia the recent conference at Sydney is supposed to have given a little impulse towards confederation, but the best informed persons on the spot have no belief that anything practical can come of it for a very long time to come, if ever,—so divergent are both the various interests and men's views of their interests. Three years ago a conference of all the Australian colonies was held to consider the adoption of a common fiscal policy. The delegates of New South Wales, South Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and Western Australia voted in favour of a resolution which recommended the appointment of a joint commission to construct a common tariff, but Victoria voted in a minority of one, and the project was therefore abandoned. If there is this difficulty in bringing the colonies of a given region into union, we may guess how enormous would be the difficulty of framing a scheme of union that should interest and attract regions penitus toto divisos orbe.

Another line of consideration brings us still more directly to the same probability of a speedy deadlock. In Mr. Forster's ideal federation there must, he says, be one principle of action throughout the empire concerning the treatment of uncivilised or half civilised races. With the motive of this humane reservation all good Englishmen, wherever they live, will ardently sympathise. But how would a Federal Union have any more power than Lord Kimberley had to prevent a Cape parliament, for instance, from passing a Vagrant Act? That Act contained, as Lord Kimberley confessed, some startling clauses, and its object was in fact to place blacks under the necessity of working for whites at low wages. He was obliged to say that he had no power to alter it, and we may be quite sure that if the Executive of the Greater British Union had been in existence, and had tried to alter the Act, that would have been the signal for South Africa to walk out of the union. We may look at such contingencies in another way. Great Britain, according to a statement made by Mr. Gladstone in the last session of parliament, has spent more than twelve millions sterling on frontier wars in South Africa during the eighty years that we have been unfortunate enough to have that territory on our hands. The conduct of the colonists to the natives has been the main cause of these wars, and yet it is stated that they themselves have never contributed more than £10,000 a year towards military expenditure on their account. Is it possible to suppose that the Canadian lumberman and the Australian sheep-farmer will cheerfully become contributors to a Greater British fund for keeping Basutos, Pondos, Zulus quiet to please the honourable gentlemen from South Africa, especially as two-thirds of the constituents of these honourable gentlemen would be not Englishmen but Dutchmen? Yet if the stoppage of supplies of this kind would be one of the first results of the transformation of the mother country into the stepmother Union, what motive would South Africa have for entering it? On the other hand, is there any reason to suppose that South Africa would contribute towards the maintenance of cruisers to keep French convicts and others out of the Pacific, or towards expeditions to enable the Queensland planters to get cheap labour, or to prevent Australian adventurers from land-grabbing in New Guinea? If it be said that the moral weight of a great union of expanded Englishmen would procure a cessation of the harsh or aggressive policy that leads to these costly little wars, one can only reply that this will be a very odd result of giving a decisive voice in imperial affairs to those portions of our people who, from their position and their interests, have been least open to philanthropic susceptibilities. It is perfectly plain that the chief source of the embarrassments of the mother country in dealing with colonies endowed with responsible government would simply be reproduced if a Federal Council were sitting in Downing Street in the place of the Secretary of State.

The objections arising from the absence of common interest and common knowledge may be illustrated in the case of the disputed rights of fishery off Newfoundland. It has been suggested by Lord Grey that in such a matter it would be of great advantage to have in the standing committee of colonial privy councillors which he proposes a body which would both give it information as to the wishes and opinions of the colonies, and assist in conveying to the colonies authentic explanation of the reasons for the measures adopted. That the agents from Newfoundland could give the Government information is certain, but what light could the agents from New Zealand throw on the fishery question? Then apply the case to the proposal of a Federation. As the question raises discussions with the United States and with France, it is an imperial matter, and would be referred to the Federal Council. That body, in spite of its miscellaneous composition, would be no better informed of the merits of the case than the present cabinet, nor do we know why it should be more likely to come to a wise decision. However that might be, we cannot easily believe that the merchant of Cape Town or the sugar-planter in Queensland, or the coffee-grower in Fiji, would willingly pay twopence or fourpence of income tax for a war with France, however authentic might be the explanations given to him of the reasons why the fishermen of Nova Scotia had destroyed the huts and the drying stages of French rivals on a disputed foreshore. We fail to see why the fact of the authentic explanation being conveyed by his own particular delegate should be much more soothing to him than if they were conveyed by the Secretary of State, for, after all, as Mr. Seeley will assure him, Lord Derby and Sir Michael Hicks-Beach are brothers and fellow-countrymen. No, we may depend upon it that it would be a mandat impÉratif on every federal delegate not to vote a penny for any war, or preparation for war, that might arise from the direct or indirect interests of any colony but his own.

