'The successful in adventure and enterprise,' he says with just prescience, 'will want other rewards than the mere accumulation of wealth,' and other rewards, may we add, than knighthoods and sham peerages. 'The awakening ambitions of the gifted and heroic will need fitting spheres for their honourable gratification,' and such spheres, we may be very sure, will not be found in a third-rate little consultative council, planted in a back-room in Westminster, waiting for the commands of the Secretary of State. In short, a suspicion dawns upon one's mind that this sense of coldness, this vague craving for closer bonds, this crying for a union, on the part of some colonists, is, in truth, a sign of restless _malaise_, which means, if it were probed to the bottom, not a desire for union at all, but a sense of fitness for independence. There are great and growing difficulties in the matter of foreign and inter-colonial relations. But these will not be solved by a council which may be at variance with the government and majority in the colony. They are much better solved, as they arise, by a conference with the Agent for the Colonies, or, as has been done in the case of Canada, by allowing the government of the colony to take a part in the negotiations, and to settle its own terms. Fisheries, copyright, and even customs' duties, are instances in point. This is a process which will have to be carried further. Each large colony will have relations to foreign countries more and more distant from those of the mother country, and must be allowed to deal with those relations itself. How this is to be done will be a problem in each case. It will furnish a new chapter of international law. But it is a chapter of law which will grow _pro re nata_. Its growth will not be helped or forwarded by any _a priori_ system. Any such system would be attended with all the evils of defective foresight, and would both fetter and irritate. III.