a British
Parliament and a Federal Council.

[3] _Constitutions of the Britannic Empire_ (1872), p. 43.

Another consideration of the highest moment ought not to be
overlooked. In view of our increasing population, social complexities,
and industrial and commercial engagements of all kinds, _time_ is of
vital importance for the purposes of domestic legislation and internal
improvements. Is the time and brainpower of our legislators, and of
those of our colonies too, to be diverted perpetually from their own
special concerns and the improvement of their own people, to the more
showy but less fruitful task of keeping together and managing an
artificial Empire?

VI.

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.