Another line of consideration brings us still more directly to the same probability of a speedy deadlock. In Mr. Forster's ideal federation there must, he says, be one principle of action throughout the empire concerning the treatment of uncivilised or half civilised races. With the motive of this humane reservation all good Englishmen, wherever they live, will ardently sympathise. But how would a Federal Union have any more power than Lord Kimberley had to prevent a Cape parliament, for instance, from passing a Vagrant Act? That Act contained, as Lord Kimberley confessed, some startling clauses, and its object was in fact to place blacks under the necessity of working for whites at low wages. He was obliged to say that he had no power to alter it, and we may be quite sure that if the Executive of the Greater British Union had been in existence, and had tried to alter the Act, that would have been the signal for South Africa to walk out of the union. We may look at such contingencies in another way. Great Britain, according to a statement made by Mr. Gladstone in the last session of parliament, has spent more than twelve millions sterling on frontier wars in South Africa during the eighty years that we have been unfortunate enough to have that territory on our hands. The conduct of the colonists to the natives has been the main cause of these wars, and yet it is stated that they themselves have never contributed more than L10,000 a year towards military expenditure on their account. Is it possible to suppose that the Canadian lumberman and the Australian sheep-farmer will cheerfully become contributors to a Greater British fund for keeping Basutos, Pondos, Zulus quiet to please the honourable gentlemen from South Africa, especially as two-thirds of the constituents of these honourable gentlemen would be not Englishmen but Dutchmen? Yet if the stoppage of supplies of this kind would be one of the first results of the transformation of the mother country into the stepmother Union, what motive would South Africa have for entering it? On the other hand, is there any reason to suppose that South Africa would contribute towards the maintenance of cruisers to keep French convicts and others out of the Pacific, or towards expeditions to enable the Queensland planters to get cheap labour, or to prevent Australian adventurers from land-grabbing in New Guinea? If it be said that the moral weight of a great union of expanded Englishmen would procure a cessation of the harsh or aggressive policy that leads to these costly little wars, one can only reply that this will be a very odd result of giving a decisive voice in imperial affairs to those portions of our people who, from their position and their interests, have been least open to philanthropic susceptibilities. It is perfectly plain that the chief source of the embarrassments of the mother country in dealing with colonies endowed with responsible government would simply be reproduced if a Federal