There is, however, another very different method by which the object in view may be attained or at least approached with the prospect of final attainment. Instead of radical change and reconstruction we may look to a policy of gradual but steady adaptation of existing national machinery to the new work which must be done. This method commends itself more especially to thinkers in the mother-land, who are accustomed to consider that the supreme merit of the British institution consists in the fact that it is not a written rule,--not a system struck off at white heat by the efforts of legislators, but is, in the main, the result of a progressive historical development. To them further progress would seem safer if pursued on similar lines. The policy seems of less consequence to colonists, living as they do in countries going through rapid changes, and lending themselves more readily to new organization. The ideal of Federation which naturally presents itself to the mind is one which provides a supreme Parliament or Council, national not merely in name but in reality, because containing in just proportion representatives of all the self-governing communities of the Empire. Such a body, relegating the management of local affairs to local Governments, and devoting its attention to a clearly defined range of purely Imperial concerns, would seem to satisfy a great national necessity. It would secure representation for all the great interests of the Empire, it {304} would bring together those best fitted to give advice on Imperial matters, and it would be free from that overwhelming responsibility for petty administration which now paralyzes, and at times renders ridiculous, the supreme council of the greatest nation in the world. This, it seems to me, is the ideal which must be kept in view as the ultimate goal of our national aspiration and effort. It is a reasonable ideal, one which, as we have seen, long since commended itself to the philosophic mind of Adam Smith, and which has today, under the changed conditions of intercourse, infinitely more to justify it, and infinitely less to hinder its attainment than in his time. Even Burke, to whom it also occurred as a reasonable political conception, would have hesitated to employ the phrase, _opposuit natura_, with which he dismissed it, could he have grasped the possibility of what steam and the telegraph have done during the last half century. The realization of some such an ideal as this--a common representative body, Parliament or Council, directing the common policy of the Empire, while absolute independence of local government is secured for the various members--may fairly be looked upon as the only ultimate alternative to national disintegration, the only thing which can fully satisfy our Anglo-Saxon instincts of self-government, and give finality to our political system.