for the application of the Federal principle. 'It may be said,' he remarks, 'that federation becomes desirable where, on the one hand, the country is too enormous in extent and too diverse in conditions for its internal affairs to be satisfactorily managed by one central government, while, on the other hand, the communities have certain common interests best served by their coming together, or are confronted by common dangers if they keep apart.' Never in the history of the world were these conditions more completely fulfilled than in the case of the British Empire. But objections to a federal organization for the Empire are at once raised. 'The areas and communities to be dealt with are too vast, the problem too complex, and the consequent difficulty of giving an adequate organization too great for such a plan to be thought of.' To this it may be answered {33} that the growth of the United States has widened political horizons. It has proved that immense territorial extent is not incompatible, under modern conditions, with that representative system of popular government which had its birth and development in England, and its most notable adaptation in America. It has shown that the spread of a nation over vast areas, including widely-separated states with diverse interests, need not prevent it from becoming strongly bound together in a political organism which combines the advantages of national greatness and unity of purpose with jealously guarded freedom of local self-government. So that if the birth of the American Republic suggested the confident inference that the inevitable tendency of new communities was to detach themselves like ripe fruit from the parent stem, the circumstances of its growth have done much to dissipate the idea. The United States have illustrated on a great scale the advantages of national unity; their example has pointed the way to its attainment. That example has been followed in one great British community; it is being adopted in another.

But in the United States, in Canada, in Australia it is urged, we have continental contiguity. The British Empire is too large, its parts, separated by oceans, are unfitted for government under a common federal system. We can at least answer that the standard of possible size for a nation has steadily enlarged in the course of history. For a federal system the unit may be small or large, there seems {34} to be a measure by which to fix the possible size of the unit in any case. The breadth of interest is this measure. In a United British Empire each of the federated countries, as commercial communities, would have interests all over the world, and having such interests would have a justification for being units in a world-wide Oceanic Empire.

For great trading communities, moreover, we must remember that oceans do not divide. The almost instantaneous transmission of thought, the cheap transmission of goods, the speedy travel possible for man, have revolutionised pre-existing conditions in commerce and society, once more widening our horizon. The fact lies at the very basis of our national prosperity; it is recognised in the every-day transactions of commercial life. Why should it not be admitted among the ordinary considerations of political life as well?

Communities so remote from each other as those which compose the Empire, it is said again, 'cannot have those common interests which are necessary to give cohesion to a nation.' Let us consider the point.

I go into a woollen mill in Yorkshire or the south of Scotland. Its proprietor, a great organizer of industry, shows me over the vast establishment, from the warehouse where the bales of wool are being packed as they arrive after their long voyage from the antipodes, through the washing, combing, spinning, weaving, dyeing, and pressing rooms till we come to the show rooms where the completed goods are awaiting sale and shipment to the furthest {35} corners of the world. He tells me that any circumstance which checked the steady supply of the raw material even for a few weeks would leave all this extensive and complicated mass of machinery idle; would throw his employees, numbered by thousands, out of employment; would bring himself face to face with ruin and his people with want. Any circumstances which checked the steady shipment of the manufactured goods to distant markets would produce consequences scarcely less immediate or less disastrous. I find the proprietor day by day anxiously watching the reports of the wool sales in London, and through them anything that affects the wool trade in Sydney, Melbourne, or Dunedin. Clearly this man and those who work for him must look far afield, if they consider all the conditions upon which their prosperity depends. They are types which represent many millions of people in the United Kingdom.

I go to Australia or New Zealand, and find myself the guest of a squatter on his remote station. The sheep in his flocks number perhaps a hundred thousand. He shows me his station houses, his shearing sheds, his wool sheds, his vast paddocks enclosed with hundreds of miles of wire fencing, all his extensive plant, his horses, his shepherds, his band of shearers. He has to fight against drought; swarms of rabbits may threaten him with ruin; his year's clip of wool may, as the result of past disasters, be mortgaged to the Banks. But if the telegraph tells him that wool is rising in the London market, that the {36} factories at Leeds and Halifax and Huddersfield are running at their utmost capacity, that Yorkshire is prosperous, he is cheerful and faces his difficulties with a hopeful mind. A good year's sales will repay him for his risks and recoup him for the losses of the past. Cut this man off from access to the home markets for a few months, block the ports from which he ships his wool, or break the line of his communication, and his industry is paralysed, his workmen without pay; the bank which backs him and stakes much on the prosperity of him and his like may close its doors. Here manifestly is a man who, with his organized army of industry, from the shepherd who tends the sheep to the lumper who handles the bales at the docks, has interests which extend further than his immediate neighbourhood.

I go on board one of the great liners which run between Australia and England, and which may be taken to represent the third great form of British industry. Down in her hold, forming the chief part of her cargo, are several thousand bales of wool. When she returns the wool will be replaced by manufactured goods. The profits of the company which owns and manages her depend upon the prosperity of the great manufacturing communities at home and the great producing areas abroad; upon the pressure of outward and homeward trade. Upon the absolute safety from hostile attack of this vessel and her like in passing over many thousand miles of sea depends once more the industrial security of the vast multitudes of human {37} beings for whom and between whom she carries on exchange.

Can community of interest and mutual dependence be more complete than this? Of the man who produces the raw material, the man who works it up, and the man who carries between them, can we say where the interest of the one begins and the other ends? Yet what has been said of one raw material of production and manufacture may be said of a hundred. What has been said of wool may be said of wheat, for artizans must be fed while they work, and more and more English people at home will have to depend on English people abroad for their supplies of wheat. It may be said of meat, which every year, in increasing quantity, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia send to the mother-land.

No limit can be put to the range of common interest between communities of which one devotes its industry chiefly to supplying the raw material of commerce, the other to its manufacture.

This community of industrial interest is strengthened by a thousand influences which