MR. BALFOUR ON EMPIRE FEDERATION. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR:1
SIR,—The Federal form of government being much in men's minds, may I with respect record my disagreement with a portion of Mr. Balfour's otherwise delightful speech, reported in the papers of Thursday week. Mr. Balfour said :- " As we all know, the various units of that great Republic [the U.S.] are under a central Government at Washington, and they have a common Legislature, which can within certain limits control the destinies of the whole of that great continent. No such experiment is open to us. Simply for geographical reasons, or largely for geographical reasons, merely because Australia and New Zealand are at the Antipodes, it is clearly impossible that they should share the intimate day-to-day political life of a free people in the Northern Hemisphere while they are carrying on 'Moiler work in the Southern. There cannot be precisely and exactly the same relations between Westminster and, let us say, Sydney or Wellington as there are between Washington and San Francisco. . . . The dividing ocean flows between; time and distance settle these matters."
I have no idea that events will ever induce Mr. Balfour to " think Federally " whether as to a local or an Empire Federa- tion, and no one is better equipped to defend his philosophic objec- tions to the Federal State, but if he reflects he must admit that his argument as to "time and distance" is clean statute barred. In 1849 the Congressman from California who had to come to Washington by first riding two thousand miles to railhead at Fort Leavenworth, or who sailed round the Horn in a wind- jammer, was surely farther from his Federal centre than the citizen of Sydney is to-day from Westminster. And as to "oceans that flow between," the Congressman who now journeys to Washington from Sitka, or from Honolulu, just loves the ocean fourth of his journey over delightful Pacific waters in a "floating palace"; it is the thirty-five hundred land miles, perhaps in the torrid heat of an American summer, that daunt him.
Enough to say whatever objections remain as to that system of Federal government invented by Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Roger Sherman, and which alone as I believe points the road to Peace on Earth, the prodigy of modern science has in our case clean ruled out that of distance and the ocean. We will yet build wisely and well on their foundations, even though, to the regret of his best friends, that construction may have no help from Mr.
Brede Place.
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