frontier defence or South African labour. The home reformer and the overseas Imperialist will tend to be equally dissatisfied with a constitutional doctrine which imposes upon certain old-fashioned machinery a task apparently too complex for its performance.
From these obvious anomalies has sprung the dream of federation—an old dream as Imperial politics go, but still rather a dream than a policy. If it were possible, it would afford the most satisfactory solution for an Empire with strong divergent local interests, and no less insistent common problems; for all schemes of federation provide for complete local autonomy—home rule in its truest sense—and a common legislature and common executive for Imperial affairs. If we may borrow the usual metaphor of writers on federation, there are many centripetal forces at work. The old sentiment of kinship has been revivified by partnership in war, and the course of foreign affairs and the rise of other empires is increasing the sense of mutual dependence. Our people travel further, have wider interests, know more of the life of their relations oversea. Most significant of all, the vision of a united Empire is ceasing to be the perquisite of a few theorists, and is slowly penetrating local politics, so that in some form or other it is becoming, like the monarchy, a presupposition of all parties in the Colonies and at home. But though the leaven is at work, the time for actual union is still far distant. It may be doubted, to begin with, whether the federal ideal is the most suitable for an Empire which contains self-governing Colonies on the one hand, and on the other lands where autonomy is eternally impossible—dependencies which must always be directly administered by the Crown. The problem of our tropical possessions will always raise difficulties in the way of a type of union which in essence belongs to white men and the temperate zones. Again, federation means the creation of a new representative body, either out of the British Parliament, by adding to it colonial representatives, or independent of it, but on analogous lines.