I have said little of the difficulties arising from the vast geographic distances that separate these great outlying communities from one another, and from the mother country. But those difficulties exist, and they are in one sense at the root of others more important than themselves. 'Countries separated by half the globe,' says Mill in his excellent chapter on the government of dependencies by a free state, 'do not present the natural conditions for being members of one federation. If they had sufficiently the same interests, they have not, and never can have, a sufficient habit of taking counsel together. They are not part of the same public; they do not discuss and deliberate in the same arena, but apart, and have only a most imperfect knowledge of what passes in the minds of one another. They neither know each other's objects nor have confidence in each other's principles of conduct. Let any Englishman ask himself how he should like his destinies to depend on an assembly of which one-third was British-American and another third South African and Australian. Yet to this it must come, if there were anything like fair or equal representation; and would not every one feel that the representatives of Canada and Australia, even in matters of an imperial character, could not know or feel any sufficient concern for the interests, opinions, or wishes of English, Irish, or Scotch?'[6] Tariffs, as we have seen, are one question, and the treatment of native races is another, where this want of sympathy and agreement between Englishmen at home and Englishmen in the most important colonies is open and flagrant.

The actual circumstances of federal unions justify Mill's remark on the impossibility of meeting the conditions of such polities where the communities are separated by half the globe; nor does the fact that New Zealand is now only forty days from the Thames make any difference. The districts of the Aetolian, and the towns of the AchÆan, League were in effect neighbours. The Germanic Confederation was composed of kingdoms and principalities that are conterminous. The American Union is geographically solid. So are the cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The nine millions of square miles over which the British flag waves are dispersed over the whole surface of the globe. The fact that this consideration is so trite and obvious does not prevent it from being an essential element in the argument. Mr. Seeley's precedents are not at all in point.

It is no answer to say, with Mr. Forster, that 'English-speaking men and women look at life and its problems, especially the problems of government, with much the same eyes everywhere.' For the purposes of academic discussion, and with reference to certain moral generalities, this might be fairly true. But the problems of government bring us into a sphere where people are called upon to make sacrifices, in the shape of taxation if in no other, and here English-speaking men and women are wont not by any means to look at life and its problems, from George Grenville's Stamp Act down to the 333 articles in the tariff of Victoria, with the same eyes. The problems of government arise from clashing interests, and in that clash the one touch of nature that makes the whole world kin is the resolution not willingly to make sacrifices without objects which are thought to be worth them. If we can both persuade ourselves and convince the colonists that the gains of a closer confederation will compensate for the sacrifices entailed by it, we shall then look at the problem with the same eyes: if not, not. Englishmen at home withdrew the troops from New Zealand because we did not choose to pay for them. Englishmen in Canada and Victoria do their best to injure our manufactures because they wish to nurse their own. The substance of character, the leading instincts, the love of freedom, the turn for integrity, the taste for fair play, all the great traits and larger principles may remain the same, but there is abundant room in the application of the same principles and the satisfaction of the same instincts for the rise of bitter contention and passionate differences. The bloodiest struggle of our generation was between English-speaking men of the North and English-speaking men of the South, because economic difficulties had brought up a problem of government which the two parties to the strife looked at with different eyes from difference of habit and of interest. It is far from being enough, therefore, to rely on a general spirit of concord in the broad objects of government for overcoming the differences which distance may chance to make in its narrow and particular objects.

If difficulties of distance, we are asked by the same statesman, 'have not prevented the government of a colony from England, why must they prevent the association of self-governing communities with England?' But distance was one of the principal causes, and perhaps we should not be far wrong in saying that it was the principal cause, why the time came when some colonies could no longer be governed from England—distance, and all those divergencies of thought and principle referred to by Mill, which distance permitted or caused to spring into existence and to thrive.

The present writer claims to belong as little to the Pessimist as to the Bombastic school—to borrow Mr. Seeley's phrase—unless it is to be a Pessimist to seek a foothold in positive conditions and to insist on facing hard facts. The sense of English kinship is as lively in us as in other people, and we have the same pride in English energy, resolution, and stoutness of heart, whether these virtues show themselves in the young countries or the old. We agree in desiring a strong and constant play between the thoughts, the ideals, the institutions, of Englishmen in the island home and Englishmen who have carried its rational freedom and its strenuous industry to new homes in every sea. Those who in our domestic politics are most prepared to welcome democratic changes can have least prejudice against countrymen who are showing triumphantly how order and prosperity are not incompatible with a free Church, with free schools, with the payment of members, with manhood suffrage, and with the absence of a hereditary chamber. Neither are we misled by a spurious analogy between a colony ready for independence and a grown-up son ready to enter life on his own account; nor by Turgot's comparison of colonies to fruit which hangs on the tree only till it is ripe. We take our stand on Mr. Seeley's own plain principles that 'all political unions exist for the good of their members, and should be just as large, and no larger, as they can be without ceasing to be beneficial.' The inquiry is simply whether the good of the members of our great English union all over the world will be best promoted by aiming at an artificial centralisation, or by leaving as much room as possible for the expansion of individual communities along lines and in channels which they may spontaneously cut out for themselves. If our ideal is a great Roman Empire, which shall be capable by means of fleets and armies of imposing its will upon the world, then it is satisfactory to think, for the reasons above given, that the ideal is an unattainable one. Any closer union of the British Empire attempted with this object would absolutely fail. The unwieldy weapon would break in our hands. The ideal is as impracticable as it is puerile and retrograde.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES The transcriber made the following changes to the text to correct obvious errors: p. 329, "embarassments" changed to "embarrassments"

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