The abolition of slavery all over the British Empire is, every one must admit, a political development of first magnitude, one doing the greatest possible honour to the great nation having first taken the glorious initiative of granting to the black race the justice ordered by Christianity. It is undoubtedly a very valuable reform to the credit of England. The Imperial Parliament realized that the constitutional regime of the United Kingdom could not bear all the fruits to be expected from it with an electorate restricted to privileged classes. To support such a splendid edifice, admirable in structure and strength, a larger basic foundation, more solid, laid deep in the national soil, was required. After a long political struggle, freedom was once more triumphant in the Motherland. The first great Reform Bill of 1832 was the starting point of successive legislative enactments, enlarging the franchise, calling to the exercise of political rights various classes of the people, bringing up the British electorate to the glorious standard of being one of the freest, the most enlightened, and most independent in the world. The crowning measure of this extensive political reform has been the Bill of 1917 providing for the addition of some 8,000,000 voters to the roll, including about 6,000,000 women. The rotten boroughs of old were abolished and replaced by a much better redistribution of electoral divisions. Dating from 1867, great autonomous federal colonies, with full Sovereign rights in the administration of all their interior affairs, have been created by Imperial charters. The Canadian, Australian, South African, and New Zealand Dominions, of a total territorial area exceeding 7,000,000 square miles, with a total population of over 25,000,000, nearly 20,000,000 of which belong to the white race, have commenced their new political career with all the confidence and the hopes inspired by their free institutions. Finally, the Imperial Parliament passed a law granting Home Rule to Ireland. Unfortunately, the war, so disastrous in many ways, prevented the immediate carrying out of the will of Parliament, certainly representative of that of the nation. But this vexed question must at last be settled once for all. It is to be hoped that the day is not far distant when it will be removed from the political arena by a solution satisfactory to Ireland, to England and to the whole Empire. Besides all those very important measures of political reform, the British Parliament has passed many laws of urgent social improvement. The crowning act of the Imperial Parliament has been its determined attitude for the maintenance of peace through a long series of years. If all the above enumeration of measures of widespread influence for the general good is to be called Imperialism, I say without hesitation that it is an Imperialism worth favouring. The world will never have too much of it. CHAPTER XXIV. IMPERIAL FEDERATION AND "BOURASSISM".