IMPERIAL FEDERATION {ii} This Edition is intended for circulation only in India and the British Colonies {iii} Macmillan's Colonial Library IMPERIAL FEDERATION THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL UNITY BY GEORGE R. PARKIN, M.A. _WITH MAP_ London MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1892 No. 143 {iv} 'I tell you that when you study English history you study not the past of England only, but her future. It is the welfare of your country, it is your whole interest as citizens that is in question while you study history. How it is so I illustrate by putting before you this subject of the Expansion of England. _I show you that there is a vast question ripening for decision, upon which almost the whole future of our country depends. In magnitude this question far surpasses all other questions which you can ever have to discuss in political life._' PROFESSOR J. R. SEELEY. OXFORD: HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY {v} PREFACE THIS book has been written at the request of many friends who think that a useful purpose will be served by putting the facts and arguments which it embodies into a connected form, where they will be easily accessible to the ordinary reader, and where either their fallacies may be exposed or their truth find a wider recognition. In most of the chief centres of the British world both at home and abroad I have found men of all classes, and not seldom large masses of men, who agreed on the whole with the line of thought which I here try to follow; agreed, too, with an intensity of belief and a warmth of enthusiasm which are, I think, rarely found except in connection with great and true causes. This concurrence of other minds has deepened the profound conviction which I have long felt that the completion of a closer and permanent political unity between the British communities scattered throughout the world should be a first aim of national statesmanship, and might {vi} become, if its advantages were clearly understood, a supreme object of popular desire.