bond with the mother-land seems to me a guarantee of sufficient unity between the colonies—not so close, not so instinctive, it is true as the more direct tie, but still amply sufficient to give effective national cohesion. All the colonies are parts of the same great body; all would alike suffer from the weakness of the whole. All would gain indefinitely from united strength.

'In their case,' to repeat what Mr. Freeman says of the United States, 'mere continuity produces a crowd of interest and relations common to all.' But if Mr. Freeman reflects that seventy-seven per cent. of Australia's trade, eighty per cent. of New Zealand's trade, eighty-five per cent. of South Africa's trade, fifty per cent of Canada's trade, finds its way backward and forward over the vast oceans which separate these colonies from Britain, or from each other, he will be forced to admit that mere distance of separation produces, if not a crowd of interests and relations, at least a few interests and relations common to all which are practically predominant. No states of the American Union have an interdependence of financial and commercial relations proportionally so exclusive and complete as those which exist between New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, or even Canada and Great Britain. 'It is hard to believe,' adds Mr. Freeman, 'that states which are united only by a sentiment, which have so much, both political and physical, to keep them asunder, will be kept together by a sentiment only.' Mr. Freeman has evidently not studied {44} the facts of colonial trade, or the relations of English and colonial industry[2].

Another practical aspect of the question naturally appeals strongly to many minds. We are the most strenuous working race of the world, and the problems of labour fill a large place in our thoughts of the present and the future. Not only to hold our own in the keen competition going on with the rest of the world in both manufacture and the production of raw material, but also to reach the higher ideal formed of the life possible for a working man, we seek to make as light as may be the burdens which industry must necessarily bear. In all countries no small portion of these are such as are imposed by the needs of national organization—burdens which no country has ever yet escaped, or ever will. In national unity we may have all the advantages and resources of co-operation utilized to this end on a vast scale; one diplomatic and consular service; one fleet instead of several; ports and docks defended at the common expense for the good of all. Under any well-considered scheme it is certain, so far as defence is concerned, that all parts of the Empire would secure {45} a maximum of protection at a minimum of cost, and the same would hold good in regard to other forms of necessary national expense. A nation economizing expenditure in these directions could enlarge it for objects which tended to the common good, and brought advantages within the reach of the masses, cheap postage, cheap telegraphy, cheap transit of every kind. Combinations undertaken for ends such as these could have no savour of an aggressive Imperialism.