An effective method of illustrating this anomalous condition of the Empire and of British citizenship at the present time is to consider the immediate change which takes place in the political privileges and responsibilities of a man who shifts his residence from the mother-country to Canada, Australia, or any other great colony. He crosses the ocean, perhaps, to carry on in another part of the Empire the business of the the bank, or commercial house, or shipping firm with which he is connected here. Such of his interests as require national protection remain the same, and continue to enjoy security under the British flag. He continues to take precisely the same interest as before in the national welfare. But he loses at once the right to influence national policy by his vote, and at the same time he drops his old responsibilities of citizenship, since he no longer pays the same proportion {21} of the taxes which make the nation strong to protect him. Take again a crucial case as applied to the working man. In Australia one finds nearly 100,000,000 of sheep. The shepherding and shearing of these sheep, the packing, carriage, and shipping of their wool, give employment to a large section of the industrial population. Nearly all this wool finds its market in England, where the manufacture of a portion of it gives employment to an immense population in centres such as the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of Scotland. The safety of this wool in passing from the Australian centre of production to the British centre of manufacture is essential to the prosperity of the people in both. To this end Australian ports are made strong at Australian expense and British ports at British expense. So far all is fair and the distribution of the burden on industry is equal. But between the two countries lie 12,000 miles of sea to be guarded, and this is effectively done at enormous naval and military expense, the burden of which, however, is almost exclusively borne at the British end of the line. The proportion paid by the Australian workman is comparatively insignificant. Yet he is the one who earns the higher wages and feels the pressure of taxation less. I have heard a working man in a large public meeting in Australia assert that the position viewed from this aspect was unfair, and he added that he personally was far better able to bear an equal share {22} of national burdens as a working man in Australia than he had ever been as a working man in Britain. He was certainly as competent to exercise the national franchise. The illustration thus taken from a single colony and a single department of industry has, of course, a wide application. Whether viewed, then, from a purely British or a purely colonial standpoint there are unanswerable reasons, and they are equally unanswerable from either side, which point to an early modification of the national system.