other members of the Imperial Federation. A Canadian paper sets out the opportunity and the duty in the following words:

For our part, with our ample resources and our comparatively small population, we have the opportunity of building up a nation that will be great not merely in wealth and numbers, but in the opportunity to live free and noble lives; a community where education and prosperity and comfort are widely disseminated; a community that is as free as possible from inequalities created by birth and from inequalities created by wealth, from the millionaire at one end of the social scale and the tramp and the pauper at the other. Whoever aids in the building of such a structure as that helps to build up a nation worth working for and worth fighting for; and that is the essence of patriotism.

All this looks forward, however, to a "league of free nations," banded together for the maintenance of peace and justice, for the promotion of liberty and progress; and though the day of the crystallisation of the colonies into such a "league" may be distant, yet it is strongly felt that we must prepare for its dawn. Therefore the colonies are not only spending considerable sums on their own defence, building masked batteries of immense strength, and training men for warfare, but they are looking to greater emergencies and more serious perils ; for, to cite one illustration only, the Sydney Daily Telegraph says: "The Auxiliary Squadron, though primarily an instrument of coast defence, may easily become much more, and

THE FEDERAL IDEA.

21

in the hour of need would do so speedily and on a large scale." Everywhere it is felt that surely though slowly Intercolonial Federation is coming. Thoughtful people desire it. They see it is necessary, and they discuss it with calmness and courage, with insight and hope. The colonies are far apart from each other, know little of one another, and their separation tends to a belittling parochialism in thought and act. Isolation creates prejudice, fosters ignorance, and diminishes the service of one colony to another. Canada has found Federation a measure of healing and of increased life. Australia is preparing to follow Canada's example, and thereby hasten the dawning of the day when Greater Britain will be one in everything that can contribute to the fullest wellbeing of each unit of the entire Empire.

The federal idea is "in the air." Its fullest expression, so far as I saw it, was in the conception that five federations should be created, composed of self-reliant, self-dependent and self-governing nations; no colony having authority over another colony, but each sovereign within its own area, and all united on a basis of equality. First, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; second, the Dominion of Canada, inclusive of Newfoundland, the oldest of England's colonies, but not yet a Province of Canada; third, United Australasia; fourth, United South Africa; and

fifth, let us hope, United Hindostan, all joined together and forming the Federation of Greater Britain.

It is an ideal, a vision of Utopia, but it is not too much to say that the trend of the actual life and thought of Greater Britain is distinctly towards that goal, and even to that larger union of which some dare to think, the Federation of all the English-speaking States of the world.

To further this end, it is our duty to nourish in every possible way the sentiment of unity which binds us together, to strengthen the conviction of the solidarity of our interests, and to quicken the sense of a common responsibility for so directing and inspiring our collective life that it shall help men "to do justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly with God." Then with a mighty hope we may offer the prayer of Cromwell's great secretary, "Thou who of Thy free grace didst build up this Britannick Empire to a glorious and enviable heighth, with all her Daughter Islands about her, stay us in this felicitie."

LETTER III.

MISTRESSES IN THEIR OWN HOUSES-GOVERNMENT AS AN EDUCATION-DEMOCRACY AND CHARACTER-OFFICIALS WITH A MISSIONPEERS AT A DISCOUNT-No CLERICALISM.

October 28, 1897.

RUDYARD KIPLING speaks for the British Empire at home and abroad, when he describes Canada in the lines

A nation spoke to a nation

A Throne sent word to a Throne:
"Daughter am I in my mother's house,
But mistress in my own !

The gates are mine to open

As the gates are mine to close,
And I abide by my mother's house,"
Said our Lady of the Snows.

Our colonies are resolutely self-governing. They are democracies in spirit and in method of government, in motive and in ideal. They steadfastly believe that societies held together by the principle of government must be ruled for the people and by the people, and therefore they have shifted the centre of the governing power from the aristocratic and clerical classes

right over to the people. The individual man, and in one or two cases the woman, has risen to the exercise of a full and equal share in the control of the collective and organised life of the nation. So that Greater Britain is for the most part a collection of colonies, municipalities and townships, whose distinctive note is that they govern themselves. Each one is "mis

tress in her own house." Our Empire stands solid and safe, and "four-square to all the winds that blow" on the irremovable bedrock of Democracy.

This faith is held and preached with passionate enthusiasm in most of our colonies. Sir Wilfrid Laurier said, during the Jubilee celebrations: "The feeling which to-day is dominant in every colony is the pride of local autonomy; the pride of legislative independence, connected with pride of British connection and Imperial unity.” Nobody whispers a doubt. Democracy is accepted as a final fact. It is trusted. It is gloried in. Men of wealth naturally object to some of the legislative schemes of a Parliament of artisans, but they do not quarrel with the principle of Democracy; they accept the issues. They have faith in the people and say "they will come right; they will discover their mistakes," and so they wait patiently whilst the corrective processes are at work. Victorian Free Traders confessed to me their aversion to the fiscal policy now in vogue, and pointed to