'The English people,' says Sir Henry Parkes, 'in Europe, in America, in Africa, in Asia, in Australasia, are surely destined for a mission beyond the work which has consumed the energies of nations throughout the buried centuries. If they hold together in the generations before us in one world-embracing empire, maintaining and propagating the principles of justice, freedom and peace, what blessings might arise from their united power to beautify and invigorate the world.' This is the eloquent expression of a lofty and generous aspiration which every good Englishman shares, and to which he will in his heart fervently respond. But the Australian statesman cannot seriously think that the maintenance and propagation of justice, freedom and peace, the beautifying and invigorating of the world, or any of the other blessings of united power, depend on the four or five devices, all of them trivial, and some of them contemptible, which figure in his project. Of all ways of gratifying a democratic community that we have ever heard of, the institution of hereditary rank seems the most singular,--supported, as we presume that rank would be, by primogeniture and landed settlements. As for the consultative council, which is an old suggestion of Lord Grey's, what is the answer to the following dilemma? If the Crown is to act on the advice of the agents then the imperial politics of any one colony must either be regulated by a vote of the majority of the members of the council--however unpalatable the decision arrived at may be to the colony affected--or else the Crown will be enabled to exercise its own discretion, and so to arrogate to itself the right to direct colonial policy (Rowe's _Bonds of Disunion_, 356). The simpleton in the jestbooks is made to talk of a bridge dividing the two banks of a stream. Sir Henry Parkes's plan of union would soon prove a dividing bridge in good earnest. Sir Henry Parkes does not try to conceal from us, he rather presses upon us by way of warning, that separation from England is an event which, 'whatever surface-loyalists may say to the contrary, is unquestionably not out of the range of possibilities within the next generation.' 'There are persons in Australia, and in most of the Australian legislatures, who avowedly or tacitly favour the idea of separation.' 'In regard to the large mass of the English people in Australia,' he adds on another page, 'there can be no doubt of their genuine loyalty to the present state, and their affectionate admiration for the present illustrious occupant of the Throne. But this loyalty is nourished at a great distance, and by tens of thousands daily increasing, who have never known any land but the one dear land where they dwell. It is the growth of a semi-tropical soil, alike tender and luxuriant, and a slight thing may bruise, even snap asunder, its young tendrils.'