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 U