them by German and French colonial expansion in the Pacific, and by the growth of Japan. In South Africa, on the other hand, the factors were mainly internal. The constant friction over railway and customs agreements, continually on the verge of breaking down, embittered the relations of the different Colonies and maintained an atmosphere of uncertainty discouraging to commercial enterprise. Four different governments dealt with a labour supply mainly required in one colony. Four agricultural departments dealt with locusts and cattle plagues, which knew no political boundaries, and which could only be stamped out by the most prompt and determined action. Four systems of law and four organisations for defence secured, as Lord Selborne pointed out in a striking Memorandum (Blue Book Cd. 3564) a minimum of return for a maximum of expense. A native rising in Natal warned South Africans that the mistake of a single Colony might at any moment set the whole of South Africa ablaze with rebellion. In the absence of larger issues local politics in each Colony turned almost exclusively on the racial feud. A comprehensive union alone could bring commercial stability and progressive development, mitigate race hatred, and pave the way to a true South African nationality. All the weakness in external relations, all the internal friction and impediment to progress, all the bitterness and pettiness of local politics, which marked the absence of union among neighbouring colonies, also characterised the relations of Great Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth century. But there was this difference: the immense disproportion in wealth and power, and the political control exercised by the greater state, caused all the evils of disunion to concentrate with intensified force upon the smaller state. To undo the mischief of eighteenth century disunion required at least a generation. A series of political mistakes and mischances, and a disastrous economic policy, have left the healing task of union incomplete after a century. But renewed disunion to-day would only mean a renewal of old local feuds to the point of civil war, a renewal of old economic friction, in which most of the injury would be suffered by the weaker combatant, the indefinite postponing for Ireland of the prospect, now so hopeful, of national development and social amelioration, a weakening of the whole United Kingdom for diplomacy or for defence. It is a policy which no Dominion in the Empire would dream of adopting--a policy which every Dominion would most certainly resist by force, just as the United States resisted it when attempted, with more than a mere pretext of constitutional justification, by the Southern States.