I have said little of the difficulties arising from the vast geographic distances that separate these great outlying communities from one another, and from the mother country. But those difficulties exist, and they are in one sense at the root of others more important than themselves. 'Countries separated by half the globe,' says Mill in his excellent chapter on the government of dependencies by a free state, 'do not present the natural conditions for being members of one federation. If they had sufficiently the same interests, they have not, and never can have, a sufficient habit of taking counsel together. They are not part of the same public; they do not discuss and deliberate in the same arena, but apart, and have only a most imperfect knowledge of what passes in the minds of one another. They neither know each other's objects nor have confidence in each other's principles of conduct. Let any Englishman ask himself how he should like his destinies to depend on an assembly of which one-third was British-American and another third South African and Australian. Yet to this it must come, if there were anything like fair or equal representation; and would not every one feel that the representatives of Canada and Australia, even in matters of an imperial character, could not know or feel any sufficient concern for the interests, opinions, or wishes of English, Irish, or Scotch?'[6] Tariffs, as we have seen, are one question, and the treatment of native races is another, where this want of sympathy and agreement between Englishmen at home and Englishmen in the most important colonies is open and flagrant. [6] J. S. Mill _On Representative Government_, pp. 317, 318. The actual circumstances of federal unions justify Mill's remark on the impossibility of meeting the conditions of such polities where the communities are separated by half the globe; nor does the fact that New Zealand is now only forty days from the Thames make any difference. The districts of the Aetolian, and the towns of the Achaean, League were in effect neighbours. The Germanic Confederation was composed of kingdoms and principalities that are conterminous. The American Union is geographically solid. So are the cantons of the Swiss Confederation. The nine millions of square miles over which the British flag waves are dispersed over the whole surface of the globe. The fact that this consideration is so trite and obvious does not prevent it from being an essential element in the argument. Mr. Seeley's precedents are not at all in point.