Two extremes have been, and must be, avoided. History has falsified the impression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that the colonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States, and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no less clearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralized government of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened the claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, with full rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seen whether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, and imperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. Imperial Conferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; no majority in them has power to bind a minority, and no conference can bind the mother-country or a single dominion of the crown. As an educational body the Imperial Conference is excellent; but no one would venture to give powers of taxation or of making war and peace to a conclave in which Great Britain, with its forty-four millions of people and the navy and army it supports, has no more votes than Newfoundland, with its quarter of a million of inhabitants and immunity from imperial burdens. Education is, however, at the root of all political systems. Where the mass of the people know nothing of politics, a despotism is essential; where only the few are politically educated, there needs must be an aristocracy. Great Britain lost its American colonies largely through ignorance; and no imperial organization could arise among a group of states ignorant of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. The Imperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results; if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying character and depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians oversea to appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, the dependence of every part of the empire upon sea-power, and the complexities of an Imperial government which has also to consider the interests of hundreds of millions of subjects in India, in tropical Africa, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific, the Conference will have helped to foster the intellectual conditions which must underlie any attempt at an imperial superstructure.