This question has been in a course of rapid clearing during the last few
years, and the successful establishment of the Imperial Federation
League has given an orderly procedure in every way promising. The object
aimed at is, that the empire shall have that political binding which
will give to it the maximum of power and influence possible under all
its circumstances. Above fifteen years ago some few of us--very few they
then were--first seriously raised this question at Home in the Royal
Colonial Institute. We had the smallest of audiences then. It is
marvellous to look back now upon that indifference. I recollect that
about ten years ago, when the movement was just beginning to look
serious to those outside of us, a leading Paris paper devoted an article
to the subject, remarking that if Great Britain persevered so as to
unite her empire as sought, the balance of the world's power would be so
seriously disturbed as to call for an international reconsideration of
that subject.
The progress as yet has been chiefly negative, but it has been great.
Modes entertained at first have been discarded. This may be said of
superseding the present Imperial Parliament by a pro re nata Federal
Assembly; and it may be equally said of an influx of proportionate
colonial representatives into the Home House. Councils of colonial
ambassadors, agents-general, and so on, have, I think, definitely gone
the same way. These are chiefly Home views, for Home is at length
aroused as well as the colonies to their common question; and the
summons by the Secretary for the Colonies of the Colonial Conference
which sat in London two years ago marks alike the most prominent and
most promising feature in the movement.
Mr. Froude has given, most usefully, the views of the colonists. Let us
take Mr. Dalley's, which is also that of most others, namely, that the
nascent but increasing colonial navies should be all under one imperial
command--that is, be a part of the British navy. There is one more
step--namely, to dispose of all colonial military force in the same
common-sense way, and then we have a politically united empire. But we
are "constitutional" or representative in our polity, so that something
else is still wanted. In short, the unity of the empire requires two
things. First, that all its force be under one executive, and, next,
that the colonies be proportionately represented in that executive. The
Cabinet seems to me the adaptable body we can operate upon to this end.
That body would then be actually, as well as legally, the empire's
executive. Nothing should--nothing need--prevent the attainment of this
grand end. The tariff bugbear concerns only commerce, and need not
arrest nor even interfere with the empire's political unity. All other
matters of the common interest can be leisurely settled by mutual
consent, as the empire, in its united state, sails along the great ocean
of the future. The mother will then, in emergency, have the sure call of
her children; while every colony, even to the very smallest, will know
that in case of need the whole empire is at its back. When the rest of
the world knows that fact, it will thenceforth probably not trouble our
empire either about international rearrangements or anything else.